Indie Author Interview with Constantine Dhonau
In today’s indie author interview, I chat with Constantine Dhonau, who self-published his first book—a memoir. He talks about his process and what led him to choose self-publishing, and he even shares a snippet from his book! At the bottom of the post are links to learn more about Constantine and Collateral Intentions.
When did you start writing, and what inspires you to write the stories you do?
I’d sporadically had a few writing phases as an early teen and I started my first journal when I was 17. My first journal is the most intense-looking. Every square inch is covered in at least one layer of writing. Those pages were a space that really opened me up and had me consistently creating.
I’m typically driven to write most when I have things on my heart and mind to process. When everything’s good, then everything’s good, you know? “If it ain’t broke, don’t write it.” Because of that, I mostly write from darker places. I’m sometimes envious of writers who can generate such positive work. I’ve tried. It just feels so… unnecessary? Like when I’m in a good mood all my attention tends to go more outward, and why try to capture it when I can just sit and enjoy it? But when I’m having a hard time it’s like I can’t get through my day because there are so many things in the way and swirling around inside me. It helps to turn them inside-out so I can see it in front of me. Every so often, those real feelings or waking from a dream will lead me down an interesting fictional path informing the heart or mind-state of some character in some world where things are wrong. Consequently, I like dystopian sci-fi.
Oh, I love dystopian sci-fi too! At what point did you tell yourself, “I’m going to write a book”?
So this whole thing started as nothing more than a fun project to collect all my work and print a copy for myself at my local print shop. Being excited about it, I started talking about it to my friends and family. They know my writing and a lot of them got excited about getting a copy of their own (“No way! Can I buy one when it’s finished?”). To me, it was just a bonus to have people interested, but after a handful of people got their manuscripts I printed some extra and started to plug it to see what would happen. People who knew nothing about my writing still wanted to support me. I started looking into trad and self-publishing off-handedly. Once I queried a few places and got some responses (some of which were scams), I felt I’d already done the work and I was too deep not to keep going. It was around that time I remembered talking to Saul Williams 9 years prior—showing him some of my journals—after one of his shows in my hometown and he planted the idea in my head to publish my journals.
Whoa, that’s pretty neat. Writing can be a lonely process, so do you keep to yourself or do you get outside feedback or editing before you publish?
Once I’m done generating my content, I put it down for as long as it takes to forget about it. Once I’ve forgotten about it, then I’ll come back and start stripping everything that feels unnecessary. Once it’s stripped down, I’ll run it through as many word processing programs as I can: Pages, Word, Google Docs, Grammarly, etc. to catch as many errors as possible. After it’s stripped and corrected, I’ll put it down until I forget about it again. After all those steps, that’s when I start handing out chunks to friends and family while I read it top to bottom. I find I’m usually much harsher than them. Once all that feedback has been incorporated, I’ll find some beta reader unfamiliars and ask them to tear it apart. I’ll integrate those pieces, then set it down to forget it again.
After all that, I start seeking professional counsel for proofreading, line edits, copy edits, etc. and let them know what all I’ve done before it’s gotten to them. This usually helps to get a lower rate and higher-quality professional feedback. At that point it should be near completion, so I’ll find a few more beta readers to test-run the finished product. Of course, there are always nay-sayers or room for improvement. Just near the end is when it’s important for me to remember that done is better than perfect and I can’t make everybody happy. As long as I’m happy with the time, effort, and finished product, then it’s time to publish.
That’s so important. How has it been for you to publish your first book?
Long, haha. Really though, it’s been very gratifying. Looking all the way back to when I started combing through my journals, notes, and shoeboxes, I had a great time seeing how some things never change, and in other ways I’ve grown a tremendous amount. At first, I thought, WOW I am sad all the time. But after a while I connected the dots: I write most when something’s wrong, so there was a bit of a narrow, distorted representation of who I was through my writing. Putting it together and refining my past work into something presentable while maintaining what I was expressing was a ton of fun, like a year-long puzzle.
I’m currently at the marketing phase, which many say is the real work; writing the book is the easy part. It’s still fun for me. Doing these author interviews, tweaking my Amazon ad campaigns, posting pictures and videos, writing blogs—it’s all fresh enough to keep me excited.
The hardest part? Believe it or not, the book cover. I designed it myself but Amazon kept rejecting it for micro-formatting corrections and technical hiccups. It became such an absurd obstacle that I actually completely dropped it for almost a year!
That’s a lovely cover, so it seems like waiting a year worked! Can you talk more about the marketing you’re doing?
This is the step I’m on right now and I’m still figuring it out. I’m using some of the usual—friends, family, friends of friends, people I meet in person, Amazon ads, reaching out to indie bookstores, uploading it everywhere books can be uploaded—and trying to find some more creative ways to get it out there like author interviews, sending copies to artists I admire, and dropping renegade copies in public places with a Venmo code.
Fingers crossed you get some bites through those efforts. How would you describe Collateral Intentions?
There’s a solid mix of serious reflection and tongue-in-cheek humor. The chapter reflections offer a tea time sit-down to talk about what happened that inspired the pieces. It’s poetry with biographical context concerning the philosophical, psychological, and interpersonal.
That sounds fascinating. Would you like to share a sample from the book?
Folding Mountains
01232018
There comes a time when city lights are replaced
By the raw energy of fire wrapt ’round logs
Chewing them up
Accelerating their molecular bodies
Into the ash of the future
Sending dancing smoke
Into billion-year-old light beams
Of sparkling galaxies o’erhead
A time when the earth rises to meet us
The wind whispers hello
And rivers carve through our hardened insecurities
In these times, we come to know our ancestors
In these times, we meet the origin of the soul
How beautiful. I’ll admit that I don’t read much poetry, but I know many readers do. What works would you compare Collateral Intentions to?
The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
All these for their hybrid innovation of poetry and memoir spanning existential contemplation to pants-down vulnerability to turmoil turned inside-out.
