Author Interview – Karin Cox

3:30 AM | Labels: Authors, Reading Room

Have you started another book yet? Yes, I have started Creche. A lot of my early readers and reviewers have said they cannot wait to read the sequel, so I better get to it. It reveals a lot more about Amedeo’s past and also some surprising information that even Amedeo was unaware of.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Making enough to write fulltime in a beautiful little cabin in the mountains, or in my Greek Island holiday home, or my villa in Tuscany, or my house on Sunshine Coast acreage while my partner quits his job to play daddy daycare to our brood of happy little kids. J

What are your current writing projects now? Right now, I’m working on several different things, but Creche is my priority. My other works in progress include:

Float, a YA Dystopian novel set in Australia.

Day of the Danae Shee, a YA fantasy trilogy.

From Memory, a half-finished romance novel.

The Phoenix Feather, another YA fantasy.

A book about self-editing (as yet untitled).

A free ebook about using indiereviewtracker.com and getting reviews or free or paid marketing (also not yet titled).

Are you reading any interesting books at the moment? Much as I have busy days, I always set aside half an hour before bed to read. That usually means sometime between 12 and 1 am, I am reading. At present, I am really enjoying Tony Slater’s new comedy Don’t Need the Whole Dog; Heather Adkin’s spooky The House; and GR Yeates soon-to-be-released young adult fantasy The Sword of Sighs. All are great examples of just how much indie talent is out there in different genres.

Are there any new authors that have sparked your interest and why? I’m a sucker for a success story, especially an indie one. I’ve grabbed a copy of Colleen Hoover’s latest book, Hopeless, and I was also really impressed with Carol Davis Luce’s latest Awakening: Story of a Brown-eyed Girl, and Charles Sheehan-Miles’s Just Remember to Breathe. And Wool, of course. There are loads of excellent authors out there.

What are some of the best tools available today for writers, especially those just starting out? It really depends on how you like to write. For some authors, it might be a pencil and a notebook. I personally love my Macbook and I use Scrivener to help me get organised, plot, and develope my characters. I write in Scrivener, too, but I then import it to word for the second and subsequent drafts and use Calibre to create my files once the book is formatted.

I’ve recently found an excellent program called Write or Die, which has forced me to just let go and write, rather than be constantly in “edit mode.” I set it to a function called Kamikaze, which means it starts eating my words if I pause for too long. Yes, eating them! Making them vanish. It’s kind of crazy, and I know this would tip some writers over the edge, but for me, it stops me over-thinking things. I then tidy scenes up afterwards when I edit, and I enjoy that part of the process a lot more.

Anti-social is a brilliant program for procrastinators like me too, and enables you to switch off social media but still use the internet for research if you need to.

What contributes to making a writer successful? Determination, a thick skin, a willingness to be flexible about how you write and to take feedback well, the ability to turn a phrase and to “hear” the rhythm of sentences, a love of words, and a curiosity about life and about how people react to events or how individuals reveal or conceal themselves in society.

Do you have any advice for writers? Just put your bum in the chair and tap it out. You can “plan to” and “mean to” all you like, but until you have the word count, it amounts to naught. Make it happen. It sucks that you might have to sacrifice some things in order to write your novel (think sleep, gym, or other hobbies) but if you really want to write you have to sit down and write it out, and then sit down again and revise and edit, and revise and edit, and revise and edit ad nauseam. And understand that the editing doesn’t stop as soon as you upload to Amazon. It is all part of the process. Big publishers make changes to their authors’ work at reprint to remove errors or update information all the time; you should too.

Do you have any specific last thoughts that you want to say to your readers? Thank you for reading. It thrills me you’re willing to spend some of your precious hours lost in a world I created. I can’t thank readers enough for taking the time to do that. Oh, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Email me on cruxim@hotmail.com or leave me a review on Amazon or Goodreads, or on my blog www.karincox.wordpress.com