Transcript of my Author Interview

Early Career

What kind of books inspired you as a child?

My mother was a great lover of literature and instilled in me a deep love and respect for stories and poems. She read widely to me, all of which inspired me in different ways, including things like; A Child’s Garden of Verse, The Railway Children, Anne of Green Gables, The Water Babies, A little Princess. As I got older I explored a wide variety of stories but found that modern historical fiction was my favourite. As a young teen, I used to spend early Saturday mornings in the local library in Fairfield, taking my younger sister with me. I used to spend all morning – at least 3-4 hours just browsing and choosing, losing track of time. My sister used to get bored and was always told off by the librarian. I then had to heave my massive haul of about 15 large hardback books home with me, regretting my life choices all the way, until I got home and spent the whole rest of the weekend reading. 

Did you always want to write? Who or what encouraged you to write?

I always wanted to write. It was one of those things inside that calls for attention but you ignore, because schools and conventionality tell you that writing isn’t a real career choice. So, it is something I ignored for a lot of years and did in secret as my guilty pleasure. It was only getting older that got me thinking about how life is far too short to focus on what society expects of you and what you ‘should be doing’, rather it is much better to focus on what you really want. However, even then, even after writing a couple of books, I still had this resistance that – author isn’t a proper career choice in life. I’m slowly learning to stop worrying and start just enjoying life in the way I really should.

Tell me about your career in marketing – how did you get into it? Were you freelance or did you work for an agency?

I got into marketing straight from finishing my BA degree in English with Creative Writing, and after doing a year of voluntary work with the university PR department. A small local company were expanding their marketing department and wanted to employ a professional writer to help with their website and marketing materials. As part of this role I wrote everything from website product descriptions, advertising materials, course material, information leaflets and flyers, catalogues, blogs, articles, PR pieces, social media marketing and even wrote a training script for a DVD learning course. Following this I’ve worked in many businesses and in many industries in the corporate world ending up as the head of marketing, but I always wanted to work for myself and live autonomously. So, after a few years of leaving to work freelance and going back to day jobs, I’m currently happily working for myself and building and growing ways to help people learn how to do marketing themselves. 

Do you have any proofreading tips?

The best way I’ve found to proofread is to look at it with cold eyes, which is to say that if you try to proof work you’ve only just finished writing you’re more likely to miss things. However, if you look at your work a day or so later, or even just a few hours, you’ll find that mistakes are more easy to spot and any sentence structure issues will be glaringly obvious. Having said this, particularly when working in marketing, this isn’t always possible so in this instance, I would try to take a break from it then go back later. Ultimately, you need to train yourself to spot mistakes in your own work, which is much harder than proofing someone else’s work.

Are there any online tools you would recommend for writing?

For writing fiction, I use a writing programme called Scrivener, which is made for writing fiction, non fiction, scripts and can even be used for articles. It is a full service programme that even allows research to be collated in one place and formats for print, kindle and other ebooks. I also recently got some software called Plottr, which I’m loving for planning and plotting out narratives and timelines. 

For marketing, I would advise anyone wanting to get into the career to begin familiarising themselves with the back end of websites. I have found that a number of companies use WordPress at least for their blogs; and WordPress is a really easy intuitive tool to use. Also anyone wanting to build a career in this area should have their own online presence and a WordPress website is a good way to showcase skills. Also, familiarising themselves with social media marketing tools such as Buffer, Social Bee, etc are a good idea, alongside how email marketing works and how to use programmes such as Convert Kit and Mailerlite. Also, all of this advice works equally for anyone wanting to build an author career, even traditional publishing houses expect authors to be able to market and have their own online presence to a certain degree.

For any kind of content or copywriting work, even if that’s just for an author website, it’s important to know how to use Google analytics. To keep up with content and marketing industry trends and best practice, I look to Moz, Marketing week and Copyblogger among others. 

Present

What inspired you to create HFB?

I’ve always wanted to write a book ‘one day’ but when I realised that ‘one day’ would never come unless I finally made the decision to change my outlook, the idea to turn writing just one book into a full publishing company came from my finally admitting that this truly was what I wanted to do with my life and if that was the case, I needed to embrace this decision and decide how I wanted to go forward. Did I want to write and have a publisher, or did I want control over my future? I ultimately decided that I wanted the control of being the publisher, so decided not to shop the manuscript to publishing houses and instead take the idea my own way. I was inspired by people like Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn, who has done just this and is now making a six figure income from her publishing company, and many others, who have done a similar thing to Joanna Penn. I realised that if they can do it, I can too.

Your fiction focuses on the early in the 20th Century, particularly World War one and World War two, what sparked you interest in this period?

I have always been interested in the period. As a child my favourite film was the Sound of Music and the Nazi threat was very real and very fascinating to my young eyes, I also watched a lot of black and white movies from the era and set around the time with my grandad. This was then further cemented when I learned to read and began finding books set back then. At school we read Carrie’s War and I loved it, then as I got older we studied War poetry and I was just fascinated by the whole period and what people endured. 

The whole thing was then cemented when I was married very young, at 18, as my husband was a soldier. I spent all of my 20s moving around the world following his career and bringing up children, never really having a career of my own and feeling extremely frustrated and unfulfilled intellectually. 

I began to wonder about the women of the wartime period and how they coped with being left alone and not knowing if their husbands would come home. And, with my life being very much in tune with this, I further read and became interested in these women. 

It was at this time I read a series of autobiographies by Helen Forrester about her life growing up in the depression of the 1930s and her life as a young woman in WWII. This series moved me beyond words and is still to this day one of my ultimate favourites. 

This fully cemented my interest in anything written about the period and I spent many years reading everything I could find set during the time. I found myself able to sympathise with these women because of my own lifestyle as a military wife with my husband away a lot. I admired their spirit of endurance and determination despite almost impossible circumstances. I devoured everything I could about the period, and even now remain fascinated by these women who went through so much.

This meant that when I began to write Anna’s Home Front, I wrote the book I wanted to read – set during the period of WWI and WWII and with multiple protagonists and a mystery. 

Does writing energise your exhaust you?

It energises me, definitely. 

Although, I find writing content and copy, particularly for a business, can be quite exhausting as it takes a lot of concentration and reworking of every detail. Eight hours of this can be very stressful and exhausting, but satisfying when you see how you’ve done something well, it also tends to take any creative energy from you, which is one of the reasons I don’t write content and copy for businesses any more.

However, I find that I get very depressed and fed up if I haven’t written any fiction for a while, I find I feel particularly energised if my fiction writing is going well and the words are flowing, however, if there’s things going on in my life that are very stressful and I’m struggling, my creativity just disappears and I only have energy to exist when I feel this way.  

How do you overcome writer’s block?

I find that writer’s block can often be due to other things in my life that I’m worrying about, or is me not feeling confident in what I’m writing, or I don’t have enough information to write what I need to. 

It can be difficult to work out what the issue is when you’re in the situation, but often going away, doing something else then coming back can help. I do find that trying to push through can make it worse and make you more frustrated. It’s often easier to go for a walk, or give yourself permission to do something else.

In copywriting, though, I’ve never had writer’s block. It only happens in fiction writing, possibly because it’s a different kind of creativity and with content and copywriting it’s more factual and organised.

How do you motivate yourself?

Motivation can be an issue when you’ve got family, work or other things demanding attention and the last thing you want to do is sit down and do more work, especially when you’re working from home and small children don’t understand why you need to sit at the computer rather than spend time with them. Guilt can be a big issue. Motivation tends to come from thinking of what I want to achieve, and how it will feel with the finished product. However, I do tend to be over ambitious with my timescales. Everything is a fluid process and I’m learning all the time new ways and systems to balance life and work.

Did you ever consider writing under a pseudonym?

Not really. However, having said that, I wrote under S. Thomson, when I wrote my content and copywriting non-fiction book, but this is purely to distinguish it from my fiction, but it’s not something I would rule out. It would depend on whether the new book I wanted to write would warrant a new brand.

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

I wrote the Home Front Series as a duo series – Anna’s Home Front and The Prisoner, but I think I’m planning on writing some stand-alone books. I don’t much like writing in series and as a reader I’m a stand-alone fan rather than series, so it fits with me and what I like, which is a big part of what motivates me.

I tried to force myself to do series, because that’s what they tell you to do, but it’s not me. I don’t read series, I don’t love to write series. So, I’m going to go where my heart wants me to and trust the journey of emergence as I go. 

What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

I research lots of different aspects. So before beginning Anna’s Home Front, I read a lot of fiction set and written during the period to identify how others had handled the portrayal of the setting and characters. I also read a lot of non-fiction biographies and historian written text books on the period. I read widely about the setting, the way people talked, acted and how different it is from today. I also examined museums and places that focus on the period and visited stately homes to get an idea of the way they look, are run and then picked one in particular to base the house on. 

I read letters, listened to oral history and the music of the period, even buying and examining clothing and the way people dressed  to get a complete immersion of the time. 

I also research as I’m going along as sometimes you can’t get a feel for what you need until you are in the process. One particular thing I got stuck on for ages was Anna’s lipstick. It took a lot of research to find one that was around at the time by a manufacturer that made lipstick in Britain and would have been available in 1940. It’s such a small detail in the story but one that enhances it. 

Research is one of my favourite parts of the whole process and I have to stop myself getting too involved and actually remember to write something. 

Now I’ve got the stage where I’ve written a few books I start plotting and drafting first, then list areas I need to research in a separate file list, then, once that first draft is done I get stuck into the first round of research, do the second draft and repeat. 

How do you create your characters? 

I start with a particular personality trait or a particular feature and develop it through the first draft. It’s only through writing the first draft that the characters reveal themselves and develop naturally into real people. 

With Anna, I started with a strong personality trait of her being someone who hides from and runs away from problems, but has quite definite ideas of what and how things should be, I then put her in situations that challenged these beliefs and ideas.

I find that the first draft for me is the emergence state, it’s where things happen and characters develop, then the second draft is where I can really put that person into the book because I now know them and who they want to be. 

How many hours a day do you write?

It depends on the day, I try to write at least and hour a day. Sometimes this will yield less than a few hundred words, sometimes it’s way more than that. I have less time during school holidays when my daughter is off school, but in general I do try to write something every day. This isn’t always possible, but as long as something gets done, it’s ok. 

Where do you prefer to write?

It depends on which draft I’m writing and the type of writing. If I’m writing the first draft of a fiction project, I prefer to sit on my armchair in my office on my iPad and keyboard, second drafts get done at my office desk on a computer and so does any business or marketing work. 

What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?

Confidence crisis. I’ve learned that it’s just a part of the creative process and that most creatives have confidence issues, but there are days I wake up and wonder what on earth I’m doing and just feel overwhelmed by it all and other days I’m so motivated I feel I could just write all day. The hard part is when the bad days happen and there’s no one there to boost you. When I was in a job role, it’s much easier as the team around you are there to help, but with what I’m doing now, there’s just me so it’s harder to move through these points of crisis. 

Stephen King says ““The scariest moment is always just before you start.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, what advice would you give on how to start?

Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/150292-on-writing-a-memoir-of-the-craft

Starting is only scary if you allow yourself to look at the enormity of the project and how much work it will take. Instead, I find if you focus purely on what excites you about the project starting is easy. Think of it as a question – what can you do today to get you closer to your goal?- even if that is only a small thing, like beginning, it’s still a step closer than yesterday.

And there’s no one that said you have to write in a linear way, if you want to write out of order, do it. 

What advice would you give on how to proceed once you’ve started writing a book?

I believe in a degree of planning, you need to know where you’re going and what you want to achieve in the end, whether that’s fiction or non-fiction. This doesn’t have to be detailed, but an idea of where you’re going is a good idea. I plot out a plan for each chapter as the types of plots and story structure that goes into my books is quite complicated, so I need some level of plotting. 

This isn’t detailed but it just reminds me if any particular events need to happen in that chapter to move the story along. This acts as a reminder so that when I’m writing that chapter I have an idea of what I need to happen but isn’t rigid and still allows the words to flow naturally too.

Inevitably, this is a fluid process and often changes, particularly towards the end when unexpected things happen or parts I thought weren’t going to be important turn out to need a bigger scene. I would definitely advise having a plan to follow in the beginning, but I also believe in trusting emergence and on the whole I am a discovery writer, I allow my characters the room to breathe and grow, but within the loose structure of my often complicated plots.

Is there a book on ‘how to write’ that has inspired you?

Gosh yes, loads. But most importantly, Natalie Goldberg Wild Mind, Stephen Pressfield The War of Art, Anne Lamott Bird by Bird, 2K to 10K Rachel Aaron, The Successful Author Mindset  Joanna Penn, Writing Active Setting Mary Buckham, and many more. 

What’s the best way to market your books?

It depends on the genre, some genres are easier to sell that others. Romance books and thrillers are generally the biggest sellers with the widest audience.

However, I believe in long term strategy rather than short term gain, so believe in building an online platform, using content, social media and information to build a brand alongside advertising and events, which are used much more sparingly, ultimately it’s best if all channels are used to focus towards one goal. It’s about being strategic rather than just trying to be everything to everyone. Look at the things you like doing – add them to your strategy, take out the things you don’t like doing. Make sure everything is always focused around the same goal. I have lots of marketing tips on my marketing business website, Peony Creative Media.

As a mother, author, and business owner, how do you juggle your time?

As best I can! In seriousness though, you have to be fluid with your time and be prepared to change plans and move things around depending on what is important. You can’t be rigid with your time, but equally it’s important to make sure family understand that work time is important. I struggle with time as I am generally more of a free spirit and like to work on the things that make me happy that day. However, when you’re working in marketing and with clients, it’s much more difficult to do this. So, I structure my time to allow writing time and work time. 

Can you describe how it felt when you finished writing your first book? 

I was slightly disbelieving and sat staring at the screen for a few moments before thinking, wow, it’s done. It felt amazing to finish one of my lifetime goals. What was more surprising is how many people congratulated and wished me well.

Did success scare you?

Success is scary. As a writer, you are scared to fail and scared to succeed, which sounds crazy. Ultimately, us writers tend to be very introverted, and external attention is a scary and tiring thought, but equally, it’s something you have to embrace and understand that success is a good thing. 

I am probably still scared of success, and if I’m really honest, I think it’s scarier than failure. 

Did publishing your first book change your process of writing?

With my first book, I was learning how to write a book, how to knit all the pieces together and what my processes were. I find that once you’ve learned that you know what works for you and can follow the processes I learned the first time, which makes things easier and more streamlined. 

The first book is a learning exercise. You’re learning so many different things and you pour absolutely everything into it, but after that it is definitely an easier process.

What would say were significant milestones in your career?

First was finishing my degree, second was my career, third writing my first book, fourth finishing my MA and beginning my company and fifth is probably coming to a realisation that it doesn’t matter whether people like me or my writing, what matters is that I give myself the width to express freely what I need to.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Believe in yourself and stop worrying what others think of you all the time. You can do what you really want if you just believe you can. I wish you could see what I now see, because you would then not waste so much time going around in circles on paths you shouldn’t be on – just because society told you something stupid. 

The Future

What are your future plans?

  I’m writing another fiction book at the minute about a Land Girl and am building a course programme for business owners to learn marketing in my company. 

Where do you hope to be in 10 years’ time?

With a whole body of work and some collaborative projects under my belt, happy with life, happy with family and living how I want to.