Today I’m pleased to welcome a new friend to the blog, Debra R Johnson, one of my Off the Beaten Path fellow contributors. Debra’s story, ‘To Darkness I Fall’ is a ‘different spin on seething romance…. a darker, bloodier tale’.
Debra answered a few questions about her story and her other current writing projects, so it’s over to Debra…
What other works do you have available?
Currently, my only other book out right now is the first installment of The Phoenix Curse: After – Part One. You can download it for free on Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and a few other sites as well.
Here is the link to Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/After-Part-Phoenix-Curse-ebook/dp/B00D3B1C6Y
What other projects or events do you have coming up?
I am releasing After – Part Two later this month. Very exciting for me. I actually pushed back the release date a couple weeks due to the release of OTBP so I could fully dedicate myself to promoting both books without crossing my wires.
What was your inspiration for ‘To Darkness I Fall’?
‘To Darkness I Fall’, was not premeditated at all. I had a vivid dream one Friday night, woke up Saturday morning and started writing it down. I do this a lot with my dreams – get down a sketch so I can have a story prompt for later – but Darkness became a full story that weekend. I just couldn’t let it go.
Also, the main character got her name because my husband was playing the latest Tomb Raider that weekend, and I kept hearing that name over and over. It stuck!
Why do you write? Do you have any encouraging words for other indies?
I have always had a very active imagination and have been able to weave a story quite quickly out of nothing at all. When I was young, I thought I wanted to be a writer someday, but I never received much support from my friends and family, so the dream was intangible.
Then, years later, my daughter started writing. I supported her and decided to start editing her work and, in doing so, it revived something inside me. The indie author boom had just happened, so I started doing some internet searches and stumbled across NaNoWriMo.
50k words in one month? Me? I took me a decade to write 20k on one story. There’s no way I could possibly accomplish 50k in one month!
But it was still mid-October when all that was going through my mind, so I pulled out an old file, dusted it off and got to writing. It was a short story I had started nearly 20 years ago and it only had 5k words. Within those last 2 weeks of October, I finished the story at a little over 20k. Not the longest story ever, but it was just a test to see if I could do it. And I passed.
When I wrote the final words to that story, I actually cried. Now, looking back, it seems like such a little thing, but it was life-changing at the time. That happened one year ago this October.
I entered NaNoWriMo the following month and also won that with 5 whole days to spare. Not only that, but I actually finished that book I started then and it became my first published novel.
So much has changed in this past year; the way I look at things and what I can accomplish if I put my mind to it. I’m hoping this is just the tip of the iceberg and I can’t wait to see where I’m at next year in my budding writing career!
My advice to fellow indies and NaNoWriMos, don’t give up! Just keep writing. You owe the story that much. Also, not to scare anyone, but writing is the easy part. It’s the editing that’s the bitch!
Find Debra at these places:
Sharon Sant 