I attended Bouchercon 2019 in Dallas, TX recently and as a first-time conference attendee I had the most amazing time. There was something for everyone. As an avid reader, my two favorite activities were the author interviews and author speed dating.
Author speed dating consisted of two authors sitting at your table and each had two minutes to talk about their books and themselves before moving on to the next table. It was so much fun and I met a lot of authors who were new to me but were quickly placed on my “to read” list.
My favorite author interview was when Heather Graham interviewed Sandra Brown. Sandra was very gracious and humble. She gave us a look at her long-standing career and the routine that helped her become a successful author of 82 books!
Sandra said the book Mirror Image changed her life. She stated she was stingy with her writing time, only touring ten days a year while attending one conference. She has an office with two employees that she goes to five days a week. She mentioned when she did not have an office that people would drop in on her thinking she wasn’t working.
Sandra said she didn’t know until she was a young adult that she wanted to write. She thought she would teach English. Her father was an editorial writer and a reader and her mother was an avid reader so she feels like she had a proclivity for writing. Some of her ideas came from newspaper, specifically the stories that were only two inches long. She would clip them out and go back to them for ideas.
She said coming up with names is one of the hardest parts of writing. She said sometimes the prologue starts writing itself. It is spontaneous and unexpected and she knows her idea wants to be a story when she know something you don’t know – the aha moment and that in her writing “the first question asked (overtly or not) is the last question answered.”
Sandra closed her interview stating there were just some places she wouldn’t go in her writing because she wouldn’t want live with it for a year (typical time from start to finish of a book) and the advice she gave was that “Every writer has to write to their comfort level and every reader must read to their comfort level.”
