Ludmila Guimarães Sella
asked
C.M. McCoy:
Hi! I was reading about you and started wondering, how was it to change your career? How did you figure out that writting was what you wanted to do? What made you choose YA, paranormal and thriller as you genre?
C.M. McCoy
Hi Ludmila!
Thank you so much for your question. Changing careers involved learning a lot a new things. My degree was technical, but I'd always enjoyed writing and reading, so it wasn't as huge a jump as it might seem. Starting from the bottom of the totem pole again after having clawed my way up one already was a little frustrating, but I knew I had the persistence and drive to make it happen.
Writing was something I've always done in one form or another. Whether it was writing short stories as a kid to writing creative papers in college to writing speeches for the General in the Air Force, I've been writing in one form or another throughout my life. I started writing seriously just after I left the Air Force and wound up with a memoir on my hands. After that, I felt like I had another story in me--one that incorporated all of my hopes and fears and experiences but with an element of fantasy thrown in, which is where EERIE came from.
The genres I write are a product of the characters that babble inside my head. It sounds crazy, but as their story unfolds on paper, the genre becomes apparent, so it wasn't so much a conscious choice to write a certain genre, it was how the characters' stories unfolded naturally. For example, I didn't know when I set out to write my thriller that it would be a thriller. It may have just as easily turned out to be a mystery, but my main character was too action-oriented for her story to go that way, if that makes sense.
Thanks again for writing to me!
Thank you so much for your question. Changing careers involved learning a lot a new things. My degree was technical, but I'd always enjoyed writing and reading, so it wasn't as huge a jump as it might seem. Starting from the bottom of the totem pole again after having clawed my way up one already was a little frustrating, but I knew I had the persistence and drive to make it happen.
Writing was something I've always done in one form or another. Whether it was writing short stories as a kid to writing creative papers in college to writing speeches for the General in the Air Force, I've been writing in one form or another throughout my life. I started writing seriously just after I left the Air Force and wound up with a memoir on my hands. After that, I felt like I had another story in me--one that incorporated all of my hopes and fears and experiences but with an element of fantasy thrown in, which is where EERIE came from.
The genres I write are a product of the characters that babble inside my head. It sounds crazy, but as their story unfolds on paper, the genre becomes apparent, so it wasn't so much a conscious choice to write a certain genre, it was how the characters' stories unfolded naturally. For example, I didn't know when I set out to write my thriller that it would be a thriller. It may have just as easily turned out to be a mystery, but my main character was too action-oriented for her story to go that way, if that makes sense.
Thanks again for writing to me!
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