Donald Goines by Calvin Westra

 I started a new Donald Goines brand site to shill my Donald Goines by Calvin Westra book. I am going to make this blog and write Donald Goines brand content on it in order to shill you on visiting that site and then clicking the various "buy now" links that i've plastered the site with.

By doing this I will sell more copies and get more people to read Donald Goines, which is one of my main goals in life.

Donald Goines is a sweet book. It's about drugs. It's about doing drugs and also about what drugs do to you, both physically as well as the cascading effects they tend to have on your life.

Donald Goines only took me one year to write, which blows my mind because I'm a really slow writer. I spent like eight to ten hours a day working on it. Pretty much any time I wasn't janitoring I was writing it. It took about eight rewrites but that doesn't include forty or so semi-complete drafts that received edits and slight rewriting. I like to write drafts with my old draft to the left and my new draft to the right and I type the whole thing out word by word. This allows me to catch really subtle plot errors and neatly correct them and I believe this has a massively positive effect across the whole manuscript because there are lots of little hints and things that are constantly snowballing. Also it means I don't have to call a reader's attention to a lot of things in order to make them work. Like, because I softly built it up over ten or twenty different references, I don't ever have to explain it in a way that distracts from the story.

I think people call that worldbuilding.

My book, Donald Goines, is based on Donald Goines's novel, Dopefiend, which I love. I also love Black Girl Lost, Whoreson, Swamp Man, and a few others. Some of the Kenyatta novels are kinda cheesy to me but overall I really like Donald Goines and I think Dopefiend, specifically, has something really special to it.

I was also slightly influenced my William S. Burroughs but not by the stuff people tend to assume. I don't think my book Donald Goines draws from Naked Lunch or The Soft Machine or any of that but I did revisit Junky because Burroughs sought to describe the heroin landscape using a kind of distant, anthropological viewpoint and I wanted to do something similar with my story.

I really like the distance that comes across in Donald Goines by Calvin Westra because I think you can really know the characters but you aren't specifically put into one character's shoes and that's something Donald Goines did in Dopefiend too, which I thought was cool.

My only other major influence with Donald Goines was Agota Kristof's Notebook trilogy, which are written in a very stark style and are just the coolest books in the world to me. I don't think there has ever been a better prose stylist than Agota Kristof, her sentences are just little bullets that hit you one after the next and it always feels perfect and I try to do that too even though I'm now working on an all dialogue novel that isn't just all-dialogue, it's also all text messages and it is really hard to write and sometimes I get frustrated.

The end.