Fellow Author Friday ~ Amalie Cantor

Please welcome Amalie Cantor to the blog for this week's Fellow Author Friday! 

When and how did you decide to become a writer?

I think that, in one way or another, I’ve always been a writer. My first attempt at a novel came in seventh grade. I made it through maybe eight chapters before I decided I was already bored with the topic and dropped the whole thing.  I dallied with poetry and fiction on and off through the years, but I didn’t really become serious about it until a friend directed me to writing.com. I got more and more involved with that community, even moderating an intro to poetry workshop there a couple of times a year.  Maybe six months or a year into my membership, the site hosted a “query letter contest.” As a grand prize, the site was offering funding to self-publish the novel of the winning query letter.  I had been toying with a novel idea for a few months and decided to give it a shot. Somehow, I won.  A year later, I used the grand prize money to publish the paperback version of Choosing Her Chains. I gave it another editing and reformatting and published it in eBook format six months later. 

All that to say I’m still not sure I “decided” to become a writer. I just wrote, took some risks, and what had always been potential eventually became incarnate. I do still have a full-time day job, but would love the opportunity to make weaving stories a full-time career.

Where do you get your inspiration for your stories?

For me at least, character comes long before story, even before the world they inhabit. The characters in Choosing Her Chains came to me as I was enjoying a picnic with my (then) fiancée at a local lakebed. Alisandra stepped into my consciousness more or less fully formed, and it took many months of speaking with her to get her story to come out. I have met characters in some of my other short stories (and failed novels) everywhere from weddings to funerals. Eventually they all begin to tell me their stories, and voila. 

Elizabeth Gilbert writes about how inspiration is a literal physical force in the world. My own experience makes me inclined to agree with her. I think characters are real, but that they work with us as authors to bring their stories into the world. They cannot become incarnate without our assistance. In that sense, we’re just glorified mediums.

What makes you unique as a writer? What do you think sets you apart from other writers?

I very rarely write anything that doesn’t focus on LGBTQ+ characters and situations. Being a happily married lesbian myself, I find their unique struggles both familiar and intriguing. I also like to write romantic relationships that don’t turn out well, or at least don’t turn out in the way the characters would like them to turn out. I love a good love story as much as anyone, but I am not much for the so called HEA (“happily ever after”). Instead, I prefer to leave as much of the story as I can open to a reader’s interpretation.  A reviewer recently told me that, at the end of the book, she didn’t know whether the protagonist had made the correct choice, but that she thought that was kind of the point. She was totally right. I want to present a particular point of view to my readers and then let them make the decision for themselves, just as my characters have to do.

Where can we learn more about you?

I frequently blog at DaughterofKieran.com and am a social media addict. I’m oftentimes on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads (even when I am supposed to be at my 9-5 day job).  Friend or follow me on any of them to stay up to date with all my publication information (and to see pictures of my cats).  I would also encourage any would-be-readers to check out my debut novel, Choosing Her Chains on Amazon.com.  The sequel, tentatively titled Homebound, should be out either late 2016 or early 2017.

Fellow Author Friday ~ Carmine Blanche

 It's time for another Fellow Author Friday! Please welcome Carmine Blanche to my blog.


1.    When and how did you decide to become a writer?
When I was young, I learned that I liked to tell stories.  Not the kind that kids usually tell to get out of a scrape, but real fiction.  I must have been about nine when the teacher asked me to write a story about mankind’s first encounter with aliens.  When I completed it, not only did she read it and loved it, I was beat up by a couple students for getting the best scores in the class on the assignment.  Somehow I accepted this as confirmation that I was on my way as a writer.  Simple stories and tales came forth after that and I would find myself writing about anything and everything.


2.    Where do you get inspiration for your stories?
Some of my early work, when I was not trying to publish, would come from things I saw around me.  Events that I would try to make into something more than they were.  I would watch a couple talking and think about what was being said by their actions, then create a story around it.  Sometimes it would be happy, sometimes sad or violent.  I used these as exercises to stimulate thought.

When I chose to start writing in the erotic and erotic romance genre, I drew from observation and from my own past.  I led a rather active sexual life in my youth, many of the things I have seen and done have fed into my fantasies and helped create some of the stories I have written and have yet to write.


3.    What makes you unique as a writer? What do you think sets you apart from other writers?
I cannot classify myself as “unique”.  I think that we are all unique by nature, but people who have the wrong expectations of us, as writers, cause us to conform and become less and less unique by requiring that we write within a certain “scope of work”.  Anyone that has had the unfortunate experience of having to deal with a commercial publisher has experienced the whole, “We want you to be different, but not too different, but more like this person" routine.

My biggest effort to be a little different than other men that write in this genre is that I try hard to write my female characters in a positive and respectable light.  I love women, not just in the physical sense.  Too many male written stories seem to cast the female as merely an object, a tool or an ends to a means.  I like to try to give them a mind, a story and even if they are the “slut” of the story, I want them to HAVE a story.


4.    Where can we learn more about you? (Share links to social media, books, etc!)
Well… I am here on Facebook and spend an unhealthy, some might say, amount of time here.  But if you want to follow more of my digital outings, then you can go here:
www.carminethegreat.com
http://twitter.com/CarmineTheGreat   Yes… I still use Twitter.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/CarmineB

Fellow Author Friday ~ Bree Kraemer

It's Fellow Author Friday again! Please welcome Bree Kraemer to the blog!

1. When and how did you decide to become a writer?

When my youngest child started school, my husband pushed me in the direction of writing. He was great and said that since I loved to read so much, I should try and write. It took me several years to realize that I actually had it in me to write something that people would enjoy. So finally 2 years ago, I made the decision to get serious because this is what I wanted to do.

 

2. Where do you get inspiration for your stories?

Oh God, everywhere. If a friend tells me a story, that could end up in a book. Or I could just have a dream and decide that needs to be written down. Since I write romance, sometimes it just comes from what I would want.

3. What makes you unique as a writer? What do you think sets you apart from other writers?

I think something that helps me write romance is that I am in a very happy marriage and I see what HEA should look like. So I want that for my characters. Also, I have a silly sense of humor and those little quips or jokes end up in my books.

 

4. Where can we learn more about you?

www.facebook.com/Bree-Kraemer-Author-1547122592226263

twitter.com/krazykraemer

http://www.amazon.com/Bree-Kraemer/e/B00NIU5ZCW

Fellow Author Friday ~ Kathryn Harris

Please join me in welcoming Kathryn Harris for this week's Fellow Author Friday! ~PA

Thank you, Phoebe, for letting me share my story on your blog. 

The bio on my blog says I have a one-track mind and an eight-track heart. It’s a pretty accurate description. My love for writing is tied tightly to the many afternoons I spent in childhood listening to my older sisters’ 8-tracks and vinyl records. Oh, to be a rock star in the late 1970s. It’s the stuff my daydreams were made of. I mean, how incredibly cool were the female pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll: Ann & Nancy Wilson, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Lita, Joan and the rest of The Runaways, Carole King and Linda Ronstadt. What must it have been like to blaze the trails they set afire?

 To this day, I have yet to meet another six-year-old whose imaginary friends went on make believe world tours and (gasp!) got chased by invisible groupies. Alas, I had to grow up. My imaginary band broke up. Approaching adolescence forced me to face the fact that my chances of becoming a world-famous musician were as slim as the waistline of Bowie’s “Thin White Duke.” But I liked to write. In fact, when I wasn’t tuning my air guitar and getting ready to put on an imaginary sold-out show, I was plunking away on my mom’s old manual Smith-Corona typewriter.

One day – when I was about 10 years old – one of my sisters was watching “The World According to Garp” in the basement of our split-level home in rural Nebraska, and she made the offhand comment, “Who in their right mind would want to write a book? Talk about boring.” 

 

I glanced up from the old Smith-Corona and smiled at her. “I’m going to write a book someday.” I’m pretty sure she didn’t believe me. I could tell by the way her eyes rolled. 

Not too long after that, I had an epiphany: I was going to write a book about a trailblazing rock star trying to hide her past.

I started writing longhand; the “N” key broke off of the manual typewriter (quite problematic when your heroine’s lover is named Nick). The original draft – which will NEVER see the light of day – was 26 handwritten pages of drivel, but it provided the outline of the story that would – many, many years later –become my first novel. 

There’s no way I could’ve known when I started writing how much the story would eventually mean to me, how my main character’s struggle with cocaine addiction and alcoholism would not only provide a mental escape from the turmoil in my own life but also help me understand the mindset of a recovering alcoholic, the mindset of someone like my husband (who, incidentally, will celebrate a full decade of sobriety in July).

The Long Road to Heaven is a story about letting go of the past and finding a reason to forgive the unforgivable. It’s available in both paperback and for Kindle. (Kleenexes sold separately.) :D

You can find The Long Road to Heaven on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Long-Road-Heaven-Kathryn-Harris-ebook/dp/B00Z4LRXMS/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

I blog here: www.thelongroad2heaven.blogspot.com

I’m on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/Kathryn-Harris-Author-37255976889/

I’m on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/katharriswrites

I’m on Goodreads at: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14106287.Kathryn_Harris

Fellow Author Friday - Judith Fullerton

One of the things I've really enjoyed this year and has helped me grow as a writer is starting a group on Facebook for fellow indie authors. I can't tell you how much I have learned in only a month or two of interacting with my amazing colleagues. I wanted to give a little back and to facilitate collaboration and exposure for my friends by featuring a fellow indie on my blog every Friday. 

So, without further ado, I give you my interview with author Judith Fullerton:

Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/selkiepact 
Twitter @JudithFullerton
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Judith-Fullerton/e/B00TCR07D2

       1. When and how did you decide to become a writer?

My writing journey began as a child. I struggled to read due to a childhood trauma, so was often in the remedial reading group. Luckily for me, my teachers and parents encouraged me to read and write every day.  I was determined and it worked. I developed a love of both reading and writing.  For years I'd write little stories and keep them in a journal, but no-one ever got to see them, I guess I was embarrassed.  A friend finally convinced me to write something longer, as she said I had a natural talent for story-telling. So I did!

2. Where do you get inspiration for your stories?

The inspiration for my stories come from many trips to the Antrim coast (for those of you who don’t know – this is where Game of Thrones is filmed). The place is renowned for its myths and legends, but many stories have been lost through the generations. I wanted to revive these legends and bring them into modern-day storytelling as everyone can, and should be, touched by magic! My first novel, The Selkie Pact was inspired by one of these trips. My husband and I were walking along the beach in Ballintoy when we saw a lone seal swimming out in the fierce waves.  For such a little seal, he braved the strong currents and even seemed to be enjoying the experience. It was a magical moment - my first seal encounter - and one I will never forget.  Hence my story was born!

3. What makes you unique as a writer? What do you think sets you apart from other writers?

I’m a writer who couldn’t read as a child. That makes me strive to write stories that even the weakest reader can follow. I don’t think that I’m a great writer, but I am passionate about what I do. I firmly believe this gives my stories life, which engages my readers. I’m always learning and not ashamed to say so. I’m not in competition with anyone other than myself, so I enjoy interacting with fellow indie authors – exchanging ideas and worries – the support they provide makes the journey all the more enjoyable!

Thank you, Judith! Join in next week for a new Fellow Author Friday!