Elizabeth Richards, Wings
What’s your writing ritual like? Do you listen to music? Work at home or at a coffee shop or the library, etc?
If I’m being lazy (which is most of the time), I’ll write at home, sat on my sofa in my PJs, with a movie on in the background. Otherwise I’ll either go to my art studio and listen to cheesy 80s pop, or head into town and work at a coffee shop. I once spent so much time at my local Costa, they started giving me free coffee! It was very kind of them, but I felt obliged to drink it and got terrible heart palpitations for the rest of the day!
Elizabeth Richards is the author of the Black City trilogy, the final book of which Wings, came out June 12th. Visit her website here | Amazon | IndieBound | Goodreads
Michelle Krys, Hexed
How long did you work on the book?
The first draft of HEXED took me roughly 4 months to write. It was a fast draft for me, but I’d been pushing myself to finish in time to enter a blog contest. While I didn’t get in, I did end up with a completed draft that surprised me by not being entirely sucky, and after a few weeks polishing it, I sent it off to agents.
How long or hard was your road to publication? How many books did you write before this one, and how many never got published?
Writing a book was something I always said I wanted to do but never actually made the time for—it was always something I’d do later, and when I had more time. Then in 2009 I had a baby. My son slept through the night and took 3-4 hour naps during the day. Living in Canada, I had a yearlong maternity leave, which meant I had a lot of free time on my hands. I realized that I’d probably never get a better opportunity to finally give my dream of writing a book a shot. So I spent that year writing and editing my first novel, which was terrible and unsurprisingly got no agent love. But I had loads of fun writing it, so I took what I’d learned and put it toward my next novel, which was HEXED.
I mentioned it took me about 4 months to write HEXED. I queried for roughly a month after that before I landed my wonderful agent, Adriann Ranta of Wolf Literary, and we went on submission to editors. A book deal with Wendy Loggia at Delacorte came a month later. Which is to say that I’m so glad I finally pushed myself!
What’s your writing ritual like? Do you listen to music? Work at home or at a coffee shop or the library, etc?
I almost exclusively work from home, either at the kitchen table or in my bed. I don’t listen to music while I write—I find myself singing along instead of writing, which is sort of distracting—and in fact, I prefer total silence. I also need a hot coffee at the ready, and enjoy an electric heating pad on my back. After that I just need to get a bit of internet surfage out of the way before I can begin: gmail, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, writing blogs I follow, forums I belong to, a few celebrity gossip sites (Perez, Radar Online, Dlisted, The Superficial, People, US Weekly, TMZ). You know. Just the basics.
I’m sort of a high-maintenance writer.
Michelle Krys is the debut author of Hexed, which released June 10th! Visit her website here | Amazon | IndieBound | Goodreads
Kate Karyus Quinn, Don’t You (Forget About Me)
What’s your writing ritual like? Do you listen to music? Work at home or at a coffee shop or the library, etc?
I mostly sit at my dining room table with my laptop. I actually have a desk at home too, complete with a desktop computer, but that computer is older (and thus slower) and the desk is always covered in piles of stuff too important to throw away but also with no other logical place to put it. In other words, my desk is a total disaster area. I do often like to listen to music and with (DON’T YOU) FORGET ABOUT ME I leaned heavily on the score from Edward Scissorhands.
Kate Karyus Quinn is the author of Another Little Piece and Don’t You (Forget About Me) which came out June 10th. Visit her website | Amazon |
Katherine Longshore, Brazen
How long did you work on the book?
Because BRAZEN was my third book under contract, I was very aware of the fact that I had deadlines that needed to be met. So I completed much of my research while I was still writing a first draft of TARNISH, and started writing the week after I turned that draft in. So technically, I worked on BRAZEN for eighteen months. But because it was so difficult for me to find my footing with the character and the story, I threw away my first two attempts and took another six months to start work on the character who became the Mary you see in BRAZEN. That zero draft took five months, and then I had to take it apart completely to wrangle it into any kind of shape at all. Not an easy process, and definitely not an enviable one, but one that taught me more about writing than the three that came before.
Katherine Longshore is the author of Gilt, Tarnish and Brazen, as well as Manor of Secrets. Brazen came out on June 10th. Visit her website | Amazon | IndieBound | Goodreads
Eve Silver, Push
How long or hard was your road to publication? How many books did you write before this one, and how many never got published?
My road to publication was long and convoluted. I wrote my first book when I was nine. It was the story of an unwanted teddy bear that found a new and loving home. i submitted that story to a publisher and got my first rejection letter. As an adult, I amassed hundreds of rejection letters from agents and editors before I made my first sale in 2005. But it definitely wasn’t smooth sailing after that. Published authors get rejections all the time and they just keep trying.
~~~
Eve Silver is the author of Rush and Push, which just released on June 10th. Visit her website here | Amazon | IndieBound | Goodreads
Tessa Gratton, The Strange Maid
How long did you work on the book?
I started the original draft of what was to become The Strange Maid in the summer of 2008, but didn’t dedicate myself to it until 2011. All told, it took me 2 years of fairly dedicated work to write and revise it, including multiple edit letters and an agent-intervention because I was being terrible and crazy. As I say in my acknowledgements, I’d like to thank everybody who is still my friend.
What’s advice would you most like to pass along to other writers?
HAVE ADVENTURES and CULTIVATE CURIOSITY. Writing is a craft that only takes a lot of practice, but the stories come from people and experience and learning.
Tessa Gratton is the author of The Lost Sun and The Strange Maid which released on June 10th. Visit her website here | Amazon | IndieBound | Goodreads
