Time To Feed My Reads

AUTHOR INTERVIEW When did your love of books begin? I started writing in elementary school. First with poetry, then in middle school, I started writing short stories. It was high school I started with my first book. I've loved writing for as long as I can remember, yet I wasn't much of an avid reader until my 20s when I got my first pair of glasses, and the letters stayed put on the pages. When did you start to have the wish to become an author? I don't really know when this dream first developed, but I was told that I said even in elementary school I was going to be an author. How have you found the process for becoming an author? The process of becoming a traditionally published author, seems almost impossible, especially for someone, like me, who's writing under a pen name, and suffers with such extreme anxiety that I cannot be out in the world as me. That's how I ended up on Twitter and started my website. I'm trying to build a platform, so publishers and ag...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW A little introduction: Hi there! My name is Vicky Whedbee. I'm just a regular gal, born and raised in Daytona Beach Florida where I resided until my 40s when I relocated to San Mateo Florida with my husband. I dreamed of writing a book from early on in my life, but life has a way of putting obstacles out there, so it wasn't until after the relocation that my husband encouraged me to chase the dream and my first book  Things He Hadn't Told Her  came to be. It was a labor of love over seven years, and then my second and third book quickly followed suit!  When did your love of books begin? Books/reading date back to my earliest memories. I have my beautiful late mother to thank for my love of books. She was an avid reader too. One of my happiest memories with her was when I, as the oldest child of nine or ten years, in the summertime had the privilege of sharing lunch with my mom while we read and the younger siblings took their nap ! I felt so grown up!...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW A little introduction: My name is Brett Van Valkenburg. I was born, raised, and educated in upstate New York. Quite the rollercoaster, I know. Upon graduation I moved to NYC where I work for a major financial institution while writing fiction and children's stories in my free time. When did your love of books begin? I started reading horror stories and Calvin & Hobbes on my own around the age of 8, but I only became an avid reader in my senior year of high school. I hardly ever liked the reading assigned to me in school. I found it too pedestrian. I was belatedly introduced to Kurt Vonnegut by my late high English teacher (who else?), and that was when I realized that there was a whole world of oddball literature that suited my taste. When did you start to have the wish to become an author? I've always had creative ideas--fragments of scenes that didn't really connect to anything bigger, but it was only during the summer of 2003, while I was working at ...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW A little introduction: I went to school at Oregon City High School. I attended two community colleges and then Full Sail University, where I received my bachelor's degree in game design. I found out I hated game design and only wanted to play games. Later I attended the Springboard Software Engineering program and fine tuned the one aspect I actually loved about game design, programming. I’ve never been one to try to make money off of things I enjoy doing and programming just wasn’t for me. I like to waste money apparently. The idea for Dragonkind originally popped in my head when I was sixteen years old. I was reading an article about a civilization that predated known history, something like 10,000 years BC. That or it was structures being found from that era. That put the idea in my head. Avatar the Last Air Bender defined the idea a bit, but I’ll be honest, Kail was king in the first iteration and it was terrible. It took my family, the girlfriend and kids, tel...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW A little introduction: Hi, my name’s Jane Lovering and I’ve just won the Romantic Novelists’ Association award for Contemporary Romantic Novel of the Year with my novel A Cottage Full of Secrets. I’ve been a published writer since 2008, and I’ve written nearly 30 published novels. I live in North Yorkshire with my disreputable Patterdale Terrier Teal, and write mostly women’s fiction/romance based around my local area. When did your love of books begin? My dad was an inveterate reader (not, as autocorrect keeps trying to tell me, an invertebrate reader) and he started my love of books and reading when I was very small. Our house was full of books and I was read to a lot by my parents. My mum remembers me standing in my cot waving a copy of Little Grey Rabbit and trying to entice her to read it to me. It’s all right, I was a baby, not like, fifteen or something… When did you start to have the wish to become an author? Probably as soon as I learned to read! I used to wis...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW A little introduction: I’m Mom by heart, partnered with a physicist, a teacher and counselor by trade, a rescuer of cats, who possesses the pulse of a writer and a soul of a gardener. When did your love of books begin? Not to sound trite, but as far back as I can remember. According to my mom, my first favorite books were Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? And Sesame Street’s There’s a Monster at the End of This Book. The first book I can remember reading by myself is Charlotte’s Web in the second grade. Books were my friends. I grew up in a very small town (37 people in my public school graduating class small), and books offered a whole world of experiences and characters I could relate to. When did you start to have the wish to become an author? I have wanted to be a writer since elementary school. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Hodge, encouraged us to write our own stories. She entered my story, The Funny Cat, into the Young Author’s contest. I won first pla...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW When did your love of books begin? My mom got a library card for me when I was seven. I started checking books out left, right and center and have kept up a voracious reading schedule for most of my life. When did you start to have the wish to become an author? I spent twenty-five years writing songs commercially, i.e., people would pay me, and I would write songs for them. As a result, I developed a love for words. About 2006 I began to grow weary of the music industry and walked away. At the same time, I had begun a blog and NYT bestselling author, Ken Blanchard—a friend and mentor—suggested I turn some of my blog posts into a manuscript. My first published works were in 2008 and I have written 32 books since then. How have you found the process for becoming an author? I think I was always an author, so for me it was a process of revealing rather than becoming. Regarding becoming a published author, it’s like navigating the seven circles of hell. The discipline requi...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW A little introduction: My name is Joanne Kukanza Easley, and I write fiction about complicated, twentieth-century women. A retired registered nurse, I live and write in the Texas Hill Country. When did your love of books begin? My mother read to me every night, even as a baby. One of my earliest memories is sitting beside her as she read  The Night Before Christmas  to me. I memorized the book by the time I was four. When did you start to have the wish to become an author? By the time I was in fourth grade, I was an avid reader, especially Nancy Drew books. I immersed myself in Nancy’s world and wanted to create stories that captured the imagination. As a young teen, I read the latest novels from the library and especially loved the work of Shirley Jackson. From there, I started drafting a few short stories. How have you found the process for becoming an author? Writing is a craft and requires study before one’s ideas can be brought to life as readable fiction...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW A little introduction: I’m the author of The Catch, a contemporary second-chance romance. I was born and mostly raised in Dallas, Texas, but I’ve lived in the San Francisco area since 2008. I’m married and have three funny, brilliant daughters who are 13, 11, and 9. I’m a Registered Dietitian who used to provide nutrition counseling for people living with HIV / AIDS, and that work was incredibly rewarding. But recently I realized that my own “true north” lies in writing fiction, instead. So after many agonizing nights of lying awake and talking it over with my supportive husband, I decided to make writing my day job. When did your love of books begin? My love of books began pretty much from day one. Reading, literature, and the arts are very important in my family; they’re kind of our religion. As a child, I devoured all of the Ramona Quimby, Anne of Green Gables, and Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Later, I discovered Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, and the Janes (Austen and Ey...