Interview: Indie Author Aria E. Maher

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Good morning, everyone! Today we have our first guest post, an interview with indie author Aria E. Maher! I’ll let her do the talking, and there will be links at the end of the questions so you can all go stalk, I mean, visit her afterwards!

Tell us a little about your published works.

Currently, I have two published books; a mystery/fantasy novella called Behind Her Mask was Death, and a standalone paranormal suspense novel called The Tangle, which was published just last year.

You’re a blogger, student, self-published author. How do you make all of this come together?

It can definitely be tough! When you’ve spent a lot of your day trying to focus on linear algebra and American history and all that stuff, sometimes you don’t have a ton of brainpower left over to actually work on other things. I’m always trying to push myself; trying to get up earlier or stay up later or work harder or focus more or not procrastinate so much when I might actually have time to work on stuff. It can be a little crazy sometimes, and sometimes I don’t end up meeting my deadlines, but the good thing about being an indie author is that you set the deadlines, and you can work at your own pace, which is amazing for me, because sometimes my own pace seems to be about as slow as molasses, as they say.

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What are your hopes for writing in 2018?

I would definitely like to finish and possibly publish at least one book this year. I am a notoriously slow first drafter, so it all depends on how long it takes me to finish the first draft. The book I’m working on right now is a prequel to Behind Her Mask was Death. I’m planning for it to be a full-length novel of at least 50,000 words, and currently I’m about half way there, which is quite exciting! I’m also trying to work a bit on my super-secret sci-fi project. I actually knocked off a few hundred words of the first draft the other day, which is amazing considering I haven’t even touched the thing in months!

Where did your inspiration to write come from? (Favorite books, movies, family support, etc.)

My favorite author of all time is N. D. Wilson. I love all of his books so much, and he is a huge inspiration to me always! I also love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, which is where I got some of the inspiration for the world of Behind Her Mask was Death. My original inspiration to write, however, was actually video games! When I was a little kid, I loved writing and illustrating (terrible) fan fiction about Super Mario and Zelda and other games my dad and I would play. I think that I liked using other people’s characters and worlds because I thought making up my own would be way too hard! (In some ways, I might have been right…) I went on to write my own original ‘crazy stories’, as I called them, but I was writing fan fiction way before I even knew what fan fiction was, and was definitely the thing that got me into writing in the first place.

How else do you spend your time when you’re not writing, student-ing, or family-ing?

You will probably find me spiraling ever deeper into the hole that is YouTube. Some of my favorite types of YouTube videos to watch are gameplay videos (with humorous commentary, of course), science-y theory type videos (mostly the Game Theorists/Film Theorists), makeup tutorials (I find them very relaxing?) and those funny ‘storytime’ kind of videos, where the YouTuber tells about crazy things that happened to them.

Besides YouTube, I also like to draw, listen to audio books, and read (of course), and I love going outside, although the weather hasn’t really been the best for that recently…

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Are there any topics/themes you’re currently not writing about that you would like to, and why are you drawn to them?

As I said earlier, I do have a sci-fi project on the back burner. I keep getting tons of new ideas for topics I could cover in it, like automation and self-driving cars and government surveillance, but I haven’t actually written a lot about them yet! They’re still just ideas floating in the back of my mind, but they are all things I really want to write about. They’re pretty hot topics right now, but I’ve always kind of been drawn to the idea of some kind of interconnected hyperweb full of information, that people could use to spy on or manipulate others. That’s basically what my super-secret sci-fi project is all about, but I’m always adding new ideas that I could try exploring in it.

What are the parts of the writing process you find easiest, and hardest?

First drafting is extremely hard for me, which is kind of annoying because in order to actually rewrite or edit a book you have to have a first draft to start with!  I’m kind of envious of the people who can whack out 30,000 words in a day. It could take me anywhere from a month to half a year to write that much! As soon as I have a finished first draft I can usually sort the story out and edit it fairly quickly, but it’s getting that first draft that’s the hard part. My favorite part of the indie authoring process is actually doing the formatting for the books! I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true (as long as I don’t have to reformat the entire thing twice because of a stupid margin-width error! *cough, cough* this may or may not have happened with The Tangle *cough, cough*)

What can readers expect to see from you in the near future?

I actually have a finished novelette set in the world of Behind Her Mask was Death, which should hopefully be out sometime in February, if everything goes according to plan. Other than that, I’m not sure. Like I said, I’d really like to try to publish another book this year, but we’ll see what happens! I’m also hoping to do more movie and TV show reviews on my blog this year, as well as book recommendations and other cool stuff. I really enjoy blogging; I just need to sit down and think of some good topics and actually write them out every so often!