About Doug Franklin That Author Dude
Doug Franklin:
Doug Franklin is husband, father, US Army Combat Infantry Officer, serial entrepreneur, BJJ practitioner, roof walker & new installer trainer, social media Luddite, marketing, SEO & AdWords expert, math nerd with LSSBB & PMP certifications, and an occasional book scribbler, I mean author.
Doug Franklin was not always an author, or famous, though he has always been charming and blessed with overly handsome looks. It is hard being so awesome, but we’ll get through together. He can also be a sarcastic ass, and extremely distractable.
Chronically shit with responding when it comes to email and social media Doug does have them, though they are rarely checked between projects.
Give Me A Shout!
Give it a stab, and see if you get lucky! Think of it like winning the lottery, which doesn’t really pay much in cash prizes. It is nice to connect with good people.
Email: dafrankl27@gmail.com
Social Media (Pretty Much In Order of Use)
ADD, Doug’s Happy Place:
Doug works across random fields making great progress in a few on a daily basis, but sometimes getting distracted before finishing. The stories section of the hard drive is like Dr. Frankenstine’s lab. There are beautiful & viable parts of the next monster, er-hum, I mean books, not monsters, laying everywhere in various stages of construction.
Yes, I’m THAT Doug… Squirrel!
Early Years:
Doug was a Lego kid and suffered his early school years mostly in New Jersey and then studied at Syracuse U. After that it was off to Ft Knox to play with tanks and blow stuff up in the US Army. The fun part went by entirely too fast before Big Green secured Doug to a desk with leg irons. That desk-bound purgatory ended soon enough and it was back to the line as a Mortar Platoon Leader.
The Future Author in the Desert:
Kicking in doors in Iraq for a year was pretty profound.
There was no real singular moment, but like the millions of waves against a rocky cliff, things changed slowly. There are just so many gunfights you win, mortars you can dodge, IEDs that miss & hit someone else, and 220mm lawn darts you can wake up next to before perspectives shift.
So much has changed but there are still so many things that are as vivid as the day they happened. It is like nothing before or since had the same fullness of color or content as those times. Those bonds remain. Hands shake less frequently and the nightmares are much rarer, even controllable, with conscious planning.
Years Have Passed:
For Doug, the sights and smells have faded, but are still recognizable; it is the screams of the broken open men and women begging for death or screaming for their
mothers that haunt dreams. The end to the Army came there when a 155mm artillery round crushed Doug’s ankle and changed his 5-minute 45-second mile, into an unacceptable 12-minute per mile grind. To this day it is difficult to pick up an M4, because it is like an amputee finding and reattaching a missing limb; it is like being made whole again.
That is a very scary thing when those skills and pieces of emotional armor slam back into place. You become whole again, wake & alive again, and ready to fight again in an instant.
Finally Got the Hidden Wiley Cayote Inside Joke:
On the other hand, the flaming black star on the ground under Wiley Cayote blowing up, and then a tire falling down and bouncing out of the sky, developed a whole new meaning! Watching a tank blow a truck with seven insurgents into flaming debris with a HEAT round left a star-shaped burn pattern in the dry field. Then the flaming tire fell from the sky about 45 seconds later… It was then that Doug realized that ALL those animators working on those zany cartoons were WWII generation, combat veterans.
They were drawing as catharsis, coping as best they could with the horrific shit they experienced, while society refused to hear them.
This Author’s times are vastly different, not better or worse, just different.
Author: The Path to Writing:
There were about five years between the Army and starting to write Symbiote. Between the depression of losing that Army team, meaning, purpose, and home found in the Army, and that fateful conversation that inspired Sympbiot’s outline. There were lots of bad decisions! Pretty much every new employee mistake possible was made. Silly things like agreeing to pay cuts from the Army to the first job, with someone’s word of training for advancement later. Then the guy who hired Doug Franklin quit and changed companies, and away went the arrangements with him. That was a lesson in civilian business practices.
After building houses, the evil-ex browbeat Doug into starting a series of health care businesses for her. That went well for a while until she decided to blow things up. Suffering her constant physical and emotional abuse was not easy but managed. Someone who constantly tries to provoke a highly skilled and finely honed combat veteran to violence is probably not right in the head.
She then changed tactics to break things apart. It’s funny how the cheaters accuse you of cheating while leaving pictures of themselves cheating with three different dudes in Las Vegas, on a trip you paid for, in the desk she abandon for you to clean up. Ours is not to reason why, right?
The smoking hot irony was that Doug was biblically bad in the Army, but behaved while married! Go figure! 😛
Poor Doug Franklin, Your Faithful Author’s Face-First Landing:
When Satan decided to leave, stealing both children for two years, emptying bank accounts, wrecking both businesses, emptying payroll accounts three times in a month and a half months (I don’t care what people who weren’t there say, I have the receipts), abandoning three dogs, bankrupting, and turning your favorite author homeless, it was all at once an emotional shock and huge relief!
She was gone!
The ruthless needling and abuse she doled out suddenly stopped! It was like stepping out of an oven and into a cool, fresh, springtime breeze.
It took about three months, but the time to level off was worth it. It really helped to reach out to people from the past. Four female friends, in particular, shared something along the lines of, ‘yeah, that nasty email you sent me didn’t really sound like you’. An email series with Adam, gunner on the #3 tank, led to Symbiot’s concept.
Guardsman Was Finished First:
Symbiot was extremely difficult to write.
The violence was intimately personal and deliberately very close to what I experienced.
It is science fiction but contained many realistic pieces, weapons, and situations. To write effectively Doug needs to be inside the vision for what is happening. Needless to say, jumping back into that was extremely difficult.
The Guardsman was first completed as a draft. Symbiot sat dormant for a long time, while the final sequences played out visually.
Guardsman is distant future, dystopic science fiction. Think corporate empires constantly at war over resource worlds new markets, funding mercenary corporations, while everyone else just gets on with their lives in massive cities or whatever residential form their world planners devised.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming & Book Creation:
The Author Goal:
The average paid author writes around 750 words of new content per day in order to meet their length and delivery deadlines for most publishers. Doug averages between 3250 and 5500 words per day when in full writing mode. The key to that is using a modified neuro-linguistic programming plan, geared towards directing the creative process.
NLP for Authors:
Being an author is not hard, it just takes preparation. You need things in your head so you can create them. Otherwise, I find that I’m just an author staring at a blinking cursor.
Sure NLP is a pseudo-science and there are people who like to poke holes big enough to drive a truck through. There are too many data points around many of its fundamentals to discount it fully.
‘The last thing in before sleep is what you focus on’, is why people who gratefully & positively pray, or say affirmations often see those things come true. Your big brain gets bored while you sleep, so you might as well give it something to work on before you sleep!
You need to be very careful about what you put into your head before you sleep. Things like ‘watching the news’ within three hours of sleep will leave you anxious. Watching violence will leave those images in your head before you sleep. Things like that are powerful for how you approach your next day.
Author’s Results and the Big Ask:
When in full-blown writing mode, Doug writes in the morning and edits/reviews/reads sections of his own work in the 2-4 hours before sleep. The number of times friends, family & writing aspirants have asked, ‘how do you write so much?’ is truly staggering! It gets a little frustrating to explain it, watching their eyes glaze, and then being told, ‘just write my story for me!’
Umm… No. Probably not.
Unfortunately, you probably can’t afford to hire author extraordinaire Doug Franklin.
Between the day job at Houston Daylighting, choking people at practice, writing, occasionally breathing, and sleeping 4-5 hours a night, there is not enough time left in the day for more projects.
If you want to learn how to publish your own work we can have that conversation. Very rarely, we will add to the useful books Biography series. That needs to catch the eye and is a different kind of conversation. In that case, we will need to have that special conversation about why you need the book and how we will make it interesting for others to share & enjoy your special knowledge.