1: What is the most productive time of the day for you to write?
Right now, I’m not working at our family painting business, so I start writing early in the morning, and usually write—except when I have to stop to do laundry or clean something— off and on all day long until around four-thirty or five when my husband gets home. I would love to write at night when it’s perfectly quiet, and because I am not a morning person at all, but it’s just too noisy in the evenings with the family home and I don’t have an office in which to escape.
2: Do you start your projects writing with paper and pen or is it all on the computer?
Both sort of. Even though I do ninety-nine percent of my writing on my laptop, I’ll stop here and there to write brief outline notes or write down something I might need to look up later. I love writing on my computer, and am a firm believer in the cut and paste feature. I’m always finding something that would be a better fit in a different place. Trust me, if I did that with pen and paper I wouldn’t be able to read it through the dozens of the scratch marks.
3: What do you draw inspiration from?
My head. I have a whole line of characters lurking in the dark recesses of my mind, and each one is completely different. Once I figure out which one I want to let out, voila! A story is born.
4: Do you set goals for yourself when you sit down to write such as word count?
I try to set a goal each day of at least a two or three thousand words. However, this is my first time writing in the urban fantasy genre, and also writing in first person. I am absolutely in love with this particular genre, and I find myself writing an easy five thousand words at one sitting. I’ve only been writing this novel a little over a month I think, and I have already written about sixty thousand words.
5: Are you a published or a self published author and how do you come up with your cover art?
Both. I started out self publishing short stories and my first novel on Smashwords, and Textnovel. About two months ago Books To Go Now, a lovely short story e-publisher, read the first short story I had ever written, a YA/mystery, LOST HOPE, and scooped it up. As for my novels, I have decided to self publish. I’ve only been writing just over a year, and after finishing my first novel, I tried the traditional route, but got discouraged early on, and then Joe Konrath told me not to give up and suggested I look into Indie publishing. I did, decided I loved the concept of being in control, and never looked back. As for my cover art, my friend and author, John Marion Francis, taught me how to make my own with a free program from the Internet.
6: What drives you to choose the career of being a writer?
Writing chose me when I was four years old. That’s when I first learned to read and write, and even before I could write, I wasn’t happy if I was telling a story. After high school, I got married, started a family, and put my writing on the back burner for many years. I might not have ever picked it back up if I hadn’t tried to read the worst book ever written. It was so bad I could not get through one chapter before flinging the book across the room. I told my husband even I could write better than that. He asked me what I was waiting for, and four months later, I finished my first novel.
7: Do you own an eBook reading device?
No, unfortunately I do not. I do have a Kindle reader installed on my laptop, and that will have to do until further notice. I don’t mind reading books on my laptop. The only problem I have is trying to fit my laptop into my purse.
8: Who are some of your favorite authors and what are you reading now?
I really have so many, but a few of my most favorites are John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell, Aaron P. Lazar, J. D. Salinger, Agatha Christie, and my newest favorite is Amanda Hocking. I just read her My Blood Approves series, and really connected. Her writing style is so much like mine, at times I felt like I was reading my own work.
9: What do you think of book trailers and do you have any plans to have any?
Love them—if they are done right. Some people just take odd pictures, slap on some text and music, and hit publish. I recently made the book trailer for my newest novel, Ties To TheBloodMoon, and I was really shocked at how well it turned out, especially for my first attempt at making one. I used a program already on my pc, and was surprised how easy it was to make.
10: How did you come up with the title of your latest book?
I’m not really sure. I think it came to me in a dream, because right after I started writing the book, someone asked me what the name was and it just rolled off my tongue. I Googled the title and was thrilled when I couldn’t find another book out there with the same title.
11: What are you working on now that you can talk about?
I’m the type of person that can’t write several things at once. Every morning when I wake up I’m so excited about writing the next chapters of this book that I can’t think about anything else. It is the first in a series of three or maybe more, so I’ve already started working on the outline for the next book. One of my daughters, Danielle, has been a major help to me. I bounce ideas off her, and she helps fill in all the gaps.
So, as soon as this one is finished, hopefully by the end of October, I’ll start the second book in the series, but I’m also going to write a novella about a certain character from the series. I can’t say who yet, but I can say it’s not one of the main characters.
I also pulled my first novel, Twisted, off the shelves at Amazon, and am doing a full rewrite and name change on that one. Nobody knew who I was, and I didn’t do any marketing before I released it, so it didn’t sell many copies.
I can be reached via my blog at http://www.robinpwaldrop.blogspot.com
Folks can contact me at any of those places or feel free to email me robinpwaldrop@gmail.com
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