Author Q&A – Casey Campbell

I started writing when I had a newborn baby and just used it as something to keep my mind busy. That baby is now 15 and I realised I had 20+ books, most ready for publishing. I decided at the end of last year to get them online and have so far loaded six novels with another ready to publish on 21st September. What a ride. I’m hoping to get another few online before the end of the year.

I begin every book with a central theme, which is usually a question. “What would happen to a teenage girl who is the sole survivor in a plane crash? What if she emerged from the forest ten years later pregnant?” Then I’ll expand it with more questions. Who did she meet? Why did the plane go down? What happened to everyone else on the plane? How did she survive? Those questions lead me to other characters and deeper plot. This is when I’m most anxious, lots of ideas, lots of characters. It’s like juggling china cups.

I always use a working title but have been known to change this right up to publication day (my poor cover designer). I try to use it as another function of telling the story.

There is so much information out there, I made the decision early that anything that took me away from writing was to be distrusted. Especially when you start, minimize your procrastination (social media is a time killer!), just write. Don’t worry about the rest of it, just write your story. Work out your routine, be disciplined and be kind to yourself. I’ve only recently started working on the social media side of things and find it takes a lot of time away from writing. I’m still working out things everyday, it’s all about learning.

This is a great question, and one I suspect every writer struggles with if you have a job, kids and life commitments. I’m also a librarian. My day consists of getting the kids to school, going to work an hour early and writing/editing as fast as I can while sitting in a busy school library. Morning tea is 15 more minutes of beating up my laptop, then lunch another 30. I always say I’m going to write at night, then I get stuck cooking, cleaning, being at kids sports or ‘real’ life, then I have reading for work. It sounds hectic but I’m a fast typer and usually manage to get a few books written per year. I find the more spare time I have the more of it I waste.

You would imagine as a librarian and writer I would be swimming in books. I have barely any in the house, most of them graphic novels that I collect (in plastic and boxed). I read so many books I couldn’t keep them all so tend to read new books through work, or if I’m given books I pass them on as soon as I can. And no one wants me in their book group! Haha, whatever!

My next book is called, Grayson and is a saucy novella I wrote after my friends challenged me to write something erotic. It is due out on 21st September, 2020.

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I hope you enjoy it.

All my other books can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/author/caseycampbell