Guest Posts/Interviews

Interview with author Brian MacLearn 

Interview with author Jennifer Schmidt  

Interview with author Emma Elliot

Guest post by author Sibelle Stone 

Interview with author Alexandrea Weis  


Guest Post from Author Maggie Greene

Inspiration for my Heroine

Thanks so much for hosting me today! Since this is the first stop on my blog tour, I thought I would talk a little bit about what inspired me to write Nursing Second Chances.

Kiersten grew up in the small town of Honey Creek. For those of you who didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere, I can tell you that life in a small town is not as easy as it might seem. Everyone there knows you and knows everything you do. Sometimes before you even do it. I think that is hardest for young adults who are still trying to decide who they want to become. It’s hard to change when everyone already expects certain things for you.

That’s exactly how Kiersten feels. She had a bad experience in high school that resulted in a lot of rumors being spread about her. Leaving town seemed like her only choice. I can relate in a lot of ways, even though the town I lived in wasn’t as small, it was equally as brutal. So I started with her in my head and wondered what would bring her back home.

The answer was actually simple. Her sister needed her. A family tragedy was the perfect way to bring her home and make her face her past (and future).

Alright, time for the fun part. I’m having a large giveaway as part of my blog tour. Comments on each of the stops will count as an entry in the contest. Winners will be drawn on August 1^st and will receive a gift basket from me complete with some book swag, bath products, and honey. For more details (and chances to enter), you can visit my blog (http://www.authormaggiegreene.com). Please make sure you leave an email address. 

 

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Guest Post from Author Michelle Birbeck

Today I am pleased to welcome author of The Last Keeper, Michelle Birbeck, to the blog. She's letting us in on the secrets of her writing techniques and the process of writing The Last Keeper. 

When it comes to writing, I don’t exactly do it normally. I don’t just open a document, start writing, and then go from there, it’s a little more complicated than that. Well, maybe a lot more complicated.

With The Last Keeper, what I did was started with a series of notepad files. Just basic word processing software, no italics, and no real formatting except for paragraphs and quotation marks. At this point every chapter gets its own file, leaving me with thirty or forty files sat in a drafts folder.

Once The Last Keeper was drafted, I left it there for a few months whilst I worked on something else. Then, when I came back to it, I opened up my word document and rewrote the whole thing into one file. Some bits I just copied and pasted, keeping them as I wrote them at first, and others I scrapped and rewrote. There are whole chapters on my computer that were deleted and haven’t made it into the book, and then more that were added during editing.

It wasn’t over, however, after the book was written into one document. Once again I left it for a little while and worked on something else, then when I came back to it, I had nice, fresh eyes. When I did come back to it the first lot of my own editing started. That was one of four, which sounds like a lot, and really is.

First round was done on the computer, word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. For the second round I printed out the whole book (don’t worry, I shredded and recycled all the pages!) and read it cover to cover, gave it to my husband to do the same, and then I putted all the changes. The last round of editing was pretty much the same as the first, reading it through on the computer before sending it off to the publisher.

Then the real editing started, and that was an eye opener! Despite my having gone over the book a number of times, there were still things I’d missed.

I’ve followed this process now for all of the books I’ve written, and will more than likely continue to do so. It’s long and complicated and take a fair amount of time, but it works for me. And as the saying goes, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

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Guest Post from Author Alexandrea Weis