Sarah Williams's Blog: Write with Love , page 9

Narrated by the Author Renee Conoulty

Renee Conoulty is an Australian Air Force wife and mother of two. She writes stories of dance, romance, and military life. She also narrated her own audio book, then wrote a book about it!

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:                  Welcome to Write with Love. I’m your host, Sarah Williams, bestselling author, speaker and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published. Some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do.

Sarah Williams:                  Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now, here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:                  G’day. I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today, I’m chatting to Renee Conoulty. Thanks for joining me, Renee.

Renee Conoulty:              Hi. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:                  No worries. Can you tell us about yourself and your journey to publication?

Renee Conoulty:              Okay. I never had a plan for publication. I never had a plan to write. It’s something that kind of snuck up on me by surprise. It probably started … I’ve always been an avid reader. So I’ve always loved reading. Big bookworm, and then when my hubby joined the military and we posted up to Darwin, I was looking for something to do because I was at home. I could only pick up a bit of part time work. Had the kids at home. I was like, “Well, I like reading. I’d love to join a book club.” But I found it really hard to actually get out of the house and go to a book club.

Renee Conoulty:              So I got online. I discovered this place called Goodreads and got lost in the abyss of Goodreads. I found a great group of people there to join and started reading almost competitively. I got up to about 275 books a year which is kind of a lot, but I saw myself as a reader, not a writer. I’d never been just into writing. I just didn’t think I could. I felt like writing corny poetry and dumb things that rhyme just to amuse myself, but a novel just was way too daunting. And all these books that I was reading were written by these authors that are these God-like creatures that sit over here and have creativity and can write. I’m not like that.

Renee Conoulty:              So after doing that for a little while, I started up a book review blog. Honestly, it was so I could get on to NetGalley and request free books.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              That’s why it started, which was great for me, and it was great for meeting authors. After I’d requested a few books and actually connected online with a few authors, and I discovered that authors are people. They’re like normal people like me. So that sort of made me think twice about things. Then I had a few people say, “Oh, you should write a book,” and encouraged me. Because writing this blog, I’d been writing silly little stories about things and writing book reviews. I had probably three different people say, “Oh, you should write a book.” I’m like, “I can’t write a book. What would I write a book about?”

Renee Conoulty:              The one thing that actually started me up and decided, “Okay, I will start writing a book.” Natasha Lester, who I think you had on the blog a couple weeks ago, a little while ago. She’s got a fantastic website, and one of the articles she’d written that I happen to read that week, was saying that you don’t need to know everything to write a book. You don’t have to have the whole story worked out. All you need to start writing a book is some time and one idea.

Renee Conoulty:              I read that, and the next week my husband was going away for a month for training with the military. So I was like, “Well, I’ve got all my evenings free now for a month, and I kind of do have an idea.” Because when we found out we were moving to Darwin, I started looking ’round for books that were contemporary novels set in Darwin just to get a bit of a feel for what Darwin’s like, and I couldn’t find any. When I found out hubby was going to join the military, I’ve been looking around for contemporary stories about Australian military life. I couldn’t find any of those either. I found lots of historical stuff and World War II stories, but there was nothing about contemporary, everyday life in the military now.

Renee Conoulty:              You can Google military romance or military stories. You get all the [inaudible 00:04:15] heroes and the Navy Seals in the USA, but you really don’t get a lot that’s set in Australia. And also, I took up swing dancing back in 2000 in Melbourne where I actually met my husband at a swing dancing class on the Gold Coast. So that’s been another passion of mine, and I’m always on the look out for books that have got any glimpse of swing dancing in it. And they’re pretty few and far between as well.

Renee Conoulty:              So I figured, “Well, actually I’ve got three ideas, not one idea. I want to read a book with swing dancing.” Excuse me. “I want to read a book with Australian military life, and I want to read a book about Darwin.” So I thought, “Well, maybe I can write that book.” So I thought, okay. And I sort of thought about it for a week or so, and then one of the friends who’d been encouraging me to write, she said, “I’m signing up for NaNo WriMo next month for the camp NaNo. So you don’t have to do 50,000 words. You can set your own limit. Do you wanna join me? Do you wanna join my cabin I have in the camp NaNo?” I’m like, “Okay. Well I kind of have an idea, and I was thinking about doing it.”

Renee Conoulty:              So that was that little push off the edge, and that July, 2015 it would have been, I got 20,000 words out in a month. And I’d never written more than 500 words before. So I kind of surprised myself. I gave myself the reward of buying ‘How to Write a Blockbuster’ by Fiona McIntosh.

Sarah Williams:                  McIntosh.

Renee Conoulty:              As my reward for getting through NaNo. I thought, “Okay. If I’m serious to actually write 20,000 words, I better figure out what on Earth this thing is that I’m doing.” So then from there on I started absorbing writing craft books and joining online groups and getting to know all the authors and just trying to figure out what this whole writing things is.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              I went back in … As I was figuring out what was going on, I found that a large chunk of my story was backstory that didn’t need to be there, but I needed to write it to figure out who my character was.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              So I ended up popping and pasting that out into another document, and I ended up flushing that out into a short story so I could get to know my character. And that’s actually come out since then as a prequel to the novel, but I did, I finished my novel. It took me a while. The first 20,000 was good, and from there on, it kind of slowed down. As the [inaudible 00:06:27] husband comes back from his course and life continues on. And you have ups and downs, but I kept writing.

Renee Conoulty:              It probably took about a year. All that to get that first novel, the first draft down and start playing around with it to get to the point where I could show my mom. She said, “Oh, that’s great.” She goes, “But, you know, that woman, she’s been pregnant for about 10 months now, and the book just ended. You might need to have a baby somewhere along the line.” So one of the characters, one of the side characters, she forgot to have her baby. So there was a little bit of work to get the story all back in together and make it work.

Renee Conoulty:              I did actually take that to my first … I joined RWA, and I went to the conference in 2016. I did pitch that novel to two different publishers, and they both said, “Yes, send it through.” And then I got home from conference and realized, that was in August, I realized we’re posting out of Darwin. We’re leaving Darwin in November this year. If I send these books through to those publishers, I’m not even gonna hear back about it before November this year. And my novel was set in Darwin. It was set around the swing dancing community in Darwin, who, they’re real. They’re real people. The people in the book are not real people, but the setting is all real.

Renee Conoulty:              I had this … I know what I really wanted out of my book was to have a book launch party with my friends in Darwin. I went, “Okay, well, I could send it to the big publishers, and there’s a chance I could get a publishing deal.” But what was more important to me at the moment, was not to have a big publishing deal. I wanted my book to share with my friends before I had to leave. I went, “Okay. What are my options?” I could self-publish, but I don’t even know where to start with that.

Renee Conoulty:              Then I had that friend who, a year before had been saying you should write a book, had also been talking over that last year about, she wanted to start her own publishing company. So I messaged her and said, “So where are you at with this publishing company? Do you think you could start it now, and publish my book before I leave Darwin?” And she’s like, “Okay.”

Renee Conoulty:              So we both worked together and got Kindred Ink Press started. I’m like poking her along. Can you do it now instead of next year when you’re planning to? So yeah, that got started a little bit sooner. So it’s taking her a little bit to catch up, and now she’s got a whole lot of books coming out in the next year or so with other authors. She’s got open submissions at the moment for some short story novellas and things for box sets coming up.

Sarah Williams:                  Oh good.

Renee Conoulty:              So there’s lots of things going on there, but I’m like, “I was the first one.” It was great. We really got in together and worked hard and got this book out. I had my book launch party with paperbacks in hand the week before we left Darwin.

Sarah Williams:                  Awe. [crosstalk 00:09:23]

Renee Conoulty:              And I was like, “Yay.” So yeah, if you hunt through my Facebook author page, there’s a video from the book launch party if you go through all the videos. So you can have a look at us all sweating out [crosstalk 00:09:37] at the back of the little dress shop which is a shop that was featured in the book at one point. It was just nice to have it all tie together and have that party there.

Sarah Williams:                  So what was that book called, if anyone’s interested?

Renee Conoulty:              That’s called, ‘Don’t Mean a Thing’.

Sarah Williams:                  ‘Don’t Mean a Thing’. Okay.

Renee Conoulty:              I prepared earlier.

Sarah Williams:                  I got a copy.

Renee Conoulty:              The swing dancing couple on the front. So this is book one in a series. I’m actually planning to do a series of military, Darwin, swing dancing books. So that has … The main character is a girl called Macy, and she’s a woman who’s in the Air Force. So the next book I’m working on has got a woman who’s in the Navy, and then I’ve got a third book planned with a woman in the Army.

Sarah Williams:                  Awesome.

Renee Conoulty:              Because all three forces are up in Darwin. So I’m tying them and linking them with side characters and settings and that sort of thing, but I’ve got a different couple as the feature for each book. So I mentioned before I had the prequel story about Macy, about the main character as to how she got to where she was. So that’s come out in a duet, like a pair of short stories called, ‘Gotta Be This or That’. So it’s technically a prequel. It’s set before the novel, but you could read them in any order because I wrote them around that way.

Renee Conoulty:              So it’s got that story. It’s got another short story in there around the swing dancing. A little romance around the swing dancing community.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. Oh, brilliant. So these, are you calling them romance or more women’s fiction?

Renee Conoulty:              I’m calling them chick lit, except nobody likes to call anything chick lit these days. So I tend to go romantic comedy, or I’ll say, I don’t … I tend to go to romantic comedy a bit more. The prequel is probably more women’s fiction because it’s not a romance, but I tend to sort of delve in to all the women’s fiction, chick lit, romantic comedy, contemporary romance.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. All bases covered.

Renee Conoulty:              Mix them all together. Little bits of each. Depends on the story. I’ve got a short story as well that’s more contemporary romance, romantic comedy that I wrote for, it was the Little Gems last year, I think.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, with RWA.

Renee Conoulty:              Yeah, with RWA. So it was the onix theme.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              I wrote that one, and it came like 17th. And it was only the top 14 that got in the collection. So I’m like, within a week with getting my result of saying I’m not in the collection, I went, “Well, I want to publish this now before anybody forgets who Pokemon Go is,” because it had a Pokemon Go theme. And by then, it was like, it’s not cool anymore. So it’s like, I need to get this out now.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              So I decided at that point, okay. I’m just gonna self-publish it. So I jumped in the deep and learned how to self-publish within a week. And put this little one up, so it’s up as a freebie everywhere. So it’s wide, and it’s free.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              3,000 words, little bit of fun.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s, Pokemon Go. I remember those days.

Renee Conoulty:              Yeah, it’s a romance. It’s still contemporary romance. It’s not like, Pokemon falling in love. It’s people, but [crosstalk 00:12:39] You know how you used to walk around with … catching, flicking the thing and all that stuff. It was big when I started writing it, but within six months, it’s just not cool anymore. I’m like, “Oh well.” It’ll be free. Nobody will want to buy something that’s that far out of date now. So it’s up for free.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s funny.

Renee Conoulty:              But yeah, that’s out there. But then, it was fun though. I enjoyed the self-publishing. So I like having a bit of both. I’ve got some books with Kindred Ink Press that I don’t have to … They do all the updating and uploading and the editing and the covers and all that sort of stuff, but then I had a little play with something of my own. I’ve put another couple books out since then. Just short collections or shorter books. So there’s … the short story’s called, ‘Catching Onix’. If you can find that one.

Renee Conoulty:              Then I’ve got a collection of flash fiction called, ‘Wife, Mother, Woman’. That one’s self-published as well.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent.

Renee Conoulty:              That’s wide, and both of those two are on audio. I decided I wanted an audiobook.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, so tell us about this. You audio narrated it yourself.

Renee Conoulty:              Yeah, I did because I thought okay, I can get onto … I heard all about ACX, the Audiobook Creation Exchange run by Audible. So I got on there and had a look and thought, “Oh, this is great. You can do a royalty share,” which means you don’t have to pay upfront. So I can get someone to narrate my book, and then we can split the royalties later. It’s only a short one, so they might give me a go. Then I got into the fine print. It’s like, you live in Australia, you can’t play with us. And I went, “Oh. Okay.”

Renee Conoulty:              I don’t have a big budget to do this with so I thought I’ll have a look around. There wasn’t really much that was easy to access from Australia. And then I heard about Findaway Voices coming. So I looked into them. Joined through Draft2Digital. They’re associated with them. So if you go through Draft2Digital into Findaway Voices they waive the setup fee for your book. Otherwise, there’s a $50 fee. So I thought, I’ll look into that, and then I looked into the rates for an audiobook through them. It’s like, well the story’s only 3,000 words. It’s not very long. So it wouldn’t be too expensive. So I thought I might have a look at doing that, and then I just started looking around at narrating audio books and how does it all work. Then I went, well for the price of a microphone, I could narrate that myself, or I could pay someone else to narrate it.

Renee Conoulty:              Then, ’cause I like doing everything myself, my first … ‘Catching Onix’, I edited it. I designed my own cover. I’ve done everything. So I thought, “Maybe I’ll have a go at narrating it myself.” So that’s what spun around in my head for a month or so. Then when my laptop died, I went down to JB Hi-Fi to buy a new laptop, and I came out with a new laptop and a microphone. I accidentally bought a microphone. I better do it then. So yeah, it was fun. It was fun. It was a bit of a learning experience, but that’s what it’s all about. Everything in this business is a learning experience. You gotta get in and have a go.

Sarah Williams:                  It is. It is. So which ones did you narrate?

Renee Conoulty:              So I’ve narrated ‘Catching Onix’. I’ve narrated ‘Wife, Mother, Woman’. After doing that, I had a lot of people say, “How did you do that?” So I sat down to write a blog post about how I narrated those books, and my 500 word blog post turned into about 10,000 words. So I called it a book, and I published that as well. So that’s called ‘Narrated By The Author’. So I figured I better narrate that one as well. So I’ve got that one out there too. So I’ve got three audio books that I’ve self narrated. So there’s two that are fiction, and then one’s about how to do it.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. Well that’s exciting.

Renee Conoulty:              Have a go yourself. You can get a decent microphone for around the $100 mark. I think I paid about $150 for mine. And then you can use free software and free things to edit it. Free things to record it. If you go through Findaway Voices, you can upload it all for free.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. Right. So you used Findaway to-

Renee Conoulty:              Yeah, I used Findaway. So you can actually bring your own files to Findaway as well.

Sarah Williams:                  Oh, brilliant.

Renee Conoulty:              But you don’t have to use their narrators. So I did that [inaudible 00:17:06] I’m heading out to Kobo soon. They’ve just joined up with Kobo. So Kobo’s got new audio. So I’m refreshing my Kobo to see if my book’s there yet. But it is on Google. It’s on iTunes. They’re on Audible. Amazon, and a whole bunch of other places that I don’t really know about. But every now and then some weird thing turns up on the royalties data, and I’m like, “Oh, where’s that?” So lots of library based subscription things or pay per use library stuff like OverDrive. Yeah, there’s a whole lot of them.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. That’s really cool. So any of those Australian authors who are like-

Renee Conoulty:              You can do it.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. But agree to listen to your book first.

Renee Conoulty:              Yeah.

Sarah Williams:                  Make sure you do that.

Renee Conoulty:              I started with short stories because I thought, if I just try out to get an idea of how it all works with a short book. If I jump in to try and do a novel, am I … publisher’s got the audio rights for my novel, so I can’t really do that at the moment, anyway. Just to keep in mind down the track, it’s like I’ll have a go. There’ll be other things that I write. Anything else I self-publish, I might have a go at.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. It’s good to get on the audio at the moment. It’s huge overseas. It’s definitely on its way. I am always listening to at least one audiobook which, for me, I usually listen to audio which is out of my usual writing genre. So I write rural romance, and so I’m generally listening to Natasha Lester or Fiona McIntosh, something like that. Actually at the moment, I’m addicted to the romance package on Audible.

Renee Conoulty:              Oh yeah.

Sarah Williams:                  So I’m listening to a lot of Bella Andre and Lauren Blakely, which is great.

Renee Conoulty:              I love Audible. I’ve got my earphones or headphones, something plugged in. It’s either podcast or audiobooks. I feel like I’m always plugged in. I’ve gotta remind myself to unplug occasionally, and actually let my brain do imagination stuff. Otherwise, I’ve got nothing to write because I’m so plugged in all the time.

Sarah Williams:                  I was listening to Lauren Blakely, ‘The Knockout Plan’, I think it was called. It’s very hot, but I was listening to that with my earbuds in. And I’m chopping up fruit and fiji’s for my kids school lunches. They’re doing their homework. I’m like, “I’m busy. I’m busy.” It was very funny. At least they couldn’t hear it.

Sarah Williams:                  So you were talking to me before about doing an eCourse for this. Tell me how that came up.

Renee Conoulty:              So with ‘Narrated By The Author’ I put out the eBook edition. I did a paperback edition. I decided to do the audio edition. So I decided well, I might as well put an online course together as well. So I used the text from the eBook and the audio files from the audio to do that section of the course, and then I’ve also recorded video with screen capture and demonstrations on how I’ve done things. A little tour through my studio which was my walk-through wardrobe. I decided not to do this podcast today in the wardrobe. It might have better sound, but you don’t really wanna see all my clothes hanging up behind my head. But if you do wanna see that, go check out the online course ’cause there’s a couple of bits in there in the wardrobe. The rest is out here with the bookshelf.

Renee Conoulty:              So it walks you through. A little bit more hand holding. A little bit more, this is exactly how I did it. Here’s some screen capture. Here’s a bit more information. There’s exercises and little activities to do all the way through as well to practice all the things you’ve just learnt. A little quiz in the middle somewhere. So there’s just that little bit more if you find you want more than just reading an eBook.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. That’s awesome. So yeah. eCourse is getting really popular right now. I’m definitely thinking about it as well. So yeah, that’s brilliant. RWA, Romance Writers of Australia, I think 2016 you said was your first. That was my first as well. So we were newbies together. So have you … Is that the first year that you had joined that? Or were you a member before that?

Renee Conoulty:              No, I just joined up in the January so I could go to conference.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              I had thought, I wanna join that year. I wanna do this. It sounds great. I had lots of friends say, “Oh, you should go.”

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent.

Renee Conoulty:              Go to conference. Come to conference. So I went 2016. I went 2017, and it was fabulous. It was really good. It’s great to catch up with people that I see online all the time, and I don’t get to see them in person. Especially when I was in Darwin because there’s no romance writers in Darwin. There’s one girl who I made friends with who started doing romance. She’s just started publishing things, but that was it. It was very literary upbeat. You go to any of their writing stuff, and everyone turned their nose up at you.

Renee Conoulty:              So it was nice to find one kindred spirit up there who won’t judge genre fiction. And then coming down here to Walker, there’s really not much down here either. It’s close enough to Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra that I could find things if I wanted to. But ’cause it’s a smaller, country town, there’s not a big collection of romance writers here. So I keep in touch with people online more than anything.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. That’s awesome. And you’ve got an event you’re going to in November, which is the West Coast Fiction Festival. Tell us about that.

Renee Conoulty:              Yes. Well, I’m heading over there mainly to see my publisher. My friend, Karen, she’s coming over from the US. She’s booked a table at the front with the other publishers. So she’ll have all the books from Kindred Ink Press available for sale there. So I’m like, “I haven’t met her.” She’s one of my friends online that I’ve never met. So there’s a lot of people like that, but I’m so excited she’s coming over from the US. So we’ll travel over together, and I’ll help man the table with her. So I’ll have my books there if you want things signed, I can sign them there. But I won’t have one of the official signing tables inside.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              But I’ll be there. I can’t wait to go over.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. It’s looking like it’s going to be huge. Of course, November in Perth is beautiful weather. So yeah. I was talking Lisa Islands the other day, and she’s gonna be one of the signing. A lot of the ladies that I’ve talked to on this podcast will be there. So yeah, I’m a bit jealous. I’m like, “I don’t know if I can do that.” I’m saving up to go to RWA next year in America.

Renee Conoulty:              Well I was like, okay. My publisher’s coming over. I’ve got to go to that one. So I couldn’t really afford that one and RWA, and I’ve got another weekend away coming up in Sydney for the Invictus Games because the choir I’m singing in, the military wives choir, they’ve been invited to sing for the opening ceremony.

Sarah Williams:                  Awesome.

Renee Conoulty:              So I’m like, “Ooh.”

Sarah Williams:                  Of course, Harry and Meghan are gonna be there.

Renee Conoulty:              [crosstalk 00:23:47] You won’t hear me, but yeah, it’s very exciting. It’s an opportunity you don’t get to do very often.

Sarah Williams:                  It is for sure. I know that will be exciting.

Renee Conoulty:              [inaudible 00:23:58] but I think that’s why my travel budget’s gone.

Sarah Williams:                  [inaudible 00:24:04] Well you can claim back the West Coast Fiction Festival on your taxes.

Renee Conoulty:              Yeah, that’s tax. I’ll claim that on tax.

Sarah Williams:                  I’m just waiting for my phone call, telling me I get a stall. I haven’t done that yet. So what are you working on at the moment?

Renee Conoulty:              Right now, I’ve been a little bit slack for the last couple of months ’cause my husband’s just been on a seven month deployment, and he came back about two weeks ago. So it’s all been getting ready to see Daddy again and getting the kids all sorted. I’ve been watching way too much Netflix and hanging out with him the last couple of weeks, but he’ll be back to work soon. And I’ll get back into the project I’m probably three-quarters through, which is the second book in the ‘Got That Swing’ series. So after ‘Don’t Mean a Thing’, I’m working on the next one. So the story with the Navy girl.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent.

Renee Conoulty:              So yeah, about three-quarters through that one. So I just need to sit back down in the seat and get my fingers back on the keyboard and keep things rolling.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s it.

Renee Conoulty:              I find it … I’m not somebody who sits down and binge writes and writes for hours and hours and gets it out. I’ve gotta just plug away at things. I get there, and I get to 300 words. And I’m like, “Oh, my brain is fried. I can’t do anymore.” But if I can keep going … I set myself a goal to write 100 words a day.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent.

Renee Conoulty:              If I can sit my bum down and write 100 words, that’s usually enough to get the momentum going, and then I can keep going and I can write a bit more.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              But if it’s one of those bad days, if I get to the 100, I’ve done something, and I’ve kept the story fresh in my mind. I can keep it going ’cause I haven’t been doing that for the last month or so. It’s just all dried up and stopped. I need to go back and really read the last few chapters and get back into that daily rhythm.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, maybe you should try dictation.

Renee Conoulty:              Well, I’ve thought about it, but my brain doesn’t work like that. I know. I feel like I need to think about what I’m saying with my fingers. I don’t know, but I might give it a try sometime.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. I’m dictating-

Renee Conoulty:              I can talk.

Sarah Williams:                  I know. That’s what I was gonna say. I’m dictating my novel that I’m working on at the moment as well as the last one. I’m, yeah, I’m finding it really good. I’ll only do first draft, and then I’ll edit like crazy on the computer, but yeah, I definitely find it useful. So there you go. Something to think about. Excellent. So where can we find you and your course and your books and your audio? Where can we find you online?

Renee Conoulty:              Well there’s links to everything on my website, which is the one that I originally started when I was book blogging. So it’s called heysaidrenee at blogspot.com. I’ve just kept the same one. I haven’t gone and got a new one. I just changed the header and changed the tag line and all that sort of stuff and just put up more pages with book stuff on there. But pretty much if you Google Conoulty, C-O-N-O-U-L-T-Y, you’ll find me because I’m the only Conoulty on the internet that’s doing anything interesting.

Renee Conoulty:              So I tend to come up in all … The first two or three pages will be me with a random thing from someone else. But I’m on Facebook a fair bit. I do have a Twitter account. I sort of dropped off using that quite so much. I’m on Instagram. I’m around.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent.

Renee Conoulty:              I’m around. Hunt me down. Say hi.

Sarah Williams:                  Procrastinating like the rest of us.

Renee Conoulty:              Yeah. Yes.

Sarah Williams:                  Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com, and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my books and lots of other inspiration. If you liked the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor and remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another Write With Love episode. Bye.

 

 

Steamy, Small Town NZ Author Tracey Alvarez

Tracey Alvarez is a USA TODAY BEST-SELLING author living in the Coolest Little Capital in the World (a.k.a Wellington, New Zealand). She’s a successful Indie author who writes steamy, small town New Zealand, contemporary romance.

If you like what you see you can become a patron for just a couple of dollars a month. You will also have access to bonus episodes and insider information. Go to http://www.patreon.com/Sarahwilliamsauthor

Transcript:

Sarah Williams:                  Welcome to ‘Write With Love’ I’m Sarah Williams, best selling author, speaker and creative entrepreneur.

Sarah Williams:                  Each week I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing, some are traditionally published, some do it themselves, everyone’s journey is different and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love and love what we do.

Sarah Williams:                  Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon, if you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes go to Patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:                  G’day I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing, today I’m chatting to Tracey Alvarez, thanks for joining me Tracey.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:                  No worries, so tell us about yourself, and your writing journey so far.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Okay, well I write contemporary romances, so far set in New Zealand, and I’ve been writing them since about 2010 but only started publishing in 2013. I’ve always written so I’ve been writing as far back as I can remember, one really bad novel when I was in my early 20s but it wasn’t until my kids were older that I started writing novels. So that’s pretty much how I got started back in 2010.

Sarah Williams:                  Brilliant, so you’ve been writing for a long time, did you have a few ready to go when you started publishing?

Tracey Alvarez:                 No, because before that, when my kids were little, when they still had naps, I would write short stories. So I had quite a few short stories published in New Zealand Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day, New Idea, that sort of thing, when they still published short stories. And one or two competitions and then when the kids started getting older it wasn’t so easy to find time to write, and I actually home schooled them for quite a number of years so that kind of went on the byside and it wasn’t until they went to school that I actually had the time to write longer works and now I cannot write short.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, I completely understand, I have four kids, they’re all at primary school and there’s no way I would have been able to home school them at all, let alone try and write as well.

Tracey Alvarez:                 We haven’t got enough brain power for that.

Sarah Williams:                  So, pre-writing, did you ever do any courses or anything like that about writing or you had a different [crosstalk 00:02:55]

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’ve done lots of online courses, I’ve never done something like university level creative writing or anything like that, but I have done tons of online writing courses, everything from craft to marketing, to you name it, and I’ve still got all of the notes on my hard drive. So, I feel like I’ve done my dues learning my craft as best I can, yeah.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, brilliant, are there any of those that you could recommend the most?

Tracey Alvarez:                 There’s so many and there’s so many good teachers out there, Margie Lawson has some really good courses, and I mean there’s a lot of really good craft books out there like James Scott Bell, he does some really awesome ones. I mean there’s just heaps of stuff out there, you just have to go looking for it, look for recommendations and I can’t think of… I’ve got like two book shelves full of craft books as well.

Sarah Williams:                  And are you like most of us, we like our craft books to be paperbacks rather than Kindles?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yes, but I’m saying that, I’ve got a lot of craft books that I haven’t actually read, they’re just sat there looking pretty, one day I’ll get round to them, I keep telling myself.

Sarah Williams:                  We just need to get all the information through telepathy or something like that rather than read it.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Osmosis, now that would be good.

Sarah Williams:                  Who has time to read?

Tracey Alvarez:                 The best way I’ve found as to actually write, I mean you can spend years just saying you’re researching and learning how to write, but unless you are actually putting fingertips to keyboard and doing it, you’re not going to learn anything from just reading about how to write.

Sarah Williams:                  Yup, absolutely. So you’re based in Wellington in New Zealand. And I have had a few New Zealanders come on this show, which is fantastic, I love that you guys just are doing so well, these Kiwis, it just astounds me.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I know, it’s great, and Australians too, next door neighbors. So, you rock.

Sarah Williams:                  So you write contemporary New Zealand romances and I know you have the ‘Stewart Island’ series which is, for those of us that don’t know about New Zealand geography, Stewart Island is the little dot at the bottom of the south island, separated by some ocean, and ‘Bounty Bay’ series which you’ve got a fictional town-

Tracey Alvarez:                 It is, it’s actually based on a real area that I have lived in for almost a decade up in the far north near Kaitaia, Te Hapua, 90 Mile Beach for Kiwis who know where that is. But I thought it was easier just to create a fictional town. It’s sort of a mash up of all of those areas and it just works easier for me that way, there are certain challenges when you are writing Stewart Island with Oban, I think that’s how you say it, which is actually a real town, and I’ve kind of fudged a few details there, so apologies to anyone from Stewart Island who’s read my book, big creative license.

Sarah Williams:                  But they probably love it in Stewart Island, because they don’t get mentioned very often.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yeah, actually have a friend of mine who’s a very chatty person who had a holiday down there and was actually handing out copies of my book, gave one to the library. I wouldn’t even do that, I would be much too shy but she didn’t have a problem with it.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s classic. So why did you decide to set them in New Zealand?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Well for the Stewart Island series, actually I think the first book I wrote was the first Bounty Bay series before it became Bounty Bay, and we lived up on the far north as I said and an area that was surrounded by nature’s bush, beautiful area and one of the experiences, that actually was the cute meet at the beginning was the heroine getting her car stuck in mud and trying to dig it out, and that really happened, a lot, and my husband.

Tracey Alvarez:                 So I just kind of had this idea and ran with it, way back when. But the Stewart Island series I knew I wanted to write about a police diver, and I knew I wanted to write about a small town and I’d also seen an article about a female diver with great white shark’s head coming into her dive cage and I thought, ‘Man, that woman’s got balls of steel’, and so I thought, ‘Oh sharks’, because I have a morbid fascination about sharks. But where can I find all of these things? I thought ‘Okay, it’s either Stewart Island or Chatham Island.’ But I thought, ‘I don’t know anything about the Chatham Islands, but Stewart Island’s part of New Zealand, let’s run with that.’ And it just kind of happened from there.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, brilliant.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I guess because I know New Zealand and someways that makes it easier to write, when I’m not having to research what color the taxis are. [inaudible 00:08:18] and I just love New Zealand so why not

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, and do you use New Zealand-isms in there, or do you make it bit more American for-

Tracey Alvarez:                 I do. I do both because I would say something like 80 to 90 percent of my audience is American, and a lot of Americans just love New Zealand and Australia, and it’s like ‘I want to go down under’ so I do try to cater to them and then I spell with American spellings. But I do use New Zealand slang, but not too much, I substitute some words that will pull an American reader out the story, for example we say ‘jug’, I don’t know what Australians say? But, ‘put the jug on,’ Americans are like ‘What?’ I just have to put kettle, most people know that is.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Just little things, I try to make it a bit easier for the reader experience. I’ve had by beta readers say, what was one of them? There’s a few funny ones that they have hauled me up on, that was just I don’t even think of them being New Zealand-isms, and they’re like, ‘What does that mean?’

Sarah Williams:                  So you still chuck the odd ‘pavlova’ and ‘Jandles’ in there?

Tracey Alvarez:                 I actually, no, I do flip-flops. [crosstalk 00:09:51]

Sarah Williams:                  I’m actually from New Zealand-

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’ll say [inaudible 00:09:54] Australians are actually pretty smart, ‘We know what that is.’

Sarah Williams:                  I’m trying so hard to teach my kids it’s Jandles it’s not thongs.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Oh yeah, we don’t want [inaudible 00:10:04]

Sarah Williams:                  And we ended up compromising.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Fanny pack or something, and I suddenly thought [inaudible 00:10:21] So you’ve gotta have the beta readers that are gonna say ‘You can’t say that.’

Sarah Williams:                  ‘That’s not right’. That’s excellent, so tell us about publishing, did you always decide you wanted to go independent and self-publish? Or did you have dreams of traditional?

Tracey Alvarez:                 When I first started in 2010 in self-publishing really wasn’t much of a thing it was only the few outliers and rebels that had tried it, so my first conference, the Romance Writers of New Zealand Conference I went in 2010 I actually pitched what become a book that I have just released called, was it Quake? I have just released an earthquake book set in Wellington, it was a book I had written, I can’t remember which one now, was the hopes of going traditionally.

Tracey Alvarez:                 And I’d actually, from that point filling and even won a couple of those IWA contests, you know the first few chapters got some requests from editors. One of them was Harlequin Editor and she asked to see the full, which was awesome, but then she lost it and so I ended up waiting for about a year to hear back from her and to cut a long story short she really liked it, she couldn’t use it on her line, she wanted to sent it to another editor and I just said, ‘No thank you’.

Tracey Alvarez:                 And by then I had already self-published the first two Stewart Island books I think it was so I’m like ‘No, I’m just gonna do my own thing’ and I’ve never looked back.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent, so you’re happy that you did do that way and that you didn’t wait for traditional deal.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I really don’t have much of an interest in traditional, going the traditional way. I mean if one of the big five knocked on my door I would certainly look at what they had to offer, but otherwise I’m just quite happy publishing myself.

Sarah Williams:                  No, that’s brilliant. And again I’ve interviewed quite a few New Zealander authors and they are all doing it independently and all doing very successfully, especially with the American market. And I think that possibly for Australians our own market is quite big, so I know a lot of us do publish quite widely in Australia. And actually getting into the American market can be a little bit trickier. So yeah, it’s really amazing to see that you guys are just going straight to the American market as indies.

Sarah Williams:                  So you got USA Today best-selling status, which book was that for? And how did you manage it?

Tracey Alvarez:                 That was my box set which had the first five Steward Island books in it, and it’s normally $7.99 and I discounted it to 99 cents once I’d scored a book promotion on it, otherwise I never would have tried to make a run for the USA Today list on a single title.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I think for indie authors unless you’ve already got a huge following it’s extremely hard to hit the USA Today list on a single book, so I discounted the box-set and then I staggered a bunch of promotional sites like Bargain Booksy and Robins Reads and ENT and all of those ones that most of the authors are familiar with. And I staggered them that week and I went into it with an aim to make the list, and so I called on every favor of every author I had helped in the past, and I said, ‘Help, can you mention my offer in your newsletter or post it on Facebook that I am having this sale’ and yeah I was really terrified the whole week that I wasn’t going to make it, but I landed at number 63 so I was absolutely blown away, I was so chuffed.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s awesome, that’s really brilliant and so Romance Writers of New Zealand is the conference and the association that you’re a member of?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yes I am, I’m actually on the conference committee this year, organizing the 2018 conference, and it’s just an amazing group of women and really so supportive of each other and we just have a blast at conference, given me who’s a wall flower.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I mean last year was the first time I took a panel workshop on self-publishing, I was absolutely petrified, I made myself get out of my comfort zone and do it, it was just really neat, you know having someone like Nalini Singh, because I kind of know her from conferences about talking to her beforehand, having her go to my workshop, I was like, ‘Oh my god Nalini Singh’s doing my workshop’ But it was fine, everyone was juts so lovely. [crosstalk 00:15:24]

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent, so you’re not doing another workshop this year?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Not this year, no.

Sarah Williams:                  Not this year.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I think we are because we’ve got Bella Andre coming over, but I won’t be taking any workshops this year.

Sarah Williams:                  I’m really excited, I’m going to be there for WMC conference this year, it’s my first time.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Oh are you?

Sarah Williams:                  Yes I am [crosstalk 00:15:47] as soon as they said I’m like, ‘I’m there dude.’

Tracey Alvarez:                 You’ll have to do a live broadcast or something,

Sarah Williams:                  Yes, I have lots of things planned, I’m going to be in Auckland for a week preparing and doing things. It will be a very big and thankfully child-free week for me, so it’ll be brilliant.

Sarah Williams:                  Have you ever gone abroad to any of the other conferences? WA America, or anything in Europe?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yeah I went to RWA 2016 in San Diego, that was my first WA and I was completely overwhelmed, I’ve never been to the Aussie one, but you know having been to a few New Zealand ones. I was totally unprepared for how many people there were, I mean I don’t particularly like crowds, it wasn’t quite Comic-Con, which was happening a few doors down later. But for me it was like Comic-Con with just people, but yeah amazing speakers, and learned heaps. It was really cool, and then we did a road trip afterwards so that was even better.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah of course, you’ve got to tie an end with a nice trip around. So what are you working on at the moment?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Right now I’m working on the Stewart Island book number ten, which is called Bending the rules, it’s my cop, Noah’s story and very quick  and interesting heroine who’s got to drive him nuts called Tilly, so that’s what I’m currently writing. I’m also getting Break Your Heart which is the Bounty Bay book five, getting that ready to go. I’m just getting new covers done for that series actually and I’m so excited about them. So really distracting this last few days getting new covers done, I just want to stare at them, and not actually do any work.

Tracey Alvarez:                 So that’s coming out June 15th, I’ll be releasing it and giving that [inaudible 00:17:56] out in a few weeks and, yeah, so that’s currently what I’m working on.

Sarah Williams:                  Oh that’s brilliant. What are the things, so you write these, it’s really just these two series that you are concentrating on at the moment, so are they generally just, the Stewart Island ones I know it’s basically the same people that keep reoccurring in the books, but they all have their own different stories? Yup? So their kind-

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yeah, I’m kind of running out of couples now, there’s a few left who have got this story and then I’ve got to decide whether I want to introduce a bunch of new characters or, I’m thinking more likely do some spin-off, a spinoff series. I’ve already started a-spin off series from these and [inaudible 00:18:33] Sorry, but if you knew [inaudible 00:18:40] it’s a gorgeous little country town. [crosstalk 00:18:49]

Sarah Williams:                  It is. Yeah, excellent, I was going to say, yeah how many books can you write based on Stewart Island, there must be-

Tracey Alvarez:                 I mean there’s only a population of 400 people that live there so it’s a small area, so there’s a little bit more scope with Bounty Bay, so they’ve had a couple of different sort of families and characters keep coming in, and originally I was going to stop at this book but I think I might actually do, I can see readers screaming for our little sister’s story after this one. So at least one more and possibly more.

Sarah Williams:                  And so your heat level, you’re sweet?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Oh no, no.

Sarah Williams:                  No you’re not.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’m quite steamy, I would say sexy to steamy, but also heartwarming and sweet as well but definitely [inaudible 00:19:39]. Not that the sex is dirty, I’m not a sweet writer.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent, put a warning on that one.

Tracey Alvarez:                 [inaudible 00:19:52]

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent, well, where can we find you online Tracey?

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’m online at my website which is traceyalvarez.com and all over Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and that’s about it really ’cause I spend far too much time on social media as it is, or my newsletter which I send out once a month, that’s a good way to keep up with me too, and I like replying to emails and stuff.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent well thank you so much for that, that was really fun.

Sarah Williams:                  Thanks for joining me today, I hope you enjoyed the show, jump on to my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my book and lots of inspiration.

Sarah Williams:                  If you like the show and want it to continue you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to find out more, and remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and leave a review of the podcast.

Sarah Williams:                  I’ll be back next week with another Loved Up episode. Bye.

Dancing Queen Diane Demetre

Diane Demetre is a fresh, passionate voice in storytelling. She is an award-winning author of genre-busting romance novels with a twist. Her dramatic flair, sense of place and evocative style create an entertaining escape for her readers. Diane’s works feature empowered heroines who live life to the fullest on their terms, much like the author herself.

If you like what you see you can become a patron for just a couple of dollars a month. You will also have access to bonus episodes and insider information. Go to http://www.patreon.com/Sarahwilliamsauthor

 

Transcript:

Sarah Williams:                  Welcome to Write with Love. I’m Sarah Williams, bestselling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published. Some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do. Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now, here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:                  G’day. I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today I’m chatting to Diane Demetre. Thanks for joining me, Diane.

Diane Demetre:                It’s great to be here, Sarah. Thank you.

Sarah Williams:                  No worries. It’s lovely to have you on the show today. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to publication?

Diane Demetre:                Okay, well, I started off many, many years ago in the entertainment industry. I was a dancer, an entertainer, a choreographer, and director. That was my form of storytelling, I guess, because as I was growing up, I was an avid reader. I used to write stories, but I used to like performing best of all. Then about, I don’t know, a number of years ago back in 2012 or something like that when Fifty Shades of Grey was really, really big, a friend of mine said, “Oh, you must read that.” I said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to read that.” She said, “No, no, no, read it, read it, read it.” I went, “Oh, okay.”

Diane Demetre:                Under sufferance, I read it. That was the impetus to my writing career, because I went, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” For a start, I was a child of the ’70s, which means we went out there, and we marched for women’s rights. We did those things. We went, “No, my body is mine. It’s not yours.” When I read Fifty Shades of Grey, I went, “Oh, no, that’s so wrong.” We all burned our bras back in the ’70s to stop that sort of crap from happening, so I went, “No.” I had no intention of writing erotic romance. I’d already written children’s books years before, and they’d all been sitting in drawers, but the whole thing came in. No, you’re writing erotic romance, and so that’s how Dancing Queen was born.

Diane Demetre:                Dancing Queen was about a 42-year-old woman who goes out and has sex on her terms rather than the other way around. Dancing Queen flew out of my fingers. I’m going, “Why am I writing erotic romance? I don’t even read it.” I’ve never even read it. Straight after that in my head, Tiny Dancer was already lined up, which is about a 24-year-old dancer who gets the job of a lifetime at the Moulin Rouge. Then the last one, Dance to a Gypsy Beat, was lined up. They were all lined up like they’re at the lights, and that’s about a young lawyer from Australia who has to flee Australia because of his unsavory clients and finds himself connected to a very famous flamenco couple.

Diane Demetre:                So the Dance of Love series was born. As they say, write what you know, so having been a dancer for the first third or more of my life, it was very obvious to me to have characters that were dancers and to take the reader through not just the onstage and backstage situations, but the feelings and how that all works. I found that it worked a treat for erotic romance, because I’ve got lots of hot dance scenes and all sorts of things going on. That was it. That’s how that started, but it wasn’t how I envisaged I would ever get into writing, through erotic romance.

Diane Demetre:                I was fortunate enough to have two publishers say, “Yes, we want it. We want it. We want it.” I was one of the lucky ones in that I had a publisher who jumped on it, two, and then I chose one. Going through traditional publishing for my first foray into a writing career was great, because it put some wind under my authorly wings. I went, “Okay, yeah, I’m probably going to … I’ve got the time now in my life to do this.” I went, “Right, full steam ahead. Let’s go.”

Sarah Williams:                  Fantastic. I love that Fifty Shades of Grey was an influence in a lot of writers’ lives, I think, at the moment.

Diane Demetre:                Oh, it is. Yeah, I’m sure.

Sarah Williams:                  Whether good or bad, but that’s a really interesting story. Wow. Yeah, so tell us about the first book. Did you pitch it, or did you send it to slush piles? How did that all happen?

Diane Demetre:                Look, it was just one of those wonderful fortuitous moments. I pitched it out. I sent out cold submissions online to various publishers. I had seen an author, H.C. Brown, speaking at a conference. After that conference, I went up and I spoke to her, because she was really very compelling. She was a bit like me. She was very willing to say that she had voices in her head. Not everybody’s willing to say that. I went up. “I have voices in my head too.” I was telling her what I was writing, and she said to me, “Listen, I’m with the erotic romance publisher, Luminosity, in the UK. Once you’re ready, let me know, and let me see your submission letter. You can mention that I referred you.”

Diane Demetre:                Luminosity offered me a contract, and then it was a cold submission from the United States from an independent publishing firm over there who also offered me a contract. Then I looked at both of them. I asked them both a few leading questions about how they function, and I was looking for the most transparent and the most professional. Luminosity won hands down, and I was thrilled to sign with them. Within a year, the other publishing company had gone under anyway, so it was very serendipitous. I had made the right choice and ended up with Luminosity Publishing.

Sarah Williams:                  Oh, that’s great to hear, and yeah, with publishing houses closing down as regularly as they do, you definitely made the right decision with that. Wow. You’ve decided to go in a slightly different way with your latest book that’s coming out. Tell us about Retribution.

Diane Demetre:                Well, Retribution is my salute to people who live hellish lifetimes, who live terrible childhoods, and go through awful trauma, and how they overcome that and how they can actually set up a new life for themselves, and then perhaps fall in love again. It was my tribute to people who surround all of us who have all of this terrible emotional trauma, because I was a stress and life skills therapist for many years. I’ve counseled people in this. Again, I tend to be very intuitive with my writing, so I haven’t set out and been a strategic writer. I could keep publishing erotic romance, but that wasn’t the next book that came in.

Diane Demetre:                The next book that came in was Retribution, which was a damaged ex-soldier, but not damaged because of war, damaged because of something else, and a talented ballerina who had a buried secret inside of her that was coloring everything in her life. I wanted to have the hero as a dog. I fashioned my hero on my Border Collie, and so the dog in the story is called Whiskey. She’s absolutely integral to the action and what happens. Again, it was a beam into the story. This is who they are. This is what they look like. This is how it’s all going to flow, and this is what’s going to happen. That’s how Retribution was born. I love the story, and I love the characters. They’re very, very special there.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s fantastic. How are you publishing this one?

Diane Demetre:                I’ve decided to self-publish, because to be very honest, I got sick of waiting. I got sick of waiting for people to answer submissions, publishers to answer submissions, or they’d say, “Yes, we like it, but it’s not right for us,” and so on and so forth. I understand that, because I do write slightly outside of the box. I don’t write exactly what they want. I write what I feel I need to write. I had lots of interest in it, but no one wanted to take it. I thought, “What am I doing? Why am I sitting and waiting? It won the Romance Writers of Australia best unpublished manuscript award last year, so why am I sitting and waiting for somebody to tell me it’s good enough to publish?” Then I went, “Dammit, I’m going to publish it myself.” That’s what I’ve done. There we go. If it’s won the award, it’s good enough to publish. Off I went, and I went on that crazy self-publishing journey. Whoa, my head hurts, Sarah. My head hurts, but there we go.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, it [crosstalk 00:09:44] certainly is a big lesson to learn, and that first time you do all those tax forms, [crosstalk 00:09:51].

Diane Demetre:                Well, I found that the easiest part, because as a business owner, that didn’t bother me, but it’s just the amount of setup everywhere. You have to set up with book funnel, and you set up with KDP, and then you set up with … It goes on and on, IngramSpark, and then da da da. Then you have to do the formatting program, and then it’s like … Today I spent most of the morning setting up a new launch schedule for my next book and putting everything in order, so I know where … Tick, tick, tick for next time should be a lot easier next time.

Sarah Williams:                  Until something changes, and then you’re going to have to do something else. It’s always changing, this industry. That’s why we love it.

Diane Demetre:                Oh, yes, isn’t that fabulous? Like the Amazon paperbacks coming from America, first of July, the GST. Yeah, thanks for that, Amazon. Love you on that one. That was crap.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s it. Are you going wide, or are you just going to go with KU?

Diane Demetre:                No, I’m just doing Amazon. I’m going to stay exclusive. I’m going to do AMS ads, and I’m going to test the hell out of them. I’m going to see how it all comes together. [inaudible 00:11:02].

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent. Well, that’s good. If you do need any help, just sing out. I’ve been doing Amazon ads for a while.

Diane Demetre:                I will. I’ll take you up on that.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s a real change from … Retribution from your Dance of Love series, but I do love that you’ve got a ballerina in there, so it’s not too far.

Diane Demetre:                No, no, I needed a really gritty, tough, disciplined female lead. From my experience, you don’t get much tougher than a soloist in an international company. They are tough, so I needed her to be tough and flexible so that she could get out of her tight spots.

Sarah Williams:                  Okay. Fantastic. You’ve also done some workshops. I know I was in Brisbane last year for the RWA 2017, and you did a workshop there on the Dance of Love. Just tell us a little bit more about that.

Diane Demetre:                That was actually doing dance as the expression of love. RWA asked me, the organizers asked me, could I do something using my dance background, my choreographic background, to do something a little different? What I wanted to do was use the two ballroom dances that had been assigned to me and to actually express how love works, not just from a chemical, pharmacological viewpoint in the brain, but how that moves through the body. Dance is the perfect way to show love, all the sequences of love from first sight, first touch, and all of the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again, and to do all of that through the sequencing of dance. Yeah, it was great. I loved doing it, and the dancers loved doing it. It was really different, because then I narrated it, as you know. It gave, I think, a different insight to the audience as to how love works in the body and how visually, if you’re putting dance if you’re not a dancer into your story, that you can actually switch on those senses and see it anyway.

Sarah Williams:                  It was beautiful. I’ve always loved ballroom and Argentine, Latin dancing and that sort of thing, so it was really spectacular to watch. I was really thrilled to see that.

Diane Demetre:                Oh, good.

Sarah Williams:                  Do you do any other teaching or mentoring or anything like that?

Diane Demetre:                Yes, yes, I do a lot of workshops in writing and in getting started. I look at the seven steps to being a writer. I don’t gloss over. I don’t make it a, “Oh, it’s fabulous. It’s a glamorous lifestyle. It’s wonderful.” It’s a lot of hard work, and it’s a lot of dedication, as in everything in our lives if we want to succeed. I always say to people in my workshops, “It takes 10,000 hours to be an expert.” You’ve got to put in the 10,000 hours to get anywhere out of the rookie stage into mid-range up to an expert stage. I do workshops at local libraries. I’m looking at probably doing some workshops here in my new office next year in 2019. I just have a few more books to get published and written before I start doing that, but yes, I love doing that. I love passing on information.

Diane Demetre:                I was thinking the other day, having done this self-publishing journey, I would love to do a real nuts and bolts self-publishing course and give everybody all of the information that I’ve learned, because you’ve got to go to so many places to find it all, rather than, “Right, this is how you do it. Off you go. I suggest you go to this course, this course, this course, this course, and then go,” rather than that’s what took me a lot of time was trying to find which are the best courses to go to and the different tools you need to make your job easier. Anyway, it’s all in the pipeline.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah [crosstalk 00:15:07]. Oh, brilliant. What are you working on now?

Diane Demetre:                I will be finishing off my next book, which will be launched on the 14th of October. That’s called Island of Secrets. That’s a sweeping multi-generational love story in the vein of … What’s his name? Oh god. I’ve forgotten his name, just lost … See, the brain is gone, unfortunately. It’s across 40 years. It’s all centered around this one island off the coast of Maui, a privately-owned island called Harbor Island. Yeah, it’s a lovely story. It’s told in two parts and from the female protagonist’s point of view in each part, and all the secrets this island has had for many, many years and how they have impacted the progress of the island and the very climax of the book, and what is revealed at the end, and how at the end, will love topple the legacy of the island or not?

Diane Demetre:                Yeah [crosstalk 00:16:12], and again, it was one of those inspired books. I was out on the Broadwater going boating. What was it, end of last year? I can’t even remember now. I was out waiting for inspiration and saying to the universe, “What are we writing next, fellas?” This boat traveled past. It was an older type of cruiser. It was called Harbor Island. I went, “Bingo.” Then the whole book just flooded into me about this island called Harbor Island off the coast of Maui and how it’s going to work and everything else. I went, “Great. Thank you. Off we go.”

Sarah Williams:                  I love it. That’s awesome.

Diane Demetre:                Then the one I’m currently writing is called Murder on the Silver Galapagos, and that’s part of the murder series, because I grew up and just devoured Agatha Christie. I think I had every one of her paperbacks sitting up on my shelf in my library here, very old and tatty. Then all of a sudden, I thought, “Oh, I guess I’ll be writing murder mysteries next.” Yeah, so Murder on the Silver Galapagos came to me when I went to the Galapagos Islands last year. I went on an expedition cruise there. As I walked onto the boat, on the ship, sorry, not boat, on the ship, it was nearly like Agatha Christie said to me, “We’re doing a murder mystery here.” I went, “Really?” Off I went, and I got everybody on side. You can actually kill somebody on that ship and never get found out, so my biggest thing is, how are they going to find the murderer? Because you can’t do it. They showed me where they don’t have CCTV.

Sarah Williams:                  Good to know.

Diane Demetre:                The captain said, “I hear you’re doing a murder on my ship.” I said, “Yes.” That’s the next one. Yes, they all just beam in, you know? I’m the [inaudible 00:18:01] lady of writing. I don’t know.

Sarah Williams:                  Now that you’ve started with the self-publishing, I’m presuming you’re going to keep going with that?

Diane Demetre:                Yes, simply because … I mean, I would love to get a big traditional publishing contract, but you know what? The amount of time it takes to do the submissions and to send them out and to just wait, and in most cases, they never reply, so I get a bit peeved with that, being in the business world myself. I always answer emails. I don’t think it’s that hard to say, “Sorry, no thanks.” I’m a bit peeved with how publishers don’t follow business protocol. The amount of time I spend sending out submissions, I go, “You know what, I can spend that time more effectively by writing and self-publishing.” I’m reclaiming more writing time by not submitting is how I look at it now.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, absolutely. [crosstalk 00:19:03]. You have Retribution coming out on what date is it?

Diane Demetre:                Yeah.

Sarah Williams:                  Oh, you’ve got it-

Diane Demetre:                On Friday. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:19:09]. I’ve got a little proof copy there, so yes, it’s coming out on Friday, this Friday. It’s a romantic suspense. Yeah, I’m very thrilled with it. I love my characters. It’s a gripping tale of betrayal, hope, and love.

Sarah Williams:                  Fantastic [crosstalk 00:19:28]. As this goes out, it will be available on Amazon.

Diane Demetre:                Yes.

Sarah Williams:                  That is absolutely fantastic. Where can we find you online?

Diane Demetre:                Look, I’m on Facebook and Twitter. Of course, my website, which is all the Ws, dianedemetre.com. Then you can find all the links to everything from there anyway. Yeah [crosstalk 00:19:49], join me, join me, join me.

Sarah Williams:                  Yay. Well, thank you so much for that, Diane. I really appreciate your time.

Diane Demetre:                That’s all right, Sarah. Thank you. It was wonderful, and all the best with all your publishing too.

Sarah Williams:                  Thank you so much.

Diane Demetre:                Go, go the self-publishing.

Sarah Williams:                  Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump on to my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com, and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my books and lots of inspiration. If you like the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to find out more. Remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved-up episode. Bye.

Casey Clipper on RWA (America) and writing romantic suspense

Amazon Top 100 Bestselling Contemporary Romantic Suspense Author Casey Clipper is an active member of the Romance Writers of America, Contemporary Romance Writers, Three Rivers Romance Writers, Kiss of Death, and ASMSG. Casey is the recipient of the 2015 JABBIC HBARWA Contemporary Romance Short Readers’ Choice Award.

If you like what you see you can become a patron for just a couple of dollars a month. You will also have access to bonus episodes and insider information. Go to http://www.patreon.com/Sarahwilliamsauthor

Lisa Ireland and the art of story telling

Lisa Ireland is an Australian bestselling author, who lives on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula with her husband and three (big) boys. She loves eating but not cooking, is an Olympic class procrastinator and (most importantly) minion to a rather large dog. Lisa’s fifth novel, The Art of Friendship, was published in May 2018.

If you like what you see you can become a patron for just a couple of dollars a month. You will also have access to bonus episodes and insider information. Go to http://www.patreon.com/Sarahwilliamsauthor

** To enter the competition go to https://www.facebook.com/SarahWilliamsWriter. Like and share the competition post for your chance to win a ebook copy of The Shape of us.**

Transcript

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write With Love. I’m Sarah Williams, bestselling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published, some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do. Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show, and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/SarahWilliamsAuthor to learn more. Now, here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            G’day I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today I’m chatting to Lisa Ireland. Thanks for joining me, Lisa.

Lisa Ireland:                  Thanks so much for having me, Sarah.

Sarah Williams:            It’s a pleasure. You have a really interesting story. Would you like to tell us about yourself, please?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, sure. I guess I always wanted to be a writer from the time I was a really little girl, but I grew up in Melbourne’s western suburbs, so I went to just the local state schools there, and it kind of wasn’t the sort of occupation that people aspired to. Nobody really thought it was a real thing. Being a writer was sort of like a fantasy, but you didn’t really grow up thinking that you could really, truly do that.

Lisa Ireland:                  I went off to high school, and my teachers encouraged me, because I did quite well at school and did quite well in English, and so my teachers would sort of encourage me to look at professions like being a lawyer, something like that, and I ended up getting into journalism. I did a arts law degree, and I started out studying journalism, and in my very first week at university, my journalism lecturer told me that I couldn’t write, and that I may as well give up now.

Lisa Ireland:                  I didn’t give up on that very week, but I kind of listened to him. I kind of thought I wasn’t any good, and writing wasn’t the career for me, and not even thinking really that I wasn’t suited to journalism, that really I was more suited to creative writing. Anyway, so I trundled along, and did all the things that we do. I had a career in teaching, which I loved. Got married and had kids, and when I had my first child, I had a year off work, as many of us do, and I kind of thought that I might start to write a book, but I still, at that stage, wasn’t really looking at it as a profession, looking at getting published, I just kind of thought that it was something that I might do to fill the time, and I ended up doing a few courses, that type of thing, and eventually I …

Lisa Ireland:                  It’s a long story, but eventually I joined the RWA, the Romance of Writers of Australia, and I didn’t know anything about romance. I would have said back then that I had never even read a romance. Of course, that wasn’t actually true, I just didn’t really understand what the definition of a romance novel was. I joined RWA and fell in love. Fell in love with the genre, fell in love with the association, and kind of started to realize that maybe this was something that I could do as a profession. That’s kind of where I got my start. I don’t know. I feel like I’m gabbing on quite a lot about myself, but …

Sarah Williams:            That’s what we’re here for. It’s all good. Tell us about … Did you pitch? Did you submit? How did you go about that?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. Well, I had, like most of us, I had quite a long journey to publication. My very first foray into getting feedback was after my very first conference, so I joined, and I went to my first conference within a couple of weeks of one another. I joined so I could go to the conference, and on the last day, on the Sunday, in the plenary session, one of the speakers said, “Don’t forget to get your entries in for the Little Gems, which closes on Wednesday.” This was Sunday. I’d never written a romance before, but I thought, “I’m gonna give that a go.” I was sitting with a girlfriend, and she said to me, “I’m gonna do that,” and she said, “You should do it too,” so I went, “Oh, I’ll give it a go,” and that was … I’m just trying to think what year that was. I think it was 2005, and i actually got in to the … I came in fifth, and got my story published in the Little Gems, so of course I thought I was brilliant then.

Lisa Ireland:                  I thought I was off and away, and that it was only a matter of time before a publisher would snap me up, and of course that wasn’t exactly what happened. I started submitting … I had written a book. I’d been writing a book, because I’d been doing PWE, Professional Writing and Editing, at TAFE, and I’d been doing novel writing, so you had to write a book for that, and I had a book that I’d sort of been working on, and I started to realize that, with a few tweaks, this could fit the romance genre quite nicely. I sent it off to … Back then, this was a long time ago, back then there was no email submission. You had to print your manuscript out, and bind it up, and send it off, and for me … There were no romance publishers in Australia back then.

Lisa Ireland:                  Had to go to England or America or Canada, so I wrote sweet, or still write quite sweet. Well, actually, maybe not. Maybe not so much in the women’s fiction, but my romances are reasonably tame, and so I was pitching to one of the sweeter lines, and that came out of England at the time, and I sent off my … Back then, the process … and I’m sort of out of the way of what happens with category novels now, but back then the process was that you didn’t need an agent, you sent off a partial three chapters and just a query letter, and so they requested my full … We worked on that manuscript for quite some time, back and forth, with an editor, and in the end, it was rejected.

Lisa Ireland:                  I thought I was [inaudible 00:06:29], you know, but it didn’t turn out to be the case. By the time it was rejected, they said to me, “Oh, look, Lisa, can you send us something else?” I did have something else by that stage. I’d been working on something else for another year, so I sent them that, and ultimately what happened was the editor that I was working with left, and I went right back to zero, so I’d been working with her, and then didn’t hear from her for a while, and then realized she’d left. I was told by somebody else, and then it was ultimately not picked up, and I was a bit, I don’t know, depressed, I suppose, about that, and I didn’t submit for a while. I kind of had a period of not writing. I kind of thought, “What am i doing? It’s a fool’s game. It’s too hard.”

Lisa Ireland:                  So I had a period of not writing, and then I don’t know what prompted this, but I … Oh, I know. I went off to RWA’s, which I don’t think they have anymore, but 5DI, which is five day intensive, so that was at Griffith University in Queensland, so I did that. That didn’t really spark me up to write a new manuscript, but I met lots of other writers, and so I kind of liked the idea that I might start going to conference again to try and just get myself a bit enthused again about writing, and when I went to the conference in 2013, Escape Publishing had just opened its doors. It had been going for, I don’t know, maybe nine months or so. I can’t remember, but not a really long time.

Lisa Ireland:                  I pitched that first book, the one that I’d worked on with the Mills & Boon editor. I pitched that to Kate Cuthbert, and I’d had to rejig it a bit to make it a bit more modern, because when I first wrote it, Facebook wasn’t even a thing, so I modernized it a bit, and then pitched to Kate, and Kate said yes, is the short story, but she also had said to me that she thought it was suitable for Harlequin [inaudible 00:08:45] print program, but it was a bit short, so from there, I was an Escape author, but my next book I deliberately wrote longer so that if Harlequin [inaudible 00:08:56] was interested in it, it would fit the word count.

Lisa Ireland:                  For those of you that are interested, the first one was 60,000 words, and that wasn’t considered long enough. They did talk to me about possibly writing more, adding more to that story, but I felt that the story was complete as is, and I couldn’t really see how I could bring it up to 80 or 90,000 words without just padding, which was agreed by Harlequin. They agreed with me, so the next one I wrote, and it was around that 90,000 words, and that went directly to print. That was kind of how I ended up being print published. Yeah, so I did three rural romances with Harlequin, and then I’ve now moved into a different genre.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, so now you’re writing women’s fiction.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            How has that been to move over in? Have you noticed much difference?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. It’s interesting. I never really set out to write rural romance. My story with that is that the story that I had been working on … My very first year as a teacher was in country Victoria, and I was very much a city girl. I’d grown up in the city, didn’t really know much about living in the country. Even though my dad grew up on a dairy farm, I still was very much a city girl, and so I moved to this country town, and it was quite an awakening for me, and I loved it. I had a great time, and I still look upon that time very fondly.

Lisa Ireland:                  My first book, even though it’s complete fiction, but it was kind of born out of … That was the inspiration, born out of my experience as a city girl in the country, and back when I very first wrote it, there wasn’t a genre called rural romance. I mean, maybe Rachael Treasure was writing that kind of stuff, but there wasn’t a whole carved out genre specifically called rural romance, so I didn’t know I was writing a rural romance, and it didn’t get published, as I explained before, until many years later, and by that time … I think that was my catalyst, actually. When Rachael Johns’ Jilted got published, I went, “I’ve got a story like that sitting in my drawer,” and that was the catalyst for me to pitch it to Kate Cuthbert in Fremantle.

Lisa Ireland:                  I was asked this, actually, at an author talk the other night. An aspiring writer asked me, “You know, I’ve got all these ideas, and they’re all from different genres. Is that okay? Can I explore all these different genres?” I sort of said to her, “Well, yeah, you can do anything you like, but to be commercially successful in Australia, which is a very small market, my advice to authors would be to pick the genre that you love, and establish yourself in that genre first.” I think, for me, I didn’t really understand that initially, so I’d wrote three rural romances, all of which were bestsellers, all of which did really, really well, but my next story … It wasn’t that I’d deliberately planned to move away from rurals, it was just that the next story that came to me was not a rural, and it was not a romance, and so I just wrote that, and I sold it, which is great, but I’ve now moved into a completely different market, which has been quite challenging, to be honest.

Lisa Ireland:                  It also means one of the things that I’m finding challenging is that if I have a rural idea, really now I’ve moved into the women’s fiction market, and the readers that I’ve picked up there are not necessarily gonna follow me back to rurals, so it is tricky. Some people do manage to do it quite successfully, but they’ve usually built up a massive following before they switch genres, so yeah. But anyway, at least for the time being, I’m writing women’s fiction.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Your two women’s fiction have been The Shape of Us and The Art of Friendship, and The Art of Friendship of course is the latest, which has only just come out recently.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            These two, they’re not with Harlequin, are they, they’re with Pan Macmillan.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, they’re with Pan Macmillan,

Sarah Williams:            Did you have to resubmit, go through that process again?

Lisa Ireland:                  I did. How that sort of came about, it was just because it was not a rural, but it’s quite complex, the whole contract thing, which I didn’t really … I didn’t have an agent for my first three books, so I was kind of just happy for anyone to take me [inaudible 00:13:43]. Kind of a bit naïve, and sign things. Not that there was anything wrong with the contracts that I did sign, they were fine, but I had to give Harlequin the first book at my next book in anything that was rural, but that was not the case if I wrote outside that genre.

Lisa Ireland:                  Basically what I did, I submitted widely. I submitted all over again, did that whole query process, yada yada, the whole, yeah, write [inaudible 00:14:13] like I was a beginning writer, and the most appropriate offer I felt came from Pan Macmillan, and the reason was … It wasn’t that I wanted to move away from Harlequin, because I loved Harlequin, and would have been happy to keep publishing with them forever. It was just a simple matter of Haylee Nash was at Pan Macmillan, and she fell in love with my book, and that’s very intoxicating when somebody loves your book. It was more about wanting to work with her rather than any other aspect of the contract. Pan Macmillan are a publisher that do sort of focus a bit more on women’s fiction rather than romance, but obviously staying with Harlequin would have been a good option too, I was just fortunate that I had an option.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Absolutely, and Haylee Nash is out on her own now. Has she become your agent, or anything like that?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yes, she has, actually. It’s really quite a funny story, because she bought … I didn’t have an agent when I sold to Pan Macmillan, so I sold to her as my publisher, and then she left and then became my agent, so it’s quite funny. We both had this kind of quite weird sort of relationship, where the books that she now represents me for, I actually sold to her in the first place, so the good thing about that is that she knows the books very well, and I know she likes them. She bought them, so yeah, so that’s kind of been an interesting thing. But I was actually Haylee’s first client, so yeah, and she’s an awesome agent. I’m very happy to be working with her.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, so The Art of Friendship. Tell us about this story. What’s the plot line, and when did you come up with it?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. It’s about two childhood friends, so little girls that grew up together. They first met when they were 11, then they grew up as neighbors and were best friends, and have seen each other through pretty much everything that best friends do. You know, breakups, and first kisses, and all that kind of thing, but they haven’t lived in the same town. They grew up in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs, but now have both moved further afield. Now Kit lives in … She does live in Melbourne still, but more in the inner west, and Libby’s lives in Sydney, but they’ve both lived all over the world in the interim.

Lisa Ireland:                  The story takes place in the year of their 40th birthday. They’ve, as I said, been living apart for a really long time, since their university days, so the last time they were together, geographically, was when they were at university, but they’ve kept in touch, and Kit is Libby’s child’s godmother. They spend every Christmas day together, so they’re still really, really close, but they haven’t lived in the same town for 20 years, and at the beginning of the book, Libby’s husband gets a job in Melbourne, and the family moves back to Melbourne, where they’re 10 minutes away from Kit, and the two women are just ecstatic that they’re gonna be back together again, but very quickly after the move, cracks start to form in the relationship, and I kind of wanted to explore that idea.

Lisa Ireland:                  Several ideas, but one of the ideas is that maybe the friends that you choose in childhood, if you met them today as they are right now, would you choose them all over again, and of course sometimes the answer is yes, but sometimes the answer might be no. There was that question that I was looking at. The other thing is that the image that we present to the world online. Because they’ve kept in touch via email, via text, via phone call, as well, but they’re not physically in each other’s presence, so I wanted to explore that idea that we don’t always show the world exactly who we really are. That we present our best side or our happiest side to the world, and there can be things going on under the surface that no one sees, not even maybe the people that think they’re out very best friends.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, so there was that, and there’s a few other things running through the book. Themes of motherhood. One woman is childless and the other one has a 14 or 15-year-old son, so there’s those type of things, too. Does that affect friendship, if one person is a mother and one person is not, and yeah. That’s kind of what the book’s about, but one of the sort of fun … It’s quite a serious book, but one of the fun things in the book is that Libby moves to a gated community in Melbourne, and a very wealthy community, because her husband is a lawyer, and he gets this job as this very up-and-coming building company, and one of the perks is that that they get to live in this gated community, and there’s a set of what I called the arcadia housewives, and it’s sort of like those women, they all have a very big role.

Lisa Ireland:                  It might not seem apparent in the beginning, but they all have a role to play in the story, and I didn’t even know that myself when I started writing the book, but how I pitched it to Pan Macmillan, I think I said it was Stepford Wives meets I Don’t Know How She Does It, and yeah, and so there is a little bit of a … It’s not comedy, but a little bit of sort of a lighter element with the housewives, and their Botox, and their designer handbags and their et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know if that kind of feeds into that thing, too, of who you really are, because Libby is a woman that likes to fit in, and so another thing is what do we compromise to fit in with the people around us? How much of your core values will you give up to be part of the crowd? Yeah, that’s basically what it’s about.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, wow. It’s definitely coming a long way from the country rural romance [crosstalk 00:20:40] gated communities.

Lisa Ireland:                  There is a romance in there, but I won’t tell you about that because that’s a spoiler.

Sarah Williams:            These are all just standalone books, they’re not series or anything.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Excellent. Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Are you a plotter, a pantser, a dictator?

Lisa Ireland:                  I’m a big pantser, huge pantser. I’ve kind of experimented with process over the course of my writing, so Breaking The Drought, which was the first rural, was written in scenes, because in the beginning, I probably didn’t even really intend to write a book. I was writing it for a course, and I was just writing bits and pieces to send off to my lecturer each week, and then I kind of pasted them together to paste a book, so that was written in scenes. Feels Like Home, which was my second book, I quite tightly plotted, because I was pitching that to … I didn’t have a contract for it, but I was fairly certain that it would be taken by Escape, and that if it was good enough, that it would go to Harlequin  which is what happened, and so I was very cautious with that book.

Lisa Ireland:                  You know, I wanted it to hit all the notes, plus I had done quite a lot of professional development by that stage. You know, so I had all the three act structure going on, and plotting my turning points and whatnot. That was not a pleasant book to write. I didn’t enjoy that particularly. I was gonna say my favorite book to write, but maybe my second favorite book to write was Honey Hill House, which is the next one, and that is part of a series. They’re all standalone books, but it’s part of the Last Chance Country series that was written with Jennie Jones and Catherine Evans. Jennie and Cath are both good friends of mine, and we had this idea that it would be great to write something together that could go in an omnibus, in an anthology, and so as series, we could sell individually as eBooks, which is exactly what happened to it.

Lisa Ireland:                  We pitched that to Escape, and Kate thought it was a great idea, and then once they saw the stories all together, then it went on to be a print book for Harlequin. That was huge fun. There was a bit of planning involved in that because obviously it’s a shared universe, a shared world, a shared town, and each of our characters appear in the other books, so we had to have a set of characteristics, I guess, and physical characteristics as well as personality quirks, and we worked quite closely on that. We were all reading each other’s work as it was developing because … I’ve got a mother, like an older woman, sort of a matriarch, in my book, who’s got an important role in all three books, and Cath had written some stuff, and she sent her to me. She’d send it to me, and I’d read it, and I’d say, “Oh, no, I don’t think everyone would talk that way. You need to tone it down a bit.”

Lisa Ireland:                  Then we had this great idea about two of our characters having this really close friendship, and then we realized that her character, her female character, was very young. She was, like, 21, and my male character was, like, 30-something, and we went, “Yeah, that’s not gonna work.” But so that was a lot of fun, and so there was a bit of planning that went into that, but as far as the story itself went, I just sat down and I wrote it, and it’s probably the quickest book I’ve ever written, and it just happened organically. It was a very quick write, and yeah, no plotting in that one at all, and in fact, I was starting to panic towards the end of it because I wasn’t really sure how it was gonna end. I mean, you always know how a romance is gonna end, but I didn’t know how I was gonna get there, because I did some terrible things to those characters, and I didn’t know. How else can you get out of it?

Lisa Ireland:                  But I did, and then the next one, which was The Shape of Us, and that book’s truly the book of my heart, and I was actually writing another rural, and it wasn’t working. I just didn’t have the right enthusiasm for it, I guess, so it was coming along, but I wasn’t enjoying writing it, and I felt like I just wasn’t hitting the right notes with it, I didn’t think, and I was talking to … I think it was to Rachael Johns about it, and she said to me, “Why don’t you just write … If you’ve got another idea for something, why don’t you just go and write something else for a week or two, just to sort of clear your head,” and I started writing [inaudible 00:25:37].

Lisa Ireland:                  Had that idea, had it kicking around in the back of my head for about two years, or maybe even more, and I thought, “Yeah, I’ll just get a few ideas down,” and so I started writing down, and I didn’t stop, and that had no plotting whatsoever. It was just 120,000 words of completely and pure pantsing. Yeah, and it got there in the end, and then The Art of Friendship was totally pantsed as well, because I figure it worked for Shape. That one was a bit trickier. It took a lot of editing because I wrote myself into a few corners in that book, and there are some quite dark things in that book. When the first draft was finished, my editors were concerned that the characters, one in particular was a little bit too dark, and so it took a bit of massaging to get her to be a bit more relatable.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, so that’s, I guess, the drawback of pantsing, is that you can get yourself into trouble, and it does often require quite a large and thorough edit, structural edit, I mean, at the end. For this one, because of what happened with The Art of Friendship … I’m writing a book at the moment titled Pieces of Me, just working title, and I’m very good friends with Sally Hepworth, who is another Australian women’s fiction author, an internationally published author, and she’s had lots of success, and she’s a huge, huge plotter. We were talking about process, and so I kind of decided that I was gonna give this plotting paper a go, and I have turned myself inside out trying to plot this book. I’d already written 45,000 words before I decided that maybe, because I got a bit stuck, so then I thought, “Oh, maybe I’ll give the plotting a go.” Hasn’t worked.

Lisa Ireland:                  For me, I think plotting rocks my confidence, and it sort of kills my creativity. I start to second-guess everything, and decide, when I see it in those plotting graphs, I decide that it’s useless, and there’s no story, and I might as well give up now, whereas if I’m just writing, I just keep writing and writing. I think when I teach, like when I teach writing to other people, when I run workshops and stuff, I always say to aspire and write as … If plotting’s not your thing, if it doesn’t feel good to you, it’s something that can be superimposed. The structure can be superimposed in the second draft.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yes, it will be hard work. It’s not gonna be easy to do that, but it might be better for you to just write your whole first draft and get all that, run with your creative spark, get your idea down on paper, and then when you’re satisfied that you’ve finished, that you’ve told the story that you wanna tell, then you can go back and massage it, and pick it up, and cut and paste, and yeah, put the structure into it then.

Lisa Ireland:                  That would, I guess, be my advice. If plotting comes naturally to you, lucky you. Go for it. But if it doesn’t, I think maybe my advice would be don’t try and force it, just go with what feels naturally good, and it might take you a few books. It might take a few goes before you actually understand what your real process is.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, and there is no one size fits all philosophy, so yeah, that’s really good advice, and I did hear something the other day, and it said you’ve gotta write, what was it, 100,000 words before you’re a relatively good writer, you know? Habits, and these sorts of things.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. It takes time, perseverance, and obviously you’ve had to persevere a lot, so yeah, no, that’s great to hear. Are you coming to Romance Writers of Australia here in Sydney?

Lisa Ireland:                  I am, and in fact, I am the newbie coordinator this year, so if you’ve not been before and you’re thinking about coming, I’ll be there to hold your hand and help you. I’ve got a little team of newbie helpers who I’ll be announcing next week, and we will run some … We’ll have a meet and great on the Friday night before the cocktail party, so that if people are thinking about coming to the cocktail party, but they’re a bit shy and they don’t wanna walk in on their own, that’s fine. You can come, and I’ll hold your hand and walk in with you.

Lisa Ireland:                  You’ll be fine, and we’ll be available at all the main breaks, at morning tea, lunch, et cetera, on the Friday and on the Saturday. Usually you find by Sunday you’ve made your own friends by then and you don’t need us anymore, but we’ll be available. There’ll be someone from the newbie team available to just direct you, or stand and have a cup of tea with you, and find out how your morning’s been going or whatnot. Yeah, so I’m definitely going, and I’m also on a panel with Haylee Nash, Christine Wells and Rachael Johns, which is called What’s So Romantic About Women’s Fiction?

Sarah Williams:            Oh, cool.

Lisa Ireland:                  That talks a little bit about the differences between writing romance and writing women’s fiction, and why we write what we write, and help people define what they’re writing, because we often find that people will tell us they’re writing women’s fiction, but they’re actually writing long-form romance, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so we’re there to champion both genres, and romance in particular I think is such a high-selling genre in this market, in the Australian market, that I’d be really encouraging people to, if you are writing romance, own it. Don’t pretend that it’s something else, because there’s really no need, and be out, and loud, and loud and proud.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah.

Lisa Ireland:                  Because it’s a genre that is the bestselling, so ….

Sarah Williams:            Not just in this market, in the international market, it outdoes everything else.

Lisa Ireland:                  I think sometimes there’s a bit of … we’ve all experienced this, I guess, romance cringe, but you know what, there shouldn’t be, because good writing is good writing, no matter what genre. Whether it’s romance, whether it’s women’s fiction, whether it’s crime, or whether it’s literary fiction, good writing’s still good writing, and there’s a huge market for romance. I just think that a lot of people are cutting themselves out of markets by branding themselves women’s fiction when their book actually isn’t women’s fiction. It does fall under the bigger umbrella of women’s fiction, but what we’re kind of trying to get people to see is that if you’ve got a strong romance theme, then you’re maybe to market it as romance primarily, rather than women’s fiction.

Lisa Ireland:                  Anyway, obviously there’s 90 minutes worth of discussion there in the panel, so I probably can’t do it justice here in five minutes. If you write in either genre, or you’re thinking about crossing over from one to the other, that might be a panel to stick your head into at RWA this year.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, definitely. That’ll be in Sydney in August this year if you are interested. The registrations are open on the romanceaustralia.com.au site, so head on over to that. My little plug for them. The other thing you’ve got going on in November is the West Coast Fiction Festival. I’ve not been to that before. Tell us, what do we do? What is it about?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. Now, this is the inaugural one, so hopefully it’s gonna be huge. From memory, I think there are 60. I could be wrong, but it’s around that number. It’s 60 authors, indie authors and traditionally published authors. I think the organizers have tried to get a balance between the two types of authors. I’m super excited about it because there’s so many people going. Just trying to think which authors were. You’ve got people like Rachael Johns. I’m just thinking about in the women’s fiction market. You’ve got Rachael Johns, Tess Woods, and then you’ve got lots of rural romance people, Jennie Jones, lots of indies. I’m just trying to think of who we’ve got in indies. I know [inaudible 00:34:20] just signed, Rebecca Raisin, who has had lots of success overseas in the UK, but is a passionate Perth author. She is coming.

Sarah Williams:            Natasha Lester is gonna be there, I think?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. I don’t know that Natasha … I’m not sure. Maybe, but I’m not sure about that. Anyway, there’s 60 of us chalking along, and it’s a really great event because, apart from anything else, it raises money for Share the Dignity, which is a national charity that provides mainly sanitary items, but also other items for homeless women. People might have heard of Share the Dignity through the … I can’t remember what it was called. They have a handbag collection in about November every year. I’m just trying to think what that particular drive is called. It’s gone out of my head.

Lisa Ireland:                  Anyway, so all money raised goes to Share the Dignity, and it’s actually really all the profits are going. It’s covered, it’s got lots of sponsorship, so ticket sales, if you buy a ticket today, your whole ticket price will be donated to Share the Dignity, I believe, so it’s a really great cause. What they’ve got going on is there’s a signing, so we’ve got all the authors will be signing. There are books available for sale. There’s also, if you get a VIP ticket, there’s a big author party after the signing, so you can boogie the night away with your favorite authors, and there’s also art and craft markets. It’s a big festival, so it’s gonna be fantastic, and I personally can’t wait to go.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, fantastic. I’m just having a look so we can throw some other names up there. Amy Andrews, Alissa Callen, Vanessa Carnevale, TM Clark, Claire Connolly, Pamela Cook. Oh my gosh. Some huge names, are going, so yeah. Tania Cooper. That’s gonna be gigantic. Obviously I can see why I got knocked back. There’s always next year.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, well hopefully, if this one goes well, it’ll be an annual event, and I’m sure … I think this time they were kind of conservative in how many people could go because, you know, it’s never been run before, so it hopefully will be even bigger next year.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, and that sounds like a great idea, obviously, with [inaudible 00:36:51] not doing their signing events now and that sort of thing. It is nice to have something else there to take over a bit. Well, we’re kind of running out of time. There’s a still a couple of things here we need to talk about. The Shape of Us, you’re offering a print giveaway for The Shape of Us, so all the details on this will be on my Facebook page, so if you would like to read the book of Lisa’s heart, please hop onto my Facebook page, which is Sarah Williams Writer, I think, on Facebook. On my website we’ll have the details, too, which is sarahwilliamsauthor.com. What are you working on at the moment, Lisa?

Lisa Ireland:                  I’m working on a book called Pieces of Me, which is really a book about motherhood, and it’s set partially in Victoria and partially in Brooklyn, in New York, and it’s about a woman who is running the New York Marathon to deal with her grief over something that’s happened in her past, so yeah, that’s essentially it.

Sarah Williams:            Well, fantastic. Oh, that sounds brilliant. Excellent. The Art of Friendship is out now throughout Australia and New Zealand, and yeah, so where can we find you online and see where you’re selling it?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, if you just got to my website, which is lisairelandbooks.com, you can find all my social stuff there, all of my stuff on my books, and I’m all over social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. I’m a big chatter on Facebook, so you can … I’m happy to have a chat on any of those mediums.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. That is great. Well, thank you so much for that today, Lisa. That was really fun.

Lisa Ireland:                  Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:            Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com, and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my book and lots of inspiration. If you like the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/SarahWilliamsAuthor to find out more, and remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel, and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye.

 

Broaden your mind with Wendy Vella

Wendy Vella is a bestselling Kiwi author of contemporary and historical romance fiction. She is also 1/4 of the SPA girls Podcast. We have a great chat about romance genres, being Indie and getting a little help from friends.

If you like what you see you can become a patron for just a couple of dollars a month. You will also have access to bonus episodes and insider information. Go to http://www.patreon.com/Sarahwilliamsauthor

Transcript

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write With Love. I’m Sarah Williams, best selling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published.  Some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do.

Sarah Williams:            Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            G’day, I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today I’m chatting to Wendy Vella. Thanks for joining me today Wendy.

Wendy Vella:                No worries. Thanks for having me on Sarah.

Sarah Williams:            It’s a pleasure. So, tell us how you started out and your writing journey so far.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, I’ve always been … I love romance. I’m an absolutely incurable romantic, and my mother, many years ago, started me on Georgette Heyer and wrenched the book out of my hand and said, You need to try something a little bit … Broaden your mind a little bit. So then I went out to Georgette Heyer, and I never looked back, really. The Regency era has been a particular favorite of mine for many years.

Wendy Vella:                So I wrote for quite a long time. I joined Romance Writers of New Zealand, and did competitions, and just basically spent some time honing my craft. Then I entered competitions, and as I started, I won a few and got Reader’s Choices. I thought, maybe I’m ready to publish. So at one of the conferences I pitched and was picked up by Random House for the Loveswept Line. And, so I published my first book traditionally; it was in November, what am I saying November, it was January 2013.

Wendy Vella:                Then I really had a few problems with trying to get them to pick up another book. What I wanted to write and what they actually wanted to publish were two different things. I had a wonderful group of writing friends who I went on with some of them to do the SpaGirls, which is our podcast we do. And we talked, and they said, Why don’t you have a go at self publishing? That was fairly terrifying.

Wendy Vella:                So I went and got a cover and based on my ability and got someone else to read it and thought okay I’m gonna have a go. So in November 2013 “Duchess by Chance” was published and that went fairly well actually, considering the errors that were still in it. Christmas that year I put out a novella called “Christmas Wishes”. Then I was [inaudible 00:03:11] after that, I really decided that because I write quite quickly I thought this suits me. Being able to adjust and change things and move with the times and covers, and things like that, I thought well okay I really enjoy this.

Wendy Vella:                So I carried on writing in circles for a while and then I thought self publishing allowed me to write across genres and I get bored very easily so the next step for me was I’m going to write some contemporary. I went into contemporary and then published my first contemporary February 2015. Same year I actually retired, not retired, left my job, my day job and worked from home so that was really buzzy, I really, really enjoyed that.

Wendy Vella:                So, yeah, I’ve never really looked back. I’ve got 16 historicals, straight historicals, well not straight as in the traditional scenes, but I have four historical paranormals and I have 8 contemporaries out now, and my first audio came out this year too which is great.

Sarah Williams:            So busy year. So you must write fairly quickly then to have so much.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, I’ve been busy.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, so much in such a short amount of time.

Wendy Vella:                I do write fairly quickly. My first draft is always really quick. I’m not a plotter in any way, I’ve tried many times to plot, because it frustrates me that I quite often will write in circles and go back and change. But, I think my process now, it’s taken me a while to get to the point I’m at, but I know my processes now. I know that when I get to the end of the first draft its very, very rough. A rough, quick first draft. What I do when I write is I need to be able to keep the words on the page so if I find something blocking me I just write in capital letters and that part needed here and carry on because otherwise I’m spending all these hours researching, you know. So, for me that works really well, for me just getting that first draft down.

Wendy Vella:                The second draft is a lot slower and a lot more detailed. So that is how my writing process has gotten…

Sarah Williams:            So are you a plotter or…?

Wendy Vella:                I don’t do any plotting at all, no structuring, nothing. I just sit down and go.

Sarah Williams:            So your first draft is pretty much you telling yourself the story really.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah it is. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried the Snowflake method. I’ve tried friends sitting down with me and helping me plot. But I find it’s a really weird thing, I find that it blocks me. I find if I know the story, I really struggle and so I’ve just given up. The latest book I’ve just finished the first draft on and I rewrote the first part three times as I went through the book but that was just the process that needed to be done. You know everyone’s different but that works for me.

Sarah Williams:            That’s brilliant, wow. So your Regency Romance, obviously you’re in New Zealand, so do you do a lot of research, I guess you know a lot about that area and you’ve traveled over there a fair bit?

Wendy Vella:                Yes I have. My family is from England. I do love it over there, really, really love it so I’ve been back. I went on my honeymoon over there with my husband plus my son played rugby over there so we went over there. Then, my first grandchild was born over there, so I’ve had a few trips over there. I will go again because I love the history. We don’t have that here in New Zealand. That history is just so vital and so rich.

Wendy Vella:                I think the Regency era, I love that no one alive was around then, so you have so much [inaudible 00:07:12], even though you’ve got to stick to those, you know because the people will let you know if you get them wrong. Believe me I’ve had a few of those emails. But I just love that you can really play with that era whereas with contemporary, people living today know what it’s all about. But, then you can really have some fun. I really love it.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, absolutely. And you’re a Jane Austen fan? Which one’s your favorite?

Wendy Vella:                My favorite is probably 2017 version of Persuasion, I think it was 2017 or maybe it was 2015, I can’t remember, with Rupert Penry-Jones on the t.v. But, Persuasion is my favorite and I know it’s her last book but I just love that story, it’s great.

Sarah Williams:            It is, it’s gorgeous, I love it too. So what are some of your other favorite authors that write Regency as well?

Wendy Vella:                Some of them are not straight Regency, I know, I love Julia Quinn and of course Elouise James, but she can be more Georgian. There are so many, Lisa Kleypas, I think it’s Kleypas, I can never get her name right, but she also writes contemporary so she’s sort of, I like that she does both. Miss Stephanie Lawrence of course, there’s just so many historical writers out there that are amazing. I’m actually gonna look up on my bookshelf because there’s a million people up there but I can’t quite see the titles from here.

Wendy Vella:                I think as a writer, that was something that I stopped doing was reading, because I was just write, write, write…and then I realized I was really missing it. I realized that it was really vital for my creativity and to getting everything moving to read as well, not just spending time doing your own stuff. So, now I make myself read.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. And of course you’ve got your contemporary series as well. Those ones are mostly based in the United States aren’t they.

Wendy Vella:                Yes they are. I never really had any inkling to write about anything in New Zealand isn’t that terrible? I’m a New Zealander, but I never really had, I’ve always read American based contemporary and I just sort of thought right I’m gonna go do that straight away. So I haven’t editor who can edit the Americanisms in because quite often she’ll come back to me and go I’ve got no clue what that means. Absolutely no clue because it’s a kiwi thing. I think that’s finally important. I do have an American voice which is good. I seem to be able write American. My readers for over the years tell me that I do okay.

Wendy Vella:                You have to be very careful. Something that I’ve realized is that if I don’t know something than I’ll either write away from it and around it or I do the research and find it. You can write most things and then come back and edit in the stuff that needs to be edited.

Sarah Williams:            Fantastic. Your sales in American, are they bigger than they are in Australia and New Zealand?

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, by a long way. America is my biggest audience and then it would be the UK.

Sarah Williams:            That is fantastic. So this year you have a book which you turned into an audio book?

Wendy Vella:                I did. I thought I had to go with it. So I went through Find A Way and they sent out some recordings of a few people doing a little bit of my first contemporary Promise of Home. I did a few audition types and I went through each and I sort of had, I knew where I wanted the voice to go cause when you write something, you have a vision of what characters are like. I knew what I wanted from any audio, anyone who was going to do the reading. I picked a lovely lady and she’s done a fantastic job. It was really weird though, when she said, Oh get on there and have a listen, and I was wow, I don’t know if I want to hear my book read back to me. It’s a very, very unusual feeling when you just sit there and listen to the whole thing.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, no, it’s great, it’s going well. But I think it’s like publishing for the first time on anything whether it’s ebook print until you have something for them to go on to, I’ve not really pushed it hard advertising wise or marketing wise because I would like to get another couple before I start that and then they can roll on to that because unfortunately that’s just the way things seem to be better if you’ve got something for them to go on to.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, absolutely, totally agree. So Kindle Unlimited is your preferred platform. Tell us about your decision to do that.

Wendy Vella:                Well I put my contemporaries wide and I’ve always had them wide since 2015 when I published my first one. They did really, really well, you know, don’t get me wrong but Kindle Unlimited has always been half of my income with my historicals. Page reads are massively important and you know there’s two schools of thought with giving Amazon that much control over your life or going wide, but for me it’s just worked really well so I’ve put everything thing in this year.

Wendy Vella:                I really haven’t looked back, I’ve had some of my bigger months the last few months and the page reads do really well and the sales don’t seem to be affected at all. So yeah it’s going well and if I sort of equated the two from going wide to going into Unlimited money wise then I would be saying that I would be coming out on top.

Wendy Vella:                So it was quite…I haven’t had too much push back from readers of yet. If anyone emails me and says I can’t get your ordinary book anywhere, then I’m [inaudible 00:13:02] them a copy, you know I don’t want people to miss out.

Sarah Williams:            Exactly. So you do the SpaGirls podcast, I’ve heard Cheryl Phibbs on the show which is fantastic. So how long has that been going for now? You’ve racked up quite a few other sites.

Wendy Vella:                I think we’re probably well into the hundreds, you know I don’t have that information they’re going to kill me for that. But the thing about the four of us is we’ve been friends for many years. We started off as a critique group, all of us were unpublished, but I think really, this is about community because it’s such a solid re-occupation you spend all of the time on your own in your own head and being able to have friends that do the same thing is vital. We all work from home now and we all have our own strengths and we’ve been able to carry that. Without them I probably wouldn’t have self published. I might have gotten around to it eventually but they’re pretty special. So that was a natural progression for us to come into the SpaGirls.

Wendy Vella:                We had a lot of people approach us about oh how do you do this and how do you…and we were talking about this and we said well why don’t we just start something to help people out. So we started that and it’s sort of, despite ourselves, gone crazy. We get a lot of wonderful people and we’ve got a lot of wonderful listeners.

Wendy Vella:                Until you start pulling your knowledge, you don’t realize how much you know about it. As soon as we started I thought this is a good thing because there are podcasts out there but there are not that many that are for real outside beginners. You know people that are just starting the journey and that’s what we really like to target.

Wendy Vella:                So we wrote our first book and we get together and we have a lot of laughs and we enjoy each others company too which is vitally important.

Sarah Williams:            You’ve got to interview some great people. I know you’ve talked to Mark Dawson, how was that.

Wendy Vella:                It was amazing. Well, it was quite funny, Cheryl and I went to Florida last year to [inaudible 00:15:09] and we were sick, really sick. We got sick from the minute we got there. Her alarm went off and she said huuh, oh my gosh we’ve got to interview Mark in 20 minutes. Get up, get up. And we just went running through the hotel and there he was what a wonderful man.

Wendy Vella:                I coughed much of the way through it but fantastic, fantastic, humble guy who’s got an amazing knowledge and very happy to share that knowledge. He sat and talked with us for ages and after the podcast had finished, he talked to us for a bit longer and that I think is the thing about this community most people I know are really willing to share their knowledge.

Wendy Vella:                Roxanne St. Claire was the same, she was amazing/ And we just meet so many people that have just been so supportive of us. Once you get over that fear of asking someone, you know if you think about it everyone wants to talk about themselves and share that information don’t they? So why not do it?

Sarah Williams:            It’s funny, I’ve recently been asking a lot of different people and really bulking up my schedule on podcasts, and no one says no.

Wendy Vella:                It does…it just does. You’ve got to get over that fear yourself of asking. But as soon as you do, we’ve got some great cases coming up so it’s good. I really enjoy it and I think people enjoy listening to it as well.

Sarah Williams:            It is, and I’ve heard Mark Dawson on his own podcast and other peoples podcasts. It’s always something different, I’m sure I learn something different about him and his experiences listening to him on your podcast than I did on anything else I’ve listened to.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, I know, he’s a great guy and as I said, willing to give, and that’s a good thing about this community I think.

Sarah Williams:            It is…it is. It’s fantastic. It’s amazing too, like we write romance and Mark Dawson writes thrillers but you’ll still learn things. The publishing industry is the way it is.

Wendy Vella:                It’s evolving isn’t it.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah and it’s incredible what works for people in thrillers can still work for people in romance and vice versa.

Wendy Vella:                Absolutely.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, fantastic. So you’re a member of the Romance Writers of New Zealand? So you’ve been with them for a few years?

Wendy Vella:                Many, many, many, many, many, many years. So when I was unpublished I just used to go along and just feed off of the wonderful people there again giving up their time. I think it has evolved so quickly this publishing industry that England’s learned quite a lot with self publishing. Other viewings it’s been great they understand that and all of their authors, they cater pretty much to everyone and the evidence is Bella Andre coming to conference this year, one of the big guns of self publishing. So yeah I love RWNZ they’ve been really good and they’re a great source of knowledge.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant, so conference is coming up in August this year, in Oakland, which of course I’ll be going to. I’m very excited and I just got confirmation I will get to talk to Bella Andre for the podcast. You guys are probably going to try to hit her up as well?

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, we will I think.

Sarah Williams:            That will be awesome. Brilliant. So are there any other conferences that you’re planning on going to or you’ve been to recently?

Wendy Vella:                I haven’t actually. Smart artists I would like to go to and maybe, I always get it wrong, the 20 books of 50K. I really want to go to that as well. This SpaGirls, we’ve actually discussed going next year. So whether we get around to doing it or not I don’t know but we’ve got a few things planned for ourselves you know that we want to implement as SpaGirls as well. So moving forward we definitely want to go somewhere, we’re just not sure where we’ll end up yet. But Trudy went this year to Smart Artists and enjoyed it very much.

Sarah Williams:            So I know the 20 books to 50K have sold out their Vegas conference, sold out within something like 24 hours.

Wendy Vella:                Very quickly. I really would like to go there. I mean I enjoyed other RWNZ, but not sure, that as a self published writer, that I got as much out of it as I would have thought. That could also been because I was unwell.

Sarah Williams:            So that was Romance Writers of America. That was in Florida in 2017.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, that’s right.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant, what a shame you were sick for that though.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, I know. The crew doctor helped.

Sarah Williams:            Cool, and you’ve got a great list of tools and resources and books on your website for new wannabe writers. It’s great that you’ve done that.

Wendy Vella:                It’s worth having a good look. It really is. I’ve got a wonderful assistant and she’s fantastic and she does [inaudible 00:20:15] and she does all of those sort of things for me. We have massive discussions and she’s a really smart cookie, so she’s the one who helps me with all of that and getting things working.

Wendy Vella:                We’re all about trying to help other writers too, starting out. We didn’t have that so much when we were starting out because that was a few years ago but now I think it’s really evolved and I think it’s important to help people get on that journey the right way. Because there’s a lot of raw, bad knowledge out there. There’s a lot of people who will ask you for money and then not actually do it all for you.

Wendy Vella:                It’s good to use the resources and talk to people who you know and who you trust.

Sarah Williams:            Exactly, and of course, if anyone listening is still an aspiring it’s important just to get their craft down and get your voice and all this.

Wendy Vella:                Absolutely. People don’t want to hear that actually a lot. They want to finish their book and they want to publish it. They want to, wow I’m going to be number one and I completely get that, but if you’re in this journey for the long game, then you really need to understand you have to put the product out there and you have to keep writing. Unless you’re an absolute outlier that’s going to come out like, I don’t know, Fifty Shades of Gray, and go bang…it doesn’t happen that often.

Wendy Vella:                More often than not if you actually talk to someone that it does happen to they’ve been writing for a long time hiding their craft. I think tempering expectations is vital when you come into this game. I think if you come into this game thinking you’re going to make a massive living and it’s going to start for you straight away, again, you’re not coming in for the right reasons. Same as if you think you’re going to write a book just because you decided you think it’s you even though you haven’t written romance or whatever. Even then again it’s not going to work. You need to do your due diligence. You really do.

Sarah Williams:            There’s a lot of people out there who want to write a book and absolutely you should write a book. But, it is a process. It took me two years to just get the craft sorted out when I wrote my first book and I know a lot of people it’s taken many more years than that.

Wendy Vella:                Absolutely.  I think also coming to the understanding of why you’re writing. If you want to write you’re [inaudible 00:22:39] book of your heart but it’s not going to fit into any genre because it’s poetry about [inaudible 00:22:46]. It doesn’t mean to say it’s not a wonderful thing and someone’s gonna love it, but it’s probably not going to sell as well as if you’re writing a book that is in the marketplace, it fits somewhere and millions of women want to read it everywhere, or men.

Wendy Vella:                I think you’ve got to be aware of your reasons for writing and temper your expectations accordingly. I really think that that’s quite vital because it can be quite a tough business to be in. Rewarding, and I love every minute of it, but it is quite a hard business.

Sarah Williams:            It is. Absolutely. So what are you working on at the moment Wendy?

Wendy Vella:                Well I just released the fourth book in my Sinclair & Raven series last month which is going well. Now I have just finished the second book in my second contemporary series, which I don’t have a title for, in the Ryker Falls series and that’s set in Colorado. So I’ve just finished that very rough first draft on that one.

Wendy Vella:                Then after that I will be writing the final book in the Langley Sisters series which I get a lot of emails, people telling me that they’ve been waiting a long time for it and it’s time that I write it and complete the series. They let me know quite a lot.

Wendy Vella:                So I have a plan and I need to sit at my [inaudible 00:24:10] because I can fall off track very easily, so I need to be very structured or strict on myself. Cause I can be very lazy, should I be required to be.

Sarah Williams:            So it’s easy to get distracted.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, very.

Sarah Williams:            Well that’s awesome. Where can we find you online?

Wendy Vella:                Well you can go to www.wendyvella.com or Facebook, author Wendy Vella, you can find me there and I’ve got an email newsletter you can sign up for on Facebook or on my website, which I send out once, sometimes twice a month, mainly once. But those are my main two platforms that I spend time on.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Well that was great. Thank you so much for that Wendy.

Wendy Vella:                No worries, thanks for having me. It was very enjoyable.

Sarah Williams:            We’ll see you at RWNZ.

Wendy Vella:                Okay!

Sarah Williams:            Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump on to my website sarahwilliamsauthor.com and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my book for lots of inspiration. If you like the show and want it to continue you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to find out more. Remember to follow me on Facebook, twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my youtube channel and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another love dump episode. Bye.

Indie Convert Keri Arthur

New York Times bestselling paranormal and urban fantasy author, Keri Arthur has written more than thirty-three novels. She’s received several nominations in the Best Contemporary Paranormal category of the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Awards and has won RT’s Career Achievement Award for urban fantasy.

If you like what you see you can become a patron for just a couple of dollars a month. You will also have access to bonus episodes and insider information. Go to http://www.patreon.com/Sarahwilliamsauthor

Transcript

Sarah Williams:                  Welcome to Write with Love. I’m Sarah Williams, bestselling author, speaker and creative entrepreneur. Each week I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published, some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do. Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now, here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:                  G’day. I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today, I’m chatting to Keri Arthur, paranormal and urban fantasy author. Thanks for joining me today, Keri.

Keri Arthur:                        Thanks for inviting me.

Sarah Williams:                  You’re welcome. Can you introduce yourself and let us know how you started out in your writing journey today?

Keri Arthur:                        Oh god, how long have you got? I first started writing when my daughter was born in 1990 … Well, seriously writing, I’ve written all my life. But I decided because babies didn’t do anything but sleep and eat, I’d have plenty of time to write. That didn’t quite work out that way and it took me 10 years of submitting and rejecting to get my first publisher in 2000, with was Imajinn books in the USA. I had 12 books and a novella out with them over course of about four years.

Keri Arthur:                        In between that I wrote the Full Moon Rising which was the first of my Riley Jenson series. That took nearly two years to get an agent, but once I got an agent it took six weeks to sell and it had a three-publisher bid war which was absolutely amazing for this little author in Australia.

Keri Arthur:                        Then I wrote 38 to 39 books I think traditionally, and last year I started self publishing because I lost my traditionally contract. It’s been a long different journey.

Sarah Williams:                  Yep, so you don’t have any traditional contracts now? You’re just going indie from here on?

Keri Arthur:                        Full indie, yep. Apparently the stuff I’m writing now the publishers don’t think they’ll sell, so I’m full indie.

Sarah Williams:                  Wow. So tell us about the types, obviously it’s paranormal and urban fantasy. So tell us about some of the topics and characters that you use?

Keri Arthur:                        I tend to do vampires, werewolves. They’re usually a cop of some sort, fighting supernatural crime. Stuff like that. Just the fun stuff. I’ve always loved vampires and werewolves, and combining the two. Kick ass chicks is what I write.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent. So you’ve got a few different series as well as standalones. Are there any of those in particular that you prefer or loved writing more?

Keri Arthur:                        I will always love the Riley Jenson series, because that’s the series that hit the New York Times list for me and made my name, basically. And paid for my house. I usually love the book I’m writing right now, and right now is the fourth of the Lizzie Grace series, which is my self-published series.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent.

Sarah Williams:                  So tell us about your New York Times Bestselling status, how did you get there? Please tell us the tricks.

Keri Arthur:                        It was mainly due to the publisher. When I sold the first one, Full Moon Rising, I’d actually had the first three books almost written by then. By the time the first one came out in hardback, I’d written the fourth one. They knew this, so they said, “Well we’ll put them out in two or three month gaps.” That’s what made it hit the New York Times, because the first one sort of sold well but didn’t go anywhere. The second one sold better. The third one hit the extended list, and the fourth one hit the New York Times list. So it was a case of put them out so fast and so quickly and put the pre-orders up so fast, it sort of built momentum. That’s basically what self-publishers have to do.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, that’s true. So how long ago, what year was it that you got onto the New York Times?

Keri Arthur:                        2007 I think it was?

Sarah Williams:                  That’s really good. So the accolades and nominations that you’ve been receiving, you’ve got a stack of them.

Keri Arthur:                        I’ve got a few, yeah.

Sarah Williams:                  So you’ve got Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awards?

Keri Arthur:                        Yes … I actually can’t remember which book that was for, that was a few years ago now. I’ve got Romantic Times, a few nominations and one award. I’ve also won a ARRA award here in Australia for science fiction, which was good.

Sarah Williams:                  Brilliant.

Sarah Williams:                  Do you write really fast? Are you just a really, really fast writer or a really clean writer? How quickly can you turn them out?

Keri Arthur:                        When I first started, my first book took me two years to write. These days a book takes me about three months.

Sarah Williams:                  Wow.

Keri Arthur:                        So it’s just a case of … Because I’ve written so many books, I’ve gotten faster as I’ve gone along. They’re also much cleaner as I go along. After writing 38 or so books, you sort of know what you’re supposed to do.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s it. You’re indie now, so are you still using an editor and a cover designer?

Keri Arthur:                        Oh god yes.

Sarah Williams:                  Yep.

Keri Arthur:                        Yep, yep. My books still go through the same process, I still go through a content editor. I’ve still got a line editor, proofer, a couple of proofers. Yeah. I pay good money for good cutters. I think you’ve got to spend money to make the money, these days. Because there’s so many people going the self-publishing route, you’ve really got to spend the money these days to stand out.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, that’s it. Do you think you learnt anything being traditionally published that you’re bringing to self-publishing now?

Keri Arthur:                        I actually don’t know. I love the freedom that’s self-publishing, because when you’re traditionally published you haven’t got much say really in the covers or when the books come out, or anything like that. But with self-publishing you can pick your own cover, you can choose your editors. You’ve got so much more freedom as a self-publisher. I really like the freedom.

Sarah Williams:                  Actually when you were traditionally published, how many books did you put out a year?

Keri Arthur:                        Two books a year.

Sarah Williams:                  Two books a year-

Keri Arthur:                        I was contracted for two books a year, yeah. I would quite often write three books a year, but I was usually one ahead. But it’s usually two books a year coming out.

Sarah Williams:                  Yep. So independently published? Are you still doing two? Or are you doing more now?

Keri Arthur:                        No, I’m doing four this year.

Sarah Williams:                  Four?

Keri Arthur:                        Yeah. Well because I’m so new at the self publishing, I sort of want to build it up a bit. So I will probably drop back down to three, maybe next year or the year after. But the first year I’m sort of doing four.

Sarah Williams:                  So what’s the size of these books? Are they relatively short novels or are they big full ones?

Keri Arthur:                        Two of them are 90,000, and two are 120,000.

Sarah Williams:                  Wow.

Keri Arthur:                        Yeah.

Sarah Williams:                  So that’s a really good effort.

Keri Arthur:                        Yeah, yeah. Well, three of them were written last year and I finished one this year. The 90,000 one I finished this year in two months. Pacemaker. Pacemaker is my key. It’s brilliant.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah?

Keri Arthur:                        It’s an online tool where you can plug in your starting date and your ending date, and it gives you a graph of how many words you’ve got to write a day. If you don’t meet those words, the graph keeps going up. It scares you.

Sarah Williams:                  Okay, so was that place or pacemaker?

Keri Arthur:                        Pacemaker. Pacemaker.net I think it is.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent. I’ll definitely have to look at that one. I’m very behind [crosstalk 00:08:49].

Sarah Williams:                  Wow, so that’s really incredible. Now that you are an indie, obviously you have to do the marketing side of it as well? Are you wide or are you Amazon Kindle, unlimited.

Keri Arthur:                        I’m wide. I won’t put it solely into Amazon, because I do not want to support solely Amazon. I believe it’s better for authors if we go wide.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s so cool.

Sarah Williams:                  So conferences and events that you attend. You’re a member of the Romance Writers of Australia and have been for some time?

Keri Arthur:                        Oh yeah. I’ve been with them since 1991 or 92 I think? I was on the committee for a number of years. But even though when I first joined I was one of the few paranormal authors they had there, but they’re so supportive and I’ve learned so much with that organization. I just love them, still.

Sarah Williams:                  Have you ever done any presentations or workshops or keynotes at any of the conferences yet?

Keri Arthur:                        I did one … I did an emergency one a couple of years ago at AW Australia in I think it was Adelaide?

Sarah Williams:                  I remember that, yeah.

Keri Arthur:                        Yeah. It was my bones and all, warts and all, journey of my publishing career. I stepped in and did that. Last year I think I did one on [inaudible 00:10:28], which I’m doing in RWNZ this year.

Sarah Williams:                  Oh, brilliant. Cool. So heading across the ditch to RWNZ.

Keri Arthur:                        I am. I love their conference. They’re all so friendly, and it’s much smaller than ours. So you can get around and chat to everyone. It’s great fun.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent. And the Romantic Novelists Association, where you ever part of that?

Keri Arthur:                        No. I’m with ARRA, Australian Romance Readers Association, in Australia. I’ve been to the Romantic Times convention over in the US a few times. They’re brilliant fun, absolutely brilliant fun. A great way to meet your readers, and just have a good time.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah. Excellent.

Sarah Williams:                  For paranormal and urban fantasy … Actually some people might not know what urban fantasy specifically is, so can you clarify that for them?

Keri Arthur:                        Urban fantasy is supernatural beings set in a modern, urban environment, basically. Mine are dark urban fantasy, which means I can go … They’ve got more horror and sex elements in it. More horror, than anything. Mine can get pretty damn gruesome.

Sarah Williams:                  You look so innocent, who’d have thought?

Keri Arthur:                        Beneath this face … Is the monster.

Sarah Williams:                  Are you a mum as well?

Keri Arthur:                        Yes, I’ve got one daughter.

Sarah Williams:                  What does your daughter think of this? Does she read your books?

Keri Arthur:                        She won’t read my books, because she doesn’t like horror novels. They get a bit gruesome for her.

Sarah Williams:                  Don’t read them before bed.

Keri Arthur:                        Yeah.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent.

Sarah Williams:                  Well what’s your latest book to have come out that readers might see on the shelf? Or in their big bookstore?

Keri Arthur:                        I had one released in February, which is Hell’s Belle, which is the second book of my Lizzie Grace series. Which is basically two witches in a werewolf reservation in Victoria solving supernatural crimes.

Sarah Williams:                  Oh, wow.

Keri Arthur:                        Then in May I’ve got the first of a new fantasy series coming out, called Unlit. So looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Sarah Williams:                  So what’s that one about?

Keri Arthur:                        It’s set in a completely different world, it’s a fantasy world. It’s basically a soldier who hasn’t got magic who gets involved in a plot … Trying to stop a plot to destroy her city.

Sarah Williams:                  Wow. It looks very exciting.

Keri Arthur:                        I didn’t describe it very well, I’m hopeless at those sort of things. Website.

Sarah Williams:                  While these ones are all getting ready to release, obviously you’re working on something else?

Keri Arthur:                        Yes, I’m working on the fourth book of the Lizzie Grace series. The third book is already at my editors and it’s coming out in August.

Sarah Williams:                  Wow. And you’ve got some standalone books as well, don’t you?

Keri Arthur:                        I don’t have a lot of standalones. I tend to write in a series because I can’t get … I just can’t seem to leave my characters. I tend to write in long series like the Riley Jenson series was nine books. The Dark Angel series was seven books. Once I create a world I don’t want to leave it. So I’ve only got a standalone novel and the fantasy novels I’m releasing this year will basically be standalones, even though they’re set in the same world.

Sarah Williams:                  Wonderful.

Sarah Williams:                  Do you have any advice for anyone aspiring, especially if they are writing paranormal or urban fantasy? Any pieces of advice for them?

Keri Arthur:                        The best bit of advice was given to me 20 years ago, was write what you love and I still think that’s the best thing anyone’s ever said to me. In this world you can’t control … If you traditionally publish you can’t control anything, the only thing you can control is your writing. I think with the self-publishing and the need to constantly put out books you’ve got to enjoy what you’re writing. So basically write what you love, and don’t worry about what the market is doing.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, and as you said that it’s much easier as an indie to just keep writing what you like not having to follow the market quite as much.

Keri Arthur:                        Yeah. I’ve never followed the market. It’s part of the reason why I took 10 years to get published. But it’s also the reason I was published, because it was very different to what was out there at the time.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s it. And you’ve had a very illustrious career so far, so doing well.

Keri Arthur:                        Yeah, yeah. Well the last couple of years have left something to be desired, but you know it happens.

Sarah Williams:                  Dips in places.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s absolutely fantastic. So where can people go to found you online and find out more about your books?

Keri Arthur:                        Well I’ve got my website, www.keriarthur.com. I’m also on Facebook, Keri Arthur Author. And of course Twitter, which is Kezarthur. All the usual ways.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s excellent. Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Keri.

Keri Arthur:                        It was lovely, thank you very much for inviting me.

Sarah Williams:                  No problem.

Sarah Williams:                  Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my books and lots of inspiration.

Sarah Williams:                  If you like the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to find out more, and remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye.

Alli Sinclair and her love for travel

Avid traveller and overseas explorer, Alli Sinclair based her first three books in exotic destinations with a dance theme flowing through them. Her latest book, The Burning Fields is based in North Queensland and has an historical storyline to fall in love with.

If you like what you see you can become a patron for just a couple of dollars a month. You will also have access to bonus episodes and insider information. Go to http://www.patreon.com/Sarahwilliamsauthor

Transcript

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write With Love, I’m Sarah Williams, best selling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published, some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love, love, and love what we do. Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show, and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to Patreon.com/SarahWilliamsAuthor to learn more. Now, here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            G’day, I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and [inaudible 00:00:53] publishers at Serenade Publishing. Today, I’m chatting to Alli Sinclair. Thanks for joining me today, Alli.

Alli Sinclair:                  Hi, thank you for having me.

Sarah Williams:            No drama. Can you introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about yourself, and your writing journey so far?

Alli Sinclair:                  My name’s Alli Sinclair, I’m Australian born. I’ve lived overseas in Peru, Argentina, and Canada. Spent a lot of time traveling the globe, working as a tour guide, and mountain climbing guide as well. A bit settled now, back in Australia. I live in Southern Australia, and mother of two kids.

Sarah Williams:            When did your first book come out?

Alli Sinclair:                  First book was Luna Tango, and it came out in August 2014.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant. That was also the year you won your, or were nominated for a favorite new romance author by Australian Romance Readers Association.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, for that book.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, so it was quite the year, quite the introduction to being published, that’s for sure. It was amazing.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Did you pitch to a publisher for that one. Tell us about how that all happened.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, actually I had an agent, who she pitched my Luna Tango to Harlequin Australia. But, I also had an idea for a couple of other books. We decided to just go for it, and just pitch the three books, and they loved the idea for all three, so Harlequin decided to sign me on for that. Which, that was just such an amazing experience. Getting that phone call, I’m running around the house like crazy, screaming, and yeah, it was quite the moment.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Have those books just been published in Australia, or around the world?

Alli Sinclair:                  No, being published around the world. I have my books also published over in the States, Canada, and UK with Kensington Books. Then, I’ve also had some books translated into German, and recently Serbian.

Sarah Williams:            Wow, Serbian.

Alli Sinclair:                  I know, it’s great.

Sarah Williams:            That’s awesome, wow. You’ve got all these different translations, so how did that process, did they just say, hey, we want to put it in German or Serbian?

Alli Sinclair:                  My publisher over in the States, Kensington, have a really strong foreign writer’s department. What they do is, they go through the books, and they figure out which ones might suit which market. Then, they have an agent over in that particular country. For example, in Germany there’s a German agent who has all the contacts for the German publishers. Publishers, I don’t know how many publishers read my book, but one definitely bought it, so that got translated and it went really well. They’ve now bought a second book, and that one is going to be published, I think April next year.

Alli Sinclair:                  Too, it was really pretty amazing, firsts, all the firsts that you get. You have all these dreams, and then you want them to happen, but you don’t expect them to happen. One of my dreams was to be published in German, and also to be published in hardcover, and boys and girls, show and tell. This is the German version, and they’ve actually published it in hardcover, and it even has its own [inaudible 00:04:28].

Sarah Williams:            That is so cute.

Alli Sinclair:                  That was a super, super duper special moment, I must say.

Sarah Williams:            It is. Tell us about your books. They all have a dancing theme running through them, don’t they?

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, well, the first three definitely do, yep. The first one is set in Argentina, and is around the Tango. The second one is set in Spain, and about flamenco, and then the third one is set in ballet. In ballet, in Paris, and it’s about the ballet, the Russian ballet.

Sarah Williams:            Fantastic.

Alli Sinclair:                  But, I like to weave in a lot of history into my books. Sorry.

Sarah Williams:            No, no, keep going. I was gonna follow that line anyway [crosstalk 00:05:15].

Alli Sinclair:                  Yes, in my first three, I definitely had dance are in there, but you don’t have to be a dancer to appreciate them by any means. Then, my next book is a little bit different, in that it is an Australian historical, but it’s also mixed in with an Italian story in 1943.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant, so a little bit of historical happening there as well.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yes, I love my history. My history teacher will be very proud of me.

Sarah Williams:            Fantastic. Tell us about this next book that’s coming out, the Burning Fields. Of course, it’s set in North Queensland, which is where I’m from, or just moved from. Tell us how you were inspired to write that book, and what it’s about.

Alli Sinclair:                  Ideas come from the weirdest places. This one came to me fully formed while I was doing the dishes. Just, obviously I was not very involved in doing the dishes. My brain wasn’t anyway. Yeah, it just came to me fully formed. As soon as I did the dishes, I just sat down, and for two hours, just wrote this story that had been growing in me, that I didn’t even know. Then, so now you’ve got Burning Fields. Load of drafts, and drafts afterwards, you have Burning Fields. I wanted to, this time around, I wanted to set something in Australia.

Alli Sinclair:                  I think we had a lot of really fantastic stories that we can tell, and because I am drawn to our history, I wanted to tell a story, or two stories really, in this book, that may not be told, or not said so often. This story is set in 1948, and is about Rosie, who was working for the war effort, has now returned to her family farm, and she’s finding it just really hard. Because, she’s mid 20s, she’s getting on the shelf. There’s expectations on her to marry, but she’s had this taste of independence, and she really just wants to continue exploring all the different opportunities that she had prior, when all the men were at war.

Alli Sinclair:                  Then, she meets Thomas, who is an Italian, who has immigrated to Australia, and he’s got his own little story going on there, and lots of mystery behind his actually background, which gets revealed throughout the story. But, I think in Australia, we’ve got such an interesting immigration story, and also the story of our women post war, which is two things that really appealed to me. Then, the more I started looking into it, the more I knew this was definitely the story that I wanted to tell.

Sarah Williams:            Fantastic. I’m guessing with the burning fields, we’re talking about the sugarcane, and how they burn [crosstalk 00:08:24].

Alli Sinclair:                  Yes. I just, I don’t know why, I just find sugarcane really romantic as a backdrop. We’ll ignore all the creepy crawlies underneath, and in between the sugarcane. But, I just, I’m really visual when I write my stories, and I think with North Queensland, it just, it’s such a beautifully visual place, that it just makes sense to set the story there, and I just knew right from the get go, that was where the story needed to be.

Sarah Williams:            No, it’s, I remember reading Elianne by Judy Nunn a few years ago, and I actually met her, and I’m like, why did you write that book up in Babinda, or Tully, or in Innisfail. Because, I was living in Townsville at the time. She’s like, well, I had friends in Bundaberg, so it made more sense. It is, it’s very romantic, and it’s spectacular to see them burning the sugarcane, and getting rid of all the insects, and rats, and those sorts of yucky things. But, really beautiful pictures, and I do love your cover too. Your cover is spectacular.

Alli Sinclair:                  Thank you. I always like to take credit, but no. [inaudible 00:09:40] at Harlequin popped it together, and it’s just I love this color so much. In case anyone wanted to see it. It just depicts the story perfectly. I don’t, it couldn’t be anymore perfect in my eyes, anyway. I just love it.

Sarah Williams:            Harlequin, they picked you up for the first three, which would have been so, Luna Tango, what were the other the two?

Alli Sinclair:                  Under the Spanish Stars, Beneath the Persian Skies.

Sarah Williams:            There we go, beautiful names. They’re doing this one as well for you, so they’ve done four. That’s awesome.

Alli Sinclair:                  I’m contracted for another one that will come out next year, more than likely.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, so we have more to wait for.

Alli Sinclair:                  More to write.

Sarah Williams:            We still write them first.

Alli Sinclair:                  Exactly.

Sarah Williams:            In all this spare time that you have, you also do, you’re based in Victoria, so you do some work for the Victorian’s Writer Center, and you’re in workshops mentoring?

Alli Sinclair:                  Yes, yes. That’s nother aspect I really love, and it seems to be growing. I take workshops for Victorian, writers of Victoria, sorry. I do manuscript assessment, and mentoring, and I love it. It’s, gosh, you find some gems, and it’s really great to be able to interact with other writers. Because, even though I’m there teaching a workshop, I also learn as well. We all have this amazing exchange of ideas. Because, writers all have different backgrounds, and experiences, and we all have something to bring to the table. Whether we’re starting out, or we’ve been doing it forever and a day. That’s one of the things I really love about writing is, there’s always something new to learn. I enjoy that.

Sarah Williams:            Absolutely, and this week you just announced that you’re going to take a writer’s at sea cruise, so tell us about that, and how we can get involved.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, it’s very exciting. My good friend T.M. Clark, Tim Murray, we are organizing a writer’s workshop at sea on the 30th of August, and it’s on the Carnival Spirit, and we’ll be sailing to Noumea. We’ll be doing workshops onboard, we’ll be doing mentoring. We’ll also be doing writing sprints, and many different aspects. Not just the craft, but also things like how do you make the most out of the time that you have, in terms of writing, and making the most of it that spare hour, or spare 20 minutes that you have. Because, everyone’s strapped for time.

Alli Sinclair:                  We’re going to be covering quite a few different topics. I think, also just the chance for writers to go, and somewhere where they can hang out with like minded people, and they can work on their craft, and all they have to worry about is, oh gosh, am I gonna have the pasta for dinner, or do I want the salad? That’s the biggest decision that you’ve got for a whole week. Plus, it’ll be, well, hopefully, I suppose I can’t control that, but we’ve chosen a good time of year, so fingers crossed. But, yeah, so sun, sea, writing, it’s a pretty good combination.

Sarah Williams:            Are you gonna, hopefully, do more of these next year?

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, we want to make it an annual event, because not everyone can afford to do it every year. But, it’s definitely something that we would love to run on a regular basis. Hopefully, people get a chance, when they can, to do it.

Sarah Williams:            Of course, you’re take the cruise, which goes to Noumea and New Caledonia, so that’s [crosstalk 00:13:40] I was there a couple of years ago, and I definitely said, I have to come back here.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, I’m a bit of a serial cruiser. There was a thing, like the one I was on last year, I was just like, we just need to make this happen. We just need to make this retreat happen. We’ve been talking about it for ages, and yeah, so we put all the planning in, everything’s in place now, so now it’s just a matter of getting on there and doing it.

Sarah Williams:            Fantastic, so are there any prerequisites for people, do they need a first draft, or anything like that, or can they be a complete novice?

Alli Sinclair:                  No, we wanted to open it up to everyone, because there will be one-on-one time as well, that we’ll be able to spend with people. We do, we will be asking if, for people to give us 10 pages, and a synopsis. Then we can go from there, and spend some one-on-one time, and work with them through that, and brainstorm, and that kind of thing. But, the workshops themselves, we’re gonna open it up to everyone at different levels, because we all learn something. We can all learn something, so we wanted to make it so anyone could come along. Better if you’ve got a bit of an idea as to what you’re gonna write. But, you can be entirely inspired to come up with something totally different.

Sarah Williams:            It’s always like that, that’s brilliant. You’re also involved in Books in Homes. Tell us about that.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, Books in Homes is a really amazing organization. I’m a volunteer there, and what they do is, they work in conjunction with authors, and publishers, and receive donations of books. Mainly, aimed at primary school children in remote areas, or in areas where the families may not have the means to buy books. They’ve discovered, through experience, and also a whole lot of different things that they’ve researched, that if kids own a book, they tend to read it. There’s that sense of ownership, and their literacy actually increase quite dramatically.

Alli Sinclair:                  They work with schools over, say a 12 month period, and kids actually get a list of say, two or three books that they can choose from. Once a term, an author comes along and hands out the books, and actually, kids get the books that they want. Then, they take it home, and they read it with their parents. The teachers actually notice a massive difference, in terms of their being engaged in reading, and their literacy level is going up. It’s a fantastic organization, real amazing.

Sarah Williams:            Fantastic. I was talking to Josephine Moon a couple of weeks ago. She was talking about the people who take dogs in, and they read to the kids with dogs.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, I met someone the other day who does that. It’s amazing.

Sarah Williams:            It’s brilliant. We’ve got some failing literacy scores, I guess you can say, in Australia. It definitely does need to go up. Really, anything we can do to help these kids to read. [inaudible 00:16:53] as always, we might as well, they’re are future readers.

Alli Sinclair:                  Yeah, exactly right.

Sarah Williams:            They might not want to read our books right now. That’s brilliant. Awesome, so what are you working on at the moment?

Alli Sinclair:                  I am working on a book, surprise, surprise. This one is set in the same fictional town as Burning Fields, but in a different era. This one is, has, I didn’t really write too much, but there’s a bit of Hollywood glamour in this one. But, there’s a connection to rural Australia as well. I’m about 65,000 words in, so I’m getting there. But, it’s pretty research intensive as always with my books. I’ve found some really interesting little gems, which I’ve been able to weave into the story. I’m working on that one at the moment, and it doesn’t have a title, so I’ve kind of, that book that will not end. That’s the title.

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic. Well, where can we find online, Alli?

Alli Sinclair:                  You can usually tell when I’m under deadline, so I’m on Facebook way too often, under Alli Sinclair author. I also got my website, which is www.AliSinclair.com, and if you’re after some information about the writing retreat, I’ve also got that there under the writing retreat banner. I’m on Instagram as well, under gosh, Alli, I think it’s, _Sinclair. Twitter, occasionally [crosstalk 00:18:45].

Sarah Williams:            Good, because also I’m really looking forward to reading the Burning Fields, which is out 21 May.

Alli Sinclair:                  Thank you.

Sarah Williams:            If it’s not already out as this goes live, it will be very soon. Yay, well, thank you so much for that, Alli, it was great.

Alli Sinclair:                  Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Williams:            Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, SarahWilliamsAuthor.com, and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my books, and lots of inspiration. If you like the show, and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to Patreon.com/SarahWilliamsAuthor to find out more. Remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to you my YouTube channel, and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode, bye.

Natasha Lester shares her writing secrets

Perth author Natasha Lester has just released her latest historical novel called The Paris Seamstress. She studied creative writing and now teaches aspiring authors through her workshops with the Australian Writers Centre and other local groups. In this interview, Natasha will share her tips and writing strategies.

If you like what you see you can become a patron for just a couple of dollars a month. You will also have access to bonus episodes and insider information. Go to http://www.patreon.com/Sarahwilliamsauthor

Transcript

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write with Love. I’m Sarah Williams, best-selling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published, some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do.

Sarah Williams:            Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            G’day, I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publisher. Today I’m chatting to Natasha Lester. Thanks for joining me today, Natasha.

Natasha Lester:            It’s my pleasure, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Williams:            So, you’ve been a very busy lady of recent, so, can you just introduce yourself and tell us about your writing journey?

Natasha Lester:            Sure. My writing journey started somewhat later in life. I actually worked in marketing for 10 or 12 years, that was my degree that I first did at uni when I left high school, and I had lots of great jobs. I worked for L’Oréal Paris as marketing manager for Maybelline, and I had lots of lipsticks, which was great. But through that whole time and since I had been a child, I had had a dream about being a writer in the back of my mind, and that was just something that I had always wanted to do but didn’t really know kind of how to do that.

Natasha Lester:            So, we were emailed when I was working for L’Oréal, my husband had come to Melbourne with me, and then he had to go back to Perth for his job. So, I kind of had to quit my fabulous job and sort of start all over again, I guess. And I thought, well that’s kind of one of those moments where you can choose a different pathway. I could’ve got another marketing job or I could do something different. So I decided I would go back to uni and explore this writing idea that I still had in my mind and hadn’t been able to let go of.

Natasha Lester:            So, I enrolled in a master of creative arts, and I wrote a book as part of my master thesis. And that was my very, very first novel. It was sort of contemporary literary fiction. It was called “What Is Left Over After” and it won the T.A.G. Hungerford Award which is like prize for an unpublished manuscript prize. And I think [inaudible 00:02:39] had something quite similar. And, so, winning that meant I got a publishing contract, with Freemantle Press, which is a small independent publisher here in WA, and published my second book two years later in 2012 and then I changed in direction, I guess. I’ve always loved historical fiction and just I suddenly had this story idea which is what came out in “A Kiss From Mr. Fitzgerald” and I sat down to write that with a lot of doubt, not really knowing what I was doing. I hadn’t written a historical before.

Natasha Lester:            It wasn’t my background. I knew I had to change publishers and agents because the paperwork presenting me at that time didn’t publish that kind of fiction. But I wrote it anyway, cause I just loved the story, and I loved the writings, so much. And was just really lucky that I was able to get an agent and then Hachette picked it up. And since then I’ve been so blessed with Hachette, they’re amazing and so they published all three of my historicals, “A Kiss From Mr. Fitzgerald,” “Her Mother’s Secret,” and now “The Paris Seamstress.”

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, and you studied creative writing, so did you get a lot out of that? Would you recommend that’s something people do?

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, for me it was really good because I didn’t know how to write a book. Having a supervisor, who could just tell me to keep writing because I see it that everyone who write a book, knew what they were writing about and they had a plan and a chapter by chapter outline and they just kind of worked through that. Where as when I sat down to write my book, I had this tiny state of an idea and nothing else. And my supervisor was the one who said “That’s okay, you still can write a book that way. You just have to work on it page by page, and trust the process,” and that was probably the most important thing she said to me, because I had never done it before. I didn’t know to just trust the universe, that it would all work out.

Natasha Lester:            And so because she kept saying that idea that I just kept writing, it was quite stressful because I’m so planned and organized in every other aspect in my life but not when it comes to writing. And I still write in exactly the same way. I start with the state of an idea of an idea and literally it’s just a page by page kind of process. So, yes, for me it was useful because I didn’t know how to write a book and my supervisor helped me work that out. And she made me keep going when I probably would have stopped because I felt like I wasn’t doing it the right way. But she was the kind of person who said “There isn’t a right way, the only thing you can do is just to keep writing.” So to have her continually saying that to me got me through the end of that first book, and made me understand that stressful as it is, that’s my process and I just have to work with it all the time.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, oh wow, so your latest book has just come out in March, and that was “The Paris Seamstress”. Tell us about that, it’s such a beautiful cover.

Natasha Lester:            It is beautiful, I know. Yes, that’s my third historical, and it’s set in the 1940s and it begins with Estella, the main character and she working at an atelier in Paris with her mother and she has a dream that one day she might own her own atelier, be able to make her own designs, but it’s June 1940 and the Germans are sweeping in to ground. And so she knows that given that set of circumstances, her dreams are likely to ever come true. Then she gets caught one night helping a resistance worker smuggle some maps and that puts her life in danger, so she’s forced to flee to France and she goes to New York, and she realizes that there is no fashion industry. That basically the rest of the world copies Parisian designs but now that Paris has been shut down by the Germans, that can’t happen. So she wonders whether maybe New York is the place where her dream of designing her own clothes might finally come true.

Natasha Lester:            It also picks up with her granddaughter Fabienne in contemporary times, so it’s a joint narrative, historical and contemporary, and Fabienne is trying to work out exactly what her grandmother Estella got up to during the second World War and why it’s had such a lasting impact on her, and why she’s never told Fabienne about it. So yeah, it’s really interesting to write that joint narrative for the first time.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant. So, I’ve listened to your other two books. I loved the audio versions of your first two. So I’ve been waiting for this one to come out, and I love that you use really empowered, strong females that really, in all of the books that I’ve read so far, they definitely have that, so yay! Yay. And of course, your “A Kiss From Mr. Fitzgerald” dealt with an obstetrician. Yeah, how was that to write about? I mean, that’s something that most people don’t know about.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, and I think that’s why I sort of naturally gravitate to those kind of stories, cause I think that there were so many women who did so many remarkable things throughout history, and because they did those things, I have all the opportunities now, as a woman today, that they didn’t have. And if they hadn’t done those things, then I wouldn’t have the opportunities that I do have, but that lots of their stories haven’t been told and have been forgotten, and I think obviously, because history has primarily been written by male historians. And that is a shame, because it means a lot of those women’s stories have been lost and they did do really extraordinary things.

Natasha Lester:            I mean, I couldn’t write about the exact person who was trying to become the first female obstetrician in New York City, in “A Kiss From Mr. Fitzgerald.” Cause I couldn’t find the record of who she was, so her story is lost to history, and so my creation of Evie, and making her that woman, was an attempt to resurrect that woman’s story and say, “Look, what she did was absolutely remarkable because there was so much bullying and so much backlash against those early female medical students.” And so here’s her story that’s worth telling, even though I’ve had to kind of make it up based on other accounts from other female medical students of the time.

Natasha Lester:            But if she hadn’t’ve fought like that, then medicine as an opportunity for women mightn’t be as clear a path as it is these days, so I think that’s why I’m drawn to those kind of stories. Lots of women did do some very extraordinary and unusual things throughout history and here are some different examples. I like those kind of stories, and the research, I find it very inspiring to see how hard these women fought, and that they did not give up, and thank God they didn’t because it has given us the opportunities we have today.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, exactly, and I remember thinking in your second one, where she was making the lipstick, and all of these people saying, “You’re not allowed to wear makeup,” and all those [crosstalk 00:09:18].

Natasha Lester:            So crazy, isn’t it? And you’re exactly right, we do take it for granted, something like putting on rouge and not being fired because of it, or called a whore or something like that, which is what happened to those women who were the first ones to start wearing makeup out and about. So we are lucky, in way, that we have more freedom, but we only have that because of women like the ones that I write about.

Sarah Williams:            That’s it, and it was only a hundred years ago when this sort of stuff was happening. It’s so recent.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, it is.  And also, the other really tragic thing that I found, particularly in relation to “A Kiss for Mr. Fitzgerald,” when I was talking to readers about that book, is so many current female medical students or practicing GPs or specialists, would come up to me at the end of my talks and say to me, “That bullying that you’ve described, it’s still really prevalent today. It’s much more subtle, obviously, than what it was in Evie’s time, when it was very blatant and overt and very obvious, but it’s still just as hard for women as it was back then, and it’s still a very patriarchal system, and we still have to fight constantly.”

Natasha Lester:            And I found that so disappointing, and I think that’s what I really love about historical fiction. In some ways, it’s “Look how far we’ve come.” The birthing practices, for instance, that Evie was forced to use are obviously very different to the birthing practices that we have today, which are much more about letting the mother decide what happened to her body. But historical fiction is also about, “Look how far we still have to go,” because well, yes, the bullying is of a different nature, but it’s still there. We’ve still got so much work to do in those respects, so yes, I love historical fiction cause it has that kind of looking back at the past and going, “Yay, we’ve done quite a lot,” but then looking forward at the future and saying, “No, we still have more work to do.”

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, we’re only halfway through, really.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.

Sarah Williams:            So writing historical fiction, do you have any advice, or I mean, a lot of people watching this maybe only read or write in contemporary times cause it’s easier with quotation marks. So yeah, tell us how is it writing historical? Is there anything that we really need to think about?

Natasha Lester:            Well, first of all you have to choose exotic locations like Paris to set your books in so that you can travel there. No, I’m being facetious, but no. I think one of the big things for me is the research, and for me it’s really important to go to the places where my books are set, specifically for research, and I know not everybody can do that, but I really feel like that makes such a big difference. I mean, I’ve been to Paris lots of times, but I still went there specifically to research “The Paris Seamstress” because there were things that I wanted to experience that I hadn’t done as just a tourist.

Natasha Lester:            So I spent time in a Parisian atelier where they make the official flower decorations for haute couture gowns, which is what Estella does in the book. So I could see the women actually working on those, the process, and the camaraderie between the women in the atelier. I spent lots of time walking through the Marais area of Paris, which is where the book is set, and you see features of the district that, if you don’t write about those features and include those, then you wouldn’t be representing the Marais properly.

Natasha Lester:            And also, there were so many things, like the street that Estella lives on, which is called the passage St Paul. I found that street in the Marais and I used that, because when I walked past it, it looks like a dark, kind of dingy alleyway, and it has an apartment building kind of vaulting across the street. But then you can see this little pinpoint of light down the end, and I thought, what is that? I wanna go down there and see.

Natasha Lester:            And so I did, and you walk down to the end, and it’s actually a back entrance to this very spectacular church called the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis. And you walk into this church and it’s completely amazing, and you would have no idea that it was at the end of this alley. And I was like, oh my God, my character has to live on this street. This street’s so amazing.

Natasha Lester:            So without having gone there I would’ve just had to pick a street off a map that I could’ve looked at on Google Maps. But it’s not quite the same as having that experience of discovery, which I think really helps make historical fiction authentic. And you want the reader to be so immersed in the world, and I think you can only do that by having walked the street and using the details that you see when you’re walking the street. So I think that’s really important.

Natasha Lester:            In some way, you can spend a lot of time on the research. It makes a big difference. But at the same time, I always write a first draft of my novels before I do the main bulk of the research, and for me, to find out what the story is so that it doesn’t get laden down with research. Because I think that can be a danger with historical fiction. And so then I do my research after that first draft. And so I’m researching to fill in the gaps that are in that first draft, like it’s the first draft, it’s like a research blueprint in a way. Whereas if I researched first, cause I wouldn’t really know what the story is, I would do too much research and I wouldn’t have a focused kind of scope, I guess.

Natasha Lester:            Also, I find that researching too early means that you write to the research [inaudible 00:14:25], whereas you open that first draft to let your imagination run wild and imagine what the story could be. And then use the research to support that, rather than overwhelm that. And so I think that’s another really important bit of [inaudible 00:14:40] in writing historical fiction, too.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, well, that’s really interesting, and yeah, I totally agree. You should, if you can, go to those places and research. I write contemporary and I still do that, still been out there.

Natasha Lester:            Exactly. For any kind of fiction, to go to the place and where you’re setting it.

Sarah Williams:            Exactly. And of course, you’ve got not just the physical places, but how did they speak, and what did they wear, and what did they eat, those sorts of things, too.

Natasha Lester:            Absolutely, yes. So I have a shelf full of books of things like just daily life in the 1920s, for instance, when I was writing “A Kiss for Mr. Fitzgerald,” which is all about those kinds of things. Like, when were automobiles primarily in use? But you don’t wanna have your character, their family owning a car that wasn’t quite right for 1922, for instance. So you just need to find out those kind of things and apply them. They had an iron, for instance. So, that’s really important, to have those details right, and language, too.

Natasha Lester:            I mean, there’s a fantastic online etymology dictionary which I used all the time, which tells you the first known usage of every word and also when it was in common usage. So often there are little phrases and words that I just want to check, and I’ll use that to make sure that it is right for the time period, because there’s nothing worse than reading something and jolting out of the story because you think, aw, nobody would’ve said that back then. I spend a lot of time on that kind of stuff, too.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, and I suppose if you do say something wrong in the book, someone’s gonna tell you about it.

Natasha Lester:            Absolutely, absolutely. I don’t want that.

Sarah Williams:            So I mentioned that I’ve listened to your stories on audio. Have they been translated at all yet?

Natasha Lester:            I have a translation of “A Kiss for Mr. Fitzgerald” coming out this year into Greek, which will be very exciting. Cause obviously Greek is a different kind of script, even, to English, so I can’t even imagine what that’s going to look like, and the cover and everything. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to that, cause obviously my UK and US ones are all just basically the same, apart from changing some spelling for the US version. Yeah, but the Greek one will be really exciting to see. It’s so hard to imagine, for me, readers on the other side of the world reading my books. Like I can’t quite get my head around that, and I don’t think I will until like, someone sends me a photo of Evie in a bookshop or grocer in the UK, or in the US, then I’ll go, “Right, now I believe it.”

Sarah Williams:            That’s awesome. So you do a lot of workshops and mentoring, and I know when I was in Townsville, we got you up to do the workshop “How to Write a Bestseller” with the Australian Writer’s Center, and that was just absolutely fantastic. I’ve used your information a lot from that. So tell us about workshops and mentoring and how often you do that and stuff.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, I love teaching, it’s one of my… Next to writing, one of my favorite things to do, and I think it’s for a couple of reasons. I had some really great teachers when I was learning, so if I can help writers in any way, then I’d love to be able to do that. And also, I get really inspired and motivated by teaching because you’re in a room full of people who are so enthusiastic and want to be there, and so keen to have their books published and to have readers reading them, that it reminds me of how lucky I really am. So I really love that.

Natasha Lester:            Unfortunately, because the books are kind of doing so well and I’m going out in the UK and US this year, I’ve got less time to do teaching, so I’m doing less this year for the first time. But I’m still doing, I’ve got a great program which I’m gonna see if I can maybe roll out online next year so that I can do it with people other than people in Perth, which is a six month sort of intensive, where we meet once a month for six months and we spend a couple of hours together. And it’s only a small group of seven people, so you can really get into the nitty gritty of their particular issues and relation to their manuscript.

Natasha Lester:            And hopefully, I’m hoping that by the end of the six months, the first session we’ll set some goals, which might be to finish first drafts, or sort of redraft, or something like that, and I’m hoping that with that kind of monthly commitment, they will be able to reach that goal by the end of the six months. So that would be a really great thing to do face to face, here in person in Perth this year, and then maybe online next year if I can see a way of that working. I wonder whether you’d get the same rapport with an online kind of group like that. I don’t know, so I’ll have to see. Maybe people can tell me if they think that’s a good idea.

Sarah Williams:            I think it’s a great idea, so.

Natasha Lester:            And yeah, I was just in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, teaching “How to Write a Bestseller” in Sydney, which I love teaching that course, that’s one of my favorite courses and that’s always lots of fun. And then I always do a plotting master class and an introduction to novel writing each year. And they’re coming up in August and November, so there are two things going on but I’m not doing any one on one mentoring this year, which is a shame. Which I have done in the past, just kind of doing what I can fit in.

Natasha Lester:            But always thinking about, for next year, what else can I do to help people with the queries that I often get, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            And you’re a big advocate of Scrivener.

Natasha Lester:            Yes.

Sarah Williams:            So you’ve got an online course with Australian Writer’s Center for that one, don’t you?

Natasha Lester:            Yes, I do. So that’s called “2 Hours to Scrivener Power,” and it basically takes you through all the things that I think are the really important things for writers to use in the program to be able to write their novel in a more efficient kind of way. I started using Scrivener when I was writing “A Kiss from Mr. Fitzgerald,” and it literally changed my writing life, because I am quite a chaotic writer. I do write a bit all over the place, so the way in which Scrivener works, where you just write it in scenes and you can move things around so easily, and have that beautiful color-coded binder so you can see at a glance.

Natasha Lester:            Particularly for “Paris Seamstress,” I guess, being a joint narrative, the color-coding was so good for me to be able to see how much time I’d been spending in the historical narrative versus the contemporary narrative, and also to track subplots. I mean, there’s always a love story kind of subplot in my books, so tracking where that’s coming into play and have there be too many gaps where those things haven’t come into the story at all. Yeah, so it’s really, absolutely changed the way I write, and I couldn’t write in anything else. I hate it when I get to the end of the structural era and I have to output it into Word. I’m like, “No, no!”

Natasha Lester:            So yeah, the thing with Scrivener is there’s so much in the program that it can be overwhelming when you sit down to work with it, and that’s why I do the course, because it was to say, “Okay, yes, there’s lots and lots of stuff in Scrivener, but if you just do these things that I teach in the two hours, then you can get so much out of it and it can really transform your writing process, and don’t worry about the other stuff until you’re more proficient at everything that we cover in that two hours.” So hopefully that makes life a bit easier for people with Scrivener, cause it does have a bit of a learning curve.

Sarah Williams:            It does, yeah, and a lot of people have said that they think it’s too organized, and then they start doing it and they’re like, “No, I’m a plotter, I’m not a plotter, I’m a painter, and I just wanna do this bit there,” and that’s exactly why it’s good. Like, I’m a complete plotter and I have very, very, very well sorted out before I start writing. So it’s great for me but it is great for those people who like to just wing it as well.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re a plotter you can use the binder to write your outline, basically, before you start writing, and it’s got the outline function in there as well, so that’s, again, why I love it. No matter if you’re a plotter or a pantser, it works for both kinds of ways of writing. So yeah, it’s very flexible and very brilliant.

Sarah Williams:            Yes, yes, the number one program for writing.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Wonderful. So what are you working on now, Natasha?

Natasha Lester:            So really, sort of, I’m juggling three books at the moment, because I’ve got lots of publicity stuff for “The Paris Seamstress” to do, which is really fun. I’ve just been in Sydney. I’m going to Brisbane at the end of May. Just doing events, all that kind of thing, which I love, it’s so nice to get out from behind the desk and go and talk to readers and have a kind of a dialogue rather than just a monologue with you and your computer. So there’s that.

Natasha Lester:            Plus I’ve just finished the structural era for “The French Photographer,” which is the working title for next year’s book. So that’ll be out this time March, late March, early April next year, and the copy edit for that is due in about a month or so. So quite a long way ahead, which is nice. And I’ve also got seventy-five thousand words into a manuscript that I hope will be my 2020 book, so that’s a first draft, so it’s very rough and very all over the place, but yeah, so I’m juggling those three, which is always fun.

Sarah Williams:            [crosstalk 00:23:29] So, “The French Photographer,” I’m presuming, is French, so where’s your 2020 going to be set?

Natasha Lester:            So it’s set in England, largely. Cornwall, in fact, is a big, important city in that book. But it’s also set a little bit in France and in Germany and in Sydney, so it’s kind of moving all around the place.

Sarah Williams:            So another international trip is getting planned.

Natasha Lester:            Yeah, that’s right. Well, in fact, I’ve already done. We had to go to Europe late last year, so I did some of the research for that then. Spent lots of time in Cornwall. I was like, “I have to set my book here!”

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic. Well, I’m really looking forward to the audio being available so I can get the latest one, “The Paris Seamstress,” which just sounds immaculate. I can’t wait. So where can we find you online?

Natasha Lester:            So I’m pretty much everywhere online. So my website is just www.natashalester.com.au, but I also love hanging out on Facebook, so you can find me there as Natasha Lester author, and of course, Twitter and Instagram, too, so pretty much, if it exists online, I am there.

Sarah Williams:            That’s set. Well, thank you so much for that today. That was great.

Natasha Lester:            Thank you so much for having me Sarah, it was so lovely to chat to you.

Sarah Williams:            Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com, and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my books and lots of inspiration. If you like the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to find out more. And remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye.

 

Murder and Mayhem with Michelle Somers

Michelle Somers writes murder and mayhem mixed in with a love story. Valerie Parv Award recipient and member of the Melbourne Romance Writers Guild, Michelle shares her experience writing romantic suspense.

Jump onto my website: http://www.sarahwilliamsauthor.com and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my book and lots of other inspiration.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write with Love. I’m Sarah Williams, best-selling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published. Some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love and love what we do. Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            Good day. I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today, I’m chatting to professional killer and matchmaker, Michelle Somers. Thanks for joining me, Michelle.

Michelle Somers:         Hi, Sarah. How are you?

Sarah Williams:            Good, thank you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your author journey?

Michelle Somers:         I can. I’m an ex-Kiwi, now Aussie. I’m a mother of three boys. I am a romance-aholic, a chocoholic, crime show addict, so many things. Look, I’ve always loved romance. I’ve always loved reading romance. I always toyed with the idea of writing, but it’s so funny, one of things that a lot people say, I never thought I could actually do it. I liked the idea of it, but I thought, “No, it’s going to be too hard. No, I’ll never be good enough so I won’t try.” It’s really funny because when my third child went to kinder, after many, many years of just toying with the idea, I suddenly thought, “You know what, if I can’t do this and show my kids that if there’s something that they really want they should actually go out and get it, if I can’t actually do that, then how can I actually tell my kids to do the same thing?” That’s exactly what I did. I grabbed a computer and I started typing.

Michelle Somers:         I wrote my first book in six weeks. It was a shocker. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no clue. I did everything wrong. But I had finished a book. It would never be published, but that’s okay. I started writing my next one. I don’t know. I think we’ve all got to start somewhere and we all have a different journey. I think if anything, if there’s anything that I’ve really got out of this experience is that, you know what, if it’s something you really want to do just do it. Don’t worry about what people think. Don’t worry about how you might go, whether you’ll be good enough. At the end of the day, if it’s something you want, then you can’t really go through life and have those regrets and say, “I wish I could have. I wish I did.” Better to do and succeed than not do and never know.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, that’s [crosstalk 00:03:15]-

Michelle Somers:         That’s my story.

Sarah Williams:            There’s a lot of authors or people even out there who say, “I’m going to one day. One day I will do it.” There’s this huge achievement just to finish a novel, let alone then publish and write another one and another one and another one and keep going. Yeah, it’s definitely an achievement. I was the same as you. I had to wait until I’d finished my kids. I was going through that what am I going to do now stage. Totally understandable.

Michelle Somers:         Totally, totally. We all have those stories where it’s like we think are we going to be good enough, what will people think, what will they say. It’s that whole thing of romance. People have this idea of romance and what it is. They don’t realize how much we all want it in our lives and how important it is to us to actually find somebody and fall in love. If we can read about that or write about it and I guess bring some happiness into other people’s lives by doing that, then that’s always a fun thing to be a part of.

Sarah Williams:            Absolutely.

Michelle Somers:         Yes.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant. You write romantic suspense. Tell us about your books.

Michelle Somers:         My books. My husband says that I find two unlucky people, make them fall in love, and kill a few people along the way, but there’s always a happy ending. That’s how my husband explains what I actually do. I love romance, but I also love the crime aspect and the suspense. I’m fascinated with serial killers, which is kind of a bit of strange thing to be fascinated with, but I love the psychology behind why people do what they do and what makes somebody turn towards killing, whereas somebody else from that very same kind of background doesn’t. For me, exploring that in my books, as well as the romance aspect, because I do love a happy ending, is always a lot of fun. Do you want me to continue …

Sarah Williams:            Yeah.

Michelle Somers:         … rattling?

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, keep going.

Michelle Somers:         My first book, Lethal in Love, was written after I had tried to write five novels. This was my sixth attempt at being published. Every single one of my novels was a straight contemporary romance, no suspense. I had these little bits of suspense kind of creeping in, but I kept on ignoring it. Finally, one day, I turned around and I was like, “You know what, I actually need to write what my subconscious is telling me to write.” I started writing this book. It was about a detective, a homicide detective, and a reporter. Something happened, I don’t know. It just flowed. It worked. I started entering competitions. I started finaling, which was really amazing. I thought, “You know what, I’m actually onto something here.” Lethal in Love was born. It was an amazing revelation for me.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah.

Michelle Somers:         In terms of my journey.

Sarah Williams:            I remember that when that one came out, and it came out a lot of shorter kind of like a serial.

Michelle Somers:         It was, yeah. Six part serial.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Now, you can buy it and it’s the complete volume.

Michelle Somers:         Yes. Yes.

Sarah Williams:            Extraordinary-

Michelle Somers:         Sorry. It was the same thing actually. I went to a Romance Writers of Australia conference and I actually pitched my book to four people, two agents, two editors. I was lucky enough to get four requests, so I sent my book off to four people. One of them was [Lex 00:07:12] Hurst from Penguin Randomhouse. As soon as she got it, actually, she wrote back and said, “I can’t wait to read this.” It was a partial, so within 24 hours she got back to me and she’s like, “Oh my God, I’ve read what you sent me. Send me the whole lot. I need to read it.” I was like, “Wow.” I did. She came back to me in a week later. She said, “Look, I’ve got a proposal for you. We’re looking at trialing a new line. It’s a serial. We’d like to have your book as the first of that particular line.” That’s what they did. They posed the idea. I thought it sounded like a really cool, interesting idea, so I went with it.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent.

Michelle Somers:         That was my publishing story.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. You’ve continued to be published by Penguin or have you jumped ship?

Michelle Somers:         No. Yes, there was a lot of changes in Penguin. Lex has since gone. It was Penguin Randomhouse. They merged, and then there was a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes. When I finished my second book, I sent it to them. I hadn’t heard anything for quite a while, so my second book, Murder Most Unusual. When I contacted Lex, she said, “Look, there’s so much happening at the moment. We’re not taking on any books. If you were keen, you can wait and see what happens,” but she was leaving and she was moving across. I thought, “You know what, I actually would like to see how I’d go at self-publishing.” I thought it would be an interesting thing to have one book with Penguin, one book self-published, and see how I’d go with actually controlling the whole process. It was actually quite exciting to me because I totally love my cover of my book. I don’t think I would have had as much control with Penguin running the show than I would have had myself. Should I show you my cover?

Sarah Williams:            Yes, please. I was just going to ask.

Michelle Somers:         There, if you can see that. That’s my cover. Isn’t that amazing?

Sarah Williams:            It is beautiful, wow.

Michelle Somers:         Murder Most Unusual. That’s my second in my Melbourne Murder series.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Melbourne, they’re all based in Melbourne?

Michelle Somers:         They’re all based in Melbourne. I decided there because it’s a place I know and love. Yeah, it just came to me. The idea just came to me. This one was quite fun to write, too. I had some really quirky characters.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant. You’re a Melbournian anyway. How was that, writing about the city you live in? You must be envisioning murders happening on every street corner.

Michelle Somers:         I do. I do. Don’t we all? I don’t know. I think, as writers, we always imagine things happening, whether they be murders or romance or something in relation to our books. I often find myself thinking, “Oh, okay,” looking at couple there, “What if?” Or I’ll see somebody driving past [inaudible 00:10:13] and there’s somebody in the backseat and they’re not looking as happy as they could look, and I’m thinking, “Okay, what’s their story? What could I turn that into?” There’s always a story everywhere. It just depends on how deep you dig.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. What is the storyline behind Murder Most Unusual?

Michelle Somers:         Murder Most Unusual, okay, I’ll tell you how it came to me and then you’ll understand what it’s about. It actually came to me as a scene. I have a picture of this woman out in the middle of a field in the dark. It’s been raining solid for a couple of weeks. This is the first week of no rain. She is struggling with something in the mud. I had no idea what it was. I started thinking, “What is she actually doing out there in the middle of the dark, quite secretly, and struggling with something?” That’s the idea I came up with, this romantic suspense author who believes that before she writes a murder she has to commit it. She doesn’t believe in killing people, so she has a mannequin called Ronaldo. Ronaldo actually goes with her on these trips where she actually will kill him over and over again to make sure that her murder scenes make sense. That’s Stacy. Of course, when you have a homicide detective who’s wanting to solve homicides, and there are some homicides that are very similar to the murders in her books, it makes for a very interesting story. That’s kind of the story behind Murder Most Unusual.

Sarah Williams:            It does sound great.

Michelle Somers:         It was fun.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. You’ve been involved, you were saying before, with the Romance Writers of Australia for a few years. Have long have you been part of that association?

Michelle Somers:         Wow. I would say for the past six or seven years.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent.

Michelle Somers:         I actually remember when I joined. It must be six or seven years. About as long as my writing journey.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. You’ve entered lots of competitions and you’ve done quite well on a few.

Michelle Somers:         Yes. Yeah. I think I’ve been very lucky with the judges have liked my stories. That’s always a bonus. I have been, both in Melbourne, sorry, in Australia, and in America, as well. I’ve also finaled in a few competitions over there, which was really nice. Yes.

Sarah Williams:            I was talking to Valerie Parv last year, because she knows you very well because you won the Valerie Parv Award, that would have been about three years ago. Am I right?

Michelle Somers:         Four years ago, I think.

Sarah Williams:            Four years?

Michelle Somers:         Was it 2013, I think?

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Tell us about the experience, winning the Valerie Parv and how that experience worked for you working with Valerie.

Michelle Somers:         It was amazing. Valerie is amazing. She is an incredibly, a beautiful lady and so giving and open with her experience and her knowledge. It was really funny, actually. When I first started writing and I decided that romance was going to be my genre, I had a look at what was out there in terms of development. One of the things I had in my vision was I need to win the Valerie Parv competition to be able to actually write the way I want to write. I want to write well. I had it in my sights. I had actually met an ex-Valerie Parv winner, Anna Cowan. She raved about Valerie. That was another thing. I was like, “Okay, I need Valerie.”

Michelle Somers:         That’s when I started entering the competitions. I entered a couple of years in a row and not really got anywhere very fast with different books. Then Lethal in Love came along, and that’s when I entered Lethal in Love and was lucky enough that the judges marked it very highly. I finaled, and then Valerie read it and she enjoyed it. She decided to choose me, which was wonderful because it was such an experience. I would recommend that any new, emerging or aspiring author, writers who actually want to do well and to actually learn the craft to enter that competition. If you get Valerie, you get an amazing, just a mentor and a friend, as well. She’s now a friend. She’s very special.

Sarah Williams:            Valerie is just brilliant. Her books are spectacular. She did a great interview last year. At a workshop. I was living in [Townshall 00:15:06] at the time, and so she did a workshop for us out there. That was just a brilliant workshop. She’s a real asset to Australia and to the Romance Writers of Australia as well. That is definitely, probably the best award you can win through the RWA Australia.

Michelle Somers:         I totally agree. Totally.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant. You’re still a member of the RWA. You’re still going to conferences, which is great. I always see you there.

Michelle Somers:         Yes.

Sarah Williams:            This year, or was it probably, yeah, this year, you started doing a blog for them as well. Tell us about that.

Michelle Somers:         Yes. My Simply Writing blog, when I first started writing, I tried to read as much as I possibly could and learn as much about the craft. One of the things I’ve discovered over the years is that there are so many things that we’ve got to remember as writers, the show don’t tell and the deep point of view and the this and the that. A lot of the time, we read these books and they’re quite complex. We come out almost more confused than we were when we went into reading them. My whole idea is simplifying these ideas and making them really accessible to newbie authors. I started an idea of Simply Writing. I actually wrote a book. I’m going to show you my book. My Simply Writing Simply Synopsis. Basically, what I wanted to do was take something that was really complex and that most writers and authors absolutely hate doing and put it into a format which actually becomes quite fun. It makes it so easy to do.

Michelle Somers:         That was the idea for my Simply Writing series. Then I suddenly thought, “Oh, what if I could actually do this on a monthly basis and take topics and simplify them for people, make them easy, so that writers can go away and actually practice the idea and actually build on that in terms of their writing?” That’s where the Simply Writing blogs came about.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. You’ve got the one, Simply Synopsis, published. Are you going to have more in that series?

Michelle Somers:         I am. I’ve got a few plans actually. I’ve got ideas for another book called Simply Characters, where I’d like to break down the idea of how do we build up a character and how do we make three-dimensional, believe characters, and looking at it in a way that hasn’t been looked at before. I also want to … I’ve got an idea, also, on queries, blurbs, and pitches. I want to have a look at that and see how people can actually query and pitch their book and then write a blurb that’s going to engage readers to actually want to read their story. That’s another idea. I’m not sure which one. I’ve actually started both of them. I’m not sure which one is going to come out first now, but that will be something to look for in the future.

Sarah Williams:            Obviously, you like teaching and you like being able to share what you’ve learned with other authors. Do you do mentoring and workshops and those sorts of things, as well?

Michelle Somers:         I do. Up till the end of last year, I was actually mentoring somebody. I do do mentoring on a one-to-one type basis. I also love doing workshops. I’ve done a few workshops through the RWA and through my Melbourne Romance Writers’ Guild. I’ve done quite a few workshops there. I’m always open to workshops. I’ve done an [inaudible 00:18:56] last year through the RWA, the online workshops. Do you know what? I actually really enjoy sharing what I know. I think that’s one of the great things about it being the romance industry. We do share knowledge. That’s how I learned everything I’ve learned, through other, more experienced authors sharing their ideas and their knowledge and their wisdom with me. If I can do the same thing back, it’s that whole paying forward thing, isn’t it. I think we make the industry a better place by helping the others out there to become better writers.

Sarah Williams:            Absolutely. Yeah, no, that’s brilliant. Tell us about the Melbourne Romance Writers’ Guild.

Michelle Somers:         Melbourne Romance Writers’ Guild is an amazing group of women. I’ve actually been a member of them longer than I’ve been a member of RWA. I discovered them first, and they told me about RWA. When I first started writing, I didn’t actually realize there were any writing groups out there. I started writing by myself at my computer, not a clue. My husband went to a conference and he actually sat next to a gentleman, and they were talking about their wives and their partners. The guy said, “My partner writes.” My husband says, “Oh, my wife writes, too. What does your partner write?” “Romance.” “Oh, my wife writes romance, too.” “Oh, well, your wife must join the Melbourne Romance Writers’ Guild. They’re really …” that’s what it did.

Michelle Somers:         I’ve joined them ever since. We’re the largest face-to-face critique group in Australia. It’s affiliated with RWA. We have about 33 members at the moment and basically we’re a support group. We have a Facebook group, private Facebook group where we support each other, egg each other on, we have writing sprints, and just basically share knowledge and support. It’s incredible. I’m the treasurer of the group, which I love doing. I love being part of it and love helping newer authors who come in to succeed, I guess.

Sarah Williams:            I do know a few of the other members. It’s fantastic, because you’ll see somebody on Facebook who’ll go, “My friend Michelle just put on this book.” The social media share, which can be so great.

Michelle Somers:         Absolutely. They’re awesome. Beautiful. Good friends now, as well.

Sarah Williams:            No, that’s fantastic. What are you working on at the moment, Michelle?

Michelle Somers:         I’m working on, as I said, my non-fiction series, but I’m also working on two projects. One is a novella that’ll be coming out as part of a box set for the Melbourne Romance Writers’ Guild at the end of the year, a Christmas box set. That’s my bee story. No people lose their life in the story, but there are bee deaths, I’m sorry to say. It’s the whole suspense thing. My second thing that I’m working on at the moment is a romantic suspense set in Chicago. It’s James Bond meets Stephanie Plum, with a Quantum Leap twist.

Sarah Williams:            That’s great.

Michelle Somers:         Yes. That’s what I’m working on at the moment, too. It’s become bigger than Ben Hur. I’m looking at a series.

Sarah Williams:            Brilliant. Have you been to Chicago before or are you just researching?

Michelle Somers:         No. I’m researching. Google is a wonderful thing, and so is Facebook. In RWA, there are quite a few members who actually live in Chicago. I’ve had quite a few people help me with some of the geographical issues that I’ve had and answer questions about America and all sorts. That’s been really helpful. I like the idea of writing something set in America. It’s a bit of a challenge now.

Sarah Williams:            Definitely. Now that you’ve done the traditionally published route as well as the self-publishing route, what are you thinking for your future books? Are you going to continue to pitch or are you just going to do it yourself? Or maybe it’ll depend.

Michelle Somers:         I like the idea of both, actually. I like the idea of having control over some of my work, but also I would like the idea of pitching my Chicago series to a US publisher. That’s my thought. The novella will be self-published with my group. There will be other novellas and other stories that I will self-publish. I’d really like this series to go to a traditional publisher. It’ll be a bit of a mix.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, fantastic. Any plans on going to Romance Writers of America conference any time soon?

Michelle Somers:         I would love to. It’s a little bit difficult at the moment. We’re building a house, so any holidays are on the back burner, but I would love to. I’ve looked at the RWA America conferences often and looked at what they offer. Their workshops and just meeting the authors over there would just be amazing. It’s definitely in the future. I just don’t know how far into the future.

Sarah Williams:            I know. We’ve started a Romance Writers of Australia who are going to America 2019, when it’s in New York, for that conference. I reckon there’s probably 30 or 40 of us already in this group all just sharing ideas on how much it’s going to cost and where they’ll stay and what they’ll do while they’re there. We’re all trying to work out if we should do workshops and pitch and all sorts of things.

Michelle Somers:         Wow.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, it’ll be interesting.

Michelle Somers:         That’s exciting.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Aussies take over New York City. Stay tuned.

Michelle Somers:         Watch out, New York.

Sarah Williams:            Between us and the Kiwis, it’ll be intense.

Michelle Somers:         That’ll be awesome. I think if you’re going in a group, as well, being able to share accommodation and have that network, it’ll be so good. You’ll be able to share costs. It’ll make such a difference.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, that’s it. Excellent. Where can we find you online, Michelle?

Michelle Somers:         I’m everywhere, man. Facebook, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. I’m on YouTube. If you go to my website, it’s www.michelle-somers.com, you can find all the links there. Obviously, my books are on Amazon, iTunes, [Kobo 00:25:56]. Everywhere, everywhere. Although, actually, at the moment, Murder Most Unusual is on Kindle Unlimited for a limited time. Anybody who’s on Kindle Unlimited can pick that up for free. I think that’s all. That’s the best place to get me, on my website. I do have a newsletter that I send out once in a while. It’s not a regular thing. I send it out when I have news. I don’t spam people. If they would like to go to my website, you can actually sign up for that. That’s quite fun. I normally put some interesting content in there, as well as some news on myself.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, I think you give away a little free short story or something as well when you sign up?

Michelle Somers:         I do. Cold Case for the Heart is my short story. You get that free with any signup. That gives you a taste of my writing, to see whether it’s something you actually like before you commit.

Sarah Williams:            That’s it. Absolutely brilliant. Cool. Thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

Michelle Somers:         Thank you, Sarah. I’ve had fun. It was good.

Sarah Williams:            Good. Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my books and lots of inspiration. If you like the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to find out more. Remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye.