[New post] Interview with Shadow Stained Author Rachel Hobbs!
Athena C posted: " Hi everyone! In an effort to bring more interviews and author content to OneReadingNurse, I put out an open call a few weeks ago! As a result I can now bring you this awesome interview with Shadow Stained author Rachel Hobbs, where she talks about her p"
Hi everyone! In an effort to bring more interviews and author content to OneReadingNurse, I put out an open call a few weeks ago! As a result I can now bring you this awesome interview with Shadow Stained author Rachel Hobbs, where she talks about her publishing journey, morally gray characters, social media, and more!
1. Thank you for taking the time to chat! Tell everyone a little about yourself and your novel!
My name's Rachel Hobbs and I'm the author of the dark fantasy novel Shadow-Stained. Love and hate, good and evil, I write about morally grey monsters and opposites that both attract and violently polarize. I'm a dental nurse for a small local practice, and when I'm not working with teeth, I'm summoning demons at my keyboard.
My characters don't always deserve your affection, but just maybe they'll steal your heart anyway.
2. What was the Indie publishing journey like for you? Do you have any tips for fellow indie authors trying to publish a book?
I actually queried Shadow-Stained for a good nine months before making the decision to self-publish. I had this dream of seeing my book on the shelves of a physical book store, and having done my research on both avenues of publishing, I knew that you could fall back on self publishing after querying, but not the other way around. I went into the querying trenches with realistic expectations and came out on the other side with the kind of thick skin and determination only one hundred plus agent rejections could get you! When I made the decision to go it alone and publish Shadow-Stained anyway, I was nervous of getting it wrong. In hindsight, self-publishing my debut novel was the best decision I could have made. I was in full control of every aspect of my launch – final content, cover design, marketing – and my books still made it into my local indie book shop. I couldn't be happier with the way things panned out.
If I had one tip, it would be don't skimp on the cost of your cover. A good cover will sell your book time and time again, so a good cover designer is an investment that you won't be sorry you made. There are so many amazing book covers out there already. Why set yourself at a disadvantage from the get go?
3. How do you feel about social media? I am seeing a lot of love towards indie authors these days and it's amazing
I know some authors tend to find social media a chore. Personally, I've been made to feel very welcome on Twitter, especially in the writing community. I've made a lot of solid friends on that platform and in some ways, it's almost like having one big online family! Everyone is so supportive of each other and cheering for your success. In a similar way, social media is a goldmine of undiscovered gems. I've found a few of my current favourite reads this way, books by extremely talented indie authors that deserve all the love and attention. I don't enjoy Facebook, but maintain one anyway. It really is each to their own, when it comes to social media.
4. There is also a lot of "noise" out there and I have seen authors on Twitter lamenting about ratings and having their work seen, has that been a challenge?
Ratings are everything when you're first starting out. When your name means nothing to anyone, a reader is relying solely on existing reviews, the book blurb, the cover. It can be disheartening to put yourself so wholly out there and get very little back, but writing is marathon, not a sprint. There isn't really such a thing as an overnight success, because the chances are, that successful person worked really hard in the shadows for a long time before being discovered. All you can do is show up and put the work in. It can be a challenge to get your work in front of the right eyeballs, especially when there are so many amazing books already out there. But it's important to remember that the other authors are not your competitors, they are your community. And the chances are that by supporting and lifting others, you yourself will eventually be lifted in kind.
5. One of the main characters in Shadow Stained is a morally gray, "destruction and mayhem vs saving a girl" kind of guy. What do you think makes up a good "Gray" character?
Morally grey characters are so deliciously complex. Thorny and often only looking out for number one, one of the best things about a good 'grey' character is that they're unpredictable. One moment they're saving your life, the next you're facing off as enemies. They have the potential to be both the hero and the villain at any given moment, depending on what most suits their needs at any given time. They're not boxed into any one category, and because of this, you never quite know which way they're going to turn.
With Drayvex, my morally grey Demon Lord from Shadow-Stained, I know I really pushed the boundaries of grey. He's about as wicked as a character can be without actually being the villain! But to me, this makes it all the more compelling when he finds himself stumbling towards the hero side of antihero, clueless as to how he even got there, but fully committed for his own personal reasons. I think another thing that can have us so attached to a great morally grey character is their unflinching drive, their tunnel vision commitment to what they consider to be the only rational way forward. We don't always agree with them, but by damn we want them to win.
6. In your bio you wrote that narcolepsy and parasomnia inspired some of your writing, are you comfortable elaborating on that?
When I was in my early teens, I had a hard time staying awake. Sometimes it felt like I was dragging a physical weight around with me all day long, and I would fall asleep at inconvenient moments at school. What I didn't know at the time was that this was a neurological condition called narcolepsy, but it was the parasomnia at night on top of this that really pushed me to the edge. To summarize, we're talking sleepwalking, hallucinations and periods of paralysis upon waking and falling asleep, so I really had my hands full! As a sort of coping mechanism, and a way to explain what I didn't understand, I made each of these conditions into a demon that was personally responsible for my suffering. It's for this reason that demons feature so heavily in Shadow-Stained. Turning to creative therapy, when I eventually started to pour my demons onto the blank page, it sparked a wildfire idea for the darkest little monster story. That creative fire has been burning ever since.
7. What else inspires your writing?
I've always thought of ideas as being like sand. Inspiration can come from anywhere and everywhere; the secret smile of a stranger, a snippet of conversation you overheard on the train, a vivid memory, a really good film. By themselves, they're just grains of sand. But meld them all together and they become something else entirely. I suppose that's quite vague, but I know that a lot of my inspiration is subconscious. It's a really strange feeling when you read back something you've wrote, and only after you've wrote it and it's on the page do you start to pinpoint the origins of such an idea. When I'm looking for inspiration, I can turn to a good book, a curated playlist, or even Pinterest.
8. Alright let's end this with some easy rapid fire general bookishquestions: Do you have a favorite book that you always recommend? Favorite literary character? What genre do you usually read? Do you have any strange and wonderful bookish habits?
One of my favourite authors is Darren Shan. He has quite the extensive back catalogue at this point, and I often change my mind on which of his books is my favourite. But Lady of the Shades is a cracker, and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a dark twisty thriller that will keep you on your toes. If I had to pick a favourite literary character, I'd have to go with August Flynn from V E Schwab's Monsters of Verity duology. August is effectively the one monster with a conscience in an entire city of savages. His heart and his melancholy, along with this chink of light inside him that makes him want to show up and fight his true nature again and again, is what makes him such an interesting character. I like dark, gritty fantasy, and love to read the kind of things I love to write. Monsters and rogues, enemies to lovers, villains that are the heroes of their own story. I'm sure by now you're seeing a pattern forming! I don't really have any strange and wonderful bookish habits that I know of, but maybe it's time I adopted one.
9. Thank you so much again for offering to interview! If there is anything else you want to say about yourself, your novels, your life, or anything at all, please do so here!
I get overly attached to book characters. I've lost count of how many times over the space of a book or a series that I've made a character the latest object of my obsession –ahem, I mean affection– and then had my heart ripped out when there are no more pages left. I love it, I dread it. It's like losing a friend. And then of course, there's the void to fill in their absence. But the best characters stay with you, and some even live on in little pieces of my own characters. All in all, the book hangovers are a small price to pay. We really are suckers for punishment!
Here are Rachel's author links and links to view and purchase the book!
WordPress.com
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