Guest blog: The biggest hurdle of being indie

Today’s guest blogger is Joann H. Buchanan, whose latest book is being released this week from Seventh Star Press. Joann was raised in a military family and at the age of 19, followed in her father’s footsteps and joined the Navy. She went to college at OPSU in Oklahoma, majoring in CIS, but the love of writing made her ultimately come back to it. After Dark is Joann’s fifth book. Joann and her husband John have five children and live happily in the heartland of middle America.

The hurdles of being indie

Everyday there are over 500,000 books published on Amazon. That is the biggest hurdle. How to stand out in a sea filled with water?

The most obvious answer is marketing. There are a lot of indie authors who can’t afford to market a book the way it should be.

There are a few ways to get around this.

One, hire someone who is versed in marketing and can make it easier on you or two,  gather a few people who are in the same boat and work together. The second is probably going to end up being the most rewarding because you make friends in the journey and you don’t feel so alone. Also, set your expectations one day at a time. If you receive a review about your book and it’s fabulous, use that to keep moving forward. If you are able to help a friend spread the word, use that to keep moving forward.

That’s the most important thing… keep moving forward. Ultimately you are your own worst enemy. If a new author focuses on the fact that you aren’t a number one best selling author right off the bat, then you are focusing on the wrong thing.

As a friend of mine has told me, this is a marathon, not a sprint. In other words, be prepared for a long journey and celebrate every step that moves you forward.

I have been fortunate in this business in that I have not only made money, but I have connected with some amazingly talented people. They have given me a map when I was lost, an ear when I wanted to vent and a laugh when I have felt down. Allow yourself to exist in the moment. Eventually the bottom line will take care of itself as long as you are existing in the moment.

The other thing, appreciate your fans. They don’t have to buy your book. So even if they don’t particularly enjoy one book but they loved another, tell them thank you for reading it. I think some writers forget the fans. One of my favorite things to do is answer emails from fans. They are everything when it comes to the literary world.

The question is what is the biggest hurdle for an indie writer—I think the biggest hurdle is ourselves. We should band together to make things easier. I’ve seen authors put others down instead of celebrating accomplishments. Don’t do that. Remember that today it is their turn but tomorrow it may be your turn. Wouldn’t it be better to celebrate one another and help one another than to walk all over one another or allow jealousy to rule?

If you are an indie writer and you want to work together to move forward, let me know.  I will gladly be part of your group to help one another move forward. To me, that’s what it’s all about.

After Dark: Children of Nox series No. 3

The time of three arrives….

The stained one is revealed.

The dream protector’s power grows.

A demon possesses the body of Jonah.

All the pieces are in place, guided by Trinity.

Gods, goddesses, and supernatural forces converge, and a clash of powers looms that will determine the fate of the world.

What will come after the dark?

The thrilling conclusion of the Children of Nox Series awaits you!

Joann Buchanan

Jane Friedman Knows Lots About Publishing

On Saturday morning, a meeting room filled with people from all stages of publishing. Multi-pubbed award winners to aspiring writers who hadn’t finished their first draft yet, working in all genres, found their spots and settled in.

Jane Friedman has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in business strategy for authors and publishers. She’s the editor of The Hot Sheet, the essential industry newsletter for authors. She also maintains an award-winning blog for writers at JaneFriedman.com; her expertise has been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CBS, the National Press Club and many other outlets.

With those kinds of credentials, it’s no wonder people were engaged and interested for the day-long workshop called “Are You Ready for Success?”

The main points included learning how to build an author platform, optimize branding and messaging to appeal to readers, and employ strategize in your website, blog, newsletters and social media to reach and engage your audience.

The first point she made was to define “platform,” which she equated to visibility. Right off the bat, the audience was asked to think, not in terms of individual sales, but in terms of how we reach our audience at large.

And the only way to reach that audience was to do the work.

In other words, write the book.

Building an author brand. The idea of a brand is to build an expectation in readers for what you deliver in text, design, and action. Presenting a unified, even repetitive image across all your media helps solidify that brand in the readers mind through consistency.

Optimizing your books starts with metadata, which consists of the book description, cover, editorial reviews, categories and keywords. She mentioned that one of the ways readers know what they like is through comparison, which is why you often see phrases like, “If you like X, you’ll love Y!” in book marketing.

Whether or not those comparisons are entirely accurate, knowing who and what is selling in your genre or niche can help you identify your target audience. Yasiv.com is a helpful tool for finding similar books, as well as looking through your also-boughts, checking reviews for mentions of similar authors, as well as Goodreads lists and those media roundups of “Top 10 Whatever Books To Read Next.”

Writing compelling book descriptions is more than telling the plot. Using headlines, bold type, and white space effectively, including editorial reviews from bloggers and media, as well as working in appropriate categories and keywords can help readers find you in their searches.

She also suggested updating your book descriptions periodically to take advantage of new trends. A little work every few months might bring in fresh readers.

Consider your strengths in generating leads. Are you a good blogger? Can you do a podcast or run a Twitter chat? Maybe you’re great at networking – not all authors are introverts. All of those and more are ways to generate leads, which in publishing translates to finding readers.

One way to discover some of your possible lead generation avenues is to do a SWOT analysis. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Focus on maximizing what you can (write more books!), and taking the chances that come your way.

Platform Assets: Website first, because it’s your official face as an author. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it should be functional. It should look like you – an opportunity to reiterate your branding – and it should have all the information about your books a reader or a potential contact might need.

Social media is another platform asset, because it’s a way to connect you to the community of readers, as well as a way to network with other authors and publishing professionals. It is not your best selling tool, but it is a way to brand yourself and build relationships.

The final leg of your platform asset is your email newsletter. When you build your list organically, it consists of your most engaged readers. They’re the ones who will evangelize for you.

She addressed a few different strategies for producing original content. For instance, readers enjoy media content lists — what you’re reading/watching/listening to/streaming right now. Q&As and interviews with other authors are of interest, as well as behind the scenes peeks into the writing and publishing process. Finally, funny is always a good bet for entertaining, value added content.

You can also send out RSS feeds, blog roundups and automatic digests for newsletters.

One of the biggest keys to maintaining a vibrant, engaged newsletter list is consistency in frequency, format, look, and voice.

If you need a priority list for your platform assets, attend to your website first, then your newsletter, then pick one social media platform where you can show up regularly.

But the best way to build readership?

Write more books!

If you’d like to find out more about Jane Friedman, visit her website at https://www.janefriedman.com/ and sign up for her free newsletter, Electric Speed, at https://www.janefriedman.com/free-newsletter/

If you’d like to learn more about the Missouri chapter of Romance Writers of America, the organization that hosted the special event, please visit https://www.morwa.org/wp/

Sela Carsen is an award-winning author of paranormal and sci-fi romance — with or without sex and dead bodies. Your pick. She maintains a permanent nerd-on for fairytales and mythology, and openly hoards reference books about obscure folklore. Born a wanderer, she and her family have finally settled in the Midwest. Until they move again, at least. http://selacarsen.com/

Search History and the Writer’s Spark

From Seventh Star Press!

There is the standing joke about not checking the search history of a writer.  Questions, often of a criminal nature, find their way into long, damning lists (How to dispose of a body? or domestic terrorist organizations or importing poisonous animals might pop up in histories of friends), as writers research things that, given our more sedentary and timid natures, we probably don’t know first-hand. 

This research is usually for the obvious purposes.  Writers anchor themselves in plausible fictional worlds, creating a kind of dream they invite the reader to share, and any time the dream veers unnecessarily and unintentionally from plausible stuff, you’ll have a reader out there who knows the terrain: when your errors emerge, there’s a reader out there who’ll catch them, whose whole absorption in the book is punctured by your ignorance of what you may have thought was a small matter, but becomes enormous to the reader who knows you’ve made the mistake, then begins to speculate that if you’ve made a mistake he knows about, what is keeping you from others?

When I found out how to tap a telegraph wire, I resolved I’d be damned if I didn’t use all that reading and consultation and leg work in the piece of fiction I’d researched it for.  Then discovered, of course, that parts of my newfound knowledge deflected from the power and dream of the story—that if I talked about this fascinating subject for as long as I wanted to go on with it, my readers would forget what was going on in the book.

How reliable, in short, is the world you’ve created?

So, for the most part, research guides you through uncertain country, maps out the signposts so you can steer the reader’s belief in the story around swamps and sinkholes and perilous bluffs.  That’s why I spent days researching how to tap a telegraph wire—because I both dreaded and respected that informed reader who’d have the information, who was trusting me to unfold the story and whose trust I needed to have for my fiction to work.

It’s also why I steer away from technical passages on firearms in my books.  I grew up around guns, but they held little interest for me, and when they come into play in my stories, it’s always with reluctance that I bring them up, because somewhere out there are a dozen readers whose version of the way that a specific gun works is both authoritative and enough different from the other authorities to cause disputes. For which I am blamed, and my story is discredited.

In short, you can’t be a thorough-going font of specific knowledge, but you can do your best.  And when you do your best, it often patches the worst holes in narrative detail, thereby making the dream of your fiction more vivid and plausible.

But the practical benefits of research are only part of the reason I’m doing it constantly.  Good research not only patches my ideas, but it gives me new ones.  The older I get, the more I glimpse the vast interconnectedness of all the things I learn—how a discovery, say, of a particular medical phenomenon might take my thoughts back to an historical moment that might have only a metaphorical connection to medicine, or to an architectural structure or to a move in a chess game.  What this kind of research does, if you enter it openly, is bend or disorder what you expected.  It’s research in the romantic/academic vein—research as discovery and poetry and play. 

And there are always dangers special to this kind of research.  It’s like the lotus-eaters of the Odyssey, where you bite into the plant and want to stay on the island forever.  For why write when there’s all these good things to discover?

Then you recall that writing is discovery as well.  That it is poetry and play and insight, and that such pleasure are why you got into it in the first place.

And the other principal danger is the temptation to use it all. 

Nowadays, I couldn’t even tell you what I learned about the telegraph.  But no knowledge you gather dies unheeded or untransformed: it lies fallow for years, or floats out to connect with something far-fetched and more useful and wonderful.  Knowledge is the parent of playfulness, which is the parent of knowledge. 

So cut perpetual slack to search histories.  And above all, don’t erase them: we’re going to revisit them in a month or two.

Trajan’s Arch by Michael Williams

Gabriel Rackett stands at the threshold of middle age. He lives north of Chicago and teaches at a small community college. He has written one novel and has no prospects of writing another, his powers stagnated by drink and loss. Into his possession comes a manuscript, written by a childhood friend and neighbor, which ignites his memory and takes him back to his mysterious mentor and the ghosts that haunted his own coming of age.

Now, at the ebb of his resources, Gabriel returns to his old haunts through a series of fantastic stories spilling dangerously off the page–tales that will preoccupy and pursue him back to their dark and secret sources.

Michael Williams

Michael Williams

Over the past 25 years, Michael Williams has written a number of strange novels, from the early Weasel’s Luck and Galen Beknighted in the best-selling DRAGONLANCE series to the more recent lyrical and experimental Arcady, singled out for praise by Locus and Asimov’s magazines. In Trajan’s Arch, his eleventh novel, stories fold into stories and a boy grows up with ghostly mentors, and the recently published Vine mingles Greek tragedy and urban legend, as a local dramatic production in a small city goes humorously, then horrifically, awry.

Trajan’s Arch and Vine are two of the books in Williams’s highly anticipated City Quartet, to be joined in 2018 by Dominic’s Ghosts and Tattered Men.

Williams was born in Louisville, Ky. and spent much of his childhood in the south central part of the state, the red-dirt gothic home of Appalachian foothills and stories of Confederate guerrillas. Through good luck and a roundabout journey he made his way through through New England, New York, Wisconsin, Britain and Ireland, and has ended up less than thirty miles from where he began. He has a Ph.D. in humanities and teaches at the University of Louisville, where he focuses on the modern fantastic in fiction and film. He is married and has two grown sons.

The writing process that works for me

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the writing process.  Each writer develops their own process, over the course of time, that works best for them as an individual.  The sooner the writer understands this, the better it will go for their writing.

My approach has been honed since the mid-1990s, when I dedicated myself to writing fiction with an intent of being published.  Looking back, I have made some small refinements to my process, but by and large I found what worked for me during the first few years and did not deviate from it.

One of the best early decisions I made was to have a dedicated space set aside for writing only.  I made the conscious decision to have one computer committed to being my writing computer, and to have it located in a different room from the one that I conducted business on.

Author Stephen Zimmer

Over time, this had the effect of snapping my brain into writing mode when I sat down at this particular computer.  I attribute this as a big reason why I have not had problems during my career with writer’s block.

I started playing music while writing to block out sounds in the house or out on the street, creating a sort of bubble that further reinforced my writing mindset when in a session.  Music also can help with the mood of a scene, providing another benefit for my process.   

As the internet grew to greater prominence (long before the rise of social media), I also recognized the potential distractions of the online world and saw to it that the computer that I wrote on was offline.  When social media emerged into the pervasive force that it is today, that decision turned out to be a great one, as it is very easy to be distracted by notifications, the urge to check messages, or browse online. 

Despite writing in large word count formats like epic fantasy, I have never put my focus on word count goals for my writing sessions.  The most important thing to me then and now is writing regularly, whether I write a couple hundred words or several thousand in a given session.  Writing on a consistent basis keeps my mind in the right kind of zone for the creative process, even when I go about my daily activities in between sessions.

I also do not allow myself to become bogged in a particular scene.  If I find myself becoming a little stuck in a particular scene, I will move ahead with another, and come back to the earlier one later.  This “walking away” from the problematic scene for a short time has worked out well in giving me a fresh perspective, as when I return to it I usually have figured out what I want to do with it and what it needs to accomplish for the greater story.   

From the beginning, as a writer of multiple series, I deemed it important to know the destination of my stories and have a basic framework for getting there.  At the same time, I understood how new ideas, plot lines, and characters can crop up over the course of writing a manuscript. 

I embraced balancing the need for having a road map in the form of an outline while leaving room to breathe for the creation of new characters and story ideas.  I have never sensed that I have boxed myself in too tightly with my initial outline, and I have always had a very clear vision of the general course I envision for a manuscript. 

The part of the process that had to come with time and experience was knowing when I was ready to hand off a manuscript to an editor.  Virtually all writers are capable of making changes and rewriting endlessly, if they allowed themselves to. 

When doing passes through a manuscript, a writer will always come across a word, phrase, or even scene that they will feel a need to change.  A very important part of the writing process is having the sense to know when a manuscript has reached the right state to declare it finished and ready for the editing process.  

During the course of the past ten years, I have tightened up this window and I recognize the point where a manuscript is ready much clearer than I did before.  Rewriting and additional passes through the manuscript take less time than they did before and my editors have remarked that I have been delivering extremely clean copy on my last few titles (which allows them to spend extra time analyzing content, as opposed to correcting things they come across).  It is a sense that I had to develop through seasoning, growth, and experience.

Going forward, I am open to adjusting things in my writing process to make sure that I have the process that best suits me.  I share my process as I enjoy seeing the writing processes of others, and I never know when I might come across a good suggestion that could work for me as well.

Writing is quite the journey and it is a path of constant growth, but it is very individual in nature.  Just remember, there is no right writing process for everyone. 

You have to find what works the best for you. 

About the author:  Stephen Zimmer is an award-winning author and filmmaker based out of Lexington, Ky. His works include the Rayden Valkyrie novels (wword and worcery), the Rising Dawn Saga (cross-genre), the Fires in Eden Series (epic fantasy), the Hellscapes short story collections (horror), the Chronicles of Ave short story collections (fantasy), the Harvey and Solomon Tales (steampunk), and the forthcoming Faraway Saga (YA dystopian/cross-genre).

Stephen’s visual work includes the feature film Shadows Light, shorts films such as The Sirens and Swordbearer, and the forthcoming Rayden Valkyrie: Saga of a Lionheart TV pilot. Stephen is a proud Kentucky Colonel who also enjoys the realms of music, martial arts, good bourbons, and spending time with family.

Find out more about Stephen Zimmer’s new book, Prowling the Darkness!

Dark rumors and whisperings of unholy sorcery bring Rayden Valkyrie to the remote city of Sereth-Naga. There she finds a populace cowering in fear of the city’s ruthless, mysterious rulers, who remain behind the high walls of their citadel.

An even greater mystery surrounds the city. Something is prowling the darkness.

Something that has kept the enigmatic rulers for centuries from escaping Sereth-Naga to spread their wickedness to other lands.

Prowling the Darkness is a stand-alone novella that is part of the Rayden Valkyrie Tales.

Blog Tour!

Website: www.stephenzimmer.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/stephenzimmer7
Twitter: @sgzimmer
Instagram: @stephenzimmer7

Seasoned romance, or, old people like sex too

And who are you calling old? Get off my lawn.

Romance genres can get pretty darn niche.

The vampires of yesteryear became werewolves, and those became werebears, and those became billionaire alpha werebears, and those became interracial billionaire bear shifter menage pregnancy romances.*

One of the niches that isn’t quite so, er, specific is Seasoned Romance. Basically, it’s romance between people who are no longer nubile 20- or 30-somethings. It’s romance with characters who’ve had a life. They’ve been married and divorced or widowed. Or not, because they never found the right person before they got bifocals. They may still have teens at home, or they may be grandparents, or somewhere in between, or neither, or both.

Sela Carsen

But it’s still a relatively new genre, even with the advent of self-publishing, because for years, agents and publishers told us these stories wouldn’t sell. No one wants to read about people their parents’ age gettin’ it on, they said. And the occasional toe-dip into the older demographic just proved their point.

What’s that? You mean the audience they trained to respond only to perky virgins and buff billionaires didn’t flock to buy something they’d never seen before?

But since authors decided by the hundreds to self-publish, readers now have access to the stories we’ve always wanted to tell without anyone trying to yuck their yum.

Now, readers can type “seasoned romance” into the search bar on Amazon… and there are things there! They can even narrow it down to their favorite sub-genre — historical, paranormal, sci-fi**, military, small-town. Whatever they like to read, someone is writing it with characters who have a uniquely experienced viewpoint.

It’s become established enough that RWA — Romance Writers of America — just established a separate chapter during their national conference this summer called “Aged to Perfection.” The Seasoned Romance Facebook group that started three years ago now has nearly 3,000 members and grows daily. There are readers who are tired of characters who’ve never had to deal with menopause and poochy mom-tummies and random chin hairs. They’re looking for characters like them, who are facing retirement and wondering what’s the next step. Who just got their youngest child launched into the world, but now they’re caring for their elderly parents.

Love doesn’t stop after forty, so why should love stories?

*In case you thought I was kidding: An Heir for the Billionaire Werebears: A BWWM Paranormal Shifter Menage Pregnancy Romance.

** If you’re interested in seasoned sci-fi romance, check out Silver Wolf Rising, a stand-alone story that’s part of my Wolves of Fenrir series. Or read Ace’s Odds, my latest release that includes a seasoned romance on a futuristic space station.

Sela Carsen is an award-winning author of paranormal and sci-fi romance — with or without sex and dead bodies. Your pick. She maintains a permanent nerd-on for fairytales and mythology, and openly hoards reference books about obscure folklore. Born a wanderer, she and her family have finally settled in the Midwest. Until they move again, at least.

It’s a book birthday!

A Wolf to Watch Over Me turns four years old today!

I remember writing it, then being so ecstatic that I’d finally finished something after my hiatus of almost five years to take care of my family. My friends at Romance Divas challenged us to write short stories for a charity anthology, and I thought, “I can do that!” When I couldn’t even think about a novel, or even a novella, I knew I could write a short.

A Wolf to Watch Over Me by Sela Carsen

So I did! Just writing the words “The End” on something flipped a switch for me, and I started looking around for other projects.

Little did I know…

One of the friends who’d been in the anthology with me emailed to ask if I’d think of writing something else for a Viking anthology. And, by the way, it would be great if it was part of a series.

I think I typed Yes before I finished reading the email.

Sure! I had a series! (Not.) But then I thought about Hakon sidUlfr and how the world I built for him was based on Norse traditions and mythology, and it turned out I did have a story for his friend, Ule: A Most Wanted Wolf.

Then a different friend said she wanted to put out a group release of “seasoned romances,” which are romances with older characters, rather than the typical, nubile 20-somethings that populate the genre. And I thought, “Hey, Ule’s mother from Book 2 could use her own story.” The project didn’t work out quite the way we’d planned, but I still had this wonderful romance with amazing characters, so there was the third book: Silver Wolf Rising.

The folks who’d wanted the second book were going to put out a final Viking anthology, and by then, I knew it was time to wrap up my storyline with the hero I’d been waiting for. Where all the other stories stand pretty much entirely on their own, this one had to pull together all the threads I’d laid out before. And by now, I was feeling a lot more like a “real” writer again, with deadlines to meet and a sense that people were waiting. They wanted this story. It’s a thrill I’ll never get used to.

Writing Hakon’s brother in The Wolf Who Came In From the Cold was almost as freeing an experience as writing that first short. And I always think that the people who read the whole series are fellow travelers on my journey. 

Come along for the ride!

Sela Carsen is an award-winning author of paranormal and sci-fi romance — with or without sex and dead bodies. Your pick. She maintains a permanent nerd-on for fairytales and mythology, and openly hoards reference books about obscure folklore. Born a wanderer, she and her family have finally settled in the Midwest. Until they move again, at least. Website.

Linkage:

A Wolf to Watch Over Me: Literary Underworld – only $3!

A Most Wanted Wolf: Literary Underworld or other fine booksellers

Silver Wolf Rising: Literary Underworld or other fine booksellers

The Wolf Who Came In From the Cold: Literary Underworld or other fine booksellers

Wolves of Fenrir: Literary Underworld – $15 for the whole set!

The waiting is the hardest part

By Sara M. Harvey

There is this weird kind of myth that getting an agent is some kind of finish line. But I had read that once you clear that agent-getting hurtle all you do is trade in your old anxieties for new ones.

And it’s pretty true.

Authors spend months struggling with their manuscripts, finishing, polishing, perfecting, all the while worried if it I going to get finished? Is it going to be good? Seems like it takes forever to get from “Once upon a time” to “The End”.

And then, querying. Ugh. A fraught process that can take months or even years. I queried by latest book for two years (although there was a baby in the middle of it) and queried over 100 agents. Querying takes a LOT out of you. You have to write a summary of your WHOLE BOOK (YIKES!) and also a super compelling, charming-but-not-too-cute query letter. And once you have all of that, you send the query. And. You. Wait.

Depending on the agent and their workload and policies, you might have sent sample pages, the synopsis, or just the query letter, or some combination of all three. It can take a few days, a few weeks, or even a few months to hear a yes or no. And that waiting is HARD.

BUT! Let me tell you, that is NOTHING compared to the next step.

You get an agent and that’s so great and you and they made some revisions on your book and talked through the list of editors and publishers best suited to your book and the agent made some calls and sent some emails and sent your book to the people who said YES, LEMME READ THAT!

And. You. Wait.

Like your agent, these editors have a workload and house policies that will dictate their timing of turnaround on manuscripts.

The editors might give you feedback on why they said no, just like some agents might let you know why they passed on representation, but they don’t always. Sometimes that feedback is useful and sometimes, not so much….

I’m in the not-so-much useful spot right now. A handful of editors have said no to me (and my agent) but their feedback was the usual “This didn’t work for me.” Which is a legit, if frustrating, response. And honestly, if you are a halfway decent writer, that is going to be the thing you hear the most. And it SUCKS because you don’t know what didn’t grab their attention. But it’s mostly because it’s a well-written piece that is not connecting with them, not for any real reasons you can actually do anything about. In fact, one agent or editor might love a thing that another one really disliked. Just like readers! (Compare some one- and five-star reviews some time! It’s enlightening! [so long as it’s not someone complaining that your book is not a 36-pack of Jimmy Dean sausages]) 

So, while waiting, you are SUPPOSED to be working on another book, and not your theoretical next book in the proposed series…because your editor might not want to take your series in that direction, or might have some substantive changes to your first novel and then you have to rewrite TWO books instead of one. But damn, it’s hard to change lanes in your head to another storyline and characters, especially while waiting to hear back from this first one OCCUPIES YOUR ENTIRE BEING.

So, here’s where I am. My agent isn’t due to nudge our remaining editors for another week. Usual policy is to give editors three months to make their decisions. THREE. MONTHS.

Not a long time in the long run, but when each day you are obsessively checking your email, just like in your agent querying days, it can feel like forever!

But once an editor says yes, there’s going to be a whole SERIES of structural edits, plus copy edits, plus page proofs, and and and and and…. So a book sold today to a Big Six (Five? Four?) Publisher won’t be on the shelf for a YEAR OR MORE.

I knew there would be a lot of waiting, but you really cannot understand the anxiety and tedium until you have been there. And waiting. With new and exciting anxieties.

So, I’m going to go back to waiting, and cue up some Tom Petty.

SARA M. HARVEY lives and writes fantasy and horror in (and sometimes about) Nashville, Tenn. She is also a costume historian, theatrical costume designer, and art history teacher. She has three spoiled rotten dogs and one awesome daughter; her husband falls somewhere in between. She tweets @saraphina_marie, wastes too much time on facebook.com/saramharvey, and needs to update her website at saramharvey.com. Check out her Patreon!

Q&A: Steven Shrewsbury

Q: Why did you start writing?

SS: I’ve been telling stories since I was about 3. I listened to what they called Talking Tapes in the early 70s due to my eye troubles. My mother got me the Bible and Tarzan which probably explains my storytelling stance a lot. I started writing and telling tales as I grew older because I felt a need to tell stories not told by my fave authors or stuff history left out. I guess I was compelled. 

Q: What was your first paid published work?

SS: Wow, in a poetry rag when I was 19. It was a five-dollar check, in Poetry Motel, I think. I recall cracking up and showing that to my dad. 

Q: What inspired the idea for your current project?

SS: The one with (Brian) Keene was inspired by his trip to the boyhood home of Hunter S. Thompson and some punk in the street not giving a dang or caring who that was…l eading Keene to wonder how folks will recall him. I placed this emotion and experience in the Rogan Bastard realm and…well. Things happen. However, my current work is as close to a barbarian romance as I’ll ever get. That was inspired by a great many things and a lot of heartache. 

Q: What’s your daily writing ritual?

SS: I work a great deal. I rise early, shower, lots of coffee and let it roll. At times, I write in strange places.

Q: Do you do research for your books? If so, what’s your favorite resource besides Google?

SS: I actually look stuff up in real books and go to the library. The ladies there assisted me greatly in the creation of Philistine, because books on those folks are rare. I also draw on a lifetime of reading bios and others works that usually accumulate into a work. 

Q: Who are your favorite writers?

SS: Robert E. Howard, Karl Edward Wagner, H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Manly Wade Wellman…oh, some live folks? Joe Abecrombie. 

Q: Do you listen to music when you write? What kind?

SS: Sometimes. Johnny Cash, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Queen, Hank Williams Sr, Jr and III, old Metallica, Alice Cooper, AC/DC, Waylon Jennings, Rob Zombie, Creedance Clearwater Revival

Q: How do you balance being a writer with your day job/family/secret identity as a superhero?

SS: It can be a real female dog of a time. At times, there ain’t much left of me at the end of the day. Still, one strives on. Just gotta pick yer spots.

Q: What was the most useful advice you got as a beginning writer? And the most useless?

SS: Karl Edward Wagner encouraged me to read other genres to expand my mind. Good advice. More good advice from Harlan Ellison was to not be a phony bastard like many are… that all being PC is just lying. Bad advice? A schmuck in NYC told me never to try and get paid to write as it was a danger to the purity of “the craft.” Meh. 

Q: What’s the weirdest/funniest/coolest letter or comment you ever got from a reader?

SS: I was offered oral sex from a guy in exchange for a book. Not my thing. Another thought my name was a pen name and demanded I reveal myself. Another had all of my books and just wanted to say thanks. That was cool. 

Q: How do you handle a bad review?

SS: Water on a duck’s ass; but see if it is really valid or if they really as just jealous I cockblocked them at a Con somewhere. There is a pub that will not even look at me because of that, but I digress. Gotta take the rough with the smooth. 

Q: Do you write happy endings? Why or why not?

SS: I’m always happy when it ends, ha ha … but the story tells itself. I suppose a few of mine have a grim or TWILIGHT ZONE ending, but there’s usually hope. I like to think folks are left entertained. 

Q: You’ve finished your book! What do you do after writing “The End”?

SS: I used to have a drink and smoke a cigar, but life moves too fast for me now to have such a perfect ritual. But having a beer & cigar isn’t so rare so I have to find a new ritual. I’d say I run through the yard naked, but I live way out in the country and no one would see anyhow. 

Q: If you won the lottery, would you keep on writing?

SS: Of course. I write because I HAVE to, not WANT to. It has to come out. 

Q: If you could advise a beginning writer, what would you suggest?

SS: DON’T. Naw, just kidding. Read. Read everything, all genres and keep trying. It is gonna suck at first. Keep trying and find your voice. Last summer, my eldest son was talking comic books with Brian Keene at SCARES THAT CARE. John then talked of fan fiction he wrote for Marvel, DC and Star Wars. Keene was surprised at a few characters John knew and as I laughed, Brian reminded me, “That’s how we both started, doing that, but it wasn’t called fanfic then.” True. I used to write mean Battlestar Galactica and Avengers fics in junior high. 

Q: What are you doing next?

SS: Writer wise? Trying to rework that fantasy novel, next draft of a suspense thriller, and overdraft of another fantasy work… and possible submit another Joel Stuart novel where he is 94 years old. Then, I might write some new stuff. 

Steven L. Shrewsbury lives, works, and writes in rural Illinois. More than 360 of his short stories have appeared in print or electronic media, along with more than 100 poems. His novels run from sword & sorcery (Overkill, Thrall, Bedlam Unleashed) to historical fantasy (Godforsaken) to extreme horror (Hawg, Tormentor, Stronger Than Death) to horror-westerns (Hell Billy, Bad Magick, Last Man Screaming). He loves books, British TV, guns, movies, politics, sports and hanging out with his sons. He’s frequently outdoors, looking for brightness wherever it may hide.