First off I want to thank the Author’s lounge.
My biggest struggle as a published author has been marketing my book. I find that it is very much a game of selling yourself, and that’s
something I’ve never been good at doing. Then someone from the Author’s lounge reached out to me about writing an article about my book, that is something I can do–write.
While working full time and being a mom full time, I don’t often get to do things for myself–it’s not a complaint, just a fact. It also means less funds to explore this big world we live in–with the exception of writing. In stories you can be anything, do anything, go anywhere. That is what you will find in my book Lawless Women: The Jewel of the Sea. You see a young girl who is a lot like myself, she doesn’t see all that she is or can be. People see more in her than she does in herself. Yet you see her do amazing things. She didn’t want to be a pirate, life threw her there and she bloomed in this unlikely setting.
She learns from her experiences,
she grows. She learns that reality isn’t as black and white as she wanted to believe in her youth. Pirates–like herself–weren’t necessarily bad people. They are products of the world they were thrown into. She seeks to help all those around her to reach their fullest potential and live the life they want, while not believing the same is doable for her. Her crew helps build her up as she does them.
As any author knows, our stories don’t come out the same as the first copy that we write. The first draft of this book was written by a high school girl tired of being told what she could and couldn’t do as a girl by the older men in her family. It started off as a tale solely as the intent to express that emotion. She was going to stick it to anyone who didn’t think she could do something because she was a girl. She wouldn’t hold her tongue when I did. This led to her being a pirate–because who doesn’t follow the rules more than a pirate right?
Revisiting the story later as a college student
I was able to look at and fill out some of the other characters. This led to a bigger theme than the well over-done expression of girl power
that I had initially created. Instead, this strong willed girl who is striking out after tragedy gets to know her crew. She gets to see the people they were before they were pirates. Like her, this wasn’t their first choice of lifestyle. They, like her, were a product of their circumstances. This allowed me to explore the themes of that true gray area that exists in the real world between right and wrong–ultimately known as survival. It helped me as a sheltered girl, accept that I too was making mistakes, and that didn’t make me bad, just finding my own way.
I think this is what we do in our stories as authors,
we grow and learn about the world through what we do to create the worlds of our own creation. We see our own flaws reflected into our characters, and how we respond from feedback of our characters that we receive. One of my few readers I asked about whose side he was on while he was reading the part about an argument in the book. When they decided to choose a side, he found the character that most reflects me was in the wrong because of her over the top response.
This is a quality I have reflected on and see in myself when it comes to those topics–like my character–that I hold close. The more we immerse ourselves in stories, written or orally told, the more we learn from them. All I can hope for as an author is that someone learns from my story at least half as much as I did from writing it.
Below find the link to my
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