I knew early on that I wanted to start this “A Day in the Life” interview series with our Wise Wolf authors. I have long held a fascination with how creative individuals spend their days, how they mentally prepare themselves to sit down and do the work, how and where they work best, and how they reward themselves. My fascination reaches an all-time high when we’re talking about writers.
While many of us (now or at one point) picture a writer bent over his or her desk writing feverishly, a fresh cup of coffee and a book (or ten) never far out of reach, this is a glamorized version of reality.
Reality looks a lot different.
Perhaps it comes in the form of an unwashed mass of hair piled on top of a woman’s head or the five-day-old scruff on a man’s face. Perhaps it means a desk piled high with heavily marked-up drafts and near-empty cups of coffee topped with fine layers of curdled milk. For many, it means saying no to lunch and coffee dates, to impromptu visitors, to anything that will distract them from their work. For most, it means sitting their butts in chairs each and every day, not moving until the work is done.
When a book first comes across my desk, the very first thing I do, even before I start reading, is look up the writer online. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, a personal blog—I’m looking at them all. A curious person by nature, I want to know a little about the person whose work I’m about to read. At the very least, I like knowing what they look like. But my favorite thing to come across when looking up an author is a picture of their writing space. This way, when I pull up their submission on my iPad, I’m able to picture them in their space, writing the words I’m reading. To me, this is a beautiful thing.
“A day in the life” interview series begins
When are you most focused during the day? Do you have a dedicated writing space, and what does it look like? Do you have a ritual that you perform before or during your writing? What is your biggest distraction? How do you reward yourself after finishing your manuscript? These are all questions I hope to ask our authors.
I will begin with debut author Nova McBee, whose young-adult action-adventure novel, Calculated was the first title released under the Wise Wolf Books imprint back in February. It is my hope that I will be able to share these interviews monthly, and that you will take as much delight in reading them as I do in putting them together. It is my hope that you, too, are as curious as I am.