Interviews

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.

Dana Gricken is a prolific author from Canada, whose titles include The Soulless War Trilogy and the upcoming Jessica Prince Mysteries. Dana kindly agreed to be interviewed for my blog and give us an insight into how she creates so many magical worlds.

What’s your first memory of writing?

In first grade, I wrote a short story and illustrated it called “I Lost My Cat”. It was about—you guessed it—losing my cat. There may have also been some aliens written in. Don’t worry, the cat was saved! I was a little girl who adored her cat, and I usually wrote about what I knew back then.

You are incredibly prolific. What are your secrets to remaining disciplined and finishing projects before starting exciting new ones? (Something I think all of us writers might struggle with!!)

It can be difficult sometimes to focus on one task, but I learned a long time ago that you have to in order to get things done. Jumping from one project to the next is fun, but not very productive! I write down clear goals for myself to follow and hold myself to them. If I follow through, I’ll reward myself with chocolate or free time. That way, there’s more of an incentive to stay focused on one project at a time! Always, always, always finish what you start.

You’ve said your dreams can inspire stories – I’d love to hear an example?

I once had a dream where my husband had been murdered in bed next to me. Graphic, I know—and I didn’t even have a husband! That would eventually inspire my thriller novel, In the Middle of the Night, where a journalist’s husband is murdered and she must solve it while learning some terrible things about her beloved. I’m still hoping that will find a publisher one day.

You started your writing career self-publishing. Tell me about that. How did you go about it? What did you do that you’d perhaps change in hindsight?

I self-published my first fantasy novel, The Girl Who Walked Through Fire, in 2018. I had tried for years to find a publisher and agent and it just wasn’t happening for that novel. I was still determined to get my work out there, so I self-published through Amazon and Draft2Digital. I designed the cover myself and had my mom give me feedback on the story. It was fun! In hindsight, I think I would’ve done some more marketing for it and spread the word a little more. I’m grateful that it’s finally getting readers seven years later! That’s the great thing about writing—it doesn’t need to be a success right out of the gate. You can find your audience, even a large one, decades later.

How do you balance writing with marketing and building an online presence?

It can be tough! I have timers set for myself. A few hours of writing in the morning, then an hour or so on Twitter/X and Instagram in the afternoon. It can be a struggle but marketing and building an online presence are so important! No one will buy your books if they haven’t even heard about them.

What does your average day look like?

It’s pretty much the same every day! I wake up very early, then write a chapter of my current novel. I’ll break for breakfast, answer some emails and social media messages, then a little reading and video game time. For the rest of the afternoon, I write another chapter of my current book and do some light editing on a previous project. Then I usually take the evenings for myself to cook dinner, watch TV, and just relax. I am very blessed to be a full-time author with my family’s support—both emotionally and financially! All my productivity wouldn’t be possible without them, and I love my parents and grandma dearly. Also my two cats, Whitey and Timmy, who sleep next to me while I write. I usually don’t work on weekends either unless I’m on a deadline and need to get something done. I try very hard to balance work and play. If not, I can get a little stressed out!

How do you unwind and chill out?

Video games! They are my true love. Reading books, watching Star Trek with my cats, hanging out with my boyfriend, and going shopping with my grandma helps too. I love buying (and posting selfies in) dresses! That’s very clear across my social media, ha ha.

You’ve said you like to write with a clear plot. How do you go about plotting it? Do you map out every detail? What’s your process?

I keep a notebook on my desk as I write that lists characters, the setting, and major plot points. Sometimes even a world map if I’m writing fantasy or sci-fi, and I hand draw it. I try to make sure I have a clear beginning, middle, and end before I start writing, and I usually write a blurb before too. Who is the protagonist/hero? Who is the antagonist/villain? What is the hero trying to do, and why does the villain want to stop them? How far will they go? What are their best and worst traits to make them seem as realistic and human as possible, even if they aren’t human themselves? (No one is completely evil or completely good, so I try to write complex and flawed characters.) Those are some questions to ask yourself before sitting down to write. I try to outline as much as I can, though I do leave some legroom to improvise. Surprisingly, some of my best ideas have come on the spot! Ultimately, everyone’s process is different, but mine has worked for me for years. The best part about writing is personalizing it and finding what works for you and your schedule.

Do you like to listen to music while you write?

I listen to instrumental music, yes! Mostly soundtracks that fit with the theme of the book I’m writing. For example, if I’m writing fantasy, I might listen to the soundtrack for Game of Thrones. I can’t have any words or singing since it’ll distract me. My favorite soundtracks to listen to are Skyrim, Baldur’s Gate 3, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and James Bond! When not writing, my favorite artists are Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Dua Lipa.

What are you currently reading?

I just finished The Unknown Witch by my friend, Grace Herbst. Right now, I’m currently reading an early copy of The Serpent’s Bridge by SZ Estavillo, a gritty crime thriller with fascinating characters. It releases in August of this year. She’s a talented writer and a lovely friend—plus we now share a publisher—so do check out her work and support her debut novel!

What’s your all-time favourite book?

Oh boy, this is a tough one! Percy Jackson definitely comes to mind. Also the Vampire Academy series. My good friend, AG Rodriguez, has a great fantasy novel called Stone Feather Fang which incorporates Puerto Rican mythology. I love to see diverse authors sharing their cultures and history while weaving them into fantasy and sci-fi worlds. So many good books to choose from!

Is there anything you would like to talk about and mention? Feel free!

You can find out more about me at danagricken.com. Currently, I have eleven novels out and seven book deals coming soon! I write, read, and love all genres and age groups, and I never back down from a project, even when it gets difficult. I’m still in talks for a few other projects, including film and TV rights for my existing novels, so hopefully those will work out. Fingers crossed! All my books can be found on Amazon and other book retailers, both in e-book and paperback forms.

Tell me about your upcoming projects, if they’re not top secret.

Absolutely, I can share a bit! I have a romantic fantasy trilogy coming out with Oliver-Heber Books this year. The first one is called Modern Fairytale. I also have books releasing with Fire and Ice Young Adult, an imprint of Melange Books, called Kingdom of V (a young adult vampire novel and the first in a series), and Coming of Age, a young adult sci-fi and the start of another series, both next year. They’re also publishing my standalone paranormal novel called Chatter this year. Jessica Prince and the Crimson Caper, a young adult mystery and the start of a series in the vein of Nancy Drew, releases this fall from Roan and Weatherford Associates (their young adult imprint called Mad Cat.) Additionally, Evernight Teen is publishing my YA horror novel called Desire and a young adult thriller novel called A Billion Reasons. Whew, that’s a lot—and there’s more going on behind the scenes! My latest release, Whispers in the Woods: A Short Story Collection, inspired by Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and The Twilight Zone will be released on June 17th, 2024, self-published. More details are found on my website, danagricken.com, or my social media.

And one last question: how do you determine which publisher is a good fit for your book? I guess this isn’t so much of an issue as you’re agented. But how did you avoid publishing scams and cons?

My agent, Jessica Reino of Metamorphosis Literary Agency, is a wonderful resource, yes! She has a lot of knowledge about the publishing industry which is helpful to avoid scams. But anyone can do some investigating. Just typing in “publishers open to submissions” will reveal a treasure trove on the internet. I try to submit to publishers widely, then cross my fingers and hope they like my work. It can be a shot in the dark, but sometimes, it does work out. Make sure to read the submission guidelines on their website to see if they publish the genre you’ve written. When looking at a publisher, investigate their social media first. Do they seem professional? Do their book covers look good? Do they try very hard to promote their authors across social media and maintain a website? Then check websites called Writer’s Beware, Absolute Write, and QueryTracker to see if there are any complaints when it comes to the publisher you’ve chosen. Publisher’s Marketplace also has lists of reputable publishers. Whoever you choose to submit to, they should be respectful, pay their royalties on time, design your cover art, edit and compile your book, market it all, and NEVER ask for money. If they do, that’s a red flag—so run! Make sure to carefully read any contracts you receive for hidden clauses. Remember, if something feels wrong, it usually is. You can always reach out to me or other authors on social media for clarification on contracts and terms if you’re confused. I’ve chatted with many authors and given them free advice and encouragement, something I love to do. Best of luck publishing your books! Please don’t get scammed or get discouraged. Lots of rejection is normal. Keep writing, keep trying, and keep believing! For reference, I have been published by Fire and Ice Books, Roan and Weatherford Associates, Evernight Teen, and Oliver-Heber Books, four publishers who are very reputable and lovely to work with. Feel free to query them or my agent if you think your work is a good fit and they’re open to submissions!