It has been a pleasure chatting with our newest Authors M. K. Smith. Her book, Finishing the Game is due out on the first week in October and is available for preorder now.
I started by asking a little about herself and her home life and about her writing.
I’m a bartender/waitress. I moved back to Florida to get my masters in psychology but recently decided to put education off to give myself more time to write. I have been writing for about 10 years. My first story came to me in a dream. I was standing in my kitchen and there was a man outside in a tree watching me. This spark made me want to be a writer, it took me a while and I had my fair share of rejection letters, but that is all apart of learning the writer’s craft. The first rejection letter I’ll never forget. She said, “Not only is this not what we’re looking for, but it’s also just bad writing!” Though one kind editor was much more helpful and wrote back suggesting a more structured outline for my story, showing me where I was going wrong because she thought I had potential.
I work at home in my small office and write during the day. I enjoy reading a mystery or suspenseful romance novels. I love the genre, so that’s what I typically write. I can’t really say how long it takes to write a story because a lot of the time I’ll get about halfway through and decide I don’t like where the story is heading. I delete it and have to start over because I find it easier to work from a fresh start. Finishing The game I wrote and fine-tuned in about 10 months.
My ideas just come to me. for example, yesterday while I was out, I had an idea about a woman who felt like she was being watched. I wanted to capture the feelings while they were fresh in my mind, so when I got home I wrote nine pages in a snap. I always write my ideas down. Sometimes it just flows well and like I said sometimes I hate the story. My tip for aspiring authors is it write everything down, but if it doesn’t flow scrap it and move on. Once I’d written 89 pages of a story, it was really not working so I deleted it. I don’t ever try to rework a story that doesn’t read well.
Thank you for taking time out to chat with us, very interesting to hear how your writing process works, I think it is brave to scrap so much text, it must be a hard thing to do.
You can find M. K. Smith’s book on Amazon. To pre-order click, Finishing the Game.