Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I am an extraordinarily shy girl and trying to fill out a personal profile or write a short description of myself is a huge fear of mine. I don’t have much of a colorful picture to paint about my life currently as it is pretty boring. I’m a fairly reclusive person, I keep to myself and I spend a great deal of my time daydreaming, writing and working on my art.
Currently I have self-published seven books. I have a novel, five short poetry books and a short story related to my novel available. I have a lot of other work in various stages of completion including three finished short stories. I plan on publishing one of those stories in the very near future but more on that later.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
The name of my latest book is The Sunset Script and elements of my life, specifically my ongoing battle with severe depression, is the inspiration for it. It is a book about pain and it is a book about bringing things to a close. The book address a variety of issues including depression, death, violent crime and the abuse of drugs and alcohol. Some of those issues hit very close to home for me while other issues are things we all see and hear in the news every day. Thee issues affect everyone in some way, shape or form and for a lot of people there is no easy way to overcome those issues. I will admit the book may be a tough book to read but it was also a tough book for me to write.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
The most unusual writing habit I have is writing in the dark. I would not recommend that practice to anyone but for some reason the motivation for me to write often comes right as I am trying to fall asleep so I find myself writing either by flashlight or from the glow of my laptop. I also write everything out by hand first because the words come to me a little easier that way.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Hands down I would say Zora Neale Hurston is my biggest influence. I am still in awe of her colorful way of writing. I love the unique dialects she applied to the characters in her stories and I have a great appreciation to how raw and real her stories are. Not every story is a journey of magical happiness. People experience hardships, people have struggles and some of those struggles are more than enough to cripple even the toughest souls but we can learn to put our lives into perspective and attempt to gather strength from them.
What are you working on now?
Right now I am working on my novels and my short stories since they are all related to each other and it is a highly expansive world that I have spent nearly the last fifteen years daydreaming about.
The novel I am working on is book two of my In Search of Infinity Series. To give a brief synopsis of the first book, In Search of Infinity: Living Through the Glass, I would have to say the first book is about a psychic, paraplegic Goddess who is shunned by her family for her disability until a younger relative suffering from his own personal demons shifts the balance of power in his favor and forces our main character to use her powers to figure out what led to not only the deaths of her caretakers but how to stop the chaos surrounding this relative’s messy lifestyle.
Book two of this series is told from the perspective of this male relative. From the first book we learn he was punished for being a flighty womanizer and instead of using his punishment as a means to change his ways for the better, he finds himself falling into a dangerous cycle of anger and dementia that drives him down a dark path of becoming a murderer in the name of freeing himself from his punishment. However, the fallout from his actions may not necessarily signal the end to his suffering.
My short story series entitled The Lost Stories. I settled on that name for the series because I want the focus to be on the lives of all of the characters who appear in my In Search of Infinity novels. The first short story, Ubiquitous Aspirations, is about the family patriarch’s obsession to have a son to leave his creations to. The main character does get his son but it comes with a high price to pay.
The second short story is the story I mentioned earlier. I have yet to come up with a title for it but when that happens I hope to have that published within the next couple of months. This short story is about one of the associates of the family patriarch. He is a man with a fiery temper and he holds wildly different views than his colleagues on how to deal with women, marriage and romance. To dispel notions of his political incompetence to his colleagues, our main character in this story executes a new method of social warfare to try to achieve world domination but a tiny oversight may threaten to derail his master plan for good.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I am still very new at promotion. I have only joined the ranks of social media this year and after 9 months I still haven’t become very comfortable with any platform. I admit my shyness is a huge hindrance to promoting my books so while I would like to give advice to others about what methods work for me I am unable to because I am still trying to learn about what practice works best for someone like me.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
My advice to new authors is to write what you want to write about. We have all experienced moments where someone told me what we couldn’t do. Writing is open-ended and as long as you have a topic in mind then there’s nothing wrong with going for it and telling the story you want to tell.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Someone once told me that everything isn’t for everybody. For every one person who doesn’t like my writing there is another person out there who will like it. It is not my duty to try to get everyone to like my work and it is far less stressful to not think about trying to please everyone and trying not to offend anyone for the purposes of telling a politically correct story. This world needs originality and sometimes that comes with going against the grain.
What are you reading now?
Right now I am not reading anything. I am a person who finds it highly uncomfortable to read another person’s work because I don’t want to feel as if I am using someone else’s work to influence my own work. Also I am ashamed to admit it but daydreaming about my stories takes up a lot of time.
What’s next for you as a writer?
The only thing I am focused on at the moment is finishing my novels and my short stories. I have no idea where that will take me and with bits and pieces of over fifty stories still swirling around in my head. I still have plenty of time to get all of that done and try to figure out my next steps.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
I don’t think that could be possible with me. Personally I would prefer a to take a pack of pens and 3 or 4 five subject notebooks but I get bored so easily that if I had a few books with me I would have read them by the time I reached the island and then I would lose the desire to read them again.
Author Websites and Profiles
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