Published 1/15/13

David is one of my favorite authors on Wattpad. His stories have a brightness and a boldness to them that I have always enjoyed in fantasy. He has posted several stories for both adults and teens on his Wattpad profile (@davidalastairhayden), one of which won an award for Best Villain. David has also independently published seven books, which can be found at the following links:

Amazon: http://brev.is/yA23

Barnes & Noble: http://brev.is/QM54

Kobo Books: http://brev.is/PM54

1.      You’ve got several books up on Wattpad, but The Storm Dragon’s Heart and its sequel, Lair of the Deadly Twelve, have seen the most success by far. Can you think of any reasons those books might have performed particularly strongly?

They have an advantage over my other two books in that Wrath of the White Tigress and Chains of a Dark Goddess are both Rated R. Wattpad doesn’t promote R-rated books. They don’t get ranked or featured. Fans just have to find them by ... I don’t know how they find them. I’m thankful that a fair number of them do! 

Wattpad trends toward a YA audience which helps the Storm Phase books. Storm Phase is far from standard YA fare. That presents a challenge to getting new readers, but it’s also an asset, a way to stand out. And a lot of readers thank me for having written something that’s different from all the rest. 

2.      You joined Wattpad in 2009, but it looks like you didn’t really start sharing your stories until 2012. What changed last year to bring that on, and what were your first two years on the site like? 

I started sharing in 2009, actually. I put up sample chapters of Wrath of the White Tigress. It was only a Podiobook at the time. Not much happened. Not long after Wrath of the White Tigress and The Storm Dragon’s Heart were published in Summer 2011, I posted the first three chapters of both to Wattpad. And not much happened again. I honestly forgot about the site for six months or more. I returned and added a few more chapters to Storm Dragon. A few months later, someone with a lot of fans sent me a message and asked if I was going to post more chapters. I did. After that, the traffic started picking up. I decided to serialize it and post one chapter each week, hoping to earn a few fans and to entice the impatient to buy the book online. 

3.      You’ve talked elsewhere about how The Storm Dragon’s Heart didn’t always enjoy the support it now has on Wattpad. Could we get the full story of its Wattpad journey? 

I think I may have just answered that one! A few well-connected folks on the site started reading and I guess some luck factored in. Releasing more chapters didn’t hurt. I think I made one forum post announcing the book. I didn’t do any other promotions. 

4.      You became a Wattpad Featured Author in November. How did that come about for you? 

Wattpad contacted me ... I think it was July 2012 ... and asked me if I wanted to be a Featured Author. I said no. LOL. Actually, I asked them if I could become featured in November when Book 2: Lair of the Deadly Twelve would be debuting. Conveniently, that date matched up to when I would run out of chapters of Storm Dragon to post each week. Of course, it wasn’t really convenient so much as I timed it out that way. Wattpad was great with this and more than willing to work with me on it. Caitlin was easy to work with and helped make sure the timing met my needs. 

Before they contacted me, I didn’t really know what being featured meant. I had an incredibly busy and difficult 2011 and early 2012 because I was helping out some family members in a rough spot, so I never really learned everything about how the site works. I just went with the flow. 

5.      In addition to putting your stories out on Wattpad, you’ve independently published them. At one point, I saw a website for a press it looked like you had set up for them, but I can no longer find it. Can you talk a little about the experience of setting up that press, whether you’re still operating it, and why you chose to shutter it, if you’ve closed it down? 

Typing Cat Press (typingcatpress.com) is an imprint for publishing myself and Pepper Thorn. It goes on and will continue to do so. If I ever publish under a pseudonym for some reason, you will see the work come out there. I currently have no intention of publishing any other authors through Typing Cat Press. 

I posted chapters of Chains of a Dark Goddess before it came out. Which it just did (January 2013). Otherwise, all the books were published before having chapters up on Wattpad. As much as I love my Wattpad fans and success here, I have many more fans and readers outside the site who buy my books. The paying customers come first, of course. 

6.      You serialized The Storm Dragon’s Heart on Wattpad after it was already available commercially. What was that experience like? Has your success on Wattpad translated into success at your e-tailers? 

Success is a tricky word. Wattpad definitely helped out my sales, especially Summer 2012 which was otherwise a lean time for my numbers. But Wattpad is not the most successful promotional endeavor I’ve used. Far from it. Still, it helped and plays a part in the rapid increase in readers I’m currently seeing. 

But I don’t think Wattpad forms a direct line between reads/fans and sales. While making those sales brought in by Wattpad, I’ve earned some true fans. You know the idea about building a core of 1000 true fans for success? I think Wattpad is very useful for that. Readers on Wattpad are far, far, far more likely to contact me and tell me they bought the book and that they love it and can’t wait for the next one. They’re proud they found the book on Wattpad. I get so much feedback from those fans. That’s a blessing. 

7.      On your website, you talk briefly about how your college major didn’t equip you to do much outside of write and teach. Do you have a day job, and if so, what is it? 

My day job is currently writing. Which is short for: I married someone with a good insurance plan and enough income for us to get by whilst I follow my dreams. I also happen to be a good cook, and I can be coaxed into cleaning. I’m also a decent money manager, one of those people who can get $1.10 out of $1. 

8.      According to your various online profiles, you’re an avid roleplayer and you design your own tabletop roleplaying games. Have you learned anything as a gamer that informs your writing, and vice versa? 

I’ve been playing games, mostly as a Game Master, for longer than I’ve been writing. Since I was 13 years old. My style of gaming has always been loose and make it up as you go. I’d come up with a situation or two and then respond to what the players chose to do via their characters. I think that’s highly useful in developing a sense of story flow. And you can judge what sorts of things work on your tiny audience. More than that, it’s storytelling practice. 

Game design never helped much in learning storytelling. If anything, it distracts me from writing, so it’s something I have to control. I could design games all day every day and never finish a single one. I can just get lost in it. 

9.      You also practice taijiquan (known to many as Tai Chi), and you write stories in which martial arts play a central role. How has learning a martial art informed the creation of the martial arts in your writing? 

I practice the Traditional Yang Family Long Form. That’s not what most people learn. It takes about 25 minutes to do the form, when you do it right and don’t get in a hurry. Most people are familiar with the modern variation Yang Short Form that takes about 5 minutes to do. I started there. I’ve forgotten some short sword forms, bagua forms, and a Chen-style Taiji Cannon-fist Form. 

I don’t think my taiji practice has had much impact, honestly. It’s just a neat detail about me. Maybe it affects things and I don’t see it. That’s always possible. Actually, I can think of one way it affects me. I’m highly conscious that the Chinese martial arts are not some sort of magical mystery and I don’t try to write with a fixation on them. Yes, I write ninja-type characters and talk about fighting styles now and then, but any martial culture is going to have an elaborate art built up around its methods. The interesting thing about Asian martial arts is the survival of the knowledge whereas the European hand-to-hand martial arts didn’t survive the arrival of gunpowder. Most of the technique, art, and lore is lost to history, unpreserved. When it comes down to it, Taijiquan is a really fancy way to engage in a fist fight! 

10.     So typewriters, huh? Care to elaborate? 

If you get me in the right frame of mind, I’ll give you an essay on typewriters! What’s not to love about a manual typewriter. The smell of ink and metal? The hard clack and thump. The bells! There are bells that ring when you get to the end of a line! I love those rings. There’s so much feedback. So tactile and sensory. 

I’ve been using computers all my life. I write on my iPad predominantly these days and use my MacMini when publishing or doing other various tasks. I’ve nearly forgotten how to write by hand. Haven’t used checks in ages. I can barely sign my name. I’m not kidding. If I wrote three sentences by hand, my hand would start to cramp. But I can type, oh I can type all day long. I can easily type over 100 words per minute on computer. Not on a manual though, I don’t have the finger strength for it. So I think it’s just that I have a fascination for keyboards and writing machines and devices (love software for writing too!). 

Typewriters are sexy. 

If you watch Doctor Who, there’s a manual typewriter built into the Tardis in Seasons 5-7. That’s a green Olympia SM-3. I have one of those. It’s a 1956 model. It’s my second favorite typewriter. My favorite is my little green Hermes Rocket from 1955. Weighs 10 lb. and is a highly portable manual typewriter at that weight. It’s such a sweet little machine. My oldest and third favorite is a perfectly functional 1929 Royal Portable. That machine is nearly as fine now as the day it was made. 

I wrote the first draft of The Arthur Paladin Chronicles Book 1: The Shadowed Manse on the Hermes Rocket. The book will come out perhaps in Late 2013. I wrote it while stressed and it needs a rewrite desperately. These days, I’m so behind schedule that I can’t use the typewriters for anything other than jotting down some ideas and playing. 

11.     Turesobei (the main character of The Storm Dragon’s Heart) walks into the room. What does he say to you, and why? 

“Why are you so mean to me?! Why did you burden me with this destiny?! These girls are going to be the death of me!” 

And then Lu Bei would zap me in the face and stick out his tongue at me. 

12.     Thanks for your time. Before I let you go, is there anything else you’d like to say? 

Chains of a Dark Goddess came out in early January 2013. I hope to have four more books out in 2013. There will be three new ones at the least. Storm Phase Book 3 is set for Late Spring 2013. Book 4 should be out Late Summer.

Thank you for interviewing me!