Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
My name is Karen Reid. Actually, this is the first book I’ve written, in the sense of writing for publication. I wrote two books years ago for my niece and nephew, printed them myself and bound them into little books for them to read when they were just learning to read. They were both children’s stories. One was about an elephant that took a trip around the world in a sailboat. The elephant had to deal with pirates, sea monsters, and mermaids. There was one passage where the elephant ran into a storm and decided to take a shower. The other book was about a knight who wanted to be a chef instead. He learned to cook roast dragon and served it to the other knights, but they laughed at him. It was all about following your personal star instead of what other people tell you you have to be, or who you are. The books were a big success with my niece and nephew, and so later on when I had children of my own I recycled them. The whole thing gave me a real appreciation for what it takes to write children’s books. I suppose I could do that for publication, but I have never been really motivated to try.
I’ve also written many how-to articles that have never been published. These are mostly about hair styling but also about cooking, gardening, building your own computer, and auto mechanics. I find it helps me learn and remember how to do things if I write instructions down in descriptive, step-by-step fashion. I have a lot of material stored in notebooks and boxes of paper and on my hard drive that I might someday put together into books and publish, but so far it was all written for my own personal use.
I’ve been dedicated to hairstyling for many years now. That’s the main reason for my latest book. It’s compiled from some of the instructions I wrote myself over the years on how to braid hair.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
It’s called How to Braid Hair, and I was inspired to write it out of a desire to promote appreciation for the hair styling profession and for the art of styling hair. As I said, this is a compilation of instructions I’ve written for myself over the years on how to braid hair, which is only a small part of what I’ve written on hair styling. Since I’m a hair stylist by profession, that’s the biggest category of subjects I’ve written about over the years and tucked away in various places in my house and, more recently, on my computer’s hard drive. (My husband tells me I need to put all that old stuff onto the computer, too, and save everything to cloud storage so I won’t lose it. I’ll probably upload the computer files to cloud storage, like Google Drive or some such, but to transcribe all of that handwritten and typewritten stuff on paper would be a phenomenal chore! What I may do instead is to organize it according to a filing system, so I can find it more easily when I’m ready to put together another book on another subject.)
Anyway, I decided to publish How to Braid Hair in the hope that it will interest people in hair styling as a profession or at least as a hobby. Braiding hair is one of the easier types of hair styling to do, at least in the simpler forms. It’s also a way to give hair a very nice, “styled” look that it doesn’t have when it just hangs straight. It can look like you put hours and hours into styling your hair, when it’s actually much easier than that and doesn’t take long at all! I’m talking about the simpler braid styles, now, like the basic English braid. Even a French braid can be done much more easily than a lot of people realize. It really repays the effort. What I hope is that if people get interested in hair styling by way of something simple such as braiding hair, they’ll get the bug and go on to learn more. I will probably publish books on other aspects of hair styling in the future. But I thought that braiding hair made a good introduction to the subject, so that’s what I put together first.
I have to say, the process of putting together How to Braid Hair for publication made me appreciate more what my husband was saying about organizing my old written material. Some of these notes go back ten years or more! It probably took longer to find and organize all of my old written material than to put the book itself together for publication, including rewriting everything, formatting it, editing, creating the cover design, everything.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Well, it’s hard to say. What’s unusual? Isn’t every writer kind of unusual by definition? Isn’t being unusual part of what it takes to be creative? Also, aren’t we all individuals?
I guess writing a book in scraps over a period of ten years, along with material that is more appropriate for different books, and then having to go back afterward, hunt it all down, and splice everything together in the correct order, is unusual. I suppose most writers don’t write that way, but you know, until recently I never really considered myself a writer. I’m a mother, a wife, and a hair stylist, as well as an amateur gardener, chef, and computer technician. And I guess you could say I’m a professional at chaos. No, that’s a joke. Anyway, I don’t think I’d like to recommend that anyone else follow my example in terms of how to write. I’m happy with the results so far, but this is really inefficient and I don’t think I’m going to do the same thing in the future as far as original material, going forward.
The problem with that being that I still have boxes and boxes of old typewritten sheets, along with spiral notebooks full of my scribbling. About half of that is about hair styling and the other half about other things. If I’m going to publish more books on hair styling, which I would like to do, I’m going to have to wade into the mess again and pull out more material to organize into a book. In one sense it’s good, because all those future books are already written in first draft. In another sense, it’s not so good because everything is such a jumbled mess! But the material is there if I take the time to find it. I kind of think that my writing style is a lot like my mind. I don’t often forget anything, but it can get misplaced easily in connection with other things that have nothing to do with it on first glance.
What this means is that I will probably write (or I’ve already written) maybe half a dozen more books in the same way as I did How to Braid Hair. But I don’t think that I’d choose to do this if I was starting out from scratch today. Have any famous writers written in this way? I’ll bet there must have been at least one or two. But everyone needs to find the way of doing things that works for them.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
You know, that’s really hard to say, in terms of my writing. The only books I have either published or in the works are nonfiction, and my own reading is mostly either fiction or else history, and I’m not planning to write any history.
In terms of fiction, what I like best are historical fiction, mysteries, science fiction and fantasy. I love James Patterson! And I can spend hours and hours submerged in old vintage noir detective stories, back to and including Mickey Spillane stuff. I’m a fan of Harry Turtledove’s alternate history fiction, too. It’s fascinating to think about that kind of thing. He wrote a long series starting with How Few Remain that started with a single what if: What if the Confederate courier who lost Lee’s battle plans before the Battle of Antietam found them again, so they didn’t fall into Union hands? On that basis, the South won the Civil War, and that led to a series of books about a very different World War I, the years between the wars, and World War II. I think you have to study history pretty deeply to do something like that.
I have a lot of friends who are really into romance fiction, but I’ve never gotten into that very much. I don’t really fit the stereotype of a hair stylist very well, do I?
What are you working on now?
I’m not actually working on anything at the moment if you mean having a book actually in the works. I have some more titles floating around in my head. These include How to Cut Hair, Basic Hair Styling, Advanced Hair Styling, and How to Color Hair. All of those books are already written, just like How to Braid Hair was when I started putting it together, so it wouldn’t involve writing so much as exploration of the archives in my closets, my garage, and the basement. Honestly, I kind of cringe at the thought! But at some point I do need to do it.
Probably the next step will be to do what my husband keeps telling me I should, go through and organize it all. I can divide it up into mini-articles on hair styling, gardening, auto mechanics, computer technology, and whatever, and then it would take a lot less fishing to find what I want for future books. The biggest problem will be those spiral notebooks, probably. I’ll end up ripping pages out of them to separate the page on dying hair in streaks from the one on how to make your compost heap work. If you’re getting the impression that my material is a mess, you’re right.
Anyway, of the titles in my mind right now, I think probably Basic Hair Styling is the one I’d want to pursue next. That would be a more general treatment of hair styling than the more specialized How to Braid Hair. It would introduce things like assessing the curl and shape, cutting hair to fit the shape of the head, feathering, layering, and so on, all of the basics of hair styling. Anyone who’s gotten the bug from How to Braid Hair might find it interesting.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
You know, I’m not doing a whole lot to promote my book, if you mean taking out ads and things like that. I never buy books based on an ad, so why would I expect people to buy mine that way? I participate in social media, and I am doing things like this interview. What I think is that the best advertisement for a book is another book. I hope I’ll get better as a writer (or re-writer, maybe I should say) if I press on, and that seems more important even in terms of book sales than any kind of marketing or promotion. The best advertisement is word of mouth, and that has to come from my readers, not from me.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
This is absolutely the best time in history to be a writer. Don’t let anyone tell you differently! It’s harder than ever to get published with a big publishing company, but there’s also less need than ever before to do that. A writer today can have complete control over his or her artistic output. You can set the price for your work, determine when it becomes available, make your own decisions about fonts, formatting, cover design, everything. Print on demand, e-books, and on line book sales are wonderfully liberating for writers, even as they’re giving the big publishing companies fits. That should tell you what kind of relationship has always existed between publishers and writers, by the way. (Can you say “exploitation”?)
All of that said, it’s never been easy and it probably never will be. But if you want to write, if it’s in you to write, just do it, and keep doing it, because you only fail if you quit trying, but getting where you want to go can take some time and a lot of work.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
The best advice I ever heard from anyone came from my mother. She told me, “Karen, you can do or be anything you want to, but always remember it’s the love of your family and friends that really make you happy. Everything else is just small stuff.” I think that a lot of people could benefit from that wisdom. Is it really important that we have lots of money, a big house, and fancy toys? That’s nice and fun, but it doesn’t really make for happiness, does it?
What are you reading now?
I’ve just started reading Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series. It combines two genres I like, detective stories and fantasy, because the main character is a detective who’s also a wizard. I like it so far because it’s really character driven and the characters are intense, especially Harry Dresden himself. I really find myself caring what happens to him, and that means a lot to me in a story.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Well, as I said, I have a lot more material in my closets, my basement, and my garage, as well as saved on my hard drive. There’s almost no end to the books that could generate. I think organizing all that old material will be the next step. After that, I plan to put together some more books on hair styling. I may or may not branch out into other areas I’ve written on before but that are outside my professional expertise. Who knows, I may even publish the two children’s books I wrote for my niece and nephew. I think a children’s book needs illustrations, though. That means I’d need to find someone to illustrate my children’s stories, because I’m not much of an artist.
What is your favorite book of all time?
I’m going to answer with a series of books, rather than a single book. I would put Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, which is historical fiction about the end of the Roman Republic, up there at the top of the list. It’s not because it’s especially well written but because of the amazing amount of research she put into it. It’s also about one of the most interesting periods of history. It starts with Gaius Marius and ends with Augustus. The main characters are mostly people out of history, but she really makes them come alive. I don’t think I’d have the patience to write something like that, so I really admire anyone who can.
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