Archive for May, 2010
An Interview with "Dream Wanderers" Author, Paula Brown, Part 3
May 5th, 2010 | 
Author:
Q: What are your goals? What would you like to accomplish next?
A: I want and need to finish my sequel. The story is done, I just need to find the time for one more look through it. I will probably have one more book in that series and there is another series that has been bugging me for a long time that I just haven’t done anything with.
Q: What advice do you have for other writers?
A: Write for yourself. Don’t do it for others and don’t do it expecting to become the next famous author, because it won’t happen. If you write for yourself then you just may end up with something that you are proud of, like I did.
Q: How do you feel about content mills?
A: They have their place, I guess. I do work for them because it gives me a chance to write and get paid for it. What I don’t like about the content mills is that readers will assume that the author is an expert, which most of the time they aren’t. I wrote one “How To” type of article a while ago that I STILL have no idea of what I was talking about. I also wish that some of them had higher standards as far as grammar is concerned.
Q: Are there any you’d recommend over others?
A: I love Word Gigs! They treat their writers with respect and really listen to us. I have also have a love/hate relationship with Demand Studios. When things are going well with them they are fantastic but in my opinion they don’t have a good enough communication system set up.
Q: How you do you balance your writing with being a mom and wife?
A: I gave up sleep. Okay, kidding aside, I try to get a couple of hours of writing done in the morning when I have some time to myself. I also will work a couple of hours in the evening. The rest of the day I just try to grab a few minutes to write here and there.
One of the most important parts of my day is the daily walk that my daughter and I go on. We walk about five miles every day, rain or shine, no excuses. We have been in several 5, 8 and, 10K races, and we even did a half marathon. It’s become an important part of our lives and it’s been a real bonding experience.
Q: Do you find it hard to fit in time to write?
A: The hard part for me isn’t finding the time, it’s forcing myself to write when I have the time. It’s just too easy to make excuses.
Q: Do you feel a mother should be able to follow her dreams? And if yes, how should they go about balancing it all?
A: That’s a very interesting question because becoming a mother always was my biggest dream. The moment that my daughter was born I felt like a missing piece of me was suddenly there. Past that, though, following a dream is important and mothers should do it. It should just never be at the expense of her family. (The same goes for dads.)
I guess that the best way to balance it all is to schedule and to share responsibilities. A wife and mother does not have to do EVERYTHING, even though many of us feel like it is all up to us. Wives and mothers need to learn to delegate some of their responsibilities. The kids can help out, and Dad can too. If the dream is something that can be accomplished with the family then she should definitely go for it. If the dream is at the expense of the family, then that’s a different story.
* Thank you all, again, for taking the time to read this 3-part interview. (Hopefully I’ll be able to post more like this in the future. If you’re interested in doing an interview, please feel free to contact me.) I also want to thank Paula for making this possible.
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An Interview with "Dream Wanderers" Author, Paula Brown, Part 2
A: I have two major influences. My first one is A.A. Milne. I have loved Winnie the Pooh my entire life and some of my best childhood memories are sitting in my father’s lap and reading the books together.
A: This is kind of a strange story. I am a huge fan of Walt Disney World and am a member of some fan sites. One day I received an email that there was a publisher who was looking for people to write reviews on various rides for a series of books on the parks. I wrote to him and asked if he needed someone to write about Star Tours. The next thing I knew I was writing ride reviews left and right, enough that I got my name on the covers of the books.
Since it is a small company I was responsible for getting the manuscript print ready, and I kept having all these blank pages! That was hard for me to figure out; computers confuse me. The other part is the promotion of it. I’m not very good at self promotion, and it is really hard to get the name of a new book out there.
A: I don’t think so. I would rather have a small publisher that likes me than a large one who always tells me everything that I do is wrong.
A: Since I didn’t exactly find my publisher by the normal route, I didn’t really have to deal with rejections there. Before I found him I was looking for an agent and ran across someone who was rather cold. I took a deep breath and just kept looking. The trick, I think, is to not take it personally, which is next to impossible because writers put a little bit of their soul into their work.
An Interview with "Dream Wanderers" Author, Paula Brown, Part 1
A: Sure, I was born in
I’ve always been into the arts. I’ve played the flute since I was 10, and I studied theater in college. I eventually became a disc jockey at a radio station in
A: I never really realized that I COULD write for a living. I would write because I loved to write. I’ve always enjoyed making things up. Sometimes I would write them down and sometimes I would just play them out in my head. I never really thought about it as a career of any type until I found out about places like Demand Studios.
A: No, pretty much the opposite. My fiction has always been very internal, and I was always scared to let anyone read it. When I wrote “Dream Wanderers”, though, something was different. I was happy with the way it came out, and I loved the ending so much that I wanted to share my work for the first time.
A: They just kind of come to me. I’m a huge “Star Wars” fan, and I have always loved the idea of creating an entirely new universe.
A: The very first piece that I consider published was a poem that I wrote for the official website for the original “Battlestar Galactica”. I don’t write poetry and this was very much a tongue in cheek piece. I had included the words “A Very Bad Poem” in the title, but they removed that when they put it on the site. The site has changed drastically, though, and I don’t think it’s there anymore.
*This marks the end of part one. Please check back tomorrow to read more of the Paula Brown interview.
