Debut Author Lani Forbes On Work Life Balance

I'm lucky (or cunning) enough to have lured yet another successful writer over to my blog for an SAT - Successful Author Talk. SAT authors have conquered the query, slain the synopsis and attained the pinnacle of published. How'd they do it? Let's ask 'em!

Today’s guest for the SAT is Lani Forbes, a middle school math teacher and proud science nerd. Her debut novel The Seventh Sun releases February 18, 2020.

Are you a Planner or Pantser?

I’m a plantster haha! I am definitely one of those writers that has a foot planted firmly in both camps. There are certain aspects I plan. For example, I usually have general character arcs in mind as well as major plot points I want to hit. I always have my emotional climax planned. As a fantasy writer, I always have my magic system and my world as detailed as possible beforehand too. But sometimes as I am writing, the story takes a different direction. I always try to follow where the emotional thread is leading because to me, that’s where the heart of the story is. After I finish, I always go back with my Save the Cat beat sheet and make sure I hit the appropriate beats at the right times and adjust the structure as necessary.

How long does it typically take you to write a novel, start to finish?

My first novel took me about two months to draft and then several months after to edit. Now, I find that I edit as I go, so it can take me three or four months to finish my first draft, but it is a lot cleaner. I have definitely found that the more I learn, the slower I write. I also don’t feel like I ever really “finish” because I’m constantly tweaking it until my publisher tells me I can’t anymore!

Do you work on one project at a time, or are you a multi-tasker?

I am definitely a multi-tasker. I have several projects I’m working on right now. I get so excited about so many different ideas that I tend to flit from one project to the next like a honeybee in spring. I’m also a very emotional writer, having to be in a certain mood to write certain stories. If I have a deadline though, I can buckle down and get the job done. Once I get deep enough into one story, I have to keep going until it’s finished.

Did you have to overcome any fears that first time you sat down to write?

Imposter syndrome is such a powerful and terrifying thing. So is mom guilt. I am a mom of two young children, and I felt so guilty taking any time for myself to sit down and write. I had to learn to balance the needs of the family with my own needs, but sometimes that guilt creeps back in. I always remind myself that I have to be the healthiest version of myself to be the best mom I can be, and writing is essential for my mental health.   

How many trunked books (if any) did you have before you were agented?

I am actually one of those rare writers where my first book published is actually the first book I finished. But don’t get me wrong, I started probably four other projects and got a few chapters in before I realized they weren’t going anywhere. I used those false starts to learn and grown, and when I finally finished my first book, I polished it until it shined before I took it out on submission to agents.

Have you ever quit on an ms, and how did you know it was time?

I had so many story ideas that I would keep notes on, but I seriously started writing two different manuscripts that never made it past the first few chapters. Both of them I gave up on because industry professionals told me they wouldn’t sell. The first was a dystopian YA novel and the second was a different YA fantasy that didn’t have a high concept. I was so disappointed at first, but I picked myself up and kept writing. I know you are never supposed to write to the market, but I also think being aware of what is and what isn’t selling is just being smart.  

Who is your agent and how did you get that "Yes!" out of them? 

My agent is the wonderful Samantha Wekstein at Thompson Literary. I signed up to do a “Ten Minutes with an Expert” through Manuscript Academy and picked Samantha because she said that she loved epic fantasies like Leigh Bardugo and Sarah J Mass, which are two of my favorite authors. She critiqued my query letter over the phone and asked me to send her a standard query. She was working for Writers House at the time, so I submitted a traditional query to her there, and she requested the full manuscript! I had eight other full requests out when I got my first agent offer, so I notified the other agents. That is when Samantha offered too. I knew I wanted to work with her immediately because I could tell how much she loved my story and I knew we had similar tastes!

How long did you query before landing your agent? 

I started querying in January of 2017 by sending out about ten queries. I didn’t get a single bite. Every time I got a rejection, I would alter my query letter and send out five more queries. I kept a list of agents I wanted to query, and which ones had responded. I continued to study the art of writing a query (including paying for several professional query critiques). I started getting partial requests and knew I was getting closer. All in all, I sent out about 30-40 different queries and had ten full requests by the summer of 2017, about six months after I started. I ended up signing with Samantha in July of 2017.

Any advice to aspiring writers out there on conquering query hell?

Cold queries DO work. If your query is good enough, it will get an agent’s attention, but PLEASE study how to write a good query letter. Tension and emotional stakes are huge. I read books and articles, attended workshops, studied successful query letters, etc. I also studied the agents themselves. Make sure you know what they are looking for and what they aren’t. I made so many mistakes at the beginning, not knowing etiquette especially (goodness I have some embarrassing stories), but every time I got a rejection, I promised myself to send out five more queries. I would make changes and learn every single time. I remember reading a fantastic article that talked about how as soon as you start getting requests and personalized feedback, you’re getting closer. Don’t give up, keeping learning and growing and using whatever resources you have at your fingertips. There are SO many out there!

How did that feel, the first time you saw your book for sale?

I haven’t gotten there yet as my book comes out next month, but holding my first ARC in my hands was the most surreal experience. You dream about seeing your words in print for so long and to finally see it in person…there really aren’t words. It’s just so fulfilling and emotional! I will probably drop dead when I see my book in a bookstore for the first time (which is okay because I already have book two written haha!).

How much input do you have on cover art?

I actually had a lot of input. The cover artist, Kathryn English, was incredible. She invited me to private Pinterest board for brainstorming and invited me to pin ideas of styles or images. I knew I wanted a black background with a golden sun, but she added the obsidian dagger with the intricate gold and jade details, and it turned out more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.

What's something you learned from the process that surprised you?

The biggest thing that surprised me was how LOOOOOOONG everything in publishing takes. I had read about it and knew that things took a while, but I was definitely surprised to find out that it wasn’t exaggerated! Patience is definitely a virtue to have in publishing, and it is so worth it! My biggest advice for putting up with the waiting is to keep working. I never stopped working on my next project and it definitely helps.

How much of your own marketing do you? 

I have an amazing marketing team at Blackstone Publishing, but I also try to help out as much as I can. I think it’s important to work as hard as they do. I know visibility is so important with marketing, so I am always trying to share and interact as much as I can on social media or local events. I have my own website and I do try to keep it updated with fun information, blog posts, and exciting news to share. You can also sign up for my newsletter there. I also have Twitter and Instagram and a Facebook page.

When do you build your platform? After an agent? Or should you be working before?

If you are trying to publish non-fiction, I think a platform is more important, but with fiction especially, there is nothing more important than WRITING A GOOD BOOK. That is first and foremost what writers should focus on. A platform can always be built, but you can’t build a platform around something that doesn’t exist.

Do you think social media helps build your readership?

This is such a tricky question. Everyone I have asked says that it doesn’t build your readership, but I know I have found many of my favorite books based on recommendations of others on social media. I love bookstagram, and if I keep seeing a book pop up on my feed, it definitely makes me curious to check it out. I think visibility and exposure is important and social media can definitely be a tool to help, but it doesn’t have to be the only tool.

5 Tips for Writing a Self Help Book

By: Dr. John Chuback

I wrote my book, Make Your Own Damn Cheese, after many years of formal academic and personal-development study. Having become a Board-Certified Cardiovascular surgeon, I was professionally quite successful but still felt somehow personally unfulfilled.

My deep dive into the self-help genre was motivated by an intense desire to understand not only why some individuals are more successful than others but, more importantly, who we really are at our essence, what makes us tick, and how do we ultimately achieve true inner peace and happiness.

After 20 years of exhaustive research into these questions, Make Your Own Damn Cheese was my contribution to the field of self-discovery, self-expression, and self-acceptance.

Below are tips for other authors thinking about writing a self-help book:

Tip #1 Study Self-Help

Well, I think this may sound a bit obvious, but if you want to write a book in the self-help genre, I think you need to begin by being a student. The best way is to read, watch, and listen to everything you can get your hands, eyes, and ears on. Self-help may seem like a niche field of study at first, but it’s extremely vast when you begin to look at it.

Tip #2 Add Something to the Conversation

You have to study to be confident that you have developed some reasonable degree of expertise in the area you are interested in.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself: do you have practical experience or formal training and education in the area you are pursuing? Do you have a personal or professional track record for success in this area of self-help?

This is going to be vital if you want to be taken seriously or even noticed at all. Publishers, and the general public alike, will ask, who are you, and why should we listen to you? It’s important to feel that you have something to add to the conversation. You can’t expect to be published if you are going to rehash a lot of previously existing information. What do you have to say that is new?

Tip #3 Find your Niche within the Niche

There are so many areas of sub-specialization here. Always try to find your niche. For example, you can specialize in topics such as positive thinking or combatting pathologies like anxiety and depression. You can also look at issues, such as physical health, fitness, exercise, etc. Whatever it is, make sure you specialize; this will help you to stay unique.

Tip #4 Use Technology

In one of the earliest and best-known self-help recordings called The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale in 1957, he begins with the following words, “We live today in a golden age. This is an era man[kind] has looked forward to, dreamed of, and worked toward for thousands of years. But since it’s here, we pretty well take it for granted.”

One thing I do not want you to take for granted is the mind-boggling technology that almost all of us in the United States have at our disposal. Your mind is like a nuclear-powered engine of imagination and creativity.

As we go through the day, we are continuously coming up with great ideas. Many of these ideas can be used in your self-help book. Unfortunately, we tend to forget even our most innovative thoughts.

For that reason, I urge you to keep your smartphone at the ready at all times and become well versed in the audio-command functions of creating notes, text messages, e-mails, and voice memos.

If you can get into the habit of sending yourself these ideas for your self-help book, the project will begin to write itself. As you get back to your laptop or desktop computer and organize and develop these snippets of inspiration you collect throughout the day, you’ll be shocked to see how much information naturally comes together as a cohesive message. I’ve been putting this simple technique to good use for years and couldn’t imagine living without my “peripheral digital brain” with me at all times. 

I became so frustrated thinking to myself that I would write it down when I got to the office and then either forget what my idea was or even forget that even had an idea. Use the technology you have at hand and learn how to use it well. All you have to do is dictate or record your ideas for books, articles, chapters, etc. and then later flesh them out and bring them to their full state of maturity.

Tip #5: Write a Self-Help Book

Like tip #1, this may sound ridiculous, but it’s not. Writer Joseph Epstein has been quoted as saying that 81% of Americans would like to write a book. That’s 200 million people! So why were only 329, 259 books published in the United States in 2011? The answer is obvious, most people who think they have a book in them and that they should write don’t. Who are you? Are you the person who is going to let your self-help book die inside of you? Don’t be that person. Be the individual who, no matter what, sits down and actually writes your book. Don’t worry about anything else. Just finish the job. If you don’t, you shouldn’t be teaching self-help, you should go back to tip #1 and study it some more.

ABOUT DR. CHUBACK

Dr. John Chuback is the founder of Chuback Education, LLC. His passion is to assist patients with personal development achievement by figuring out how to set actionable, attainable goals. He is also the author of the self-help book, Make Your Own Damn Cheese.  

Joy Llewellyn On Writing Never Being Wasted

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Joy Llewellyn, author of The Teen Rebel Series which involve teenage girls kicking butt as they find their way out of unfamiliar and challenging situations. Camino Maggie is the first in the series.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

My husband, Evan, and I were hiking the Camino Frances, a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage route. We hiked for 72 days straight, averaging 25km per day, from Le Puy, France to Santiago, Spain. Evan had been a counsellor for Youth at Risk and when we were hiking, he made a comment about how taking troubled youth on this hike would be a better way to help them heal and deal with their issues than any of the punishments our system handed them. That was the seed for Camino Maggie. We have since hiked five more Camino routes in Spain and France and that idea still rings true.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

Not a lot about the plot has changed since my first draft. I knew I wanted a protagonist that got caught doing a B&E and then was forced to hike the Camino Frances as punishment. The big change involved the gender of my characters. I wrote it with teen boys in mind, then during Draft 2 gave myself a shake and thought of all the travel and adventure books I had read growing up and how the majority of them had a male protagonist. In Draft 3 I finally switched genders, making the young offenders forced to go on this hike female, and it opened up language and experience possibilities. I shamelessly used my Camino journals for story ideas, so many of the physical experiences are true and something Evan and I went through. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Again, the plot didn’t change much from the first draft. It was the characters I continually fleshed out, again borrowing shamelessly from the people we met on the trail and either tweaking their story or combining stories or imaging the reverse of what a person had told me and slipping in that version. People jump into personal story exchanges when hiking on any of the nine main Camino routes. I was a film and TV screenwriter and one of the steps you had to do (and it’s a paid step) was write an Outline, like a short story version of your script. That step is part of my creative process for everything I write. The biggest unknown was how would Maggie, my protagonist, feel at the end of her hike? Would she reconcile with her mother? Would she learn more about her own future dreams, and be willing to again step out of her comfort zone to explore them? That was a fun process. By the end of the book, she spoke and I wrote. 

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I have been a working writer for almost 30 years, as a journalist, editor, fiction and non-fiction writer, screenwriter, story editor, and now novelist. Fresh material is NEVER hard to come by. The problem is finding the time to write all the stories that present themselves. And because I was a professional writer, I didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing when I wrote. Each day was putting my butt on my desk chair and getting down to it. This was especially true of working in TV, which is time-intensive. Most of my writing work was in documentaries, which usually had a smaller budget than any drama productions so the research and writing work was done as expeditiously as possible. Finding the right person to interview, getting them to share the most dramatic stories, was a very similar process to developing characters for my fiction writing.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

 Ah, a good question. I struggle with that decision. I have two completed manuscripts in this Teen Rebel series and am presently doing a deep edit of Book 2, which I plan to publish in January, and will then move on to a deep edit of Book 3. They are all YA. The one common thread is they involve a teenager—female—finding herself forced to deal with a situation that is out of her comfort zone—but she always wins/learns/celebrates her experiences. I have a number of film and TV scripts that never went anywhere and plan to change them into novels. “Spark Rebecca,” Book 2 of the Teen Rebel Series, is based on a spec script I wrote mega-years ago as a writing sample for sci-fi shows I was pitching myself to as a writer. It never got produced, but like my spec X-Files, it got me work. And now I get to play with it. Nothing we write ever goes to waste.

I have 5 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I live on a small island a 2-1/2 hour ferry ride away from Vancouver, BC (the “mainland”). There are 2,400 people, hundreds of deer, a resident Orca pod, and my beloved Muddy Lotus writing group. There are five of us, all professional women writers, who get together every two weeks to share work and get feedback. Everyone is working on a new book—there are about 40 books published by these fabulous women (poets, memoirist, children’s, YA). I’m the newbie novelist of the bunch. We call ourselves the Muddy Lotus because in mud, the lotus grows. We’ve all had life experiences that have left our mud well fertilized with experiences and feelings of pain, joy, lust, love, pity, embarrassment, happiness, illness, ego, fear, and lots of curiosity!