Chantilly White

Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I started writing as soon as I learned to string letters together to make words. I wrote my first “novel” when I was eight–it was a 200-page treatise on what my life as an adult would be like, down to the rose-shaped details on the hand-carved white-wood furniture in my imagined third daughter’s bedroom (out of eight kids total–so glad that part didn’t happen!), and the fact that no one would be allowed to wear shoes in the house. I was going to buy a million acres and build houses for every kind of animal I liked–dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, guinea pigs, you name it–and rescue them from all the shelters in the world so they could live happily ever after in the houses I built for them.

My parents thought I would become an actress because I was always acting out my favorite fairy tales and making them call me by various character names–Cinderella, Dorothy (from The Wizard of Oz) and Aurora/Sleeping Beauty were big favorites. However, aside from having no real talent for acting and a serious case of stage fright, my real aspirations at a young age were to become Miss America and follow that with the discovery that I was, in fact, a princess and in line for the throne. Any throne. Barring that, a career as a prima ballerina would do.

Instead, I continued writing and earned a degree in Creative Writing/English Literature from the University of California at Riverside, which I almost immediately packed away in favor of starting a family and pouring my energies into raising my three children. It wasn’t until years later, when the youngest was finally old enough to fend for himself a bit, that I decided to pick the writing back up in a serious way, and that’s when I finally joined Romance Writers of America (RWA) and got down to business. There were some false starts in the first year or two, but when the big publishing industry shift really got rolling, I decided the time was right to take control of my career and indie publish.

Since then, I have published three (short) novels, two novellas and a short story, with another novella coming in the next month or so, and I have the usual pile of other manuscripts under the bed. Whether any of those will see the light of day is still up in the air. While indie publishing is a LOT of work, I am very much enjoying the process and being in control of my career. I’ve met an incredible cast of fellow authors whose support has been invaluable. This journey has been amazing so far and it is just beginning.

What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My latest book is Cupid’s Mistake, which released in February 2013. It’s a sequel to Unwrapped, a friends-to-lovers Christmas story which came out over Christmas 2012, and features Allison Kelly, the best friend to the heroine in Unwrapped, Mia Patterson. Allison’s story really came about after my friend and beta reader finished reading Unwrapped. She loved Allison and thought she needed her own story. I agreed, and Cupid’s Mistake was born.

Do you have any unusual writing habits?
My writing style is often a mess. I will write the beginning, then the end, then work back to the middle, work forward to the middle, and hope they meet up. I rarely work straight through in a linear fashion. I’ll also write a bunch really fast–for example, I’ve written a 110,000 word novel in less than a month–but then I’ll take weeks off from writing at all. I’ve tried every plotting method known to writer-kind, but none of them really work for me. I’m a “pantser,” which just means I write by the seat of my pants, letting the story unfold as I go along, rather than to an outline or any sort of formalized plot. Usually I start with either just one character or a particular scene, which as often as not doesn’t make it into the final version of the story.

I’ve heard authors talk about their characters taking over a story and refusing to do what the writers want, but I always thought that was just exaggeration or a fun part of the writer’s story. Until I wrote my third published story, Pearls of Pleasure. That story was supposed to be a lighthearted, super-sexy romp, and instead turned into a rather dark, emotional book. My characters, David and Gwen, were a married couple, and they just flatly refused to go along with the course I’d originally planned for them. I had no choice but to let them lead the way!

What authors, or books have influenced you?
Oh, my gosh, so many writers and books have influenced me, I couldn’t possibly list them all! Like all writers, I’m a voracious reader, though I haven’t had as much time for reading as I would like lately. I still squeeze it in as often as I can, but it never feels like enough.

My earliest favorites included the Louisa May Alcott books, the Nancy Drew series and Trixie Belden series, a lot of “children’s classics” like Alice In Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, and of course all the Disney fairy tales, as well as the darker Grimm’s Fairy Tales versions. I was always reading as a kid, and that never really stopped. When I was nine, my family moved from an area I loved, where I felt very happy and comfortable, to one where I felt like a very unwelcome, very lonely alien. Books saved me during my first years in that place.

A pivotal moment in my reading history happened while on vacation when I was eleven or twelve. My grandparents had a vacation cabin in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, and I was visiting for several weeks. I loved my grandparents to distraction, but there was absolutely nothing to do at that cabin but watch the grass grow or the ripples spread in the lake from the fish darting past–something I would love now as an adult–and I was bored out of my mind after the first week. And probably being a pretty big brat about it. My grandmother, who I’m sure was desperate to shut me up by then, grabbed the biggest book she could find off of her shelf and thrust it beneath my nose with the firm commandment to, “Read!” The book was The Proud Breed by Celeste de Blasis, and it opened my young eyes to the world of women’s fiction and romance novels in a big way. All my grandmother remembered about that book was that it was a history of California–and it was. Sort of. But mostly it was a romance between Tessa and Gavin and in parts was pretty explicit! My grandma kept asking me what I was giggling about.

After that, I went through both my mother’s and grandmother’s collections of romance novels pretty quickly and started collecting my own. I read the rest of Celeste de Blasis’s books immediately, followed by the works of Johanna Lindsey, Jude Deveraux, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, Danielle Steel, and many others. I branched out into other genres and read Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, Patricia Cornwell, and on and on. Then I found Nora Roberts, my all-time favorite romance author, as well as her JD Robb series.

The next most pivotal moment came about because of a Christmas gift my mom wanted to send my oldest daughter–the first two Harry Potter books. The books were just gaining traction in the US at the time, and all I’d heard about them were some wild ravings about witchcraft and other hysterical craziness. I told my mom to send them but that I wanted to read them first, just to see what all the fuss was about and to make sure they were appropriate for a ten-year-old. I was hooked and have been the biggest Harry Potter nerd on earth since then. My family and I are involved in the fandom both online and in real life and go to LeakyCon (a Harry Potter fan convention) every year. I love-love-love those books and everything about them.

Every book and author I have ever read has influenced me in some way, and I am so grateful to all of them for their blood, sweat and tears. I would not be the person, or the writer, I am today without their stories, each of which still lives in my head and in my heart.

What are you working on now?
I have a couple of projects going right now, the first of which is due to be released within the next month or so. It’s a contemporary romance novella called Deluge of Desire and is the story of a young couple, Tracey and Adam, who have been together since their freshman year in high school. They went to college together and have been living together since their sophomore year at UW-Madison in Wisconsin. They’re very committed to each other, but now they’re out of school and in the real world, navigating jobs, bills, and grown-up life for the first time. Adam wants to get married ASAP–and has in fact been proposing with varying degrees of seriousness to Tracey since they were fifteen–but Tracey is determined to make something of herself first. This story explores the difficulties of being in a long-term, committed relationship but having different timeframes for the whole marriage-and-babies question. Society’s views and women’s ideas about previously traditional roles have changed so much over recent decades–I was interested in how young couples deal with those pressures while trying to be true to their relationships and their hearts. It’s short, so it doesn’t get too deep, and it’s a romance, so clearly it has a happily-ever-after ending, but it was a fun story to write. I hope readers will find it an enjoyable escape.

Next up is my final Pearls book (Pearls of Passion, Pearls of Wisdom, and Pearls of Pleasure are available now), Pearls of Persuasion. It’s the story of a New York debutante whose family loses everything in the crash of 1929 and how she copes with going from being a society princess to a destitute young woman responsible for the care of her very ill mother. Finding love is the last thing on her mind, especially when it involves the son of a very wealthy family who made off with several of her family’s treasures when they had to sell them at auction.

What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Ah, promotion! The bane of many a writer’s existence. It’s so hard to go out in the world and do the “please buy/love/review my book” dance. I’d much rather stay safely in my writing cave and live in my stories, but promotion is a necessary part of the business.

I don’t have a particular method or website I can point to and say, “Do this and it always works!” I wish I did. I try different things all the time–different places to advertise, giving away free books, doing signings, etc. But for me, I’ve found it easier and much more satisfying overall to build relationships with people instead of trying to “sell” to them all the time. It’s a turn off to me as a reader when other writers do that, and I’ve been known to unfollow people on Twitter whose streams are full of nothing but “Buy me, buy me, buy me” messages all the time. My philosophy is engage me as a person, chat with me, get to know me a little, and then I will be more than happy to buy your book and promote you, so I try to follow that in my own business. Yes, writing is a business, and yes we need sales to stay in business and to be able to continue writing instead of working at the local fast-food place, but we’re also people and fellow readers. We should respect that as writers and remember how it feels to be treated as a dollar sign rather than as a person. Just don’t do it.

Do you have any advice for new authors?
Learn your craft but don’t get so involved in classes and workshops and how-to books that you forget to write. Bind the shoulder critic with duct tape and stuff him or her in a deep, dark well. Just write.

Find a few people you trust and whose opinions you respect–fellow authors and readers–to be critique partners and beta readers (not the same thing!), and listen to their advice. Don’t despair over finding those people. Building those relationships and finding the ones that work takes time. Invest in the process and in them–these are people who, if you are lucky and do it right, will be with you throughout your career. They are your biggest supporters and most helpful mentors.

If editing and grammar are not your strong suits (or even if they are, really), hire a professional, whether you are seeking traditional publication or putting out your work yourself as an indie author. (And if you are going the traditional route, hire an entertainment lawyer with experience in publishing contracts to negotiate for you when you get offered a contract!!)

If you cannot afford a professional editor, find someone with strength in that area and trade services with them–they will edit you and you will make their indie book covers or whatever. Work it out. But never put a book out there that hasn’t been through several pairs of eyes, no matter how great your own editing/revising skills may be. As writers, we are simply too close to our work to see it clearly. Other people will always find things we’ve missed, and it is far, far better to hear about it from a friend or colleague than in a scathing review on Amazon.

Learn your business. It’s ultimately your job to run your career. For business savvy, I recommend reading Dean Wesley Smith’s blog religiously. He is strongly pro-indie, but he gives great advice on all aspects of publishing, no matter which path you are seeking, traditional or indie. Also read his wife’s blog, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. They each have years and years in the industry and are extremely smart individuals.

You will get bad reviews. Accept that now. It’s part of the business, and part of being a professional is knowing how to handle them, which means licking your wounds in private and ranting to your best friend–not in print, and never online. In public, you suck it up, put on a smile, and continue writing. Never, never, never, ever engage a reviewer unless it’s to say thank you, and even then, just don’t. Remember a review is just that person’s opinion and has nothing to do with you personally, no matter how personal it might feel to hear that someone hated your book. Someone will always hate your book, it’s just the nature of the beast, but just remember that they are not your reader. Move on. Your readers are out there waiting, and your readers will love your work. You will find them, it just takes time and dedication. Don’t give up.

But the biggest piece of advice is always WRITE. Write, write, write. If you don’t have a book to put out there, nothing else matters, even if you have the most brilliant marketing plan in the history of forever. Write.

What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Loosely, “You can’t fix a blank page,” a quote that has been attributed to Nora Roberts and translates to WRITE. Write the thing out, then go back and fix it when it’s done. But WRITE.

What are you reading now?
I just finished The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (AKA JK Rowling) and really enjoyed it, which was a relief because as much as I loved the Harry Potter series, I wasn’t a huge fan of her first post-Harry book, The Casual Vacancy. My Kindle is chock full of books I can’t wait to get to next, from authors like Jami Davenport, Anthea Lawson, Kristine Cayne, and Christine Fairchild.

What’s next for you as a writer?
The next two things I’d like to tackle are getting my books into print via CreateSpace and Lightning Source, and on audio with ACX. I’m not very techie at all, so it’s taking me longer than I would like to figure those things out, but I’m hoping to have the print editions done by the early part of next year and the audio by next summer. I also have a couple of super-short story ideas I’d like to submit to some magazines and anthologies, but I want to publish Pearls of Persuasion and Deluge of Desire first, then see where I stand. My writing projects list is about twenty deep right now. I make my own book covers and have them all ready to go for all twenty-plus stories, so they’re really itching to get written.

What is your favorite book of all time?
That’s an evil question–there are so many awesome books out there! But Harry Potter, hands down. And please don’t ask me to rank the series, because I just can’t do it! LOL I love them all.

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