Fellow-blogger and friend Cheryl Mahoney from Tales of the Marvellous also published a book this month and we thought it’d be a fun thing to swap interviews and introduce people to our books. So today we’re swapping interviews! I hope you’ll have as much fun reading them as we had answering each other’s questions.
Cheryl Mahoney can’t remember when she began her love affair with stories. She never goes anywhere (including the grocery store) without a book and a pen. Cheryl also writes a book review blog, Tales of the Marvelous, and is on Goodreads (MarvelousTales) and Twitter (@MarvelousTales). She has been previously published in The Ignatian, and has completed NaNoWriMo twice.
Welcome, Cheryl!
LEO: Tell me a little about your book.
CM: The Wanderers is a Young Adult Fantasy novel, loosely inspired by fairy tales. It’s the story of Jasper, a wandering adventurer; Tom, a talking cat; and Julie, a witch’s daughter. They pursue quests and fight monsters, such as a sea serpent, an ogre, and a very dangerous Good Fairy. There are a lot of elements from familiar fairy tales…but generally with a bit of a twist!
LEO: When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
CM: I think I always knew I loved stories. I talked my mom into buying me a journal when I was in kindergarten, or thereabouts; there’s a short story in there that I think is the earliest I have. I don’t remember finding anything strange at the time about writing a story, though, so there may have been previous ones!
LEO: What made you decide to make the leap to publishing?
CM: I am fortunate to be in an excellent writing group with a lot of very smart, very dedicated people. They gave me the confidence that my story is good—and that self-publishing is a viable option. Self-publishing has changed dramatically with the advent of the internet, and I think we’re in an exciting time for writers!
LEO: What has been the scariest part of publishing? The most exciting?
CM: The scariest has been telling everyone—especially people I’m hoping will help me promote! In a way that’s been the most exciting too, though, when people respond in positive and supportive ways. It was also very exciting when the first copy of the book arrived in the mail—suddenly it’s real!
LEO: Do you have a favorite scene in your book?
CM: That’s very hard to choose…but one of my favorites is in Chapter Five. Jasper has been turned into a fish by a Sea Queen, and Julie and Tom have to figure out which one in a large school of fish is Jasper, at the risk of losing their own freedom if they choose wrong. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of having to choose the right enchanted person in a rescue ever since I was a kid and read Ozma of Oz; several characters have to choose among the Nome King’s knick-knacks, and are turned into knick-knacks themselves if they choose wrong. In my fish sequence, I also had fun including some humor with the crowd of talking fish, who all claim to be the right one to choose!
LEO: What are you looking forward to doing next?
CM: I’m already at work on the companion novel, The Storyteller and Her Sisters. I plan to stay in this fantasy world for at least a couple more books—and beyond that, who knows? I’m looking forward to focusing back into writing, after all the flurry of publishing, and I’m hoping that the next round of publishing will be much easier, having learned the pitfalls this time. This may be a vain hope, but we’ll see! 🙂
LEO: Where can your book be found?
CM: The Wanderers is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, on B&N for the Nook, and in other ebook formats through Smashwords. Or you can find out more about it all on the Novel News page of my blog, Tales of the Marvelous.
Go check Cheryl’s book out! I finished reading it a few days ago and it’s a lot of fun. Sadly, my favourite bit is somewhere waaaaay near the end, so I can’t off and use it as a selling point because there’d be spoilers, but I loved the talking fish scene as well. (That totally does not count as a spoiler! Shush!)
As a special gift, Cheryl is offering readers a Smashwords coupon code. (Because Cheryl is awesome like that. ^-^) If you buy the book off Smashwords (which nets us indie authors the most revenue) and add ZV64A to your Smashwords shopping basket upon checkout, you get 1 dollar off! (That’s a 33% discount for those wanting percentages.)
If you’d like to read my interview on Cheryl’s blog too, that’s here and comes with a coupon of its own. Thank you for having me, Cheryl, and thank you for visiting my blog as well!
