Allie from Reckless in Your Love has agreed to write a lovely guest post interviewing some great authors who have participated in NaNoWriMo! If you're interested in participating next year, or did it this year, you'll want to read this.

Chelsea : (Since I already knew, I didn’t ask Chelsea what her book was about; however, I
want you to know – here’s the description from her website!) Happy to be Alive, Because is a book about
life and love and loss and friendship. It’s
for anyone who has ever struggled to understand the point of the hard stuff in
life. It’s for anyone who has ever had
to try to be happy. It’s for anyone who
has ever loved their friends so fiercely, they think their heart may
explode. And it’s for anyone who, like
me, loves to get lost in a story.
Chelsea : It’s extremely personal, but not exactly in
the way most people think. For example,
my main character loses her mom, something that I have never had to deal with. I’ve experienced great love and great loss
and great friendship, maybe just in different ways than my character. That’s why writing a book is so cool – you get
to include all of this personal stuff, but you get to twist it and turn it and
mold it into your plot, disguising it as fiction.
Chelsea :
I’ve had some nasty comments, too . . . people went out of their way to email
me and let me know that they think my book is the worst thing on the face of
this planet and I should probably just go die. Because of that, I’ve made it a
point to always email or tweet authors when I finish a book, no matter how
popular they are. It hurts to see people
say mean things about something you worked so hard on, so I try to spread some
love around!
Chelsea : It always feels incredible whenever someone
reaches out to me and tells me they read my book-it’s an amazing feeling. I love getting to start a conversation with
someone who would otherwise be a stranger to me and ask them what their
takeaway was. . . . I love writing, and I love writing buddies! Writer's block doesn't stand a chance when you have friends you can talk through your words and stories a plots with. If anyone else is a writer, I'd love to connect!
Chelsea :
(on seeing her book in print for the first time) It was so amazing! My mom was in town, and when I saw that I had
a fed-ex package slip on my door, I knew exactly what it was. But it was 4:58 and the leasing office closes
at 5:00, so my mom and I booked it across the parking lot to make sure we got
there before they locked the doors. Then
we both took turns holding it and crying and taking pictures and laughing
because it was so surreal—it was an amazing experience, and I’m so glad I got
to share it with her.
P.S., As promised, you can meet Chelsea here and Lindsay here
and Rachael here. I'd highly recommend it!
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***
If you guys have been around the blog world lately, you’ve
probably seen something related to NaNoWriMo – a post, a picture, a Tweet, something. You may
have even cringed to read that word because, whether you participated or not,
you’re probably at some level of being NaNoWriMo-ed out. For those of you who don’t know much about
it, NaNoWriMo (AKA, National Novel Writing Month) is a month-long event during
which authors work towards a goal of writing 50,000 words of their novel all in
30 days. They’re absolutely crazy! From what I’ve heard, it’s really
intense. You type and type and type
until your fingers bleed, and at the end you have a 50,000 words that more or
less form a baby book which still needs a lot of work to become a published
novel. In spite of the difficulty,
something about that has an irresistible draw for me. I’ve always wanted to write a book, but over
the last months, a few of my favorite bloggers showed me that I can write a book. Like, now.
I want to write a book! There it is. It’s official.
I have a lot of experience with rushing into things without
a lot of consideration or prior knowledge, so about four seconds after I
decided that I wanted to write a book, I was hit with images of me sitting on
the floor, burned out and surrounded by half a novel’s worth of pages that
would never become a real book. I can’t
say similar things haven’t happened before.
(Coughcough, the aftermath of Hurrican Scrapbook in my basement right
now.) I do, however, really want to write a book – it’s a total bucket list
item. And because bucket list items a)
are mandatory and b) deserve consideration and prior knowledge, I emailed some
experienced authors to learn a little bit about what I’m getting myself into. They were so, so helpful, and I know lots of
things about writing books now that I didn’t before! I’d like to share that with you so that we can
both not end up burned out on the floor, but I’d probably want to introduce
them to you anyway, because they’re great: meet Lindsay, Chelsea, and Rachael.
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From left to right: Lindsay, Chelsea, and Rachael, blogger / author extraordinaires! |
All three authors were bloggers first (I’ll give you all
their information at the end so you can stalk them a little), and they’ve each
chosen to expand their passion for writing into the novel world, which makes
them pretty cool. Chelsea’s book is in
print, as in you could go to Barnes and Nobel right now and buy it, and Lindsay
and Rachael are both well on their way. They’re
all writing fiction, but each with a different spin – they’re talking relationships
and mystery and travel. They’re all from
different parts of the world, but the
whole writing thing must be universal or else they cheated on this because they
all had similar sentiments – unique, but sparked by the same passion. I absolutely loved hearing from them and
learning things about what writing a book and being an author are like. Things I now know:
// Authors write about anything and everything.
Allie: What are you writing about?
Lindsay: My book is called “Seekers,” and it’s about a group
of strangers who embark on the hunt for a long-lost hidden treasure shrouded in
myths of sinister curses, hauntings and even murder.
Rachael: My book is about a girl who is about to leave her
exciting life to travel for six months. She gets to experience life in new places, and
also learns a lot about her life on the way.

// Authors write about what speaks to them.
Allie: What inspired you to write what you’re writing?
Rachael: My life right now is really inspiring me to write
about travel and learning about yourself.
We always read books about the girl who finds the boy, but instead of
the boy, what if she finds herself? The
genre (as of right now) will be young adult fiction, one of my favorites to
read and also something I have a lot of experience with because I am a middle
school teacher.
Allie: Your book
deals with love, loss, friendships, and life stuff – things that lots of people
can relate to, but are also very intimate. How personal is the content of your books to
you?
//The entire writing process is full of roadblocks, and that’s
part of what makes writers want to write, as crazy as that sounds.
Allie: As you worked on your manuscript, what did you learn
about the writing process that surprised you the most?
Lindsay: How truly difficult writing a book is. This sounds obvious, I can picture you
reading this thinking, “This girl is an idiot, what on earth did she expect?” but
in a way it was a complete revelation to me.
I think I had a highly romanticized notion of “writing” and the reality
was vastly different. I expected the
words to flow effortlessly as I sipped my light roast coffee with my two cats
sleeping soundly at my feet. The real
situation was more like me staring at my computer, forcing the words to come
out when they didn’t seem interested in appearing, my eye twitching dangerously
as I sipped my fourth Monster of the morning while my cats and husband were
hanging out without me – often battling a voice of harsh negativity and
self-doubt in my mind. It was hard. It was lonely. It was spectacularly daunting. But I kept. on. Going. It’s okay if your writing process isn’t
pretty, I learned. All that matters is
that you make the words happen. And as
for that voice of negativity in my hear, I think every writer deals with that. I have to make an active choice to ignore it
every single time I sit down to write.
Rachael: I have hated
feeling like I never have enough time/motivation (let’s be honest, I’m a
blogger AND an English teacher, so I’m constantly surrounded by words. Sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming. The worst part is the feat that what I’m
writing might actually be total crap. I’m
always a little worried that maybe I’ll finish my book and it will be awful. But at least I’ll have written a book, right?
// Writing is all about the people you have around you.
Lindsay: The decision
to write a book actually came rather quickly, for me. I’ve loved to write my entire life, and once a
few folks (my husband, my mom, Juliette of theotherjuliette.blogspot.com)
planted the seed, I decided, “Heck, there’s no time like the present, self, let’s
dream up the plotline and write a damn book. “ It sounds so cheesy, but I
honestly couldn’t have done it without the encouragement and support of my
family and friends. I swear, their words
of affirmation were better than crack. Not
that I would know. Probably. (That was a joke, I don’t do drugs stronger
than Tylenol.)
Rachael: I also love
my writing circle, which is when a small group of us get together every two
weeks and share something different, whether it be writing a screenplay to
poetry to novels! It’s so inspiring to
be around people like that.
// Writing is totally worth it.
Lindsay: While I
wrote the first draft I was figuring it out as I went. Now that it’s complete,
it’s cool to step back and rethink my story with a more complete frame of mind.
Rachael: I think the
reason you should write a book is not only will you sound really cool at dinner
parties, but it’s really rewarding to be working towards such a positive
personal goal. //
That’s it, you guys.
I’m writing a book. Dangerously
twitching eyes and happy crying over the first copy in print and wanting to
give up and feeling like I’ve accomplished something really, really big? Sign
me up, all of it. I’m so sold!
Thanks so much for letting me be here today, Anna, and
thanks for reading to words of a complete stranger, reader of Anna in
Wonderland! I appreciate you! (Sidenote:
But let’s stop being strangers – you can drop by my regular blogging space and leave me a note, because I’d love to get in touch.)
Allie
Thanks so much again for letting me be a part of this! It was so fun to do!
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