NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is a wonderful opportunity to establish a writing habit, prioritise your creativity, and get out of your own way. The challenge to write 50,000 words during the month of November means that you are forced to put process over product and to get the words down.
Since the freedom to write crap (Ann Lamott’s ‘shitty first draft’) was the exact thing which freed me to complete my first novel, I’m a huge fan of the technique. And even if this style of production doesn’t suit your process, the other elements – community and focus – are super-valuable, too. You can set your own word count target for NaNo (I always do) and join in anyway.
October is a wonderful month to prepare for NaNo. I recommend practical things like clearing your schedule as much as possible, prepping food and stocking up on easy-to-cook meals, and making your writing space inviting and comfortable.
The planners amongst you may want to start outlining, and the ‘discovery writers’ can concentrate on making notes, inspiration collages on Pinterest, soundtracks and so on. And we can all benefit from reading/watching great stories to refill our creative wells before the big push.
Something else I like to do when preparing to write is to read a writing book or two to get me in the mood. Which brings me to a rather wonderful opportunity to get a bunch of amazing writing and publishing resources for an amazing price.
I’ve been a fan of StoryBundles for years and am absolutely THRILLED to be included in the 2020 NaNoWriMo Writing Tools Bundle curated by Kevin J. Anderson.
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Stop Worrying; Start Writing by Sarah Painter
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Business for Breakfast Vol. 13: NaNoWriMo for the Rest of Us by Leah Cutter
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Audio for Authors by Joanna Penn
The In(s) and Out(s) of Series and Story Guides by C. Michelle Jefferies
Mastering Amazon Descriptions by Brian D. Meeks
Writing Better Fiction by Brent Nichols
Killer Subject Lines by Andrea Pearson
13 Steps to Evil: How to Craft Superbad Villains by Sacha Black
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Hayley Chewins is an author of magical, feminist middle grade fiction. Her debut, The Turnaway Girls, was a Kirkus Best Book of 2018, and her second book, The Sisters of Straygarden Place, is forthcoming from Candlewick Press this September and has already been called ‘superb, spooky and unforgettable’ in a Kirkus starred review.
Hayley lives in South Africa and also works as a writing coach.
Announcement: The Worried Writer Podcast is pausing.
I love creating the podcast but have decided to take a break. After more than five years of creating the show, I feel in need of a short holiday and a bit of time to look inward and focus on my fiction. I will probably miss the podcast terribly and be back in a couple of months, but I also need a wee bit of time and distance in order to think about how I want the podcast to evolve. I am also keen to explore other ways of supporting authors and am considering an online course or mastermind group.
This podcast has helped to transform my writing life and I want to say a massive thank for your time and support.
The Worried Writer site will remain in place so you can still enjoy the backlist episodes of the show. I will also be adding new content as I work out my new focus/direction.
Finally, if you keep your podcast subscription in your app then, if I restart the show, you will automatically receive the new episodes.
BOOK NEWS
I finished the rewrite of The Pearl King (Crow Investigations Book Four) and it’s up for pre-order (out June 25th).
If you like urban fantasy or paranormal mystery, please consider checking it out!
Also, my new Worried Writer book – Stop Worrying; Start Selling: The Introvert Author’s Guide To Marketing – is out next week.
It will be out on the 9th June in paperback and ebook, with the audiobook following later this year. Apologies for the delay in the audio – the pandemic sapped my energy and closed my sound engineer’s studio!
If you pick it up, I would love to know what you think!
IN THE INTERVIEW
The full transcript is copied below.
THANKS FOR LISTENING!
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Also, if you have a question or a suggestion for the show – or just want to get in touch – I would love to hear from you! Email me or find me on Twitter or Facebook.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Sarah: Hayley Chewins is an author of magical, feminist, middle grade fiction. Her debut, The Turnaway Girls was a Kirkus best book of 2018 and her second book, The Sisters Of Straygarden Place is forthcoming from Candlewick Press this September, and it has already been called superb, spooky and unforgettable in a Kirkus starred review.
Hayley lives in South Africa and also works as a writing coach. Welcome to the show, Hayley, and thank you so much for joining me.
Hayley: Thank you for having me, I’m so excited to be here.
Sarah: I was wondering if you could just kick things off by telling us a wee bit more about your forthcoming book, The Sisters of Straygarden Place.
Hayley: Yeah, sure. Okay. So The Sisters of Straygarden Place is a middle grade fantasy book and it’s set in a magical mansion that’s surrounded by really tall silver grass. The grass is so tall that it covers the entire house. And it’s about three sisters who have been abandoned there and left in the care of this magical house.
Their parents have left and they’ve left them a note saying, don’t leave the house, wait until we come back. What happens is the eldest sister leaves the house. She does go walking into the grass one day and she returns and starts to get really, really sick and starts to turn silver and it’s up to the middle sister, whose name is Mayhap, to figure out what’s going on with the grass, why her sister is so sick, and when she starts doing that, she kind of starts to unravel all this other… all these other mysteries around her family, why her parents actually left, why the house is magical and everything kind of starts to unravel.
Sarah: Oh, that sounds absolutely wonderful. And that’s exactly my kind of book, so I’m very excited to read that. And that’s out in September this year? September, 2020?
Hayley: Yes. In America, it’ll be out in September, 2020. In the UK, it’s coming out, I think, in March next year.
Sarah: Wonderful. Well that’s very exciting. And I was going to say as well, I haven’t seen the cover for this one, but I saw the cover for your debut and it’s absolutely gorgeous. So is that a similar sort of genre, your first book?
Hayley: Yes. So they’re both kind of upper middle grade. They kind of fall into that 10 to 14 range and yeah, they’re middle grade fantasies, but they are kind of on the darker side and The Sisters of Straygarden Place even more so – it kind of walks the line between fantasy and horror. It is quite a bit on the spooky side of things.
Sarah: Wonderful. And what sort of led you into writing for that age group and in that genre? Did it… Was it just something that came naturally or something that you found difficult to choose?
Hayley: Uh, no I didn’t. When I, when I first started writing, I actually was writing kind of adult literary fiction. I was, uh, I dunno, I guess that was kind of mainly the kind of thing that I was reading at the time. I was in my early twenties. And I’ll just kind of tell you briefly what happened and how I came to realize that I wanted to write novels. I was studying, I did a bachelor of arts in Italian and English literature, and so I was always reading and writing, and I’ve always loved, I just always, always loved books and loved stories.
Um, and then after I did that, I did a law degree and it, so it was kind of the first time in my life that I didn’t have time to read fiction anymore or poetry. I didn’t have time to write. I was just reading so many cases and kind of legal articles and having to write legal essays. And like, lots of tests and things like that.
So it was, it was kind of the absence of literature from my life that made me realize how much it meant to me. And at the same time, I was kind of also uncovering the truth that I, I didn’t really want to be a lawyer. And so, yeah. So that’s kind of when I started, I just became really, driven to, to write.
So I was about 22. I loved writers like Ian McEwan and Arundhati Roy, um, and Angela Carter. And, um, yeah. So when I first started writing, I didn’t really have any ideas for books and I, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about writing children’s books. I was just kind of trying, trying to write like these writers that, that I really admired and I didn’t have a sense of what I wanted to say or kind of my own voice or anything like that.
I just felt like I just, I was kind of just very stubborn about it. Like I wanted to know, I really had no ideas and nothing to write about. But as I, as I just kind of kept writing, I kept noticing that children would just kind of appear in my stories all the time. So I would just, I just kept writing about children, even though technically I was writing books for adults or stories for adults.
And then I also at the same time, kind of started to read lots about publishing and sort of discovered children’s, the children’s world and started reading more widely and reading middle grade books, reading young adult books, and it was really writers like David Almond and Kate DiCamillo and Sarah Crossan who opened my eyes to how incredible middle grade books could be.
Um, I remember having this moment when I read Skellig by David Almond, and I have this feeling of, Oh, I want to write something like this. So, something that makes someone feel like this. Um, and so that’s when I started trying to write, middle grade books. But I was also kind of writing more books more on the literary side and more contemporary realistic books.
Um, and so yeah, it just took really lots and lots of writing the wrong thing for me to find what I was actually meant to write and what actually ended up feeling really alive and, and exciting for me to write. But it took a lot, a lot of persistence to find it.
Sarah: Oh, that’s fantastic. And that’s such an encouraging, account because I think, I mean, I can certainly empathize with that, that feeling of wanting to write, but not really being sure what.
And yeah, I think, I think that will resonate with a lot of people. That’s brilliant. And in terms of when you did write, you know, your first book that you thought, okay, this is middle grade, I often get questions about getting started in children’s fiction, which I know nothing about, so I’d love to hear about your path to publication.
Hayley: Ok, yeah. so I, like I said, I was just writing lots and lots of manuscripts and kind of having the feeling of… You know, I was writing things and finishing things cause I, I’d realized that in order to learn how to write a book, I actually had to write a book.
Sarah: So annoying, I know!
Hayley: Yeah. So I, I was kind of just on this drive to finish things, but at the same time, even though I was finishing manuscripts and revising them, I also kind of knew that they weren’t very good. And that I hadn’t really found like just something really interesting and really good and something that I really wanted to, that that really felt like me.
So it took, I mean, I actually kind of lost count of how many manuscripts I wrote, but it was many. And I think the middle grade ones, there were, there were at least four. And then eventually I got to a point where I wrote a novel in verse. It was a middle grade novel in verse that was kind of like, um, not really fantasy, it kind of blended the real with the unreal, sort of like contemporary, with a bit of magic. I finally felt like, okay, this is the kind of book that I want to write and, you know, and I felt like it was quite good and I could kind of write a pitch for it and send it out. So I did lots of research on how to write a pitch, how to write a query letter, and I Googled, um, lots of agents and kind of tried to find agents who represented the kind of thing that I’d written.
And I started querying. And yeah, I was lucky enough to get quite a few requests from that. And then I ended up getting, um, one agent asked me to revise the manuscript. He basically wanted to, he read the whole thing, really loved it, but also it felt like it needed a lot of work, which was very true.
And so he sent me lots of notes. And the, the notes resonated with me, so I agreed to do the revision for him. And what ended up happening was I took a couple of months to do that and sent it back to him and it, it didn’t end up kind of resulting in an offer of representation, but it was a really good experience for me because I learned how to revise and how to take notes, and I learned to… It just made me think about stories in, in a way that I hadn’t really thought about. It was really fantastic to get that feedback. Um, but I also didn’t really know, um, kind of how to make that manuscript any better than I had already made it. I didn’t know how to fix it. So I decided to set it aside and I started a new project, which actually ended up being The Turnaway Girls.
And what happened with The Turnaway Girls was that I entered one of these kinds of Twitter pitch competitions. And so it ended up being that… It wasn’t like a, like when you tweet a pitch and then agents like, or favorite your tweet, it was like someone, a writer who had arranged it and it was on her blog.
So they chose writers or stories that were interesting and then put the stories, the pitches, and I think it was like the first, I don’t know, five pages or something like that on the blog. And then. agents who went to the blog could request more material in the comments. And that’s how I ended up meeting my agent, because she kind of requested materials through that. And she also, it was a very similar experience because she read it very quickly. She loved it, but she also had lots of notes for how it could be made better. And she didn’t feel like she could make an offer of representation based on the state that the manuscript was in.
It had lots of plot problems. It had pacing problems. Um, and she gave me lots of notes and she gave me a list of books to read and she kind of asked me if I would be willing to revise it. And again, I was like, yes, I’m really persistent. All I want to do, like this is the only thing I want to do. I just want to make this book better.
And I was so, so grateful to have that feedback was really such a gift. So. I did the revisions and then, yeah, long story short, she ended up offering me representation based on the revisions, and that’s how I ended up getting an agent and yeah. And then. Uh, with my first book deal, it was like deja vu because we went out on sub with the manuscript and my editor loved the book and thought it needed, you know… And she sent me the most wonderful, she sent my agent rather, the most wonderful edit letter.
Um, and I did, I did the revisions and then we ended up getting an offer on the book. So, even though it has been a little bit of a circuitous path or not circuitous but I have had to, I did feel like I had to revise that book so many times before it actually became a book. Um, and then of course edits after, you know, Candlewick bought the book.
But I have learned so much as a writer through getting, you know, that kind of feedback. So I always say like if you get an offer to revise and resubmit, it’s such a compliment, from the agent or the editor because they, they’re taking time to read your work and to give you feedback on it. Um, even if they’re not offering you a book deal, or offering you representation, there’s a high chance that if you do the revisions that you know, it will end up going your way.
And even if it doesn’t, you just learn so much about your own writing. Yeah.
Sarah: No I think, I think that’s, I think that’s excellent advice. And it’s also, thank you for sharing this story. I think it was, uh, a very, um, very usual and very sort of typical story in the sense of, you know, we have to write a lot and like you say, finish books and then they’re not, they’re not really publishable, but then, you know, going through editorial feedback teaches us how to revise and how to write.
And I think. Again, hearing it again and again, it’s so important for people to know that it is a craft and it is perseverance. And I think you know, hats off to you for your attitude of being grateful for that learning experience. I think that’s, you know, I think that’s really encouraging and really good.
So in terms of giving people advice, I mean going through submission, it is really tough. It is really hard, and it can be heartbreaking. What do you think helped you to keep going?
Hayley: I think I just had… I always kind of… Basically from the moment I decided I wanted to write novels, I just knew that I was going to do it. I just knew that no matter what it took, I was going to kind of stay the course. And um, it’s also, I think it’s just having like a passion for the actual craft of writing.
Like I always, when I talk to writers, who have, um, kind of who worry that they don’t have what it takes, I always say. You know, if you, if you have a desire to do something, that’s an indication that you do have what it takes. You only have the dream to do something if you already have everything within you to, to have that thing and to do it.
So firstly that, and then also just if you’re very connected to why you are writing and why it’s important to you and your love for it, and your passion for it, then that’s kind of what keeps you going. So, um, yeah, because the thing is like even after you get published and even after you get a book deal, there’s still so much rejection. You can publish a book and then not sell your second book. You know? You can get really bad reviews. You can just, you know, someone can say something really horrible to you on goodreads, or horrible about your book on goodreads, and you just have to, you have to keep writing anyway, you know?
So I think that that’s kind of part and parcel of what it, what it means to be a professional writer. And share your writing with the world is to face the possibility that someone might not like it or that someone might say, we can’t sell this or this isn’t working, or anything like that. So I mean, it’s very, very difficult, but at the same time, it’s kind of just part of the package.
And so in order to continue, the stuff that I do is I just constantly remind myself, why am I doing this? It’s because I love language. I love stories, and I really feel like I was born to do this. Uh, so yeah, I’m going to keep doing it. You do need to have that persistence and that perseverance.
Sarah: That’s very true. And to go back to the sort of children’s fiction thing for a moment, having learnt to write for that age group, do you have any particular advice, for writing for that age group or for getting published in that, in that field, for listeners?
Hayley: Well, um, I guess the first thing, which kind of seems very basic, um, but is, but I think it’s very important and really helped me, was just reading, really widely in, in the genre that you want to write, and then also in the category. Um, so if you want to write fantasy and, you know, middle grade fantasy, then read lots and lots and lots of middle grade fantasy books. And also recently published one, so that you can see kind of what’s getting published, you know, in the past, I don’t know, three, four or five years.
So that’s the start. Um, the other thing is I think just remembering what it felt like to be a child and being really connected to how you felt when you were 12 or 13 or 10. Um, and really respecting the experience of childhood, which I think all great children’s writers do. They just have such a deep respect for children and how their, their experiences and how they feel, and they don’t kind of talk down to them or belittle them or, um, or kind of see their experiences as small and unimportant.
In fact, they kind of see it in the opposite way. Things have happened to you when you’re a child are so… They kind of get imprinted on you, and they’re these deep really important experiences. So yeah, I think, I think that if you can connect with how you felt as a child, that really goes a long way when you’re writing your child characters.
Sarah: That’s great advice. And, um, I’d love to now delve into the nitty gritty of your writing process, if that’s okay, because I’m still completely obsessed with how other writers do it. So, um, things like, do you write every day or do you keep business hours or, you know, do you aim for a particular word count and do you outline? All of that.
What’s your process?
Hayley: Ooh, ok. Yeah I also love reading about how other writers write, because I think we all kind of think that someone else has a secret that we don’t have.
Sarah: Yeah, definitely. I’m waiting for it. How to make it easy, please.
Hayley: I do find myself Googling how to write a book. Yeah. I don’t, I’m actually quite disorganized in my process and not in a bad way, but I don’t have… I’m not very strict with myself in terms of like writing every single day and like say writing… I know there are writers who write 2000 words every day of the year. I’m not really like that. Um, I have to kind of spend a lot of time dreaming about an idea before I start writing it. Um, so I have to kind of let it sit in the back of my mind and like kind of stew there and let it, I don’t know, like I, I need to…. It’s like a process of discovery, but it’s passive, not active. It’s kind of just like watching and waiting, um, for the way that this thing sits in your mind and how it grows and images that come up and things like that.
And then I’ll start to take notes and I’ll sometimes brainstorm. Brainstorming is really like fun for me, I love like putting on music and brainstorming. But I find, so I might get a few of the pieces of the story from that. Usually I do have like kind of a character maybe. The situation in the beginning of the story, a little bit of the world and what kind of world they live in. But in order to discover the story, I have to write many, many, many drafts.
So, because I work very intuitively, so I find that when I’m brainstorming or thinking about the story, um, before I write it, it’s a very valuable process to me and I enjoy it and it’s really fun, but it’s, it’s like a different part of my brain that’s working. Where when I’m actually in the story and I’m like in the voice of the character, in the language of the story, things just kind of happen serendipitously that are really magical and interesting and it changes everything.
So I might think that someone is in kind of a particular situation, I think I have an idea of what’s going on and why they’re in that situation. And then suddenly they’re having a conversation in a scene with another character and they say something and I’m like, Oh, that’s why you have this problem. Well, you know, that’s why you made this decision.
So I just write lots and lots and lots of drafts in order to kind of discover, you know, what the actual story is. And then between those drafts I might go back and forth between writing and outlining. And when I say outlining, it’s not, um, it’s very kind of broad strokes outlining. It’s kind of thinking about the broader mechanics of the story, not thinking really on like a nitty gritty or a scene level.
And yeah, and I often like sort of, write, and then get halfway through the scene and then feel really stuck. Like I don’t actually know what’s going to happen next or, or as I’m writing, I’m feeling like, Oh, this is wrong. Like this is, this is the right thing that’s supposed to happen, but it’s not supposed to happen this way or something isn’t clicking.
And then what I’ll do is I’ll take a break and I’ll step away and I’ll brainstorm a little bit about how I actually want the scene to be and then go back to writing. So it’s very intuitive and very organic, and it takes, it just takes lots of disorganized messiness.
Sarah: I’m just nodding away in understanding since I’m also an intuitive, write loads and loads and loads of drafts before I work out what the story is, kind of a writer. So it’s always a relief to me when I meet another one.
Hayley: Yeah. I have tried outlining in detail before, but then. So firstly, I don’t get really, I don’t get the same kinds of interesting ideas that I get when I’m actually in the scene.
And then the other thing is that I get kind of tired of the story before I’ve even written it. Yeah. I just find like the most interesting things happen when I’m just in the language and I’m playing and it is, it’s more akin to dreaming than it is to like figuring out, figuring something out or problem solving or like coming up with something.
It’s not a logical process. It’s you kind of have to, well, I have to kind of just swim in this language and free associate and just have images come up and have things not make any sense so that I can kind of go back and go, okay, yeah, that’s really interesting. I’m going to keep that, maybe toss that out cause that that doesn’t work.
Um, yeah.
Sarah: And this obviously is the worried writer, so I’m going to press you for more creative difficulties, I’m afraid. You, you just mentioned, you know, stepping away, if you get stuck in a scene or maybe doing some free writing or something, um, is there a particular part of the process when you’re most likely to get blocked or does fear strike at any point in the process?
Hayley: That’s areally interesting question. You know, I always find I get stuck… So I really love writing like the beginning of a book, the opening and then kind of catalyst moment when something happens and everything changes for the main character. And then once I’m kind of getting into the second act, I start to get really scared.
I always kind of start to feel like, you know, does this, um, does this idea have enough of an engine to actually carry through over the length of an entire story or an entire novel. And you know, what’s going to happen next? I always kind of get a little bit stuck on that point. And, and yeah, that’s when I kind of returned to stepping away and free writing or brainstorming or even just not thinking about it and doing something else, like going and exercising, and going for a walk, um, cooking a meal, um, even cleaning – actually doing the cleaning that I’ve been putting off for 3 days.
Yeah. That, that really helps to kind of just let my brain figure out the problem on its own. And then usually a solution will kind of pop up, you know, not, not always immediately. And you, you can’t, that’s the annoying thing is you can’t control it.
But that, you know, within probably a day or two, some kind of solution will pop up and I’ll have an idea of how to move ahead. Because often I have a plan, like a vague plan for how I think it should go, but when I get to the scene, and so I’ve got it written down, I’ve got like, Oh yeah, they need to go to a party in the scene, lets say, and then when I’m actually in the scene, I’m feeling like, no, that’s, that’s not gonna work. It’s just not the right thing to happen now. So yeah. It’s a very, um, I get stuck a lot. I get stuck like multiple times a day. I just, I think I just don’t let it bother me anymore. Like I just kind of feel like it’s part of my process.
It’s part of how I write a book. So if I get stuck, I know that I’ll always get unstuck. Like it’s not a permanent state. And I think that’s what you used to really scare me was, I kind of felt like, Oh, I’m stuck and I’ll always be stuck and I’ll never get out of this when actually stuck is just, it’s just like, Oh, I need to solve a problem, like what’s going to happen next, but I can, I can solve it.
I’ve solved a million of these problems before so I can do it again.
Sarah: That’s a really good way of putting it. And like you said, that experience really does help, doesn’t it? You think, well, I felt like this before and it’s been fine. Yeah. That’s really good. And I know you, um, you mentioned that you, you work as a writing coach, and I wondered whether that helps you with your own creative process.
Hayley: It really does because I think, um, I think when you write kind of full time or you’re writing kind of writing a lot, there’s, you, you become very inward focused, um, which is, you know, a good thing that’s a necessary thing when you’re writing a story. Um, but you can kind of become very stuck in your own head.
And the really lovely thing, I mean, I just love talking, and I think I have a feeling you have the same thing, but I love talking to writers about writing. I love talking to writers about how they write, and it’s always so much easier also to have perspective on someone else’s kind of a feeling of, of doubt or feeling of fear, than it is to have perspective of your own feeling. And so when you talk to other writers, you realize we’re actually all in this together. We all have very similar problems and very similar blocks. Um, and it just, it really gives me, it really feeds me and it gives me so much energy to have a bit more of an outward focus.
Like sometimes to not be so focused on my own, um, my own psyche and my own writing and my own stuff. Yeah, and you kind of notice when you start to talk to writers that everyone, if it’s like the same kind of issues, they might manifest kind of differently, but the same kind of issues come up. And then also it’s across the spectrum of, you know, people who are just really beginners and they’re trying to write for the first time, and they haven’t even maybe finished a manuscript all the way through to writers who have published multiple books and won awards and you know, got amazing reviews and things like that.
Everyone has the same kind of fears, and those fears don’t really ever go away. Um, in fact, sometimes they can get worse when you get published because you have more of a sense of an audience or more of a sense of, you know, there are people who are definitely going to read your work and you know, and they’re going to judge it or say about it.
So, I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t think it ever really goes away. I think you just, you find ways of dealing with it and coping with it, and you find ways of working in spite of those fears and in spite of those doubts.
Sarah: Absolutely. And I think that’s, that’s certainly something that I found through doing this podcast.
As you say, regardless of the stage of the writer’s career, the same kind of fears come up and, and that’s weirdly comforting. But also, I mean, I also wanted to ask you, how did you find going, you know, getting published obviously it’s something you wanted for a long time. You worked very hard, and then like you just alluded to the fears growing or changing and not just disappearing when you got, when you get published, how, how did you find that experience, your debut and so on?
Hayley: I mean, I was very anxious about it, I was very excited, but also very anxious about publishing my first. Um, and I really had this feeling that I wanted it to be perfect. Um, and I drove my editor a little bit crazy because I would just, like I wanted to make changes very close to the, you know, to the end of the process, I was still making little tweaks and little changes to the language.
And, um, I’ve learned, I learned with my second book to be a lot more gentle with myself. And I think that was something that I needed to learn was to not be so… I was very hard on myself with my first book. I was very, like I said, I had this idea that I wanted it to be perfect, which firstly doesn’t exist, like a perfect book it just doesn’t exist, because books are so subjective and something that’s perfect to one person is going to be imperfect to another person. Um. But I had these, I just had, I had a sense of wanting to control it and not really wanting to let go and I had to. Yeah. I think that’s the thing with your first book maybe, is that it’s the first time that you really have to let go.
You have to kind of hand it over. It’s going, it’s going to become a book in this state. You can’t make it any better. It is, you know, it’s, it is what it is. You’ve done everything. You’ve done everything you can and, and you have to just let it go and see how people react. And I think rationally I knew that of course some people would would like it and some people wouldn’t.
And I was like, kind of trying to prepare myself for that, but on an emotional level, um, it was different. It was, it was, it was harder to kind of wrap my head around, like, you’re putting this thing out into the world and what if people don’t like it and it’s, you know…
Sarah: Yeah, it’s scary. It’s properly scary.
Hayley: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah, definitely. So have you found that you’ve kind of got used to it a wee bit now that the book’s been out for a while? How are you feeling about your second book coming out?
Hayley: Yeah, I feel, I feel very different and much better about it. It is the experience and time and realizing that yes, you can, people can not like your book and also you don’t stop writing because of that and you don’t implode as a person, and then you don’t stop being yourself. I don’t know. It’s just, it’s not actually as damaging as, as you kind of think that it’s going to be. Um, but yeah, I did have a moment with Straygarden, um, when we were getting close to the end, it was kind of like second pass pages. It was the last time I could read it over.
Um, or even first pass pages and I did have this instinct to suddenly make all these changes, like it felt like every sentence was wrong, every comma had to be moved and things like that. Um, but I, I. I was able to kind of recognize that that was happening again. And I think that’s only something that really happens with perspective and with experience, is that you can kind of recognize, Oh, okay, yeah, this is how I feel around this stage. It’s very normal. It’s okay.
And yeah, and I. I kind of went, um, I’m really lucky that I have an agent who’s very supportive and very kind. And um, I told her that I was really worried about it and I kind of sent her the list of changes I wanted to make. She actually helped me narrow them down. She actually helped me make the list shorter because I, at the end of the day, I didn’t want to just be moving things around just for the sake of moving things around. I’ll get to that stage where you’re not actually making the book better with things that don’t need to be changed.
Sarah: Yeah, definitely. There’s always a stage in the edits, isn’t there when you realize that you’ve spent all day changing things and then the next day you change them back or you’ve changed some, a lot, a lot of them back and you think, yeah, no, I’m done now.
Hayley: And, and I think that is, and I’m sure as, as I publish, I don’t know if I get the opportunity to do some more books that I will probably feel more and more comfortable with that… Um, because I do think it’s just like an experience thing. But yeah, so it was Straygarden, I did, I, I made a conscious choice to be more gentle with myself.
I made this choice to go, okay, I’m actually, this book is, is good. I’m proud of it. I’ve done all that I can. I’ve worked really, really hard on it and now I’m going to let it go and let it be what it is.
Sarah: Good. Oh, that’s brilliant. And speaking of, um, sort of moving on and things, what are you working on at the moment, or what’s next for you?
Hayley: So I’m working on another middle grade fantasy book. I always joke that I write books about magical girls with secrets. So yeah, it’s another kind of magical book about a girl with a secret. Um, and yeah, I don’t, uh, like I said about my writing process, it’s really messy and discombobulated and it takes a long time for me to figure out what a book is actually about.
So I can’t say what it’s about because I don’t really know, and it would probably change like three times before it actually has finished. So, um, but it is, it’s middle grade fantasy and I’m really excited about it. I really love it. It’s a bit of a bigger world than I normally write. And my first two books have both been quite, quite sort of claustrophobic in a cool way. Like, like smaller, like kind of, yeah, just smaller worlds. Um, and this world feels a bit more expansive, so it does feel a bit scarier cause it feels like something that I haven’t done before and I’m kind of pushing myself as a writer, but at the same time, I like that feeling of pushing myself.
I feel like I’m challenging myself and doing something that I haven’t done before.
Sarah: No, that sounds really, really positive and like you say we need to keep challenging. I think we need to keep challenging ourselves. I think that’s really exciting. So where can people find out more about you and your books online?
Hayley: Okay. So my website is HayleyChewins.com. And it’s Hayley, H A Y L E Y Chewins C H E W I N S .com. I have a newsletter that I send out every month, which is usually very personal, and it’s like things that I don’t share anywhere, anywhere else. So if people are interested in my kind of behind the scenes writing lives, um, they can go sign up for that.
And the only social media I’m doing at the moment is Twitter. So I’m @hayley_chewins. Um, and that’s about it.
Sarah: That’s wonderful. Well, I’ll put all the links in the show notes. But that was wonderful. Thank you so much for that.
Hayley: Cool. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been lovely talking to you.
We have a great conversation about independent publishing, reader support, writing in series, and consistency, as well as self-doubt, mental health, and the importance of self-care.
This is episode 60 of the podcast, which means it has been running for five years – huzzah! I’m really proud of myself for keeping it going every month without a break – through good times and bad.
Thank you so much for listening, and for all your messages, questions, reviews and support over the last five years. I really appreciate it.
As ever, huge thanks to everyone supporting the show on Patreon. Thank you so much!
I love creating the podcast but it takes a significant amount of time (and money) to produce. If you want to help to keep the show going, please consider becoming a patron. You can support the show for just $1 a month! If you pledge $2 or more, you also receive an exclusive mini-episode that I put out in the middle of every month, plus instant access to the back list of twenty-three audio extras.
WRITING UPDATE
This month I’ve been working on the fourth Crow Investigations book and rewriting the messy draft of my non-fiction branding, marketing and selling book for authors.
I’ve been suffering with imposter syndrome over the last week or so, wondering ‘who am I?’ to write a book on branding and marketing, but I also know that sharing my personal experience (and lessons learned) and viewpoint is perfectly valid. The self-doubt struggle continues and I know that it will never go away.
SAVVY WRITERS EVENT
Past guest of the show, Tracy Buchanan, is running a one-day event in London on 9th May 2020, aimed at published authors (both indie and traditional).
Participants will get the chance to attend an advanced writing workshop with one of two writers, crime writer Sophie Hannah or women’s fiction author Amanda Prowse. There will also be a panel offering advice on marketing and mindset with industry guru Sam Missingham, HarperCollins editor (and previous guest of The Worried Writer!) Phoebe Morgan, and the Bookseller editor Phillip Jones. Plus a networking lunch and agent one-to-ones.
If you have any questions about writing, process, procrastination or the business side of things such as marketing or publishing options, email me, leave a comment on this post, or find me on Twitter.
IN THE INTERVIEW
The full transcript is copied below.
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INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Sarah: My guest today is USA Today best selling fantasy author Meg Cowley. Meg has two Epic Fantasy series of The Books of Caledan and The Chronicles of Pelenor, as well as an urban fantasy series Relic Guardians. Welcome to the show Meg and thank you so much for joining me.
Meg: Hello, thank you for having me, at last – it’s taken us a long time to schedule this!
Sarah: It has, I’m so excited. Thank you so much. So just to get us started, I was hoping you could tell us all a wee bit about your latest series or release.
Meg: Sure. So I am penning the final book in the Chronicles of Pelenor series, which is an epic fantasy filled with magic, dragons, intrigue, betrayal and deliciously morally grey characters and a smattering of romance.
So yeah, I like writing complex multi viewpoint epic fantasies. And I write stories set in the same world at the moment. I’m just continuing that. I’m due to finish it next week and I can’t wait because it feels like I’ve been writing it forever!
Sarah: That must be exciting but is it a wee bit nervy finishing as well?
Meg: Yeah, it is. It’s scary because you have a lot of expectations from yourself and your readers. You don’t want to disappoint anyone. So I have absolutely had massive stresses thinking ‘oh my God, this is… Is it going to be good enough? Can I manage this?’ But in the end, I’ve just had to push through it and think well, even if the first draft is terrible getting it written is the hardest thing and then I can edit it to make it pretty! But it’s going alright so far.
Sarah: Fantastic. I’d like to rewind a wee bit. I know that you are a proud and successful independent author and I don’t know if you know that I went hybrid a couple of years ago and I just love it.
I love it so much and I want everyone to know what a fantastic option it is, but I also was wondering: was it an easy decision for you? Did you start out as independent?
Meg: Yes, it was a really easy choice. I wrote my first book – I won’t bore you with the details of how that came about just same as any writer.
Love to write, decided to write a book and actually did it! Looking into the publishing options because once I wrote it I wanted to get it published of course, and it was quite black and white really. I looked at the options trad versus indie and indie just… It was the thing that suited me the most so I’ve gone the indie route. I have no regrets about that and I’m a really really happy indie author.
I think it’s allowed me to have the control and the financial freedom to make a career out of this which I had always dismissed because I never thought it would be possible and it’s just blown me away that life has changed so much in the past few years and I would not have been able to do that had it not been for independent authoring.
Sarah: That’s fantastic and you mentioned the sort of control there and obviously the finances. I’ve also discovered it’s a way to actually have a viable business which is fantastic. Are there any other things that you particularly like about being independent or if you were chatting to a listener perhaps who was maybe thinking oh traditional is the only way?
Is there anything that you would say to them to encourage them or do you think it’s something that some people just aren’t suited to?
Meg: I would say to ask yourself ‘what do you want from this?’ I think traditional and independent and hybrid and anything in the spectrum really – it’s all valid. There is no right answer there is no wrong answer but you have to know what you want from it and understand how to get that.
So for me, I wanted creative control and I wanted financial success. Indie was the natural choice for me. However, if you want literary acclaim, you want your book on shelves in shops where your rabid fans can go, and have release parties and pick your book off the shelf, trads probably best for you.
And that’s fine. It’s just that wasn’t for me. So I would say just ask yourself what you really want and how you can achieve that and see where on the spectrum you might be.
Sarah: I absolutely don’t want to sound as if I’m trying to push everybody to go indie, but I always want to say…
Meg: Just do it! Do it!
Sarah: Yeah! Having started in trad…
Meg: I’d say don’t dismiss it. I think people have a notion of what indie is: its sub-quality, people just popping stuff up on Amazon and that’s not the case, you know, the true indie author is an incredibly discerning avid reader who wants to tell fantastic stories that are worthy of being published and being read and being loved by readers.
We’re all the same at the end of the day. We all start off as readers who love stories and some of us want to tell those stories too, and it doesn’t really matter how you get to that reader. The reader doesn’t really care as long as they get a story that is satisfying.
Sarah: Honesty listeners, I am just nodding and nodding at Meg because I just agree so much! it’s about getting… As you say the readers are what matter, but in terms of of trad… I think a lot of people expect certain things from traditional publishing that you just don’t get unless you are a lead title or a ‘lightning stikes’ success or a celebrity author already. So things like ‘on the bookshelf’ you might not get those things. You might not get distribution and bookshops. So I think it’s really important, whatever you decide, to educate yourself and go in with your eyes open, whatever you’re doing. But I mean, I’ve followed your career, since I heard you on Joanna Penns podcast back when you were doing coloring books!
Meg: Gosh, yeah, that was a long time ago!
Sarah: I know! And I loved listening to my interview, so thank you for doing it. And I was… I felt like I was listening to a kindred spirit in terms of – or certainly what I was aspiring to – in terms of your work ethic, your production, your business sense. It was very inspiring to me.
So thank you and I’ve been really impressed ever since really, with your rate of production, and you’ve become a mum in the meantime!
Meg: It’s been a rocky few years, so I’m suppose. I’m quite pleased with what I’ve managed to do despite everything that’s happened.
Sarah: Oh, honestly Meg from the outside it just looks like you’ve done this ridiculous amount of amazing work. So absolutely hats off to you!
Meg: It looks like I’ve got it together. Excellent, I’ll take that!
Sarah: So, now I want your secrets you see, so could you talk me through a sort of typical writing day if you have such a thing? And things like productivity – do you keep business hours? All of that good stuff!
Meg: I think life has changed a lot in the last few years, like I’ve said, so I’ve had to change everything and keep changing everything and the only constant has been change – finding out what’s working and constantly evolving. So it used to be that I would just work 60-hour weeks and I loved that because I’m a workaholic, you know, writing was a hobby before it was a job, so if I wanted to do anything it was write stories, great. Having a child? Can’t do that anymore. And well it’s been a rough few years. So for the past probably three years now, I’ve had various health problems and then had my son and then struggled with post natal depression quite a lot. So it’s been a struggle to have any kind of steady routine.
Right now, my son goes to daycare. It was three days a week, last week he started going four days a week. So this is kind of a magical, almost normal place that I feel like I’m getting back to now. I have four consecutive days a week where I can write which is incredible and already I’ve noticed that my productivity shot up just from having that constant block of time where every day is the same, you know, I put my bum in the chair and I work. So Monday to Thursday I’m working. I write in the mornings, I do other things in the afternoon – marketing… I’m an illustrator as well, I illustrate fantasy book covers. So I do that in the afternoons and evenings. So morning is really writing words, creative time, and the afternoon is everything else and then Friday through Sunday I’m in mum mode which… Nothing gets done. That’s fine because I devote that time to my son.
Sarah: He’s very young at the moment isn’t he so it’s that phase. You know, it won’t last!
Meg: Yeah, in years to come I will wish he was as needing and…
Sarah: Speaking as someone at the other end of it you absolutely will. I’m sorry it’s annoying but there you go.
Meg: You can’t live without them and you can’t live with them can you?
Sarah: I know. Everyone says enjoy every second and then you think yes, but that last minute went on for about a week!
Meg: Yeah that does not apply to the sleepless nights, but most of the rest of it is fine!
Sarah: No it’s hard. So I was going to ask you about being a full-time author and also juggling parenthood with writing. Obviously you’ve touched on that there in terms of the importance really of getting those days that are the same and getting that chunk of time that you can then dedicate…
Meg: But even that has to be sensitive – last night I got no sleep. We have a sick toddler, and I just couldn’t sleep. So this morning, to be honest today my brain is just running on about 10% capacity and I did my writing in bed. And do you know what? Got my 3000 words written which is a miracle. But today I had to take that step back and say it’s okay. Today’s not going to be one of those ‘you get everything done’ kind of day. So it’s like I have my routine but it’s also flexible and accommodates self-care as well, which I find is really important right now because it is so easy to use up energy you’ve got and burn out.
Sarah: I’m so glad you said that because again, you know, I’m big on the productivity and I always want to learn how to do more, but I’m so aware that… Again speaking to people, or people listening who maybe are in the same situation, the last thing I want anybody to think is that they are failing if they are not on it a hundred percent all the time. Like you say, that being kinder to yourself and saying, okay well today I’m going to write in bed and it’s fine if it’s complete and utter rubbish because I’m brain-dead.
Meg: Yeah!
Sarah: That sort of thing is so important to say so thank you for sharing that.
Meg: We have a culture of busyness don’t we so if you’re not busy, then you’re not doing it right! Why are you not busy? We should all be so busy all the time doing all the things. And it’s taken a lot of time to unpick that and go ‘hang on. No, that is complete BS’.
Sarah: Absolutely.
Meg: I am at my best when I am happy, I’m healthy, you know. My energy is full when my creative well is refilled, when I’m fulfilled. I’m going to get more done rather than completely whipping myself all the time going more, more, more and just being so brain dead and sick of it all that it’s not even worth doing it because it’s not fun. And what I’m producing is not good.
Sarah: No, and burnout is a real thing in our industry, isn’t it? So it’s very wise to to pay attention to that and as well as it’s just good for you.
Meg: Yeah and learning about what kind of person you are because some people, they can pump out all those words day in day out and do that and that’s absolutely fine. That’s their natural rhythm, and for a long time I’ve tried to be one of those people and… There must just be no upper ceiling to this, if I just work harder I’ll be able to just write all the words everyday.
It’s taken a while and it’s been a bit of a bitter pill to realise, in the first instance. Now I’m fine with that. That I am not one of those writers and my pace is my pace and that’s fine.
Sarah: Absolutely. I mean, I’m far slower than you and I’ve also been trying to come to terms with what is my pace while also making sure that I am pushing myself a wee bit and not just falling into a kind of ‘och, that’s all I can do’. Like a self-fulfilling limiting belief if you like. But it’s so hard to work out where that should be!
Meg: 100% Yeah! It is just trying to work with yourself rather than against yourself at times.
Sarah: Absolutely. And in terms of the… I love what you said about the cult of busyness as well because one area again that I still struggle with a wee bit is: I love running a business. I love I love I love it. I love all of it and but I do get really overwhelmed because I could fill every minute of a 16-hour day with doing all the things and so yeah, I love the fact that today you said you felt rubbish, but you wrote in bed. So, you know your most important thing – writing the words – you prioritised that and you got that done. And I think that’s a really good tip. That’s so important to sort of emphasise that you cleared out, you know, the less important things. So is that something that you’ve come to when trying to balance the marketing, the business, the writing?
Meg: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve realised that it comes down to several core things for me as a business. So I take off my creative hat that loves creating these worlds and crafting stories and I put on my business hat and I think ‘what’s achievable? What do I actually need to be doing?’ So basically unless I am writing great stories, marketing my books and reaching readers. I don’t need to do it.
Like I don’t *need* to do it, you know, the core tasks are writing great stories and marketing and reaching readers. Like that’s it. There is nothing more to my business that needs to be done. I might have a million things on my to-do list like, I need to update this reader magnet and then oh my website needs that tweak and don’t forget to do your author page. Actually, do you know what? It’s just it’s just clutter and it clutters your mind just like it clutters your to-do list and I found that minimizing is one of the most helpful things that I’ve done over the past few years and it’s taken me about 3 years to get there from having the full page to-do list that just never gets done and then carrying over and carrying over from one week to another and just drowning under the weight of my own inadequacy because you know, I’m a failure. I can’t even do my own to-do list! What? And then realize that most of it doesn’t need to be done. So okay cross it off. And I work on that basis.
If it’s not… Obviously, I’ve got my client work as well at the moment so that you know, that is not something that gets crossed off! But ultimately, you know writing is the first thing, it’s the most important thing for me. If I get up and do that with a clear head in the morning and it’s done, I don’t need to worry about it and then the rest of the day I am concentrating on my client work and the other things that need to be done. And I’m ruthless about crossing off anything that can wait, or anything that’s not essential.
I’ve started to work with a virtual assistant and I occasionally subcontract things to her that I *could* do, but she could also do just as well. And that helps offload some of the things from my plate, and my time, and my stress to someone who is equally as capable of doing them.
So I’m really just learning to manage a realistic workload and work with the energy that I have and the type of worker that I am just to try and maximise what I can do but also in a way that promotes self care and you know avoids overwhelm and burn out basically so minimising has been key.
Sarah: And in terms of celebrating successes or celebrating what you are getting done, is that something else that you’ve been incorporating?
Meg: Trying to? Yeah, I am a workaholic. I am very goal-oriented. I’m conscientious I push myself. I’m incredibly self-critical that is just who I am as a person.
It’s how I’ve always been. If I wasn’t getting an A* it was not good enough and I used to beat myself up for it which I realise now was incredibly damaging but it’s very hard to stop doing that. So it’s a gradual work of unpicking that and actually stopping, when I’ve done something cool, to think ‘well done! That’s really cool’.
Like a sales Milestone or finishing a project or looking at my figures, my financial figures for the month, and just actually taking them in and going ‘wow you did that. That’s really cool’. So I am trying to be better about congratulating myself and treating myself when I do achieve something good, as opposed to just breezing on through and setting the next goal and going to meet that!
Sarah: Well I wanted to touch on that since we were saying just before recording that I’m exactly the same. And again I know that we won’t be alone and I hope that it might be hopefully comforting. Or maybe a wake-up call if you are listening and you find that you end each day with a list of things you didn’t achieve or you breeze past things… Take it from us, it’s not good for you. And you need to start rewarding yourself and recognising things.
Now, onto the writing side of things. Now the title of this podcast is the worried writer! So I’d like to delve into your struggles with creative writing if I may. Do you ever suffer from creative block?
Meg: I wouldn’t say that I suffer from creative block, but I am definitely guilty of imposter syndrome insofar as there are definitely points on the process where I think ‘who are you kidding?’
Any moment someone is going to find out and they’re gonna haul you off to a day job and make you work for the man because this is obviously a sham. I’ve got very good with just telling that voice to shut up and I carry-on. I don’t really get writer’s block per se. I outline and plot a lot, so I find that really helps me overcome… Any time I don’t know what I’m writing next, I go back to the plot and it you know, it informs me and I can move forward. The thing that I’ve really struggled with is my mental health to be honest. I didn’t really write much in the Autumn, having trouble with post natal depression again, so that was a rough and frustrating period.
But I just had to step back and sort of work on my self-care and not beat myself up too much for having to delay my book launch – the book that I am due to finish next week, I should have had published in November. So it’s obviously frustrating that that didn’t happen but it is what it is, ok move forward, and what’s the next best thing that you can do? So that’s that’s been the biggest struggle that I’ve had over the past few years is just struggling with mental health through illness and antenatal depression, post-natal depression that sort of thing really. Yeah. It’s just a constant every day, just trying to see on the bright side and do the best that I can.
Sarah: I think that’s… Again, it’s so important to say that or to recognise that what we do… You know, we can’t always just push through with a work ethic because what we do goes on in our heads.
Meg: Yeah, we can’t work in isolation.
Sarah: Yeah, and if our head isn’t quite right for whatever reason then no amount of willpower is going to sort that out and that can be a hard…. That’s really really tough. So I’m so sorry…
Meg: Ah, thank you. I feel like a year ago. I wouldn’t have been able to talk about this. It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact there’s nothing to be ashamed of in this and that actually, to open up a dialogue and to accept that we all face times where we struggle is a really really valid and necessary thing, because we all need to support each other through tough times when necessarily we don’t want to talk and open up about it because we feel like there’s a stigma. I feel like it’s really important especially in the industry that we’re in we often work alone, we often work long hours in isolation, socially cut off, and that is quite a challenge in itself. And then you have adult life, and all the things that that has, and I just find that I can’t work in isolation. I have to have emotional wellness to be able to write.
Sarah: Absolutely
Meg: As much as writing is a solace, I can’t be a crying mess and get my words done because I can’t do it.
Sarah: No, I’m the same – if my anxiety is bad then I can’t write
Meg: Yeah. So again working with yourself. And being forgiving.
Sarah: Exactly. And then there’s also… Again, it’s you just don’t know, I don’t know about you, with mental health and how I react to it in terms of creativity. It can vary again, you know, there can be… I can’t write with anxiety, but with grief I found that writing was – I mean not initially but after a little while it was – an escape, is still an escape and really good for me.
Meg: That was the same for me.
Sarah: I felt guilty going into it as if I was… You know, I shouldn’t be able to write as if that meant that I wasn’t grieving properly or something. So if you can bear to talk about it and you can bear to examine it and kind of air out those worries, it can help.
Meg: No, absolutely. I’ve done some of my best writing when I’ve been upset or angry but at other times I could feel like I was just not…
Sarah: Total shutdown!
Meg: Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got to work with yourself and not beat yourself up about it.
Sarah: Absolutely and I know also you mentioned there that you do lots of planning and plotting. Now, I don’t at all – I can’t. I’ve tried and I’ve never… This is my first series that I’m writing. Now I know you have been writing series and I’m used to the terror of when I’m writing a book, I’ve got no idea what happens…
Meg: I could not do that!
Sarah: And now I’m writing a series, and I’ve got no idea what happens. So my question for you is what tips do you have for me for writing a series? Or how would you reform me?
Meg: Plot it! Plot it all! Plot everything! I have only got worse and worse as the years have gone on. My three-point plot has evolved to a five-point, to a seven-point. Now, I use a 23-point plot for each viewpoint that I have. Its chronologically ordered and everything’s in beats, and I cannot survive without that structure. Depending on what I’m writing, it might be as little as a sentence for a chapter, or it might be as much as I have to write five thousand words of planning for that chapter before I can then write that chapter.
For me knowing what I’m going to write gives me the faith to trust myself, and delve into the creative process and lose myself in the flow because I know I’ve already figured it out. I can’t write myself into a corner because I know where I’m going. But it’s not flawless and it’s not perfect. Sometimes I have to tweak the plot, sometimes I have to go back waste a bit and go off in a slightly different tangent, but plotting for me works. So for me, I would say plot everything but if that doesn’t work for you, then that’s equally fine. I have huge respect – I don’t know how you do it, but wow! I wish I could just sit down and write, that would be amazing, but that’s just not for me.
Sarah: No, it’s very inefficient, I don’t recommend it! I’m always getting stuck and going down wrong ways.
Meg: I think the thing that I do if I get stuck is I go back to the last point that it worked at, and I go from there. That’s always been my go-to and whether it’s plotting or whether it’s writing if I get to a bit where I’m stuck, I’m like ‘right, where did it last work? Where do I need to get to? Am I going down the right path? Oh no, so this character wouldn’t do that because…’ Then it usually goes forward again. Sometimes have to go sideways or backwards!
Sarah: That was something I was going to ask about- when you’re plotting or outlining, brainstorming, do you get stuck then? Because that’s when you’re obviously working out all the stuff that’s going to happen. Do you get stuck then at all or is that just skipping through meadows?
Meg: Oh, I wish! I wish!
Sarah: Sorry!
Meg: I had a sudden mental image of running through fields of wheat! Possibly only UK listeners might get the slight political reference there! No I do get stuck on the plotting phase. But again I start with a very vague idea and it might be as simple as ‘main character makes a deal with such and such to kill the king’ and that’s the entire thing for the whole book. And then it’s filling in the pieces. Ok, well what if this happened here and what if this comes out and it’s gradually just building that jigsaw and making sure everything fits. Is it all in order? Yes. Okay. I’ll put it on my beat structure. Are there any beats that are missing. Oh, yeah. Okay, what could happen here? This beats in the wrong place. Let’s switch that about.
It’s just like a giant puzzle. It’s my favourite part of the whole process and it’s actually very annoying to then sit down and write a hundred thousand word book when you’re like ‘I’ve already figured this out’. The plotting is genuinely my favourite point – it’s like chemistry. It’s a formula of putting it all together and making this beautiful construct.
But yeah I absolutely get stuck and I have to go away and think, I go back to the last point that works. I put myself into the character’s shoes. What would they actually do? Am I doing something that’s true to them, that’s true to the plot.
It’s about approaching it from different angles for me and just checking – it’s almost like testing I guess that it’s bulletproof. Does this definitely work? Is this logical or am I just writing what I want to write but actually it’s a bad story because it’s not what the characters will actually do.
So I guess kind of stress test it in various angles and eventually fill in all the gaps and it works 90% And then I tweak it as I draft as I need.
Sarah: That’s fantastic. And you mentioned beats there and – do you have any particular resources where you learned about beats and story structure and things or is it something you’ve just picked up? Anything you’d recommend I guess?
Meg: Kind of Frankensteined as I’ve gone. So my 23-point beat structure is probably the combination of four or five different structures with my own bits thrown in that I’ve picked up over the last four or five years and I don’t even really know where I’ve got them from. I chat with friends and we talk about things and they you know, we send each other spreadsheets, because we’re cool, with beat structures on them. I guess I’ve just found something that works for me and adapted it.
There’s plenty of material out there on beats and I would just say go and read through them and some will resonate better than others or some parts will resonate better than others and take what works for you because as much as there might be a formula for writing a story, the way that you do it is entirely up to you, and again working with yourself and to bring the best of your own writing out, I found that this is the one that works for me.
Sarah: I think that’s a great tip – that idea that if you read a structure book and some of it makes sense or some of it resonates, that it is completely okay for you to kind of cobble together, as you said, your sort of Frankenstein’s, your own version. So I think that’s really really worth saying.
Meg: I think when you get into it you feel like you… If you read a book, you must do all the things that the book says because the book is right. And then the further you get along the further you think well actually it just doesn’t work for me. So I’m just gonna make it up on the fly.
Sarah: Yeah, when I’ve attempted plotting when I was trying to learn how to do it. I definitely read a lot of things and I tried to apply them but because it didn’t really work with my own process, but as you say I would try and slavishly follow that particular formula or method because I was looking for that…
Meg: The Magic Bullet!
Sarah: Yes, I was!
Meg: The Magic Bullet, yes. And the secret is there is no magic bullet, unfortunately, but the closest you get is finding what works for you and being able to apply that as much as you can in the lifestyle that you have.
Sarah: Yeah, definitely and I think you’ve sort of answered this probably in terms of your elaborate and detailed plotting and outlining. But again, I want to pick your brains a wee bit more on writing series. Does that help you in terms of keeping all your details? Do you keep a story bible or anything like that or is the fact that you’ve got all these outlines does it for you?
Meg: I should keep a story bible – I’m on book four now, and I keep looking back through 300,000 words of the past three books going ‘oh, I did I do this? Have I forgotten anything?’ I need to get better at series for sure. I do make sure I wrap up all my plot holes, but I definitely need to improve how I plot series and how I record because it’s just – especially in the current sleep-deprived state of my life – there is too much information to hold in my head like I used to be able to do. So. Yeah, I definitely need to get more more down onto paper. But the series for me is I guess it’s like a nested three or four act structure – the series is the three or four act structure and then each book has a three or four act structure and then the structures inside that have… And so on and so forth.
So it’s about just making sure that the books within the series are complete story arcs. That’s really important – nothing annoys me more than reading a book that is not a complete story. Cliffhanger is fine, but it still has to be a complete story and then the series as a whole wraps everything up, and all the foreshadowing through the past few books sort of come together. That’s really satisfying to do and I like to make sure that I tick all those off.
Sarah: Yeah, definitely and I’m I’m sort of keeping a series bible, but I need to get better at it. So it’s kind of comforting to me to know that you haven’t got it completely sorted, yet!
Meg: Well, I’m writing in the same universe and, well the same world, and I’ve only done almost two Series in it so far, but I’ve got like 5,000 years of history there – Tolkien sort of scope.
I really need to start writing it down, but it’s such a big job. I just don’t have the time to do it. So I need to figure that out probably sooner rather than later because it’s only going to get more and more and more that I need to write down, the more and more that I write.
Sarah: Well, maybe you’ll just have to get your VA to do that. Get your VA to create a story bible.
Meg: That’s not a bad idea actually. I might beg some of my fans – does anyone want create a world bible? That would actually be pretty cool.
Sarah: It would! It would be amazing. So another thing with writing a series, I always panic, I always put a lot of pressure on myself and I fret a lot about letting readers down. And I’m finding that even harder with a series because… It’s a series! Is that something that you struggle with at all?
Meg: Yeah. Absolutely. I’ve really struggled with that, this book 4 because this series has just been incredible to write and the reader feedback I’ve received has been amazing. People love these books and and it is humbling.
It is also terrifying to think that I have all these people invested in the mad delusions of my brain. Yeah, that’s scary. But I really really take heart from my readers, every word of encouragement from them really really heartens me. I actually printed out… I know your listeners won’t be able to hear, but you can probably see over my shoulders there’s a photo frame and a few weeks ago, I did a reader survey on branding. I really really value my readers feedback in everything from from stories to my branding, everything, and there was an empty comments box at the end and I just you know, the usual anything else to add, and they wrote the most lovely things. You know, you have the most amazing mind, thank you for sharing yourself with us, don’t ever stop writing, your series are you know one-click buys for me, I love everything you write… And I printed them out and put them next to my writing chair because it was just like, every time I feel like I’m not good enough or that I’m going to let someone down, I read those, and I think, I can do this. These people are counting on me. They believe in me and I can do this, and that’s just been really really heartening to think that I’ve got all these people cheering me along. I love my readers. Genuinely. They’re amazing.
Sarah: That’s wonderful. That’s such a good tip as well. I’m stealing that tip!
Meg: Every nice review you have, every really lovely one that fills you with warm fuzzies, if you’re feeling down, go look at them. Print them out, stick them in a book and go read them when you’re feeling like you’re struggling to do this and you’re not sure how you’re going to manage it because it’s just it’s just lovely.
Sarah: So obviously you’ve got your next, your last in series, is coming out, or you’re finishing up on that. What are your other plans for this year or or the next few months? Or would you rather not say?
Meg: In 2020… Can I swear on this podcast?
Sarah: Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I’ll put a tag on it.
Meg: 2020 is the year of getting my – together. So this is the first year that I will have vaguely full-time, so four days a week. I know what I’m doing as far as people I guess can know what they’re doing in that I can write good books. I’m confident of that. I can sell good books and hopefully support my family doing that.
That’s that’s my ultimate goal. That’s why I do this. I love stories, but I also want to provide for my family doing this. I don’t want to have to go back to day job and this is the first year where I really have the chance to do that. I won’t be having any more babies. I am hoping I won’t have any more life-threatening illnesses or situations to deal with hopefully, hopefully I’m praying that 2020 will be a straightforward smooth year where I can actually show The Very Best of myself and what I’m capable of and I feel really motivated to just go out there and try and have no limits and say yes and just be the very best that I can be.
So I want to get this series finished. This closes a really important but sort of dark chapter of my life and go on to my next series which will be set in the same world. I’m already working with my readers to sort of brainstorm what they would like to see as well as my own ideas. So yeah, I’m excited to have fun writing great stories meeting more great readers and just hopefully having a fulfilling healthy year full of self-care.
Sarah: Well, I love your goals for this year. I particularly love again as we’ve said in this in this interview that how self-care is up there. So just to finish up – where can listeners find out more about you and your books online?
Meg: So I’m on Amazon Meg Cowley, my website megcowley.com. I’m on Instagram @meg_cowley and that’s pretty much it. Again I try to minimise, so I do the bare minimum of what what is fun and what is achievable.
Fantastic. I’m definitely
Sarah: making notes as we speak. So thank you so much for your time. I’ll put all the links in the show notes.
My guest today is Vanessa Lillie whose debut thriller Little Voices is out this week from Thomas and Mercer.
We talk about dealing with reviews and being read, and how Vanessa transformed from a free-writer to an outliner.
Vanessa has fifteen years of marketing and communications experience and enjoys organising bookish events in Rhode Island, where she lives. She worked as an editor for a publisher, before leaving to concentrate on her own writing.
I love creating the podcast but it takes a significant amount of time (and money) to produce. If you want to help to keep the show going, please consider becoming a patron. You can support the show for just $1 a month! If you pledge $2 or more, you also receive an exclusive mini-episode that I put out in the middle of every month, plus instant access to the back list of nineteen audio extras.
WRITING UPDATE
This month I’ve been battling with the third Crow book. I said I was almost done and I thought I was, but the ending keeps moving away from me. This is partly because there are scenes which are in the wrong place (or I’ve realised there is a better, more exciting way to order them) and that takes lots of thought and weaving together and rewriting, and partly because the ending itself got a wee bit more complicated and I needed a few more chapters than I expected. It’s nearly done, though, which is very good news as it’s due out in November!
SPEAKING
Also, I did a talk for the lovely folk at the Borders Writers Forum. If you’re a member of the group and have tuned in today, hello and thank you, again, for having me. It was so much fun and I have great writerly chats with people after the official Q and A had finished.
One thing I wanted to talk about was somebody said that a person in their life had said something about ‘why write?’ because there were enough books in the world and every story had already been done, or something similar.
I realised this was a doubt I dealt with a long time ago and had actually forgotten that I’d once had…
So.
There is nothing new. No new ideas. No new stories. And that doesn’t matter. The execution is what matters and, crucially YOUR VOICE. Nobody else has your POV and so your book most definitely hasn’t been done yet.
Also, who cares? Who gets to say ‘enough books’? Who has that authority? It’s not like writing books hurts anybody. This is not life or death, this is just telling stories. Who on earth has the right to tell you that you’re not allowed to tell your stories?
Also, yes, there are loads of books which have been written in the past and they are valuable and wonderful, but they are products of their time. Books written now are products of this time, this moment in history. That’s important, too.
Finally, and most importantly, think of a book that was just the right book for you at just the right time. Something you loved with a passion, something you fell into at a time you needed to escape. Think about that book and how you felt the first time you read it. It might be one you’ve gone back to many times in your life as a comfort read or one that you only read once, but it transformed your world during the time you spent in it and you are eternally grateful.
Now imagine that the author who wrote that book let self-doubt stop them. They will have felt the same fears, have heard the same arguments, they might have let that stop them and you would never have had the magical experience of reading it.
Now go a step further. There is somebody out there who needs the book that is currently inside you. You don’t know them and they don’t know you, but you are connected by this need. The book inside you is the one story, the one voice, the one moment that will give them that same perfect experience. If you don’t write your book, that reader won’t get to read it when they need it.
It’s a thought which I found massively inspiring and helpful and I hope you do, too.
PUBLISHING
In more practical news, I’m not sure I mentioned it before but I have hired my husband out of his job one day a week and he’s doing lots of stuff to free up my time such as editing the podcast and the transcription of the interview.
This links to my overall business plans, but also to my mission to write as many of the books I have inside me as possible before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Remembering that this is my purpose, my ‘why’, is very motivating, and I highly recommend delegating stuff to other people as soon as you can afford to do so. This could be paying someone to do your cleaning to free up writing time or, if you’re indie and running the publishing business side, delegating operational tasks such as book-keeping.
LISTENER QUESTION
I had a great listener question on Twitter from Joanne Mallory about branding. Thank you!
It has inspired me to dedicate a whole episode to marketing and branding for authors next month.
If you have any questions about writing, process, procrastination or the business side of things such as marketing or publishing options, email me, leave a comment on this post, or find me on Twitter.
IN THE INTERVIEW
I’m still trialling the full transcript of the interviews (see below). I want to make the podcast more accessible for those who prefer (or need) to read, rather than listen. I would love to hear what you think! Do you like the full transcript or do you miss the ‘selected highlights’ of the old format?
RECOMMENDED
Vanessa is a reformed free-writer, and she recommends the following books to learn how to outline and structure a novel.
If you can spare a few minutes to leave the show a review on iTunes (or whichever podcast app you use) that would be really helpful. Ratings raise the visibility of the podcast and make it more likely to be discovered by new listeners and included in the charts.
[Click here for step-by-step instructions on how to rate a podcast on your device]
Also, if you have a question or a suggestion for the show – or just want to get in touch – I would love to hear from you! Email me or find me on Twitter or Facebook.
I have a great interview for you today with a dear friend of mine, historical romance author Emily Royal. Emily has written several novels and is impressively prolific, but 2019 is her first year as a published author. She has gone from submission hell to having several books out in one year, so there is lots to dig into, and I’m sure you will enjoy her story.
I love creating the podcast but it takes a significant amount of time (and money) to produce. If you want to help to keep the show going, please consider becoming a patron. You can support the show for just $1 a month! If you pledge $2 or more, you also receive an exclusive mini-episode that I put out in the middle of every month. You also get instant access to the backlist of extra episodes (there are eighteen now!).
WRITING UPDATE
It’s been a busy month with more summer holiday fun, a family trip down south and lots of drafting on my third Crow Investigations book.
I have also been sorting through all of the notes I took at the publishing conference in Edinburgh. One of the many things it’s made me think about is my branding as an author. I have been trying to work out what my ‘promise to the reader is’ as although my books tend to have a wee bit of magic in them, they do span different genres such as supernatural thriller, women’s fiction historical, and urban fantasy.
There was a brilliant session from Derek Murphy (CreativeIndie) and he spoke about the importance of working out how you want your readers to feel when think of you/your books, and how that is linked (or should be linked!) to the way you present yourself (your branding)
MINDSET
As I mentioned last month, one of the most important things I got from the Edinburgh conference was a mindset shift. It could perhaps more properly be described as a mindset confirmation. Doing this author thing is a wee bit odd, and stepping outside the traditional route and running it as a business is another step away from the usual… Much as I love it, I hadn’t realised how and uncertain I still felt.
Physically being in the same space with hundreds of talented, successful, businesslike authors and small publishers, was transformational. It confirmed that I’m not alone in doing this (or delusional!). It was amazing to hear from people who are extremely successful, who I would like to emulate, but it also helped me to recognise the success that I have enjoyed and the things that I have achieved. Since I’m pretty rubbish at doing that, it was really helpful!
Another great tip I got from the conference was a reminder on the importance of working out your core ‘why’ for writing. People spoke unselfconsciously about their ambition for their writing and publishing, about financial and other goals, and about their core values and reasons for writing. It was another reminder that I’m on track for my core goals, and confirmed that my heart and head are in alignment.
It also reaffirmed my commitment to being a hybrid author, with some projects done through my own publishing company and some with other publishers.
I know that many of you are aiming for the traditional route, and may prefer not to deal with the business side at all, and that’s completely fine. For me, though, it’s an exciting and creative part of being an author, and I’m so grateful that I have the opportunity and control.
If you have any questions about writing, process, procrastination or the business side of things such as marketing or publishing options, email me, leave a comment on this post, or find me on Twitter.
RECOMMENDED
I give a shout out to some lovely folk on Twitter, including humorous suspense author Bill Cokas. I throughly enjoyed his interview on Paul Teague’s podcast, Self Publishing Journeys. I’ve recommended Paul’s podcast before (especially if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of running an author business), and this interview with Bill was great.
I’m still trialling the full transcript of the interviews (see below). I want to make the podcast more accessible for those who prefer (or need) to read, rather than listen. I would love to hear what you think! Do you like the full transcript or do you miss the ‘selected highlights’ of the old format?
THANKS FOR LISTENING!
If you can spare a few minutes to leave the show a review on iTunes (or whichever podcast app you use) that would be really helpful. Ratings raise the visibility of the podcast and make it more likely to be discovered by new listeners and included in the charts.
[Click here for step-by-step instructions on how to rate a podcast on your device]
Also, if you have a question or a suggestion for the show – or just want to get in touch – I would love to hear from you! Email me or find me on Twitter or Facebook.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Sarah [00:00:09] Emily Royal writes historical romance in both the medieval and Regency periods. Her debut novel The Sins of the sire came out in March this year and was swiftly followed by Henry’s Bride, Book One in the London Libertines series. Now, full disclosure, Emily is a close friend of mine. and I am thrilled that she is finally being rewarded for all her hard work and tenacity. Welcome to the show. Emily and thank you so much for joining us.
Emily [00:00:40] Oh hello Sarah. It’s so good to be here at last. After so many years of rejections and rejections and rejections it’s great to be here and I’ve been a bit of a fan girl of your show for ages, so it’s lovely to be on the other side of the microphone.
Sarah [00:00:55] We got here! I’m so glad, too. Before we get into your twisty path to publication which I’m very excited about, I was hoping that you could just kick things off by telling us all a wee bit about the London Libertines series, because I believe Book 2 is actually going to be out quite soon.
Emily [00:01:18] Yeah. Book 2 should be out in a couple of weeks time. Just doing final tinkering on the format. So yeah the London Libertines series, I suppose you could describe it as Jane Austen with sex and dark stuff. There is a set of romances which currently is set in the Regency period but I suspect as the years progress it will move into Victorian. Set mainly in London but also in the country and country states and everything. And the heroes are unashamedly alpha males, so you could say it’s a bit bodice-rippy. But the heroines are all misfits in one way. So the heroine in the first book she’s quite plain, she’s awkward, she’s gawky, she’s intelligent and she speaks her mind, and she’s a bit of a social outcast. In the book that’s coming out in a couple of weeks time, Hawthorne’s Wife, the heroine is a complete outcast who’s afflicted by a childhood trauma and lots of horrible things happen to her and she has to overcome it. And actually in the third book the heroine is recovering from a mental breakdown. So it’s actually quite dark stuff. It’s interesting to put it in a regency setting, so it’s not your typical frothy sparkling romance with glittering gowns, it tackles some quite horrific issues sometimes.
Sarah [00:02:42] Excellent. And as I mentioned in the intro, we’re pals, so I do already know your path to publication story, having lived it alongside you a tiny wee bit, but it’s so inspiring. Especially since your debut year is such a busy one. Would you mind talking us through your path to publication?
Emily [00:03:12] Yeah. So how long have you got? I’ve been tinkering with writing for a couple of years. If we go back to kind of 2013, 2014, which is, yeah, five-six years ago, I’ve been writing for a couple of years and I think I ended up having three books that were really really rough and overly long. I remember telling you ‘I’ve written a book, Sarah, and it’s a hundred and eighty thousand words long’ and you kind of burst out laughing and said ‘yeah, you’re going to need to cut it down’.
So I had these books and I stumbled across the website for the Romantic Novelists Association, and on their website they talked about this new writing thing which they have. Where there’s a limited set of unpublished authors who can join the association so they get all the benefits of the magazine and access to seminars and conferences etc.. But with that comes a full critique of a novel. And I thought, yeah yeah I’m gonna have some of that. It’s massively oversubscribed so the slots are like T in the park tickets they get oversubscribed within about two minutes of the beginning of the year beginning. So it was March 2014 so I already missed the boat, but 2015, I stayed up at 2 minutes past midnight on the 1st of January and got in. And I got this critique in June of that year and it was really really positive and it was quite scary because that was the first time anyone had ever read anything I’d written because I just had you under the bed and didn’t even show it to my husband and kids, I was terrified of it. But it was really positive, so I though ‘brilliant brilliant’ and I started submitting to agents. And I got agent interest in September of that year which, for me, those three months submitting and getting rejections was just forever, but actually looking back I think that was pretty quick.
I got signed at the end of the year and I thought ‘Oh this is it. This is it. I’ve made it, I’m going to get a three book deal, I’m gonna get books in Waterstones.’ And now I look back and think you naive little fool! I just knew nothing about the publishing industry. So fast forward three years, nothing happens. I went through two books with my agent. I had periods of submissions to publishers, waiting to hear, lots of rejections, lots of radio silence. I can remember being stressed waiting for emails back from my agent and publishers, and every time my phone pinged it was like ‘yes, yes, check it!’ and it was an email from the Carphone Warehouse with an offer for a new phone and I just turned into a complete obsessive with this thing and it just stressed me out so much. And then I got to the end of it, and the second book failed to get a deal. So this was at the end of 2018, beginning of 2019, so a long time, and my agent and I decided to part company. So yeah, that was long and tortuous.
But during that, what I did was I just carried on writing more books. And what I did was the first book that my agent couldn’t get a deal for, I started submitting that to smaller publishers, and I finally managed to get a contract for that. That took about six months, and that book’s actually not out yet. But I got a deal for that middle of 2018. And then the second contract I got actually came out as a result of a Twitter pitch, which was a book that my agent looked at it and just went ‘No I’m not touching that, that’s way too dark, way too violent’. And that was that the Sins of the Sire. And I chucked it up as a Twitter pitch, May 2018, just really to see whether I could write a half decent tweet, whether I could do an elevator pitch. I didn’t think anything would come of it, but I got a ‘like’ from an editor at a publisher called Tirgearr which is based in Ireland and I’d heard good things about them, they’ve got quite nice covers and some of my friends published with them. I sent in the book and I gave full disclosure, I said ‘look, this book is way too violent and I’m sure it breaches all of your guidelines, but just out of courtesy here it is’. So I was quite blunt about it. Didn’t think anything of it. And I heard back from them a few weeks later and I didn’t even open the email because I just thought it was gonna be a rejection. And about two to three hours after I got the email, I came back into my hotel bedroom because I was actually away with work, had a couple of beers, thought ‘let’s see why they’ve rejected me’ and this email actually says we’re actually quite interested, what else are you writing? And they offered me a contract, which was a bit of a shock!
[00:08:03] And then the third contract was absolute lightning fast. It was just after I’d parted company with my agent beginning of 2019. My agent was based in the States and I wanted to have closure on publishers in the States, but there was one more publisher I was really interested in because they had great authors on their list who are topping some of the some of the charts, authors who I admire, who I fangirl over, so I thought I would kick myself if I didn’t at least chuck it at them and see what they thought. So I chucked it at them and then two days later I got an e-mail saying can we talk? I got back home that night and she phoned me up and then three or four days after they offered me a three book deal!
[00:08:44] So actually that one took a week to get a three book deal on that book and yet everything else has been years and years and years. Sorry, that was a long ramble!
Sarah [00:08:53] Not at all, thank you for sharing that. It’s an absolute head spinner how much things have changed and turned around for you. And there was that long torturous waiting period while you were agented, and I know so many folk listening will be able to empathise with that hugely. That glacial pace of traditional publishing and how it can go like that… Slow, slow, slow, wait, wait, wait and then fast! It is so normal, unfortunately. The rejection and the submission process and getting an agent doesn’t mean it’s a done deal, but when we’re going through it we feel as if we’re failing or that it is a bad sign. So I’m so grateful for you being willing share it, because I think it’s really helpful for other people who are either going through it or looking to start submitting or whatever. So, in terms of speed, you went from effectively nothing, to, I believe several out this year?
Emily [00:10:28] Yes. So this year, I’m probably gonna have five books out, which is completely insane. It’s like I was sat with my engine idling for three years, getting really stressed, and then wallop I’m up to 100 in half a second. I still haven’t quite recovered from it.
[00:10:50] And there were so many lows during those three years. I can remember just being absolutely gutted and heartbroken with some of the rejections and the close ones were the worst. I mean, I had one where a publisher from a pretty half decent imprint was showing lots and lots of interest in my book. It was the first book that my agent tried to submit and actually then my agent really came into her own. She was really interactive and there was loads of communication and they were talking about careers, and three book deals, other projects, where is my career going, blah blah blah… And she was like ‘No, no, this is really positive’ and then it fell at the last hurdle. The editor really wanted it, but they just said no it’s the wrong timing, we’re not we’re not taking it. And that went from being just on the brink of this massive high, and I just plummeted off a cliff. I look back and say what was the worst day of my life. It probably wasn’t, it sounds quite melodramatic, but that was a low. And then for this to happen, particularly with the DragonBlade contract, as I kind of blinked and it happened. It was like, you look away and that’s when the unicorn just trots in front of you…
[00:12:07] Yeah it’s insane. It’s not this process of, it takes you six months to get an agent and it takes you a year to get a contract and a year to get another contract. It’s not a straight line, it’s up and down and all over the place it’s backwards and forwards and, yeah, it’s completely mental this industry.
Sarah [00:12:24] Having just been through that, is there anything that you wish that you could go back and tell yourself or what advice would you want somebody listening to hear if they are going through the same submission hell?
Emily [00:12:39] Actually the advice that you gave me, Sarah, was along the lines of just keep at it, you’re getting closer. And the only way to make sure it never happens is to give up… Just carry on, just chalk it up to experience and write another book, the market goes up and the market goes down, tastes change, it’s all a matter of timing, just keep at it and you will get there. And I remember looking at you thinking ‘Yeah well it’s all right for you because you’re on the other end of it’ but it is true. Just keep at it. Be true to yourself sounds like a cliché but just carry on writing what you love.
[00:13:19] The only way to get a deal is to just keep it keep writing books. You’re not going to build a career on one book. So even if you get a deal you’re going to have to write another book at some point, so you might as well crack on with it while things are out on submission. So long as you’re getting decent feedback so that you can see where the issues are, but you can see what’s good about it, what needs to be done, then you’re always going to be learning and you’re always going to be getting that bit closer.
Sarah [00:13:47] I think that’s excellent advice, and I do think your advice to keep on writing – if you can – while you’re going through the submission hell is really a super-good tip.
Emily [00:13:59] I think the reason, or the main reason I got the DragonBlade contract is because when we were chatting she did say well we would like to have books in series and relatively rapid release, and because I’d been writing and writing and writing during this desert period, I already had three books which were drafted, and I think that was one of the things that swung the deal. So, yeah, keep at it.
Sarah [00:14:24] If it’s okay with you I’d like to go back to the beginning a wee bit and ask that very common question, did you always want to write?
Emily [00:14:32] Yeah I did. I never really liked English at school, so I didn’t like English language. I didn’t like having to read a book that you never would have read in the first place and having to analyse the characters. So I was never really good at that, but I was a hopeless romantic at heart and I always loved little romantic stories and occasionally we would do creative writing in English and I’d do little medieval romances with little drawings of girls in pretty dresses and everything. I’ve obviously got a lot darker since then… But I do remember saying to an adult when I was about 10/15 years old saying I’d love to be a writer and I’ve got some ideas for romantic stories’ and they just turned around and said to me ‘Oh yeah I’ve got a friend and she’s actually good and she’s not never got published so you got no chance don’t do it.’.
[00:15:17] [Laughter] The look of horror on your face! Slight digression. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the TV show Lost, when they crash on this kind of weird magical bizarre island? And there’s a character in there who is my favourite character called John Locke, and he’s a bit of a misfit in society. He’s disabled, he’s kind of the typical mark for con men, so he’s not valued in society but actually in the island he really comes into his own. All throughout his life in the real world people say to him you can’t do this you can’t do that. And he stands up and says ‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do’. And actually that really struck me when this adult said to me you got no chance. I thought don’t tell me what I can’t do.
[00:16:07] But that kind of festered and lay dormant in my mind until thirty odd years later. So I always wanted to do it. Actually that’s one thing I think that drove me forward during this kind of three years of horror of submissions, I though someone told me I can’t do this, I’m gonna prove them wrong! So it’s almost like a 40 year grudge that drove me through it.
[00:16:31] I have always wanted to be a writer. But then when kind of adult life and you think the responsible thing to do is to get a job that pays a regular salary. I did that and actually I love my job. I love my maths and everything that I do, but this thing lay dormant and it’s kind of the creative side I think which is my release from all the mathematical stuff I do during the day. So yeah.
Sarah [00:16:54] And I was going to ask what led you to choosing a historical romance and whether it is easy to pick a genre. But you’ve just said that your very early stories were quite romantic. Was it very simple to choose that genre?
Emily [00:17:07] It was yeah I had what I read when I was beginning to write the romance stuff I was reading a lot of crime not quite dark crime stuff. And there always seems to be this stigma with romance. If people ask me what genre I write and I say romance, you sometimes see their eye twitches a little bit as if to say ‘Oh well that’s kind of rubbish, cookie-cutter type stuff’. And they don’t realise that romance is a fantastic genre and it’s everywhere, it’s all about emotions and everything. So, I think I kind of held back a little bit earlier on, just because I thought people don’t value romance, but actually people do. There’s just a little bit of snobbery associated with it. But it was really easy to do romance and the historical romance, just the whole thing about knights in shining armour although now my knights are always a little bit tarnished.
[00:17:59] Yeah it was easy and it was it was natural. I am by no means a historian, so it’s not like I do hours and hours of research, but I do enough so I’ve give a flavour of the period. It’s authentic in terms of the period, and the flavour and the ambience.
Sarah [00:18:26] So people can really get into the story and not be thrown out of it – enough detail to anchor them in the story.
Emily [00:18:34] Yeah. You don’t want a Regency heroine picking up her mobile phone.
Sarah [00:18:40] [Laughs] Not unless it’s a time travel one.
Emily [00:18:41] Wibbly wobbly timey-wimey time travel stuff.
Sarah [00:18:47] We’ve mentioned the fact that you have a really crazy year of publishing. I know I’ve said this to you personally many a time that you are having quite the introduction to being a published author. But it’s also true that you’ve always been incredibly productive in terms of your writing. And I admire it and I really want to learn from you. So while I’ve got you on the show I’d love to hear more about your writing process. So things like you know do you write every day and keep business hours Monday to Friday. What’s your routine?
Emily [00:19:28] I have to fit it around the day job which pays the bills. When I am actually drafting I do try to get myself in the zone, as it were, and I do try and be disciplined to write something every day. So if I’m in the throes of a draft and it’s all plotted out, it’s all good to go, I will aim for about two thousand words a day. Often I don’t reach that I then say to myself if I can make a thousand, which if I’m really concentrated I can probably churn out in about an hour of real concentrated writing. And if I’m really at full pelt, I can do five thousand a day but that’s normally if it’s a day off or if it’s a weekend. But I do try and make sure I’ve just put something in everyday, so at least every day I’ve moved forward even if it’s only by a little amount. I always feel that I might lose my touch if I don’t write, so I force myself to write a bit every day.
[00:20:27] In terms of how I do it. I plot like mad to the point of obsessive compulsive disorder. I have to have it all plotted out. And then I will blitz it through from start to finish. So in terms of plotting, I see it like a painting. I’ll kind of start fleshing out the story with big blocks of colour, with the themes and the character profiles, just to get some ideas. And then I’ll start fleshing out some of the detail by, say if I’ve got fight scene in Chapter 22, I might talk about who’s fighting who, what weapons they’ve got, whether there are any other characters witnessing the fight getting involved, what they say, ideas for dialogue. Eventually, once I’ve done that, I’ll have a whole mass of bullet points which just cover the scenes. Probably about 10 or 20 bullet points describing each scene. I’ll then colour code it, I mean I’m so obsessive, I will colour code it red for the heroine’s point of view, blue for heroes point of view, green for anybody else. Just to check whether the switches are happening at the right time, so that you haven’t got twelve chapters in one point of view in two lines in another. And that normally ends up being about 20 pages of A4. Then I lay it all out in front of me. Then I’ll do my character profiles with little spider maps. So the heroine on one side, hero on the other, with lines interconnecting all the other characters in between them. Once I’ve got that it’s good to go. And then I basically sit down and blitz through the first draft and just hide under a rock and write and write and write until at the other end a first draft is spat out.
[00:22:09] I love things like the National Novel Writing Month that happens in November where you aim to write fifty thousand words in a month. Because that’s like one thousand six hundred and sixty six words a day, which is quite doable if you sit down for an hour a cup of coffee. So I tend to use that as my month for really focused drafting a book. It works really well for me because I just I love plotting but I know there’s some people who just the thought of plotting in advance just freaks them out.
Sarah [00:22:42] But it works for you. Do you have any other tips for writing regularly or for producing lots of books? Do you have any other tips for productivity?
Emily [00:23:10] Things like writer’s block. Some scenes I find really easy to write and others I find really difficult and I’m sure a lot of a lot of people find that. And a lot of people say to me ‘just leave that and go into an easy scene’ but actually I can’t do that. So one of the reasons why I do go from start to finish is I know that if I have got a difficult scene I just have to push through it. It’s like climbing a mountain, you might get a real difficult part and you think well you’ve got to do that halfway up or otherwise you’re never get to the top of the mountain. So I’ll just push through it, even if I think it’s gonna be rubbish, because at least then I will get to the other end.
I overwrite a lot, and I do know that if I’ve got scene which is difficult I’ll overwrite even more, so I just think just chuck words at it and eventually you will end up with something that can be edited down. And I always find, and I’m sure a lot of people find this as well, is that when I’m writing something I think it’s gonna be rubbish, it’s going to rubbish, but I keep saying to myself you think it is but actually when you look back at it with a clear head it’s never going to be as bad as you as you think it is. So I try to switch off the little devil inside me which says ‘you’re rubbish, this sucks, you suck, everything sucks, the world sucks’ and just push through that. And what I was saying before about forgetting submissions and cracking on with the next book, because you’ve almost always got something out on submission, so I try and switch off from that and just plough through the book. Arguing that whatever happens with the book that’s out on submission, I’ve still got to finish this book and I’m writing now so I force myself to do to do that.
[00:24:44] Oh another thing I do that stops, in terms of research and things you might if I’m writing something I’m not sure whether it’s absolutely historically accurate or I feel I need a bit more to make it authentic. I won’t stop and research and look up I will add in square brackets and capitals and ‘check the bit of history/add in a little bit of history here’ and then go back to it later on. That helps to keep the flow going of writing. So if you’re unsure about your facts I will always just stick a little note or comments. I always find that if I get interrupted when I’m writing that really causes problems. I stop and have to get back into it.
[00:25:27] Word races a great. I am I am super, super competitive, so as soon as someone says to me ‘right we’re going do a world race’ and we kind of connect on Facebook or something, think ‘right, I want to get more words out than the next person’. And I set the timer on my iPad and I blitz it for half an hour and that really helps out an awful lot words because then I’m just determined to get the words down and not worry about how perfect they are. And that really helps. Short bursts. If I try and set races for myself, I might think ‘right, I managed a thousand words yesterday, let’s see if I can do fifteen hundred in the same space of time.’ So I compete with myself as well.
Sarah [00:26:12] That’s a good tip. I meant to ask you this before when you were talking about outlining. Have you got any resources or books that you’ve read about outlining and so on that helped you to learn how to do it? Or is it just something that you’ve developed and naturally?
Emily [00:26:31] Yeah it kind of just happens. But in terms of ideas, I carry around a notebook in my handbag. And if I do get an idea and sometimes it might be in the middle of a in the middle of the meeting or in the middle of the office, I’ll pick up my notebook and excuse myself and nip into the loo and just scratch out a few little notes. So if ideas pop in, I make sure I write them down. I dream a lot as well, so I wake up in the morning and write down lots of dreams. Actually loads of the scenes in the book Hawthorne’s Wife, a lot of that came from a dream.
[00:27:16] So yeah, I’m constantly writing out lots and lots of notes of ideas that might be good for novel. I’ll often use ideas from stuff I’ve written in the past, I mean there’s one thing I wrote a kind of young adult thing which is the first thing I ever wrote, which is just awful, it’s never going to see the light of day, but some of the ideas from that I’ve been able to poach for future novels. So I tend to have a whole mass of random ideas and then I’ll start ordering them into plots. But it’s just a system that’s really kind of come naturally, although I am aware of things like you have to have a change of pace. You can’t have it all at a fast pace or slow pace, you need to have ups and downs and dark things and you’ve got to think about obstacles for the characters to overcome, so I’m kind of aware of that in the back of my mind, but I don’t set out to follow any specific structure which is outlined in a book about writing I just kind of get on with it and tinker it and massage it into shape. And I do find critique buddies and another pair of eyes, sympathetic understanding eyes, is good as well. Because if all my critique buddies come back and say ‘look that really doesn’t work, please change it’ then I will change it.
Sarah [00:28:26] Oh that’s fantastic advice. And you handwrite your outlines and you type your drafts. Is that correct?
Emily [00:28:35] The notes are all handwritten. When I actually start plotting things out with the bullet points, I will then type that so I can cut and paste scenes.
Sarah [00:28:58] Excellent. Now as you said earlier, you’ve really had quite a launch into being a published author – so many deals and so many deadlines! How are you feeling having finally achieved this dream? How is the difference between writing for fun and for external publishing deadlines?
Emily [00:29:18] Yeah. When I got the publishing contract that’s when reality struck. Before I got published, it was like ‘oh that’s the dream, isn’t it wonderful isn’t it happy and like I’d have unicorns and rainbows stars flying out of my ears when it happens’. But then when it happened, I actually felt quite low two days afterwards because it was like ‘okay this is no longer a dream’. I’ve actually got to got to stand up and do something and step up to it and treat it as a business and take a professional approach to it, as opposed to an airy fairy this is my dream. That actually was a bit of a shock.
[00:29:50] In terms of marketing, that just seems to be some form of dark art which hopefully I will learn when I enter the non-Muggle world later on. But, yeah, writing to deadlines I’ve never actually had to draft to a deadline, yet, because I already had these three books done, which was which was quite good. That will be something I’m gonna have to do next year, I suspect, certainly if DragonBlade are interested in more books in the series. So it might be you have to ask me that in a year’s time.
Sarah [00:30:36] How have you found being out there as an author, having your work read widely and that side of things because I found that incredibly terrifying. How have you found it?
Emily [00:30:48] I think having Emily as a pen name, I can detach a little bit from it. So if you do see a bit of a stinky review, even if it gets personal about the author, you think ‘oh they’re talking about somebody else, I’m not her today, I’m me.’ And when I step into Emily’s shoes, hopefully she’ll be able to cope with it. I actually find it more scary having my books read by people I know, because then they look me in the eye. And it’s people who know me and think yeah I can see which aspects of you are in that book. Whereas if it’s a complete stranger, it’s just like a book they’ve liked or not liked. So in that way it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but yeah when you start seeing reviews coming up on Amazon or GoodReads it is a bit of a daunting thought. I think because they’re strangers and we’re all detached and it’s all online, you’re not standing in a group of baying readers who are chucking things like you physically it’s not quite so horrific.
Sarah [00:31:55] And has anything about the experience surprised you – either in a good way or a bad way?
Emily [00:32:04] I think it was a surprise how quickly I came down from the high when I got the deal, because then I did realise that I’ve got to take a professional approach to it. I did burst into tears the other day. I got an email from someone – I just had a really bad review on Amazon – and I got an email from someone that came through from my newsletter. A complete stranger. Just to say lovely things about the book, saying they absolutely love it. They talk about the characters and said I’ve fallen in love with the character and I was like ‘blimey, that’s a complete stranger’ has actually opened up their email and sent me a note to say they love a character which has come out of my head and I didn’t realise what a rush that would give me and what a warm glow inside. So that that actually is amazing when a total stranger gets in touch.
Sarah [00:32:51] Brilliant. I’m just going to spoil your wonderful, positive answer, now, as I do want to ask you whether you ever suffer from creative block. You were saying you’re good at writing down ideas and you’re extremely prolific, but do you either suffer with creative block or self-doubt, or are there any parts of the process that stop you or freak you out?
Emily [00:33:22] Yeah, I’m always terrified that my work is rubbish, terrified that it sucks. Even if someone says something nice, a little voice in my head says to me they’re only saying it just to be nice, just to shut you up, because they don’t want to tell you that it sucks and tell you why. Because it’s less effort to say I like it than it is to say ‘I absolutely hate it and this is why’. So whenever I get an e-mail back from my editor I’m always thinking she’s going to tell me this sucks she’s going gonna say ‘why on earth to be offered you a contract you’ve written a load of absolute rubbish woman’. So I’m constantly feeling like that. I got an email from her about the second book. She got halfway through and actually she stopped with her edits and said I would like you to change a few things. And she was really complimentary, she said ‘your writing is lovely, but there’s just a couple of structural issues, don’t worry it it’s quite common with a new author’. But I interpreted that as ‘this book sucked so much, I got one hundred and sixty pages in and just gave up, what on earth are you doing, let’s check it back at you and hopefully you’ll go away we never have to publish this pile of absolute rubbish’. So that’s the biggest problem I have is a massive lack of self-confidence. I have imposter syndrome. I go into groups where there’s other authors and I think they’re probably looking at me thinking ‘what’s she doing here? She started writing later tonight, she’s only just started, she writes bodice rippers’. So, yeah, massive lack of confidence.
[00:35:00] It’s something I’m always having to struggle with. What I do is occasionally, I kept the initial e-mails that I got from my agent, even though we parted company I’ve still kept her initial email, from editors who’ve come back, the critiques from the New Writers Scheme. I kept those and I read those and say ‘yes, at that point somebody did say that they liked my writing enough to actually come out and tell me and go to the effort to tell me and offer me a contract or representation or something’, so I keep going back to that, and go ‘no, there was a point where people did actually think this was okay so just carry on’. So, yeah, it’s just dealing with that lack of self-confidence is a really difficult thing to do.
[00:35:47] I will often click open a good review and have a look at that, but it’ trying to focus on the good reviews not the bad ones. But even the bad ones I’ve had a really bad review which said this was one of the top five worst books, I absolutely hated it and I was crushed when I read it. And then part of me thought was a pity it wasn’t the top worst book I’d like to know what their worst book was because actually I would probably quite like it!
[00:36:13] But again the fact that it’s brought out such an emotional reaction in someone, that they feel compelled to log into their Amazon account and write about six paragraphs of why they hated it, that actually make me think it’s kind of done what I wanted, because it’s elicited an emotional reaction. And I did say to myself way back when I started I didn’t want to write books that were kinds of middle of the road I know because I like emotion and dark stuff is going to be Marmite, it is going to be love it or hate it. And I would rather have a mixture of five star and one star reviews from people where it’s really pulled out an emotional reaction than a whole mass of three stars of people saying ‘oh, it was all right’.
Sarah [00:36:52] And I remember that!
Emily [00:36:58] [Laughs] I know, when my first ever one star review came through, I said ‘this is what you said you wanted, you wanted ones and fives’.
Sarah [00:37:07] It’s so tough. And, again, thank you so much for sharing, because I do think most of us, if not all of us, feel the same way. So thank you again for sharing that. I think it’s a good strategy, definitely, trying to focus on the positive, on the positive reviews or positive feedback you’ve had. But, as you said it’s really difficult to force ourselves to believe it. Believe the positive. Listeners can’t see, but I was nodding away when you said that because that’s the crux of it, is that it’s very difficult to believe that positive feedback.
Emily [00:37:57] You do think are they just being nice to placate. Actually sometimes I’ll look at some of my favourite books and look at their reviews and think ‘yeah, it obviously wasn’t for them, but actually that’s an amazing book’. It does make me think at least I’m in good company. Yeah. We’re not gonna like the same thing. It’s just hard when you put your heart and soul into something and someone really hates it to the point where they have to tell the world just how much they hate it. It’s always gonna be tough. I’m hoping I will be more immune to it as the years go by.
Sarah [00:38:37] Well I can’t believe it, the time has raced by, so I will just finish up by asking what are you working on at the moment or what’s next for you?
Emily [00:38:48] Right. Well yes, book two in the London Libertines Hawthorne’s Wife should be out beginning of September. Book 3 which is called Roderick’s Widow, I think that’s scheduled to come out in December and that’s with my editor at the moment. I’ve plotted out book four in that series as well and I’ve got some embryonic ideas for books five and six, at least who the characters are going to be and what the main themes are. So I’m hoping to have book four written by the end of the year maybe and full drafts for five and six, and then hopefully I’ll have a chat with my publisher to see if I want to take this on. I’ve got two more medieval romances which I drafted ages ago which I had submitted a couple of times and got good feedback. So I might actually maybe self publish those because that’s something I’d like to branch into. I think once I’ve got just got a bit more experience of being an author, built up a few more newsletter subscribers, and just got a bit more of an idea about what the marketing thing is that I might actually give that a go myself.
Sarah [00:39:55] Fantastic. And where can people find out more about you and your books?
Emily [00:40:00] Oh right. I’ve got a Web site which is www.emroyal.com. I can be found on Twitter @eroyalauthor and on my website there is a link for my newsletter, as well.
Sarah [00:40:19] Fantastic. I’ll put all the links in the show notes but thank you so much for that, it was lovely to speak to you.
Emily [00:40:26] Thank you, Sarah, it has been so wonderful this chat to you.
My guest today is Aileen Erin, author of YA Paranormal and Science Fiction. Aileen has a BS in Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas.
After working in commercial editing in Los Angeles for a few years, Aileen moved to writing novels. Since then, she’s hit the USA Today Best-Selling list twice, has shifted nearly five hundred thousand books in her Alpha Girl series and sold 1.5 million books to date.
We talk about publishing options, the pressures of success, and Aileen gives her tips on writing. I love that she emphasises that writing is ‘a craft and that craft can be learned.’
You can find out more about Aileen and her books by going to aileenerin.com.
I love creating the podcast but it takes a significant amount of time (and money) to produce. If you want to help to keep the show going, please consider becoming a patron. You can support the show for just $1 a month! If you pledge $2 or more, you also receive an exclusive mini-episode that I put out in the middle of every month. You also get instant access to the backlist of extra episodes.
WRITING UPDATE
The launch of The Silver Mark: Crow Investigations Book Two went really well. At one point, The Night Raven and The Silver Mark were hanging out at the top of the paranormal suspense chart, which felt great!
Also, more importantly, I’ve heard from fans of The Night Raven that they like the book, which is a massive relief. I really didn’t want to let anybody down with a disappointing follow-up. Phew!
I’m now busy working on the third Crow book. I’ve shelved my other book, for now, as the deadline is pretty tight and I’m also thinking about what else I might need to cut out in order to focus on my fiction. I’ve got so many ideas and plans and not quite enough time and headspace. Which, to be clear, is a wonderful position to be in and I’m delighted!
IN THE INTERVIEW
As I did last month, I’ve put a full transcript of the interview (below). I want to make the podcast more accessible for those who prefer (or need) to read, rather than listen. It’s pretty time-consuming to do, so I would love to hear what you think!
If you have a writing, productivity or publishing question that you’d like me to tackle in a future episode, please get in touch via email or Twitteror leave a comment on this post.
I’ll answer it on the show and credit you (unless, of course, you ask to remain anonymous).
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TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH AILEEN ERIN
Sarah [00:00:03] My guest today is YA paranormal and science fiction author Aileen Erin has a B.S. in TV film from the University of Texas. And after working in commercial editing in Los Angeles for a few years Eileen moved to writing novels. Since then she has hit the USA TODAY best selling list twice and has shifted nearly 500000 books in her Alpha series and sold one and a half million books to date. Welcome to the show Aileen. Thank you so much for joining us.
Aileen [00:00:34] Thank you. Nice to be here.
Sarah [00:00:36] I mean I could start waxing lyrical about that amazing success but perhaps we should start off with a wee bit about your Alpha Girls series.
Aileen [00:00:45] So I wrote my Alpha Girls series in my MFA. I wrote the first one, I mean. I went through so many revisions as you do when you’re in the writing process. But when I graduated I wasn’t sure what to do with the book or what I wanted to do with publishing and there were so many different avenues to go about it, right then. There was indie, there was small press, and I could do traditional, submitting to editors and and agents and everything. But the problem that I ran into was that no one really wanted to see a submission of a YA paranormal in 2013. So I just I decided to go Indie, it felt very low risk. I started a publishing company, formulated a business plan and I started working on making a series out of the one book, and did it every six months a new release. And by the third book I was on the USA Today list. So that was pretty great.
Sarah [00:01:45] That’s incredible. My next question was going to be to ask you about your path to publication, and I was going to say you’re published by Ink Monster and that I love the logo for the imprint, it’s gorgeous. It’s so cute! So you have a big hand in all of that then?
Aileen [00:02:04] Yes. Ink Monster is my company. I started it early 2013 and I just wanted to find a way to break in with my novel. I worked with another author who has since left but we built this company.
[00:02:20] She had a marketing background I had more of a publishing books editing background and together it just really worked well for a while and I decided I knew exactly what I wanted if I was gonna be publishing and going indie, I wanted it to work with a distributor, I wanted to have the links to the next book in the series in the back of my current release, I wanted somebody that could really fight for me at retailers because as like just an individual it’s really hard to rise above from all the books and all the the people out there so, um, yeah.
[00:03:02] Yeah. And then we started with branding, logos, website design. It took some time it took about a year to get everything really together looking like we wanted it to look, with a business plan and how we were going to reach our readers and and really break into the business. And it ended up working out really well for us.
Sarah [00:03:20] I should say so and it’s so so impressive. I mean I’ll be putting the links in the show notes and I urge everybody listening regardless of whether you’re thinking about hybrid or indie or traditional to go and look at the beautiful beautiful publishing website and the fantastic logo and the branding – everything about it is so impressive and you deserve every success. I’m certainly taking some tips for from my own publishing imprint from the level that you are working at. And so in terms of…I mean I think because this is the worried writer I’m always thinking in terms of mindset and I think we run a similar timeline. So my first book came out in 2013 and, like yourself, I’d gone to university for writing and I’d worked on it for many years before, but I didn’t have any confidence whatsoever in my own work. And I kind of needed that stamp of approval from an external source. So I so admire that ability to sort of choose yourself and to be business minded from the beginning. And what do you think what helped you to do that or is that just part of your personality?
Aileen [00:04:34] It’s probably not part of my personality. I still sometimes struggle with like I kind of went around the box, I didn’t really go the way that most people do this and I’m doing it all myself. So for a little while didn’t consider myself a real author. I was like ‘No I’m just kind of like putting out books I’m not really…’ But then I had the USA Today list and I actually didn’t know that I hit the USA Today list until the next book came out and I was like I wonder if this one will. And I was checking and I was like ‘oh wait a second’ I already did, because I was my own publisher nobody tells you – the publishers are looking at that and I was doing it myself so I didn’t even think about it. I was like ‘oh my numbers are pretty high I wonder’. I just had no context of what was doing well and what wasn’t, as in was this competitive with what was out there?
So I think it’s just something that you have to decide for yourself. You have to know that inner editor is in there for every single author out there, every single writer, and you do crave that validation from, you know, a big publisher or a big agent that would get you this great deal.
But I think having that idea that you don’t necessarily need that, that you can do it yourself is really like a freeing thing.
I get that validation from my readers who are buying the books and writing these really wonderful reviews from my superfans group who cheer me on while I’m writing and I just. Yeah. It’s just one of those things. You have to you have to tell it to be quiet, you know?
Sarah [00:06:22] Absolutely. And I think we’re so lucky to have these options now. It’s great. And like you say, getting that sort of validation direct from the reader and ultimately they’re the important people.
Aileen [00:06:36] Yeah. It made it very easy for me to go indie because I went to a lot of different conventions and sat in some agents and editor sessions and everybody was always asking like ‘what are you looking for? What are you not looking for?’ And you know different authors and writers trying to write toward whatever trend was hitting or what was coming up next and they were all across the board saying ‘please do not send us anything with werewolves or vampires’ and I was like ‘well, I’ve got this werewolf book…’ But they were just not going to take it. They were not going to look at it. They were not going to accept it. And so I was like ‘well, this is very low risk because nobody says they even want to look at it.’
Sarah [00:07:21] So it made it quite clear then?
Aileen [00:07:24] Yeah. I was like I could just throw it away or I can try this other thing. And if it fails and, you know, it turns out that I’m maybe not a good enough writer or can’t make it on my own then you know it’s not my only idea. I can go back write something else and then do that traditionally. It was just my time and energy if it was going to be a success or not.
Sarah [00:07:56] Fantastic. And then, you know, you obviously set everything up to give yourself the best possible chance of success, as I was saying you’re doing this incredible job with the with the publishing side. Was that hard to learn that side? I know you said you were working with somebody that had some marketing experience.
Aileen [00:08:14] It was all a learning process, you know. In my MFA I loved learning the writing from there but I wasn’t getting enough of the business side, so I got like a subscription to Publishers Weekly, to Writer’s Digest, and I started watching for trends and what agents were acquiring what to see what was happening and all of the indie stuff was really starting to take off. It turned from something that was like oh this vanity press thing, this horrible thing that writers that can’t cut it do, to something that like a lot of writers were making quite a bit of money and having success doing and I was like well you know what I’m going to try this. But I understood that publishing was a business and I had to have a business model and a business plan and a brand and a website and a whole the whole nine yards it had to be professional. So that was kind of kind of something that I think some indie authors miss. They’re just like oh well I’ve got the book and I’ve got the cover and it’s edited and I’m just gonna pop it up on KDP. But then how are you. How are you going to stand out?
Sarah [00:09:22] Yeah absolutely. And I mean all of this stuff takes so much work doesn’t it? It takes work and it takes time being the publisher as well as being the writer. So and I would love, I mean I’m looking for tips, so I would love to hear about how you manage to balance your business side with your writing side because you’ve also been impressively productive with your writing, so please give me your secrets.
Aileen [00:09:51] So, for a while it’s just you know writing as much as you can. I I tried different tricks and tips to try and kind of balance it. It ended up being a lot of work. I had other authors that I was publishing as well and I ended up giving those authors over to a friend who was starting her own publishing business because I was like ‘this is now getting into too much work’ as the publishing stuff is a lot of work. So I try to do whatever publishing stuff I need to do – marketing, whatever is not writing – at the beginning of my day and then at lunchtime whatever it is that’s not urgent, it waits till tomorrow and then I the rest of it is like that’s my my writing time and I kind of hold that really sacred and true and I don’t try to bleed into the two. I find that can get like really tricky. And when I’m launching a book, it’s so much work I just say I’m I’m going to plan on not writing for these few weeks and then I will get back into writing that way. I’m not like beating myself up for not getting a word count in that day. But you kind of have to separate the two at least for me. I can’t switch back and forth all day from writing and publishing. It takes up, you know, two different parts of my brain so I’ve got to kind of segregate them. I also for a little while I was doing like one day a week of publishing stuff and then the rest of the week was writing. But I found stuff like bleeded over as I as I sent an email and stuff would trickle in and ‘oh can you do this?’ and ‘there’s an opportunity here’. So that’s why I decided to do all the mornings.
Now, I have someone that helps me so that’s amazing. So that’s kind of changed it a lot, so I’m writing even faster now, but it’s a balancing act, so you kind of have to figure it out, what works for you how you’re going to manage like one day a week and do the rest writing in the mornings and the afternoons. Like when is your most productive writing time? When is your mind awake and and present enough to do the writing part? I’m not a morning person so that’s why I do the publishing stuff in the morning.
So whenever you you know your peak writing time is, hold that sacred that’s your writing time and the rest of it, you fit in the publishing stuff in the cracks.
Sarah [00:12:29] That makes a lot of sense. Do you aim for a typical word count when you’re having writing days or do you have any other kind of process things that you do?
Aileen [00:12:41] So I use Scrivener. I I know it takes me about six to eight weeks to get a first draft done. So I kind of put that into Scrivener. They have like a little word count per day to get to your deadlines. Now that I have a daughter, she’s three now, I don’t like to work on the weekends if I can avoid it so I mark off the weekends and tell it I’m only going to write Monday Wednesday. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday then that’s it. And it will count how many words I need per day to make that deadline. Some days you know I hit that word count easily and go way over it, some days I’m under it but it’s usually it’s steady. I can do comfortably twenty five hundred words a day, so that’s about what I try and aim for. Some days I get like 5000 words and some days I get a thousand.
Sarah [00:13:35] So it kind of works out. Writing sci fi I imagine involves a fair amount of world building and things, do you do all that stuff up front and kind of plan things out or do you dive in and work everything out sort of organically?
Aileen [00:13:52] So I do it kind of in kind of spurts because in the beginning I do a lot of the worldbuilding and then I think I’ve got everything how I want it to be and then I start writing the draft I’m like actually I need to know about this and that. So I usually write through to the first two acts. And when I’m about to do the third act I stop, I look at all the world building do I need more information, do I need something else? And I mark things in my in my document with a double X and then hit a find for x x . Like xx name here, x x fact here. And so that I don’t break my writing flow for something that I can google later or think about and world build later. So like ‘x x new religion here’, and then I’m like OK I need to think about how this is going to play into that and then when I do my first revision, I go through and I fill in those blanks and I fill in that worldbuilding and then I send it off to my editor and inevitably she’s going to be like ‘Yeah, but what about this and this and this?’ And that’s all the editing process I take about three rounds of revisions with my with my developmental auditor to really get it polished.
Sarah [00:15:12] Hmm. Excellent. And you mentioned that getting into the flow state and not breaking the flow of writing which I think is a great tip. Do you sort of shut off the Internet or do you have a particular place that you write? Are there any other things that you do to help you get into the flow and stay there?
Aileen [00:15:30] Yes I shut off the Internet. I use Freedom. It’s an app that you can either cancel your entire internet, it turns off your Wi-Fi and it makes it completely unusable for a period of time unless you shut off your computer entirely and turn it back on. There’s no off switch. You know I’m not going to turn off. It has to be pretty desperate and dire if I’m actually going to turn off my computer to look something up. So I use that and I also like to use Scrivener’s full screen function so it blacks out out the rest of my screen, and I have notifications off, I make it fill up the screen and I kind of just let it flow until I need a break to get up and grab a drink water or whatever and then I try and get really quickly back into the story.
Sarah [00:16:26] That’s great. And do you have silence or music or white noise?
Aileen [00:16:36] Music, but no words. So I have a few Spotify playlists with kind of relaxing ambient music so it’s almost like you’re at the spa.
Sarah [00:16:50] Because this is the worried writer I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to delve into any struggles. Do you have to suffer from a sort of creative block or is there a particular part of the process when you’re more likely to struggle? Like is it drafting or is in the editing, or do you never suffer from any?
Aileen [00:17:10] Oh man. Do you ever meet a writer that never suffers?
Sarah [00:17:14] No never. You could be the first though!
Aileen [00:17:21] The second act. For me the second half of the second act I’m always like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. This book will never be finished and is carrying on forever. I don’t think I’m ever going to finish it. This is horrible it’s all horrible life is horrible. And inevitably, I come in from my office and whine to my husband and he is like and ‘where are you at in the process, where are you right now?’. I’m like ‘oh I just hit the midpoint.’ He’s like ‘Alright OK why don’t you just have a glass of wine?’.
Sarah [00:17:53] We’ve been here before! You know it’s so funny isn’t it? Why doesn’t it get easier, that’s what I keep thinking? Why do I still suffer at the same point every time?
Aileen [00:18:08] It’s so funny. And I think every writer does this and I think I mean if if there was one I’m like… Good for you. Slow clap. What do you do? I want to know. But yeah, there’s always that one point where you’re just like oh this is a disaster. And every single time I’m like No this time it’s different, this is gonna be terrible it’s horrible. It’s all awful. Read it you’re going to see how bad and he’s like ‘uh-huh, uh-huh’.
Sarah [00:18:42] So, we have to have a glass of wine and we have to moan about it and then we kind of have to grit it out, but are there any strategies that you use for when you’re really stuck when you’re trying to grit it out?
Aileen [00:18:57] When I’m really really stuck, I know that there’s there’s usually something that’s wrong. It’s like my subconscious telling me there’s something not adding up correctly here. So I try and go back in and reread. If I’m stuck for more than like a day or two I know it’s something that my subconscious is saying hey hey go back. You need to go back. So I I try and be aware of that but if it’s something that’s just happening during like, each day, one trick that I learned somebody told me a couple years ago and I was like ‘this is so smart, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this.’ He told me never ever to end the day at the end of a scene or at the end of a chapter, always stop in the middle of a paragraph, middle of a scene, middle of dialogue. Even if you’re like Oh no I have no more time, just keep going for like five more minutes and get into the next something, so you have a place to start when you’re sitting down again. And it kind of keeps the flow rolling from one day to the next, so you keep that kind of that constant consistent writing going.
Sarah [00:20:13] That’s a great tip. And in terms of I know you mentioned the sort of second act there so and I’m guessing that you kind of know a fair amount about story structure. I mean not just from writing but from your education. And is that something that you find very helpful or do you have any resources or books that you recommend for anybody who would like to learn more about that?
Aileen [00:20:39] I use a screenwriting book for my story structure it’s super basic, super easy to digest and understand. They recently did a novel version but I haven’t read it yet my husband actually just gave it to me on Friday. He was like hey they made one for novelists, don’t you want to see? It’s Save The Cat by Blake Snyder. He talks in the beginning a bit about genre and high concept and that’s more movie kind of and so that doesn’t apply for novel writing but his 13 beats that are the key points in a story and the 40 note cards, I think that really lends itself well to an outline. So that’s what I do before I start anything, I have a little beat sheet and I write out the 13 key points and then I draw the little lines. How do we get from this beat to the next beat in the next one to the next one you know? And those are my 40 note cards. So it’s 10 note cards for Act 1, 20 for Act 2 which is why it always seems like a beast to write because it’s twice as long and then ten again for Act 3. So it’s it’s really easy to do. You just write like one sentence on each no card it’s just kind of the gist of what that scene is going to be. And that’s pretty much what you need to get started or what I need to get started on a book. It usually changes and like as I write it fleshes out and becomes something else a little bit. And I go back at the end of act two and I’m like Does this still make sense? Am I still writing this ending? Okay great. I’m gonna fix it or keep going. But yeah I really really love Save the Cat by Blake Snyder.
Sarah [00:22:29] That’s great. And I’ve had that book recommended to me and I haven’t actually read it but I did get the and Save the Cat Writes A Novel and I just I just finished it is super good.
Aileen [00:22:42] I haven’t I haven’t read it yet. It’s sitting on my on my desk and I’m really anxious to get to get into it because I’m curious how they changed it for novel writing.
Sarah [00:22:53] On structure, some people hate reading about it and some people find it useful and like all of these things you know, if it helps great, if it doesn’t throw it out the window. But in terms of self-doubt and that kind of thing, are there any parts of the publishing side of it, there’s being read which is great but can be scary. Do you ever suffer with fear or self-doubt around any of those areas?
Aileen [00:23:29] Of course, of course! You know I just launched Lunar Court, it’s book eight in the series and you know I had anxiety the night before it was coming out I didn’t sleep at all. Total insommnia, I was nervous. So so nervous, even though I had reviews already that said that they all enjoyed it, five stars everything… I was like Oh but you know once the fans get it they might not like it and I hate to disappoint them you know? I think it’s just part of it. Writing is such a personal thing you know and sharing it you want it to be enjoyed and accepted and everything and that’s always, no matter what art form you’re doing, it’s always scary. You’re putting a little piece of your your heart out there and you want it to be accepted. And it’s hard to do it, but it’s kind of you can’t be a be an author without putting it out there. You can’t reach any kind of success if you’re not doing it. So yeah it’s kind of kind of one of those things that you’ve just gotta kind of get through.
But you know the self-doubt it’s there. It’s that little inner editor and I think even non-writers and non-artists kind of get that, it’s that thing that tells them that they’re not good enough. You know everybody can relate to that. Everybody’s got that in them. And it’s like how much power are you going to give that little voice? How much of yourself are you going to let that take over, and just kind of deciding you know what, it’s gonna be fine. It’s great. I’m actually doing a great job. And getting those people in your life that will support you and say ‘this is good, I would tell you if it was bad. This is good. You’re doing a great job. Keep going.’ Having those key people in your life is really helpful.
Sarah [00:25:24] Yeah. That’s great advice. That’s so true. And I was also thinking about how success, not to complain about it because it’s amazing and brilliant, but you kind of do feel that new pressure. Like you were saying about not wanting to let readers down, you’ve got this beloved series and then you’ve got that added thing of hoping that these readers that are so supportive of you, hoping that they like it. That must be that must be tough.
Aileen [00:25:55] You know it’s really a good problem. It’s a sweet problem to have. But you know I wrote this book about some of the side characters and it was one that readers had been asking me for for years and until I wrote the last book I kept telling them I don’t know that they could be together I don’t know that these two characters can be together. They’ve got too much to overcome. And then I was writing the last book and I had this idea I was like oh wait. So it was something that readers had been asking me for and I’m like if I then give it to them and they don’t like it, it is going to feel horrible. I was like, I don’t want to disappoint them because they have been asking me for years for this. So. So I finally wrote it. Then I get an e-mail last night from a reader, you know all in caps about how much she loved it and how I made her ugly cry and I was like ‘yay! I can sleep again!’. Everything’s fine. It’s gonna be fine. So yeah it’s good. I mean it is part of the process.
But I think also having that little inner editor, sometimes it’s good it keeps you wanting to do better, to keep striving to be the best writer that you can be. And like questioning ‘is this a good draft?’. I’m going to have somebody else read it let me make sure I’m doing a good job, you know? So I kind of try and push it in that direction rather than you know something that’s really hounding on my shoulder. You know something really bringing me down.
Sarah [00:27:30] That makes a lot of sense. And lots of folk listening might be trying to finish their first book or they might be going through submission hell when they’re trying to get published. What advice would you give to a beginning writer or is there something that you wish that you’d known when you started out?
Aileen [00:27:50] I think for beginning writers I would say just keep writing and I think finishing that first draft, you’ve just got to finish it. If you got something that you’re just starting working on or you’re stuck in the middle and you keep going back and revising, let it all go. Your first draft isn’t going to be good. Your first book isn’t gonna be good. You have to like learn the process. It’s a craft and the craft can be learned but you have to welcome the revision process.
Get that first draft out and start working on revising the whole piece. There’s a great saying that I love to tell people you can’t revise a blank page, so you’ve got to just keep going and get the story on the page and then you can fix whatever needs fixing later. And if you end up not happy with that book, know that that is a great achievement just finishing that book, start on something new. Keep going keep writing because every book that you write will get better and better every time you revise it. You will get better at this writing process. It’s a craft, you know. And it just is learned and the more you do it the better you get. And I would say my writing has changed drastically from my first book to the one I just put out. I keep learning new things taking going new seminars there’s always more to learn. I think my writing is much improved even after my MFA like way drastically even more so than when I was in my MFA so. So yeah, just keep keep going keep writing and don’t give up.
Sarah [00:29:26] Fantastic. And it’s so true. The more we practice the better we get. But somehow we don’t always think that when it comes to writing for some reason. I don’t know why.
Aileen [00:29:37] Well it’s it’s hard when you pick up a book and you’re like wow this is really amazing. I bet they just sat down there and wrote that in one draft first try – gold! I’m like ‘No no everybody’s like trying really hard and rewriting and then going through the same thing.’ You’ve just got to keep going. Jim Butcher he’s a great urban fantasy writer. He has this little tale about how he first got published on his website and when I was first starting writing I would go to Jim Butcher’s page every day and read his page about how he got published and how not to give up and how to keep going. And I found it extremely inspirational so I was like No I’m just going to keep going. And it’s just really powerful to go to his website read it.
It’s so great, he really inspired me and before I got my MFA, when I was in my MFA, when I started publishing and every once in a while when I’m like ‘you know what, I don’t know if I’m going to make it’ I go back through to his website and I click on About Jim Butcher and go and read his his little piece about publishing.
Sarah [00:31:01] Oh that’s brilliant. And hopefully, you saying this now, that will be encouraging. And yes, like you say, you’ve got to keep on going. And I will put a link to that in the show notes. that’s fab. And so finally I’d love to hear about what’s next for you. Like what are you working on now will your next release?
Aileen [00:31:21] So right now I’m working on Off Balance. It’s the sequel to Off Planet which came out in March. It’s coming out St. Patrick’s Day next year, so I’m about 40000 words into that and really loving it. And then after that I’m gonna be writing Alpha Erased which is book 9 in my Alpha Girls series. That’s gonna be really fun. I’m finally doing the main POV character’s mate in it, and having her memory wiped. So that’ll be really fun for readers. They’ll get to fall in love all over again. Yeah. So, it’ll be romantic and I’m really looking forward to writing that one, too.
Sarah [00:32:04] And you’ve just reminded me, I wanted to ask what led you to writing in a slightly different genre. You’ve got sci fi and you’ve got paranormal with werewolves. What made you change genre a wee bit?
Aileen [00:32:19] Well I guess most people say write what you know but I don’t know anything about paranormal or going into outer space. I mean hopefully we’ll never go to outer space, although I did read an article that they’re accepting or will be accepting people into the space station soon. Just privately you can fly up there I’m like I don’t know how much it’s going to be, maybe a billion dollars… One day maybe it’s possible… No probably not.
Sarah [00:32:47] You never know.
Aileen [00:32:49] Crazier things have happened. I could win the lotto… So yeah, but I love the write what you love. I love space opera, I love sci fi, I love paranormal, I love werewolves, I love fairy tales, so I just kind of write what I love.
It was interesting making such a big change from werewolves to interstellar travel. So that was a big leap but I kind of worked you know really hard on it hoped it was going to be accepted by new readers who had never read me before and also encouraged my fans to go with me. I’m like ‘just give it a try’. Read a sample. I sent out a lot of samples, I posted it on my social media, I just said give it a shot and they did. And they were like actually we will read this too.
Sarah [00:33:48] That’s really good. And I think from a creative point of view I can imagine it’s it’s I mean I like writing across genre because I read across genre and I love across genre. And so I can imagine that it’s kind of creatively refreshing.
Aileen [00:34:01] It is. After so many werewolf books it got to be you know a little bit like I didn’t feel like my ideas were fresh anymore. I was like I need sort of like a palate cleanser. And that’s what Off Planet it was for me.
Sarah [00:34:14] I love that you were following your passion with your writing and, as I say, doing it so well and being so successful at it. Very inspiring. Thank you so much for your time. Just before we finish, where can listeners find out more about you and your books online?
Aileen [00:34:32] You can find me at Aileen Erin dot com on Facebook and Instagram. I’m also on Twitter but I never checked that and my Alpha Girls Series and Off Planet are at all major retailers.
Sarah [00:34:46] Brilliant. Well as I say I will put all the links in the show notes but thank you so much for your time. It was lovely to speak to you.
Aileen [00:34:52] So nice to speak to you. Thank you for having me.
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is a wonderful opportunity to establish a writing habit, prioritise your creativity, and get out of your own way. The challenge to write 50,000 words during the month of November means that you are forced to put process over product and to get the words down.
