Well, that was a nice break, wasn't it? I don't remember the last time I didn't schedule an interview, but it was kinda relaxing.
I enjoyed my time - though it wasn't off as such. Still, it was limited to just two Farmers Markets over the weekend. What did you do?
In any case, it's time to get back to it - from here until January, I'm totally booked! So here we go, with Lauren Esker.
Links:
New release:
Not Half Badger (Sept. 10)
DCU or MCU?
MCU! I've just always been a Marvel girl.
A book you’re looking forward to release (by someone else)?
Cannot wait for the next Dresden Files. I'm completely hooked, and the last book left so many tantalizing threads dangling.
Coffee, tea, or cacao?
Tea all the way! (Black. Strong.) Although I also appreciate coffee and dark chocolate.
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
Very, very young. I wrote my first "book" at about age four or five. (I still remember having to ask how every word was spelled and painstakingly forming the letters.) I just always thought that books were neat and I knew that I wanted to write my own, and once I got old enough to realize that writing was a career and that it could be my career, I never wanted to do anything else. (That being said, I was in my late 30s before I published a book. A lot of life got in the way in the meantime.)
Where do you get your information or ideas for your books?
From all over. Most of my books are paranormal romance on the lighter and cozier end of things, but I draw lots of specific details of food, scenery, occupational details, and character quirks from my own life, things I've heard from other people, and so forth. As an example, the new release I'm linking to from this interview is set in the mountains and quite a lot of the descriptions are from places I've been. I needed a source of mild peril for the characters, and got an idea when I noticed on a recent drive that a lot of the trees along the road had died and snapped off in recent windstorms, so I decided to have a storm in which the characters have to go out with trees falling down around them. That kind of thing.
What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?
Erratic! I binge-write, but need breaks for brainstorming and simply letting my brain rest in between. So usually I write 3-4 days a week and do marketing or other tasks the rest of the week.
When did you write your first book and how old were you?
Well ... four years old, technically. It was about a horse in a field. But the first actual novel that I finished was a fantasy novel I wrote when I was 17 and 18. I had read that you can finish a novel by writing a page a day, so I wrote one page a day in longhand in a notebook, and I did finish it! It was over 500 pages long by the end.
What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
Reading, hiking, gardening, art, travel.
What does your family think of your writing?
They're completely supportive, in general, although the books I write aren't really the kind they read. (My husband and I realized very early in our marriage that having him offer opinions on my books was never going to do our marriage any good at all. He did read a few of my books while I was on vacation one time, though. Very sneaky.)
Do you have any suggestions to help someone become a better writer? If so, what are they?
Write a lot. Don't get too hung up on making your current project perfect. You'll learn more on your next project than you could ever imagine. And also there's a really excellent piece of advice that I read in Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird many years ago: don't try to save your best ideas for later, "when you're good enough." Use all your best ideas now. There will always be more good ideas; in fact, there's a bottomless well where those ideas came from, and the best way to get it to refill is to get used to dipping into it to make room for more.
Do you hear from your readers much? What kinds of things do they say?
Yes, often! I try to be as open as possible to my readers on social media such as Facebook. They mostly say very kind things, and I love reading what people have to say.
What do you think makes a good story?
I don't have a one-size-fits-all answer to that. I think a good story can be one that keeps the reader turning pages because they have to know what happens next, or a story that you keep thinking about, or one that you keep coming back to and rereading.
What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?
I was going to say none, but then I remembered visiting Robert Frost's house while on a driving trip of New England, and how much that meant to me. His poetry was very important to me as a teenager, and seeing the handwritten drafts of his poems was amazing.
Does writing energize or exhaust you?
Energize! It tires me out after a while, in the same way as running a marathon. But just like jogging or playing sports if that's something you enjoy, I absolutely love writing - the physical and mental aspect of just putting the words down. It really is the best job in the world (for me).
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
Don't worry about writing serious, important works of literary merit. Just write books people (and you!) want to read. The most important thing about telling stories is just to tell stories, and the best thing you can do for yourself as a writer is never lose touch with the part of yourself that used to making up stories with your dolls and toy horses when you were very young.
Are you traditionally or self published? Or both? Do you feel there are advantages to one over the other?
I'm completely self-published now. I had some books out with small presses about a decade ago, but at this point I'm totally happy with self-publishing. I may change my mind about this in the future if the market changes, though. I feel like the market is very indie-friendly right now, but that was not at all true twenty years ago, and it may make more sense for me to look into trad pub a decade from now, who knows! I like to keep an open mind and be flexible about my career.
How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?
Oh goodness. So many. The first novel I published was, I think, the seventh completed novel I'd written, but there were countless unfinished ones along the way, and there still are. I'm a lot better at finishing what I start these days, but I still have plenty of half-finished projects kicking around.
What does literary success look like to you?
Making enough money to stay home writing all the time. That's it. I just want to sell enough of my books to have a good life and keep writing my books.
What do you have coming next?
Not Half Badger, a cozy paranormal romance set in a scenic mountain lodge, out on September 10th! Doreen, the heroine, is a mechanic (a girl in a boys' world) and a badger shifter - big, loud, and grumpy. After getting fired for threatening to use a lug wrench on a customer who got handsy with her, she's decided to treat herself to a nice spa weekend and feel like a pampered princess for once. But she couldn't have expected what she actually finds when she gets to the lodge, or how thoroughly her spa weekend will be nothing like she imagined, and everything she hoped ...
Gazing at the autumn scenery, Doreen took in and let out a slow breath, filled with the scents of leaf mold and small creatures going about their lives in the forest. She could feel the remaining tension slide out of her body.
“I am one with the flow of energy in the universe,” she murmured. “I am a placid reflective pool of still water.”
While she didn’t exactly feel like a placid pool of anything, she got back into her car with a renewed sense of purpose.
More twists and turns of the road took her higher into the mountains. The colorful trees began to flow against a dark tide of pines and firs. Doreen’s view of the tallest peaks stunned her, their high summits already glistening with early winter snow. Mountains for her were calendar pictures and distant glimpses on the horizon. She had never been so close to them before.
She began to eagerly anticipate the lodge. The pictures on the website were vivid in her mind, a peaked log chalet with tall picture windows and beautifully landscaped grounds full of flowers. At this time of year, she supposed the flowers were probably not in bloom, but there would be plenty of red and gold leaves to take their place.
She couldn’t wait.
Following the directions on the website, she drove up a steep hill, the Camaro laboring on the climb and making her wince as it scraped against ruts in the gravel road. At the top of the hill, FATED MOUNTAIN LODGE was painted in large letters on a stray glacial boulder, surrounded by painted flowers in bright splashes of pink and gold. Doreen drove past it, through the trees, into a large open space.
There was a lawn, slightly brown and overgrown. There was a building. There were no flowers. There were also no logs, at least none visible. The building, vaguely recognizable in its overall shape as the one from the brochure, was swaddled in white plastic house wrap, some of which fluttered in streamers as if torn off by recent winds, and it was surrounded by scaffolding and ladders.
Doreen turned her engine off.
“Well,” she said after a minute.
She got out of the car. There was no sound except the rustle of wind in the pines and the occasional small plop of an acorn or dead leaf falling to the ground in the forest. After a minute or two, to her great relief, Doreen heard the sound of a power tool coming from somewhere out of sight among the outbuildings surrounding the main lodge. (Or what she hoped was the lodge, anyway.) She wasn't completely alone out here.
At least the weather was nice, Doreen reassured herself—just as a cloud rolled across the sun. She looked up at the ominous white fog cloaking the peaks of the mountains that she had been admiring earlier. It was starting to look like it might rain.
She left her purse in the car, pocketed her keys, and walked around the end of the building looking for the source of the power tool sounds. At least she wasn’t all alone up here, even if she seemed to have wandered into a construction site instead of the spa weekend of her daydreams.
Out back of the lodge was ... more construction. This part of the lodge grounds was in even more of a shambles. It looked as if most of the landscaping had been torn up and was being redone. There was a large pile of rocks next to a muddy pit which, Doreen supposed, in light of the recent autumn rains, was probably in the process of becoming the “Outdoor Rock Pool” promised on the website.
“Hmm,” said Doreen, her glorious spa weekend dreams deflating tragically.
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