I am very excited to have the lovely C. M. Keller kicking off the Author-fest for me. She is such a great person and I have very much enjoyed getting to know her in the past year. She has been a great support to me in my writing and I love seeing her name pop up in my e-mail inbox.
This is an exciting month for her as she has her second book hitting the internet - Screwing Up Babylon - the sequel to
Screwing Up Time. I have read it and it's brilliant! I can't wait for you guys to be able to read it as well.
Here's a short interview with this awesome lady :)
How
many books have you published altogether?
I have one out now - Screwing Up Time, and my sequel Screwing Up Babylon will be published
this month (October). I have a short story being published by Compass Press in
their anthology Winter Wonders.
What is the best lesson you've learned since starting out in the writing business?
Love the writing! There’s so much
you can’t control in the business. But if you do it because you love it, then
everything else is secondary.
What
is your favourite part of the writing process?
The first draft. I write “by the seat of my
pants,” so I usually have very little idea of where I’m going and how I’m
getting there. It’s like riding a rollercoaster while wearing a blindfold. It’s
the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but the rush is addictive.
Where
is your favourite place to read?
My favorite spot is wherever I
am—home in bed, at my kids’ piano lessons, waiting at the doctor’s office,
while I’m making dinner…Kindle makes it so easy to chop veggies while reading.
Thankfully, I still have ten fingers.
If
you could recommend any book to aspiring writers, what would it be and why?
Stephen King’s On Writing. He talks about writing with
the passion of the story—getting caught up in the story without worrying about
perfection or errors. I think a lot of beginning writers get so caught up in
their mistakes that they become stymied. My favorite quote about first drafts
is “A first draft is a celebration of everything that can go wrong on a page.”
5 Favourites...
TV Show: Grimm
(Monroe is my favorite character.)
Style of Music or Band: I’m pretty eclectic in music—I
love everything from classical to Big Band to rock to pop. But when I’m writing
first drafts, I listen to Thomas Tallis’s “Lamentations of Jeremiah.” My kids
call it “the Moaning Monks,” but there’s something about the minor Latin polyphonies
that brings me to a very creative place.
Movie: I love old movies—the creative camera angles, the
repartee, and the artistic subtlety. On the other hand, I love blockbusters
too—Inception, the Bourne trilogy,
and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.
Book: Picking a
favorite book is liking picking a favorite star in the sky—an impossible task.
But my favorites include: Persuasion
(Jane Austen), Haroun and the Sea of
Stories (Salman Rushdie—yes, that Salman Rushdie), Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier), The Jeeves and Wooster stories (P.G.
Wodehouse), The Horse and His Boy (C.
S. Lewis)…I’d better stop there, though I could go on and on.
Item of clothing: Sundresses in the summer, and yoga pants
and wool cardigans in the winter.
The Horse and His Boy is my favourite C.S. Lewis book as well. Great choice :)
Thanks so much for participating in this Author-fest with me!
If you'd like to connect with C. M. Keller, here are her links. Keep an eye out for her book release later this month. I know I'll be promoting it big time!
