Episode 11: JP Douglas Interviews Crys Cain

Good morning friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And this is episode 11 of the Write Away podcast. It is September 15th, 2020 as I record this and I believe has been three weeks since my last episode. I fully intended to have one available for you last week, this actual episode.

It was ready to go, but I couldn’t even spare the time to record this intro. I was in deep deadline mode, but I’m happy to report that I completed a romance book with my writing partner. And it’s in editing now.

What is new in my life? Lots of thinking as always. And I am considering writing a solo series in this co-written romance world. One of the things I have realized, and this was in a deep dive class on intellection through Becca Symes, is that I really miss having my old ways of thinking time. And that’s been hard for all of us as we’re still in the midst of COVID and I’m used to going out to cafes. I’m used to having places to bike to, I don’t really care to bike for no reason, but I used to have more places to bike to and from.

And even further back than that, I really miss having a car. I have had a car twice in the last seven years, both of those times when I was in the States and never more than six months of car time in my life. And I borrow cars from family and friends, all that good stuff, but I have never owned a car in Costa Rica.

And for the first time ever last month I rented a car and then I rented a car again for my birthday, so I could zoom, zoom up and down the beach and go to different beaches and have quiet time. So I have a new little mini goal to buy a car, which means money. And I have some savings schools. There’s a lot of life that would settle down with a little bit of extra income.

So as much as I really want to focus on joy writing instead of work writing, I am making the choice to continue to focus on work writing and actually go a little harder into it, rather than trying to split my time. So we’ll see how that goes. What else have I done? I actually recorded a couple of other episodes of interviews.

So I have three episodes recorded, showing I have absolutely no consistent plan for this podcast, but I am enjoying myself and I hope you are too. Exciting news for me, I ordered an iPad Pro this week. I have really started to chafe at being stuck at a desktop, and it’s been hurting my productivity in ways that surprised me.

I thought I would actually be more productive having a place to come to and being like, this is where I work every day. And it just hasn’t, I don’t know if it’s just the ergonomics of my particular situation, which are difficult to change right now, or I just don’t like being stuck. And so I have been wanting to order an iPad Pro for a while.

And with the difficulties, normally I go back to the States to visit family. And while I’m there, I make all my big purchases, because particularly with electronics in Costa Rica, there is a 30% import tax. So instead of paying a thousand dollars for an iPad, you’re paying $1300. Which is not awesome, but I was willing to do it if I had to, thankfully I did not have to. There’s a person who is coming from the States now that he borders have opened up to air travel from certain states in the U.S. So I’m having them bring down a good bit of stuff for me.

So some of the things that surprised me why I hated being stuck at the desk was I still have pain days from inflammation and sitting at a desk chair, a proper desk chair helps a lot, but it does not keep me from being in pain. And I am used to being able to lay on my back in bed and type without seeing the screen.

I have tried to replicate that with dictating into my phone. And that does work occasionally, but I need to practice dictation more. It is a really good tool to have in your pocket in case of injury, in case of repetitive strain, in case of just body pain. And I have not been practicing it. So that’s my fault.

The other thing is, since they cut my poor little tree down in front of my house. Well, I mean, granted, half of it fell, the other half they cut down for safety. That was my shade. And that happened not quite a year ago, but now it’s really hot where my desk is, and the last few days have been ridiculous.

The temperature’s only been in the eighties and nineties, which is kind of normal, but the heat index, the degree has been 114 F, 104 F, and I just have not wanted to be anywhere near any extra heat. My upstairs turns into a little cooker. I realized how much freedom I felt having a portable writing device again when a dear friend allowed me to borrow her Microsoft Surface so that I could finish this book because I couldn’t sit at my desk unless it was really late at night. And I pass out between eight and ten every night. So that was quite difficult finding that time and being awake.

But with borrowing her little Surface, I could write downstairs and it was lovely. And moving from place to place is a tool that I have used in the past to reset my mental focus, and it’s going to be really nice to have that back again when I’m having difficulty thinking in one space, can move to another, whether it’s in my house and I moved to my bed or I moved downstairs or simply to my couch, which is three feet behind me. I just really lik that I’m going to have more options.

I have some really good expectations of this enhancing my productivity. And I plan on using it to get back in art. I’m pretty minimalist. And so I’ve resisted adding a lot of art supplies to my inventory, and I used to paint and draw so much. So I’m hoping this helps scratch that art itch in some really healthy ways.

So my last item on my update is Amazon has come up with a new feature for book clubs. And I don’t know if some of you’ve seen this, but they just kind of popped it up and haven’t really done anything with it. The implementation is pretty terrible to be honest, but I really love the idea. I’ve actually never been part of a book club, but that hasn’t stopped me from starting my own.

My plan is to pick a book every month, and finishing our first book, which is Techniques of the Selling Writer, mostly is an encouragement to myself to finish this book by November 4th. That’s a little extra time because this particular book is really dense, it has so much information. How I envision it working is, we’ll pick a book every month after this, finishing that first book by November 6th, I’ll grab a few friends and we’ll record our discussion and share it on the podcast, and then you listeners will be able to join in on the conversation in the comments.

That’s a work in progress. If anyone has suggestions for managing it better, please do put it in the comments of this episode. And if you’d like more information, check the show notes, I’m going to have an email list and you can sign up.

So this week on the podcast, I did things a little differently. It is an interview, but I’m the one being interviewed. I realized a few weeks ago that I haven’t shared my getting started story in full, and I wondered why that was, because normally in person I very happily and easily share my story with no problem.

I think that my story of how I got started and how I became successful is not normal, but it is proof that you can do anything even in some pretty crappy circumstances. And I realized the fact that I wasn’t telling my story to an individual was part of the thing that was holding me back. It was really hard to just talk into a microphone all about myself and how I accomplished this.

Because it felt too much like just bragging. So I asked my friend, JP, who is in the beginning stages of his writing career, who would have the most useful questions as we’re talking about the beginning stages of my career, to interview me. So that’s what you’re getting today. JP Douglas is interviewing me about how I got started when I was next to homeless, less than $0 in the bank, and had just lost my job, had just had a baby, had moved in with my parents, with my husband, dogs, and child, and succeeded in self-publishing. So I hope this is useful. I hope you enjoy it. And I plan on putting together some resources for self-publishing when broke. It may be just a podcast and a checklist, but we’ll see.

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JP: Alright, so your origin story is crazy, and I would like to hear a little more of it. So from what I know, at the time that you decided to self-publish you were homeless and you didn’t have a penny to your name. So what made you decide to pursue self-publishing over getting a nine to five at the time?

Crys: Well, I was pursuing nine to five, but I’m pretty sure I was self-sabotaging, because I didn’t want to go back. Let’s see, there wasn’t any question in my mind whether I was going to self-publish or not. I’d been pursuing self-publishing, or been studying self-publishing not actively pursuing as a fringer, wanting but not doing for years.

I mean, since the Kindle came out, since that was a thing. I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, and just always very aware and studying the market constantly, even before self-publishing was a thing. Thankfully, I wasn’t actually homeless. I was next to homeless. What had happened was, we had a crazy year. I was still with my ex-husband at the time, and we got pregnant. Two months later, we decided for him to take a job in the States to see if he wanted to get back into his old line of work. And from decision to moving was about 19 days, which is kind of how we roll. So we went back to the States from January to September. No, my months are wrong. It was beginning of July. And anyway, sometime in July, doesn’t matter. Details.

So I came back, had my son, which was its own crazy story, and then I had mostly off for three months. I’d saved up for my own maternity. I was a freelance software developer at the time.

Three days after I started back full time, they’re like, and we’re letting you go. I was a contract worker, so they could do that. And then two months later, they let go of all their remote workers, which I knew was coming, but they had to line up severance for all of them. Still a little bitter that I got cut out of that loop.

And so we tried to make things work. I was applying, but I had a new baby. And I was exhausted and alone most of the day going crazy. I can remember my most miserable day of my life, one hundred percent. Well, maybe until like the whole relationship falling apart, but the most miserable day until that, my kid was like six or seven months old and he just was only happy if he was interacting with me,. Like I couldn’t set him down. He had to be touching me.

I was exhausted, hadn’t slept that night, and so I let him lay on me, kicking my face because it was the only thing he was happy doing that didn’t involve some participation from me.

I was having a really hard time trying to apply for jobs, trying to build up new skills to be really attractive to new jobs. But I also had formatted my resume in a unique way, because I was like, I don’t want to get hired by the same kind of miserable company I just left. I’m trying to attract the perfect employer. And, you know, most employers didn’t want unique, which is fine because four months later, still no job.

We had exhausted our savings, maxed out our credit cards, and I’m like, we literally have enough money to get back to the States if we go now and move in with my family. If we don’t go now, we’re stuck. Then we will be living underneath a beach palm tree eating coconuts, which isn’t terrible. You totally survive on that, but it’s kind of like not awesome with a baby and mosquitoes and all that fun stuff.

So we did, we flew back to the States and I’d written this little novella two years before, and it was terrible. Of course at the time ,I thought it was fine.  I got to New York, and this is the very end of March, and a friend of mine was like, “Hey, I just discovered this new little genre, little niche genre on Amazon. Have you ever read it?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve actually read a lot of that, and my little story will fit if I just change a couple of things. We’ve talked about co-writing before, why don’t we publish that and then write some other stuff and just kind of see where that goes?”

I’d been following self-publishing for forever so I knew, and still this is even more true, that you don’t make any money on your first book, generally. A hundred percent there are exceptions, and I turned out to be one. So I published this book.

I had done my own cover. It was terribly, terribly edited because I edited it, and so I spent $0 on it other than whatever resources I had at the time, which were Photoshop and a giant stockpile of Depositphoto credits, which is a stock photo site.

I created this all on my own, and I published it, and then just left it. And we were like, yeah, once we get like three books out or something, then we’ll start promoting.

But when I went and looked at the KDP Dashboard. I’d sold about $20 worth in 24 hours. And I knew that was not normal at all.

So I called my friend, and I was like, yo, this is insane. Look at this. And she’s like, yeah. Wow. We need to jump on this. So we did, we wrote two more books, very short books, that month. One was 16k and the next one might have been 40k. I actually looked it up, and I published that first book on the 5th of April, and it made $1,300 that month.

I did everything wrong. The title on the cover had just been some made up title that I had made when I had created the cover months before, and then I forgot to change it to the actual title . We didn’t research the author name that we decided to use, and it turned out that already existed and we couldn’t claim the Amazon author page. So we threw in an initial to make it different. I didn’t have any kind of mailing list. So I quick hurried to fix all of that, and I told my husband, “This is so not normal. If I run at this a hundred percent, this is my new career. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. And I’m done with programming, which I still love programming, but I don’t like programming for other people.”

Our baseline, at that point, of what we need to make to pay our debts and survive with a baby was $3,000 He was like, “We need to be able to get to $3,000 in a month before we can stop looking for jobs.”

And, yeah, it’s fair, but I really don’t want to do that because I know that this is a hundred percent the right way to go. So I was very resentful. And I did still have some interviews, but again, I was kind of self-sabotaging because I just didn’t want to do it.

I was throwing just hours and hours into writing. The second month I hit $3,000 of income. And I don’t think I’ve dropped below that since. The price of that has been a lot of books published really fast. So I have had burnout a lot, and I’m working on fixing that as we’re going forth into the future.

JP: From what you’ve told me, you’re kind of switching gears and changing into different genres. What made you decide to make that switch and what are you learning as you’re making those switches?

Crys: Yeah, the switches are aligning with what I really, really love.  Romance has taught me a lot. I was not an emotionally focused writer, to a detrimental level. I think that people can be non-emotional writers like Isaac Asimov and be successful, but they max out on a different quality. Which for Isaac Asimov is: his prose is forgettable, but his ideas are magical.

I didn’t necessarily have the magical ideas, so I a hundred percent appreciate fulfilling or expanding my skills, and the thing that I respond with in books is emotion, what they make me feel. I think that the majority of readers relate to books on an emotional level.

Not everyone clearly, but the majority. Part of my alignment is getting into genres that more align with the emotions that I’m super, super interested in. Which is adventure, betrayal. One of the hardest things about romance on many levels is that it has extremely strong emotional expectations, and you have to meet those expectations for the readers to feel satisfied. A lot of people dismiss it as formulaic, but the reality is that it’s insanely hard to write an emotionally satisfying story, or to learn to write an emotionally satisfying story, that matches the extremely strict expectations that the readers have.

There’s a lot more emotions that I want to explore that romance doesn’t really leave as much room for. You can absolutely do it. There are authors who do it, but that’s less my interest. Science fiction, fantasy–I can’t write contemporary, I’ve tried. I’ve done it with co-writers. That’s the only way I can do it. It makes me feel so boring. So if I’m writing contemporary, then it needs to at least be explosions. But I like any aliens. I need magic. I need other kinds of creatures, just… everything that does not exist and I wish it did. That’s my wish fulfillment. So science fiction, fantasy.

I’m working on a cozy right now, which is another really strict genre expectation. It is really interesting stepping into that. I think that has been a helpful segue into the brand or world of sci-fi and fantasy because I’ve kind of felt overwhelmed by choices as I’ve approached the one project I have. It’s a solo project, science fiction. This can literally go anywhere, and that is overwhelming.

So cozy–I am struggling through learning that those genre expectations, but enjoying that there are the expectations so that I can know whether I meet them or not, which is a good segue. My original thought when I started writing it was that, because I’m all in KU pretty much with the romance, and my more strict science fiction and fantasy I intend on being fully wide. My original thought when I approached cozy mystery was, well, this will give me a non-romance genre that amplifies the things I do want to write about and minimizes the things I don’t want to write about that does really well in KU and so I can pump them out quickly.

I have failed to pump them out quickly, failed to realize how much learning I have to do for the genre. How burned out I really have been. As I’ve come to a understanding with my romance side of my business, like, okay, this is what your purpose is, and this is how we’re going to interact, I felt less of a need to push it into KU so I’m not really sure what I will do with that. I really do want to move away from pumping out books. I have published over 50 books in not quite three and a half years, and that’s a lot with co-writers, but that’s been over an average of a book a month.

And that’s too much for me. My ideal is about four books a year, which to some people sounds like a lot and some people sound so small. That would make me so happy to know that I have time to work on my books, time to deepen my books in a way that I like. And part of that understanding has come from Becca Syme’s class and just understanding what’s my ideal way of interacting with my work versus what’s my capacity. My capacity can be pretty high for a while, but then I hit burnout more often.

JP: You’ve mentioned a few times that you work with co-writers. What does that process look like and how does that kind of work with your process and how have you kind of learned from that as well?

Crys: Yeah, it’s different with every co-writer. My first co-writing relationship we didn’t plot My co-writer didn’t never plot. She doesn’t like it and it makes her feel stifled. And that did cause some problems in our relationship, not the problems that ended the co-writing relationship, but that was definitely problematic. The one thing I learned is that when I do work with a co-writer, I want an outline. I won’t work with a co-writer without an outline. It just helps manage both of our expectations. My second co-writer who has turned out to be one of my best writing friends and dearest life friends.

I think we did write our first few books without outlines. We were both in really dark, emotional places at the time. I had just lost my dog that I had adopted like two months after I got married. She had some health stuff and deaths in her family, and I was like, let’s just write something to distract ourselves.

It was a different tone from any of the stuff either of us had written. We didn’t have any expectations of it, so we were completely ridiculous over the top. The format was kind of like, a military team doing missions and saving people and falling in love.

Talk about formula! We’ve got that formula down. We have written over 20 books in that series, or in that world, we have several series. So our pattern is pretty solid. We’ll pick a number of chapters, generally between 12 and 16. Just kind of like, what do we have time for?

It takes each of us a day to turn a chapter around, so we can get two chapters done a day between the two of us. And we have done faster, but we don’t prefer it because that means that we’re working asynchronously, where if she’s working on a chapter, I’m also working on chapter, and we haven’t read how they connect yet and then we have to fix it, but we have the outline so it’s possible.

We’ll sit down, we’ll have a call. Generally takes us about two hours. We sit down and we’re like, okay, this is what happens in chapter one. This is what happens in chapter two. This last time was actually the first time we jumped around, I’m like, wait, I’m having trouble seeing what’s going to happen here in the middle, so let’s jump to the end. We know what happens in the end. There’s very specific things that we have in this series that happen. There’s a ceremony that the family does every time. And then we jumped around to the middle, but that’s the first time we’ve done that.

With another friend, we hired somebody to write us an outline. We’re like, here’s our basic world building of the kind of world that we want to write in, can you flesh this out in a world and an outline? And that was a lot of fun, because we got to focus on deepening in the text more, because the person we hired is actually my friend, Tami Veldura, who I have a different co-writing project going on in science fiction and fantasy. There’s sci-fi with dragons. We’re very excited. I feel like proud mama. Tami is just one of those deep, deep world-building people who–that’s the part they love. And I love the drafting, the deepening of the prose.

So we’re hoping that we’re a really good match as we go through this project together. One of the most interesting parts for me in the co-writing relationships is not necessarily what happens with the plotting and the writing itself, but with the editing, because that’s where egos come into play and you learn what your partner finds acceptable.

One of my co-writers, and she expects the same from me, she will only make a comment if she has a big enough problem with it that she thinks it absolutely needs to be changed. And it’s actually taken me like a year or two to suss that out. I would reject some of her suggestions sometimes because my approach was like, we’re just throwing all our best stuff in there, but it’s up to the other person to agree or disagree and that’s totally fine.

And for me, that comes from a code review background with software development. Like, you get over your ego pretty quickly when everybody’s tearing your stuff apart, or you don’t survive. And so now I do extremely minimal editing on her chapters and just trust that our editor will catch anything that needs to be handled.

But, yeah, she had just a lot of hidden resentment that she wasn’t expressing because we were operating on completely different paths and expectations. So I’ve adapted a lot to her expectations just because I don’t have the smaller ego, to be honest. And I’ll fight for the things that I feel strongly about. But other than that, I’m just like, hey, commas and missed quotation marks? We’ll let that go.

And then another co-writer and I would tear each other scenes apart, and I loved that. I was very cautious going into that, and we had that conversation beforehand to set the expectations because of what I’d learned. Like where are you on this? How comfortable are you? What kind of invasiveness are you comfortable with me having on your chapters? I’m very comfortable with invasiveness. Especially because we have both been reading each other’s stuff for a while, just being in the same genre together.

So we had that comfort there, and it was like our styles match fairly well, and she had a very strong emotional skill. And I had a very strong action scene skill. And so there were definitely scenes where one or the other of us would almost nearly rewrite the other scene just because we were working in our lesser skill.

We had so much comfortableness with going deep and going rough, and that was awesome. I really appreciate that too, but it’s just that expectation between individual writers.

I mentioned my co-writing project with Tami Veldura, and she has written a very extensive outline with world building, and I’m doing the first draft. I messaged her a few weeks ago, and I was like, “Hey, I realized that I’m having a block as I’m going to write this draft. I don’t know what your pass through is going to look like. And with every other co-writer we’ve exchanged chapters. This is the first time where I’m doing the full first draft. Can you hit up that first scene I’ve done and give it an edit pass so that I can see what it’s going to look like? Because if I have a weakness in my writing and I know that you’re really strong in it, I will push myself less hard to get that part right because I know you’ve got my back on it.”

And she did it. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and go through it, but part of that learning process is analyzing what you need from your co-writer and communicating it. I mean, communication is key with co-writing. If you can’t communicate with someone you’re in for a lot of pain, possible panic attacks, and ends of friendships. It’s only happened once, but it was rough.

JP: How was the self-publishing industry when you started and how have you noticed it changed now that you’re kind of going into these other genres?

Crys: So three years (ago). On my end, it doesn’t feel like it’s changed very much. The niche I’m in seems…it is definitely harder for newbies in any genre to pop up with a terribly edited book and succeed, which I think is a good thing, but people are still popping up and making $500 their first month. Particularly in my little niche. I actually did write a book in another genre. I wrote a book in another genre with someone just to see if it would take off, because it was a hot new genre. I was like, hey, it has a lot of elements that you and I both enjoy. Let’s explore it.  And with a brand-new name, good editing, we had the whole nine yards, we made $400 that month on that book. Which was right within my expectations, but not my hopes. And we haven’t been able to finish the second book in that series because of my burnouts. But there’s just still so much opportunity.

I have tried advertising a couple of times, and I’ve never spent more than $50 on a book. So there’s probably a part of the reason it hasn’t worked for me, but my niche is also just so small that most readers have heard of the top 20 authors at some point. And I would say that my co-writer in that genre is the top author.

So people have absolutely heard of me because they’ve read our books together. The advertising hasn’t been necessary. We have really strong mailing lists. Readers respond really well to freebie giveaways, and those have been just as interactive in my mailing list as organic additions.

I think that what I see is more and more viability for wide, and more and more difficulty to get noticed in KU. I think KU caters to writers and readers who work fast, whether they publish fast, they read fast. And while I am in that game, I want to get out of that game. And so that’s why a wide methodology is appealing a lot more and more to me.

And that doesn’t mean that I won’t ever go into KU, but I would really like to get away from the dependence on one company. One month, right after I moved back to Costa Rica, it was my biggest payment from Amazon ever, but I had just changed over to a business bank account and I’d done it right when they were issuing payments.

Half of my payments got lost in the ether, and I was counting on that money to live on. Thankfully, it only took ten days of me harassing them to get it back, but that’s terrifying. That one payment doesn’t come through, and I’m screwed. I really want to get away from that.

JP: I’ve heard this on a few podcasts, and I’d like to get your take. With you going into sci-fi, fantasy, and cozy mystery, are you going to keep your author name for all three of those genres, or are you going to have a different author name for each of those?

Crys: I’m going all in on one name, á la Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. I have attempted to manage a couple of email lists simultaneously, and I can’t even manage one email list, honestly. Right now I have an assistant who does it. I’m like, “Yo, this is the thing we have to promote this week,” and then she just ninjas it all together and she saves my life. She saves my life in a lot of realms. (If anybody needs a good VA, I have one, contact me. I’ll get you her info.)

I plan on doing some serious segmentation of my list. I know that that doesn’t necessarily mean that I will be able to control my also boughts using that segmentation. I know that Lindsay Buroker has had a lot of issues with all of her books showing up in all of her also boughts because her fans love her. Good problem to have.

And that’s another reason for going wide, because the other storefronts don’t have that recommendation engine the same way. Theirs are more managed. Yes, Amazon comprises most of the e-book industry currently, and that’s where most authors get the majority of their income even when they’re wide. I’m not gonna worry about working towards Amazon’s algorithm, because that could change at any moment, too.

I want to build a steady and consistent business that doesn’t require constant pivots. We all have to make changes to adjust to the industry. That’s inevitable, but I want a business that’s steadier and requires less of me so that I can focus on the creative part of it. And I think that one name, wide will do that.

JP: Completely selfishly, what does a day in the life of Crys look like? I’m curious to know what kind of schedule do you have or don’t have?

Crys: I don’t have, lately. I used to be extremely scheduled. I had to be with my ex and my kiddo. I do have this basic schedule in that I wake up somewhere between four-thirty and seven, seven is sleeping in for me. I actually set an alarm for this (the interview), because I don’t normally have anything that happens before eight, and because I don’t have a consistent time that I wake up. I was like, well, I need to make sure that I wake up before six, because it’s six my time that we’re meeting, and not six-thirty. But I woke up at five. So we’re fine.

I hate setting alarms. It’s the worst. Alarms are the worst. No alarms unless you have a meeting because somebody is crazy and further East than I am, or a flight to catch. Those are literally the only times I set an alarm.

My kiddo goes with the nanny at between eight and nine. It depends on the day, whether his dad has him or I have him. So Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, I have no kiddo. I tend to roll out of bed and work. And I work until, I don’t know, seven, eight, get breakfast. The kiddo comes to my house, the nanny comes to my house, and I hang out with them for about an hour.

And then I try and get myself into working. I didn’t have to use to get myself into working. I’m kind of a workaholic. Right now, I have been struggling with setting a schedule because I have a lot of openness. I have a lot of free time. I’m trying to recover from burnout, so I’m trying not to just push myself straight into work a hundred percent of the time.

I have been considering whether I just need to be like, okay, these are your two hours to write, and then you have to go to the beach or something. You have to go do something! Terrible, right? And as we’ve been loosening up with Corona down here, setting coffee dates with friends I need to be like, okay, you have to get work done before you go do that.

I’m trying to set up external things that purposefully crunch in my writing time so that I prioritize it. I’ve only just started doing that, so I can’t tell you how effective it is.

JP: Well, I’d like to hear more eventually when you get around to setting that in. I think as a last question, can you kind of give us a peek behind the curtain, tell us what you’re working on and what kind of projects you have coming out?

Crys: Yeah. I will keep the romance to the side, super-secret, all that fun stuff. For science fiction and fantasy I have the cozy mystery, which is paranormal with a witch with a sarcastic cat who doesn’t like her as a familiar as my little twist on it. And that’s set on an Island in Georgia, the state, not the country. Then there’s my solo sci-fi project, which I’ve kind of set aside indefinitely.

I actually was just talking to a life coach the other day, and I realized that most of the progress I made when I was working on that, I was writing by hand because I was able to take it outside of my work environment and make it a one hundred percent creative thing. So I may need to print all that out, staple it into a notebook, and go back to writing by hand so that that becomes just the creative thing again. And then my sci-fi with dragons with Tami Veldura, that is epic space opera, multiple POV, and very different from anything that I have published. I’ve written in that style plenty as a younger teen, twenties, and never finished anything. So it’s exciting to get back into that expansive style of story. And it’s very, very different because I’ve been writing in first person for the most part with the romance. I like being able to jump into so many other people’s heads and motivations. It’s a new challenge and I’m really am enjoying it.

JP: I’m super excited to see these when they come out. Thank you for having me come on and ask these questions. I definitely jumped at it when you asked me because I’m very interested to kind of learn where you are headed and where you’ve been, because I’m kind of in the similar boat to where you started.

Crys: Now can you tell people where they can find anything about you? Because I know that you have some stories and some anthologies, so how would they find that? And do you have a website yet?

JP: Yeah. I’ve got a website. You can check me out at jpdouglas.org. You can join the newsletter, which will hopefully have some free content coming up soon. So, I’ve got a, post-apocalyptic, a sci-fi, and an upcoming horror short out.

Crys: Excellent. And those are the J Thorn anthologies for the most part.

JP: Yep.

Crys: Cool. So you should be able to search JP Douglas on Amazon and the anthologies will pop up. Thank you so much, JP.

JP: Yup. Thank you.