Roz MacLaren

Renée Shantel is an indie author in Australia. She kindly gave me an ARC of her upcoming book, In The Days Before (and you can find my review of the book here.) She also agreed to let me interview her so we can learn more about her process and work.

Tell us a little about you (and your cats!)
Well, I’m Renée 😉 and I live in Sydney, Australia. I’m in my mid-thirties and I’m still trying to find my place, both in the real world and in the world of indie publishing. By day I work in a major hospital as a billing administrator and occasional laboratory assistant, and I’m about to start a course in Library and Information Services as I consider switching careers. I’m a casual cozy and indie horror gamer, an ex-volunteer concert photographer and music journalist, and the most introverted introvert any of my friends have ever met.

I’m a life-long cat mum! Until recently I had two, but my boy, Jem, passed away in November. He was diabetic and required insulin shots twice a day at twelve hour intervals, and even now I still find myself waking daily at 5am. Now I have Jade, my six-year-old black beauty, who I found on the side of the road one afternoon when she was literally a newborn. I worked in petcare at the time so I knew to wait around (not too close!) and see if the mother cat came back, but there was no sign of her and it was unsafe to leave Jade where she was, literally on the side of a busy road. My mother suspected she’d been abandoned due to being pure black. I spent the first six weeks of her life carting her around with me to work, feeding her every three hours through the night, making sure she kept warm. I had to learn to raise a newborn kitten on the fly, and it was both the most challenging and rewarding thing I have ever done.

These days she’s my editor, and has no problem deleting entire manuscripts if she decides they’re not good enough – or if she’s not getting enough attention!

What’s your first memory of writing? I know you began when you were eleven – but what piqued your interest at that age and what did you start writing?
I would have been ten in this memory. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire had just recently been released, and I’d begged my mother to buy it for me from those Scholastic Book Club pamphlets we’d get in school. I wasn’t a reader at the time, so she was hesitant to spend the money on such a thick book that I probably wouldn’t get half way through, so she made me a deal. She’d buy me the first book. If I finished that, she’d get me the second. And so on. I don’t think she expected me to even get through the first one. But I devoured those books, every one of them, to the point that she and my aunt actually had to bribe me to read different books after I’d reread the series for literally the thirtieth time.

One night I was watching the Lindsay Lohan version of The Parent Trap, and I was struck by a thought: what if Harry Potter had a secret twin sister?

I immediately picked up the only notebook I had handy (a week-to-a-spread day planner) and started scribbling little notes and stories about Haylie Potter (because I had misheard Hallie the entire movie). Haylie ended up becoming a core character in the first fanfictions I ever posted online, from the time I was thirteen until maybe sixteen, and then she became an original character in my first original story. I also adopted her as my penname/alter ego before taking on my real name for publishing. Before I was Renée Shantel, you could find me as Haylie Jaed!

So I suppose you could say my interest was piqued by that one thought, that one idea of Harry having a twin and wanting to know what their adventures together would be like. The first “novel” I wrote however was a Marauders era fanfiction I started at eleven that was tragically lost when my old Windows 95 PC crashed. It wasn’t until after this that I learned fanfiction was actually a thing, found my first online community, and started posting my work online. I was thirteen when I posted my first chapter to the Internet!

Tell us about your publishing journey.
When I first began writing original stories and decided I wanted to be published someday, self-publishing was a very new thing.

And it was taboo. It was dirty. It was something “real” authors didn’t do, because “Only people who can’t get traditionally published decide to self-publish.” So for a long time, I didn’t even consider it. There was such a stigma around it, a knowledge that if you self-published you were a failure and no traditional publisher would ever touch you. For a time I wondered if this was my own skewed view developed from seeing comments from people I should have been ignoring, but I recently had a conversation with Cynathia Brubaker (author of the Gomada Academy series) and she had the same experience. If you weren’t aiming for the Big Five, did you even really want to be published?

I’m lucky in the sense that I’ve been writing online for so long that I’ve gained a number of writer friends along the way, and in my late twenties two of them started publishing and were willing to tell me their experiences behind it (Corissa Blakely and Nicole Northwood, for those who are interested!). It was ultimately Nicole who pointed me in the direction of an independent publisher she knew of and encouraged me to submit a short story to one of their anthologies. At the time, I was solely writing on Wattpad and had all but given up on my dreams of ever being a traditionally published author. I believed (and still do, if I’m being honest) that I wasn’t good enough to “make it.”

But my short story was accepted! And so in 2017, I became a published author of one short story.

After that, I spent years debating. Do I go back to dreaming? Or do I give up on my writing and focus on trying to make a career out of something “real”? It didn’t seem doable anymore. I was struggling a lot to stick to any of my manuscripts, and nothing I ever wrote was good enough to be published. I took a chance and submitted the last novel I’d written to a big name publisher who didn’t require an agent, and never heard back. I moved on.

But I kept watching my friends, kept seeing them putting themselves out there, and I kept debating.

In early 2023, I was struggling. I was working as a laboratory assistant at the time, and wearing gloves all day, every day had done a number on my hands. I had what I suspect was a minor eczema flare-up that started as a tiny patch near my pinky knuckle in maybe mid-2022 that by Christmas of that year had turned into a weeping wound on the back of my right hand. I was in agony daily, but I’d become so good at hiding it that nobody suspected a thing until the day I asked my manager to be excused from work because my hand was burning and I was going to step out and go to the emergency room. A trip to my doctor later, I ended up on worker’s comp with a strict NO GLOVES policy. Something that’s almost impossible when you work in pathology and handle blood, urine, and other body-related things on the daily. This ultimately ended up with me switching into administration.

It was in the middle of all this that I saw Nicole share a post on her Instagram about her then-publisher, Silver Shell Publishing, being open to submissions. I missed my lab work and didn’t know what was going to become of my job at that point, but it was this that made me take a serious look at my passion for writing and decide that I wanted to give it a real shot. We chatted for a bit, she gave me the courage I needed to shoot my shot, and I sent the email off. I was immediately terrified, but also doubtful that things would go anywhere.

But then my debut Lost was accepted by Silver Shell Publishing, and it felt like a sign.

I haven’t looked back. I’m so thankful to Corissa and Nicole for opening my eyes about indie publishing, because it has 100% been the right choice for me. I love having full control of everything, I’m enjoying learning the ins and outs of social media and marketing, and I love not having a schedule and deadlines, because I suck at those!

Your latest novel is out in October – tell me more about that. What sparked off the idea? What was your favourite part of the writing process? Without spoilers, what’s your favourite part of the book? Who is your favourite character and why?
In the Days Before is a novel about an aspiring YouTuber, Audrey Herringbone, who prides herself on making content about missing persons. Her own father went missing when she was a child, and she’s working on building up her viewership so she can share his story and hopefully find out what happened to him all those years ago. But the novel begins when Audrey’s best friend goes missing, the same day that she and Audrey argue about the content of her channel, and focuses on Audrey as she attempts to figure out what happened and bring her friend home safe.

I’m a true crime junkie, and I got the idea for this story watching Kendall Rae on YouTube. I ended up writing it for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in 2022, the whole time watching Kendall and Bella Fiori and Danielle Kirsty. They definitely inspired Audrey’s character and her drive. As an introvert, I could never put myself in front of a camera, but like Audrey I absolutely love researching, and one of my favourite parts of writing any novel is getting to do the research behind it. I spent a long time researching how missing persons investigations are conducted in Australia and tried to keep things as accurate as possible. Also, if watching Criminal Minds counts as research, I watched a lot of that to understand both the minds of criminals and the sorts of things aspiring criminologists and police officers might know.

My favourite part of the novel is definitely the reveal! I think everyone who writes a thriller must spend the entire novel looking forward to writing that part, because I sure did!

I think my favourite character is probably Detective Flanagan. He takes his job seriously and doesn’t want Audrey meddling in things and putting herself in the path of danger, but I like to think that he’s secretly rooting her on from the sidelines. He’d love to be helping her out if it wasn’t for the fact that she was an untrained teenager!

How do you balance a day job with writing, editing and running socials?
Ah…I don’t. 😂 Lately life has me down and I’m mentally exhausted, so I’m struggling with everything.

I mentioned that I get up at 5am. I work Monday to Friday and usually arrive at work around 6:30am, but my shift doesn’t start until 8am. So I have an hour and a half there that I will usually use for reading, writing, or brainstorming, whatever I feel like doing on that particular day. Lately I’ve been using it to respond to messages on social media, because I’ve been getting a lot! I suspect this will die down as my book releases and I slow down with my marketing, so I’ll start using that time for my writing again.

I try to get most of my writing done on the weekends, or in the evenings if I’m not too tired. I find editing a lot easier, and can do that pretty much whenever I have a spare moment. I spent a lot of 6:30-8am’s editing In the Days Before, then continuing in the evenings and on the weekends. Running my socials is something I’ve only recently begun getting serious about, and I’ll do that mostly on the train ride to work and in the evenings when I get home. I find those are the best times for me, because it’s a good crossover between when Australia is waking up and when North America is waking up, and most of my followers are from these locations.

If you can tell us, what are you currently working on?
Everything and nothing. I’m very much a mood writer, and at the moment I’m struggling to get into anything. So I can’t say for sure what will be coming next from me, but I’m trying to work on a YA paranormal trilogy, a NA paranormal that I hope to turn into a series, a YA paranormal crime, and three other YA crimes. And now that people have been asking, I’m also actively trying to plot and write a sequel for In the Days Before.

What are you currently reading?
My current paperback is The Reappearance of Rachel Price by Holly Jackson. Current ebook is Her Soul to Take by Harley Laroux. Current audiobook is Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas.

What is your all time favourite book?
At the moment, I’d have to say If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio. It was recommended to me by a coworker, and I have never been so captivated by an author’s writing style! It’s a whodunnit perfect for Shakespeare nerds.

Put your Spotify on shuffle and tell us the first three songs that come up.
Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off by Panic! At The Disco
Show Yourself from the Frozen 2 Soundtrack
Blood On My Hands by The Used

Overall, a pretty accurate representation of me!

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Thank you so much, Renée, for taking the time to answer my questions and share an insight into your creative journey.

In The Days Before is out on 23 October. You can (and should!) pre-order it now.