Frequently Predicted Questions

I’ve contributed interviews to a few blogs and such, but there are questions I thought maybe someone might like to ask me but hasn’t, is too afraid to ask, or maybe there’s even things about me I want to tell you that hadn’t occurred to you to ask. Or maybe it never even occurred to you to ask me anything, and maybe this is your first time even hearing from me: so here’s that!

Likely I will think of more, or you will, and I can do more of this :)

Who (the fuck) are you and why are you/what business do you think you have writing?

I’m a process engineer currently living in Oslo with my same-aged, happier-faced husband Juan and our collection of stuffed toys, books, videogames and empty cava bottles.
When I was 22, I wrote a short novel. I wrote it way too soon after what it was about and it had way too big a scope for a first project (I can see now.) I showed it to a few family members who appreciated it and encouraged me- they will remain the only people to ever see it. I’ve kept up writing to build my skills to get back to writing about what that first novel was about, and I’m still trying to get back there today, three/four years later.

How much money do you make?

Let’s just say that I recently signed up for a Netflix basic package ;) Well, we’ll see: I’m still on the free month. Fiction is where I take risks, not life.
I would love to operate some sort of pay-what-you-want thing on my books. I think you can do that with Smashwords, but I already learned how to use Lulu, so… another time. Making money for my writing would be nice. Nice things are nice and nice is nice. But more than that I’d like you to read my stuff!

You are a self-published author amidst a sea of self-published authors: why should I bother reading what you’ve written?

Short answer: I can assure you I work hard on my books and read voraciously and widely. You can trust that my writing is good quality and my insights are original enough and not yet available in the literature in their given form, to the best of my knowledge, which is really why I read anything. But likely any self-published author would tell you the same. I’m at the stage where it’s difficult to break out of the voice-sea, and to do so I rely on new readers taking a chance on me, so please do :)

Where do I start if I want to read what you’ve written?

Sinkhole is a bunch of different stories that still seem to cover the wealth of my favourite topics (eg. alienation, social justice, how to convert corpses into useful products.) If you like Sinkhole, you’ll probably like Rude Vile Pigs. If you like Rude Vile Pigs, you’ll probably like Saxual Healing. If you like Saxual Healing, you’ll have to wait for ITALO! And if you read them all, there’s fun to have discovering the links between them :)
In fact, if you kindly PM me, I’ll probably give you any if not all of my books for reviews. They do convert to sales eventually (I’ve seen it happen), sales that you would be personally responsible for generating through your support :) Oh! But can you wait a bit? I’m doing 2016 revisions of Findesferas, Sinkhole and Rude Vile Pigs, what with a year+ of author feedback!! I’ll be in touch :D

Any advice for indie authors?

Loads! Here’s the latest:

- You’ll learn that there are feelings about creating fiction that are inherent to the process and not the stage of your abilities, fame or income: is there a point? Am I any good? Can I do it again? Did I ever do it before? All of that. It’s an integral part of writing, but when people say ‘Hey, if you don’t want to experience this, don’t write!’ even if we ignore the general principle that tough love is bullshit, I don’t agree, because doesn’t anyone in any job sometimes feel like that? Haven’t you felt the same about your job sometimes?

- If you still want to write in spite of the obstacles, read every day and make sure you get enough sleep.

- There are only three things I’m guaranteed to do every day and writing is not one of them, because I’ve learned that this eliminates as much guilt as possible from the creative process, which is perhaps the most important part.

- Read what you enjoy and what challenges you in an enjoyable way: this is how you develop style, not by fawning over books you didn’t “get” or reading only daunting things all the time- that’s how you waste your time and the time of others! Again: you may need to do this for a while to learn it’s a waste of time, like I did- in which case, because of the time you did it, you learned something then stopped, so it wasn’t really a waste. Like staying in a bad relationship, reading half of In Search of Lost Time or watching a season of Breaking Bad.

- If your incentive to write something was “Fuck this/these guy(s)”, and you finish, and the only message is “Fuck this/these guy(s)”, it’s not done. Though I’ve never seen this prevent people from loving a story anyway :)

What’s coming next?

ITALO!

Other stories are incubating, and I am looking back at them while intermittently writing and rewriting and rewriting short stories.

Will you be my friend?

If you made it this far, I already am!

If you didn’t, I already was- but you’ll never know ;)