The message of Slayers

I think housework is boring, so when there is a choice between mopping the floor or writing, I usually choose writing. My avoidance of housework led me to writing 23 books. (Slayers: Friends and Traitors is my 20th published book. Echo in Time comes out Dec 23, the others will follow.)

No one has ever asked me this question about Slayers before. I do have an underlying message that I don’t actually expect anyone to pick up on–but it was one of the things that inspired me to write the book. The world needs help in a lot of ways. It’s easy to ignore that fact and concentrate on our own lives. Ignoring the problems doesn’t stop the dragons from coming, though. They’ll come. We can either fight them or we can leave the problems to someone else and hope they don’t affect us and our families.

Ellen Conford. I loved her books when I was a teen.  She wasn’t heavy on description or lyrical writing, but she put you in the character’s mind and she was funny. Since those were my favorite books, I emulated her style when I first started writing.  My early books are very Ellen Conford-ish.

My mother wanted to be a writer.  Some of my earliest (and only–she died when I was six years old) memories were of her sitting in front of  a typewriter typing.  I grew up thinking writing was a normal job as opposed to a really time consuming way to torment yourself.  (Very often it is the latter.)

For me, marketing is the hardest part of being a writer. I often joke that I wasted my time taking all of those English classes in college. I should have gotten a marketing degree.

There comes a point in every manuscript where you hate the whole thing. And really, if you read any book enough times looking for flaws and mistakes, you will quickly end up hating it.  That’s when I have to remind myself that readers will only read the finished copy–not all the drafts that got me there.

I’m always learning more about the craft of writing. I think that’s essential for any author. I’ve got a ton of writing books and I love going to other author’s presentations at conferences. Reading is also vital. If you want to be a good writer, you need to read a lot. When writers get complaisant and think they know everything, their writing will suffer.

The action scenes. I come from a background of romantic comedies, where there is very little gunplay or hurling people out of windows. I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote the action scenes trying to strike the right balance between suspense, description, and pacing.

I guess that depends on whether you consider all of the marketing, answering emails, preparing talks for classes, etc, writing or not. Some days I work all day and don’t touch a manuscript. It definitely feels full time.

I get up, get the kids off to school and tell myself I’ll answer email for a half an hour. Two or three hours later when I actually finish, I work on my manuscript until the kids get home from school. A lot of times I’ll put in more writing time when everyone goes to sleep.

You never know what you’re going to get when you do a book signing–especially when you do them out of your home area. (Which is why I always beg my friends, acquaintances, and random strangers to come to my book signings.) Once I did a book signing where only one person came into the store the entire time I did my signing. It was the Saturday before Mother’s Day,  so you would think the store would have been crawling with last minute shoppers, but no. A big football game was going on, and apparently people love football more than their mothers.

The one guy who came into the store bought my book. I’m still not sure whether to count that as my worst book-signing (one sale) or my best signing (100% of the people in the store bought my book.)

Anyway, if you ever are someplace where I’m doing a signing–please come. The author table can be a lonely place.

Write because you love writing. Read a lot. And remember that your family and friends are much more important than anything you will ever write.

That is excellent advice! Thank you CJ Hill for answering my interview questions and sharing some insight with all of use!