Welcome A. Meredith Walters!
Have you always been a writer? Did you keep a journal or write stories or poetry when you were younger?
I've been a writer most of my life. I kept spiral notebooks under my bed where I'd write my books...I know one of my best friends from high school still has three of these notebooks knocking around. I was never big into writing poetry, prose was definitely more my thing.
How long do you think about a story or characters until you finally decide what you want to write about it/them?
It really depends. With Find You in the Dark, I had been kicking around the idea of writing a love story about mental illness for over a year. Clay and Maggie sort of blossomed in that time, the plot flowing the more I thought about it. My new book that is coming out at the end of the month came very quickly and I just sort of wrote it without a whole lot of forethought into the plot line.
When crafting your story, do you write it in sequential order or do you write the story as it comes to you and then piece it together?
I usually write the ending first. It's strange, because I need to know how I'm ending a story before I can write the meat of it. So with Find You in the Dark, the prologue and the epilogue were the first bits written.
What is your favorite writing environment? Is it also your most productive?
I have an awesome home office. My family and I just moved to England and when we were looking for houses, that was the one stipulation...it had to have an office space. My desk faces a huge picture window looking into the garden. It also sports built in book shelves and a fire place. It is so conducive to writing. I love it.
Searching for new books to read is a small part of my love for books. What are some determining factors when you are selecting new books to read? Current favorites?
I'm very strange when it comes to picking books. When I go to book stores, I oddly enough look at the fonts of books. If I'm attracted to a particular font, I have to check out. I really am a marketers dream in that way. :-) But now that I read most of my books on my Kindle, I have to be grabbed by a book blurb in the first sentence. If it doesn't capture my interest at the onset, I don't bother buying it. My current favorites are the books in the Lux series by Jennifer Armentrout. This is not my normal genre of reading...not a big fan of aliens. But the personal dynamics and writing style have me hooked.
Do you judge a book by its cover?
Absolutely. If I don't like the cover, I won't bother with the book 90% of the time. I know there are a lot of great books out there that perhaps have crappy covers. But a cover is your first introduction to a book and it's hard for me to get passed one that the cover doesn't appeal to me.
Do you have a book that you like to read over and over again (what I would call a comfort read) because you know that it will make you feel good after reading it? Is it a book that you turn to because you know that it will make you laugh or does it remind you of how you felt when you first read it?
I'll admit, I've re-read the Twilight Saga so many times, the books are dogeared. I have also reread The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradely a million times. When I was younger I was all about L. J. Smith and obsessively reread her Vampire Diaries and Secret Circle books so many times, the spines fell apart. I reread these books because I love them and they are stories that no matter how many times I have read them, I always enjoy them.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. As a want-to-be writer, I always find it interesting to learn when a spark of an idea becomes more whether it's a story or a book. Sometimes the words come easily.Other times, there is a lot of plotting and planning. This is the one question that I always ask writers. Mainly because I want to understand how you know an idea can 'be enough'.
And I thank you for sharing you thoughts on books. You're another person who sings the praises of Jennifer Armentrout. I haven't read any of her books yet, but everyone is raving about her that I'm persuaded to check them out.
Find You in the Dark is available now fromAmazon
for only $2.99
for only $2.99
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The blog tour wraps up this week at these stops:
Thursday, December 20th
Friday, December 21st
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