Lisa Ireland and the art of story telling

Lisa Ireland is an Australian bestselling author, who lives on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula with her husband and three (big) boys. She loves eating but not cooking, is an Olympic class procrastinator and (most importantly) minion to a rather large dog. Lisa’s fifth novel, The Art of Friendship, was published in May 2018.

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Transcript

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write With Love. I’m Sarah Williams, bestselling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published, some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do. Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show, and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/SarahWilliamsAuthor to learn more. Now, here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            G’day I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today I’m chatting to Lisa Ireland. Thanks for joining me, Lisa.

Lisa Ireland:                  Thanks so much for having me, Sarah.

Sarah Williams:            It’s a pleasure. You have a really interesting story. Would you like to tell us about yourself, please?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, sure. I guess I always wanted to be a writer from the time I was a really little girl, but I grew up in Melbourne’s western suburbs, so I went to just the local state schools there, and it kind of wasn’t the sort of occupation that people aspired to. Nobody really thought it was a real thing. Being a writer was sort of like a fantasy, but you didn’t really grow up thinking that you could really, truly do that.

Lisa Ireland:                  I went off to high school, and my teachers encouraged me, because I did quite well at school and did quite well in English, and so my teachers would sort of encourage me to look at professions like being a lawyer, something like that, and I ended up getting into journalism. I did a arts law degree, and I started out studying journalism, and in my very first week at university, my journalism lecturer told me that I couldn’t write, and that I may as well give up now.

Lisa Ireland:                  I didn’t give up on that very week, but I kind of listened to him. I kind of thought I wasn’t any good, and writing wasn’t the career for me, and not even thinking really that I wasn’t suited to journalism, that really I was more suited to creative writing. Anyway, so I trundled along, and did all the things that we do. I had a career in teaching, which I loved. Got married and had kids, and when I had my first child, I had a year off work, as many of us do, and I kind of thought that I might start to write a book, but I still, at that stage, wasn’t really looking at it as a profession, looking at getting published, I just kind of thought that it was something that I might do to fill the time, and I ended up doing a few courses, that type of thing, and eventually I …

Lisa Ireland:                  It’s a long story, but eventually I joined the RWA, the Romance of Writers of Australia, and I didn’t know anything about romance. I would have said back then that I had never even read a romance. Of course, that wasn’t actually true, I just didn’t really understand what the definition of a romance novel was. I joined RWA and fell in love. Fell in love with the genre, fell in love with the association, and kind of started to realize that maybe this was something that I could do as a profession. That’s kind of where I got my start. I don’t know. I feel like I’m gabbing on quite a lot about myself, but …

Sarah Williams:            That’s what we’re here for. It’s all good. Tell us about … Did you pitch? Did you submit? How did you go about that?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. Well, I had, like most of us, I had quite a long journey to publication. My very first foray into getting feedback was after my very first conference, so I joined, and I went to my first conference within a couple of weeks of one another. I joined so I could go to the conference, and on the last day, on the Sunday, in the plenary session, one of the speakers said, “Don’t forget to get your entries in for the Little Gems, which closes on Wednesday.” This was Sunday. I’d never written a romance before, but I thought, “I’m gonna give that a go.” I was sitting with a girlfriend, and she said to me, “I’m gonna do that,” and she said, “You should do it too,” so I went, “Oh, I’ll give it a go,” and that was … I’m just trying to think what year that was. I think it was 2005, and i actually got in to the … I came in fifth, and got my story published in the Little Gems, so of course I thought I was brilliant then.

Lisa Ireland:                  I thought I was off and away, and that it was only a matter of time before a publisher would snap me up, and of course that wasn’t exactly what happened. I started submitting … I had written a book. I’d been writing a book, because I’d been doing PWE, Professional Writing and Editing, at TAFE, and I’d been doing novel writing, so you had to write a book for that, and I had a book that I’d sort of been working on, and I started to realize that, with a few tweaks, this could fit the romance genre quite nicely. I sent it off to … Back then, this was a long time ago, back then there was no email submission. You had to print your manuscript out, and bind it up, and send it off, and for me … There were no romance publishers in Australia back then.

Lisa Ireland:                  Had to go to England or America or Canada, so I wrote sweet, or still write quite sweet. Well, actually, maybe not. Maybe not so much in the women’s fiction, but my romances are reasonably tame, and so I was pitching to one of the sweeter lines, and that came out of England at the time, and I sent off my … Back then, the process … and I’m sort of out of the way of what happens with category novels now, but back then the process was that you didn’t need an agent, you sent off a partial three chapters and just a query letter, and so they requested my full … We worked on that manuscript for quite some time, back and forth, with an editor, and in the end, it was rejected.

Lisa Ireland:                  I thought I was [inaudible 00:06:29], you know, but it didn’t turn out to be the case. By the time it was rejected, they said to me, “Oh, look, Lisa, can you send us something else?” I did have something else by that stage. I’d been working on something else for another year, so I sent them that, and ultimately what happened was the editor that I was working with left, and I went right back to zero, so I’d been working with her, and then didn’t hear from her for a while, and then realized she’d left. I was told by somebody else, and then it was ultimately not picked up, and I was a bit, I don’t know, depressed, I suppose, about that, and I didn’t submit for a while. I kind of had a period of not writing. I kind of thought, “What am i doing? It’s a fool’s game. It’s too hard.”

Lisa Ireland:                  So I had a period of not writing, and then I don’t know what prompted this, but I … Oh, I know. I went off to RWA’s, which I don’t think they have anymore, but 5DI, which is five day intensive, so that was at Griffith University in Queensland, so I did that. That didn’t really spark me up to write a new manuscript, but I met lots of other writers, and so I kind of liked the idea that I might start going to conference again to try and just get myself a bit enthused again about writing, and when I went to the conference in 2013, Escape Publishing had just opened its doors. It had been going for, I don’t know, maybe nine months or so. I can’t remember, but not a really long time.

Lisa Ireland:                  I pitched that first book, the one that I’d worked on with the Mills & Boon editor. I pitched that to Kate Cuthbert, and I’d had to rejig it a bit to make it a bit more modern, because when I first wrote it, Facebook wasn’t even a thing, so I modernized it a bit, and then pitched to Kate, and Kate said yes, is the short story, but she also had said to me that she thought it was suitable for Harlequin [inaudible 00:08:45] print program, but it was a bit short, so from there, I was an Escape author, but my next book I deliberately wrote longer so that if Harlequin [inaudible 00:08:56] was interested in it, it would fit the word count.

Lisa Ireland:                  For those of you that are interested, the first one was 60,000 words, and that wasn’t considered long enough. They did talk to me about possibly writing more, adding more to that story, but I felt that the story was complete as is, and I couldn’t really see how I could bring it up to 80 or 90,000 words without just padding, which was agreed by Harlequin. They agreed with me, so the next one I wrote, and it was around that 90,000 words, and that went directly to print. That was kind of how I ended up being print published. Yeah, so I did three rural romances with Harlequin, and then I’ve now moved into a different genre.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, so now you’re writing women’s fiction.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            How has that been to move over in? Have you noticed much difference?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. It’s interesting. I never really set out to write rural romance. My story with that is that the story that I had been working on … My very first year as a teacher was in country Victoria, and I was very much a city girl. I’d grown up in the city, didn’t really know much about living in the country. Even though my dad grew up on a dairy farm, I still was very much a city girl, and so I moved to this country town, and it was quite an awakening for me, and I loved it. I had a great time, and I still look upon that time very fondly.

Lisa Ireland:                  My first book, even though it’s complete fiction, but it was kind of born out of … That was the inspiration, born out of my experience as a city girl in the country, and back when I very first wrote it, there wasn’t a genre called rural romance. I mean, maybe Rachael Treasure was writing that kind of stuff, but there wasn’t a whole carved out genre specifically called rural romance, so I didn’t know I was writing a rural romance, and it didn’t get published, as I explained before, until many years later, and by that time … I think that was my catalyst, actually. When Rachael Johns’ Jilted got published, I went, “I’ve got a story like that sitting in my drawer,” and that was the catalyst for me to pitch it to Kate Cuthbert in Fremantle.

Lisa Ireland:                  I was asked this, actually, at an author talk the other night. An aspiring writer asked me, “You know, I’ve got all these ideas, and they’re all from different genres. Is that okay? Can I explore all these different genres?” I sort of said to her, “Well, yeah, you can do anything you like, but to be commercially successful in Australia, which is a very small market, my advice to authors would be to pick the genre that you love, and establish yourself in that genre first.” I think, for me, I didn’t really understand that initially, so I’d wrote three rural romances, all of which were bestsellers, all of which did really, really well, but my next story … It wasn’t that I’d deliberately planned to move away from rurals, it was just that the next story that came to me was not a rural, and it was not a romance, and so I just wrote that, and I sold it, which is great, but I’ve now moved into a completely different market, which has been quite challenging, to be honest.

Lisa Ireland:                  It also means one of the things that I’m finding challenging is that if I have a rural idea, really now I’ve moved into the women’s fiction market, and the readers that I’ve picked up there are not necessarily gonna follow me back to rurals, so it is tricky. Some people do manage to do it quite successfully, but they’ve usually built up a massive following before they switch genres, so yeah. But anyway, at least for the time being, I’m writing women’s fiction.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Your two women’s fiction have been The Shape of Us and The Art of Friendship, and The Art of Friendship of course is the latest, which has only just come out recently.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            These two, they’re not with Harlequin, are they, they’re with Pan Macmillan.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, they’re with Pan Macmillan,

Sarah Williams:            Did you have to resubmit, go through that process again?

Lisa Ireland:                  I did. How that sort of came about, it was just because it was not a rural, but it’s quite complex, the whole contract thing, which I didn’t really … I didn’t have an agent for my first three books, so I was kind of just happy for anyone to take me [inaudible 00:13:43]. Kind of a bit naïve, and sign things. Not that there was anything wrong with the contracts that I did sign, they were fine, but I had to give Harlequin the first book at my next book in anything that was rural, but that was not the case if I wrote outside that genre.

Lisa Ireland:                  Basically what I did, I submitted widely. I submitted all over again, did that whole query process, yada yada, the whole, yeah, write [inaudible 00:14:13] like I was a beginning writer, and the most appropriate offer I felt came from Pan Macmillan, and the reason was … It wasn’t that I wanted to move away from Harlequin, because I loved Harlequin, and would have been happy to keep publishing with them forever. It was just a simple matter of Haylee Nash was at Pan Macmillan, and she fell in love with my book, and that’s very intoxicating when somebody loves your book. It was more about wanting to work with her rather than any other aspect of the contract. Pan Macmillan are a publisher that do sort of focus a bit more on women’s fiction rather than romance, but obviously staying with Harlequin would have been a good option too, I was just fortunate that I had an option.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Absolutely, and Haylee Nash is out on her own now. Has she become your agent, or anything like that?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yes, she has, actually. It’s really quite a funny story, because she bought … I didn’t have an agent when I sold to Pan Macmillan, so I sold to her as my publisher, and then she left and then became my agent, so it’s quite funny. We both had this kind of quite weird sort of relationship, where the books that she now represents me for, I actually sold to her in the first place, so the good thing about that is that she knows the books very well, and I know she likes them. She bought them, so yeah, so that’s kind of been an interesting thing. But I was actually Haylee’s first client, so yeah, and she’s an awesome agent. I’m very happy to be working with her.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, so The Art of Friendship. Tell us about this story. What’s the plot line, and when did you come up with it?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. It’s about two childhood friends, so little girls that grew up together. They first met when they were 11, then they grew up as neighbors and were best friends, and have seen each other through pretty much everything that best friends do. You know, breakups, and first kisses, and all that kind of thing, but they haven’t lived in the same town. They grew up in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs, but now have both moved further afield. Now Kit lives in … She does live in Melbourne still, but more in the inner west, and Libby’s lives in Sydney, but they’ve both lived all over the world in the interim.

Lisa Ireland:                  The story takes place in the year of their 40th birthday. They’ve, as I said, been living apart for a really long time, since their university days, so the last time they were together, geographically, was when they were at university, but they’ve kept in touch, and Kit is Libby’s child’s godmother. They spend every Christmas day together, so they’re still really, really close, but they haven’t lived in the same town for 20 years, and at the beginning of the book, Libby’s husband gets a job in Melbourne, and the family moves back to Melbourne, where they’re 10 minutes away from Kit, and the two women are just ecstatic that they’re gonna be back together again, but very quickly after the move, cracks start to form in the relationship, and I kind of wanted to explore that idea.

Lisa Ireland:                  Several ideas, but one of the ideas is that maybe the friends that you choose in childhood, if you met them today as they are right now, would you choose them all over again, and of course sometimes the answer is yes, but sometimes the answer might be no. There was that question that I was looking at. The other thing is that the image that we present to the world online. Because they’ve kept in touch via email, via text, via phone call, as well, but they’re not physically in each other’s presence, so I wanted to explore that idea that we don’t always show the world exactly who we really are. That we present our best side or our happiest side to the world, and there can be things going on under the surface that no one sees, not even maybe the people that think they’re out very best friends.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, so there was that, and there’s a few other things running through the book. Themes of motherhood. One woman is childless and the other one has a 14 or 15-year-old son, so there’s those type of things, too. Does that affect friendship, if one person is a mother and one person is not, and yeah. That’s kind of what the book’s about, but one of the sort of fun … It’s quite a serious book, but one of the fun things in the book is that Libby moves to a gated community in Melbourne, and a very wealthy community, because her husband is a lawyer, and he gets this job as this very up-and-coming building company, and one of the perks is that that they get to live in this gated community, and there’s a set of what I called the arcadia housewives, and it’s sort of like those women, they all have a very big role.

Lisa Ireland:                  It might not seem apparent in the beginning, but they all have a role to play in the story, and I didn’t even know that myself when I started writing the book, but how I pitched it to Pan Macmillan, I think I said it was Stepford Wives meets I Don’t Know How She Does It, and yeah, and so there is a little bit of a … It’s not comedy, but a little bit of sort of a lighter element with the housewives, and their Botox, and their designer handbags and their et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know if that kind of feeds into that thing, too, of who you really are, because Libby is a woman that likes to fit in, and so another thing is what do we compromise to fit in with the people around us? How much of your core values will you give up to be part of the crowd? Yeah, that’s basically what it’s about.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, wow. It’s definitely coming a long way from the country rural romance [crosstalk 00:20:40] gated communities.

Lisa Ireland:                  There is a romance in there, but I won’t tell you about that because that’s a spoiler.

Sarah Williams:            These are all just standalone books, they’re not series or anything.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Excellent. Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Are you a plotter, a pantser, a dictator?

Lisa Ireland:                  I’m a big pantser, huge pantser. I’ve kind of experimented with process over the course of my writing, so Breaking The Drought, which was the first rural, was written in scenes, because in the beginning, I probably didn’t even really intend to write a book. I was writing it for a course, and I was just writing bits and pieces to send off to my lecturer each week, and then I kind of pasted them together to paste a book, so that was written in scenes. Feels Like Home, which was my second book, I quite tightly plotted, because I was pitching that to … I didn’t have a contract for it, but I was fairly certain that it would be taken by Escape, and that if it was good enough, that it would go to Harlequin  which is what happened, and so I was very cautious with that book.

Lisa Ireland:                  You know, I wanted it to hit all the notes, plus I had done quite a lot of professional development by that stage. You know, so I had all the three act structure going on, and plotting my turning points and whatnot. That was not a pleasant book to write. I didn’t enjoy that particularly. I was gonna say my favorite book to write, but maybe my second favorite book to write was Honey Hill House, which is the next one, and that is part of a series. They’re all standalone books, but it’s part of the Last Chance Country series that was written with Jennie Jones and Catherine Evans. Jennie and Cath are both good friends of mine, and we had this idea that it would be great to write something together that could go in an omnibus, in an anthology, and so as series, we could sell individually as eBooks, which is exactly what happened to it.

Lisa Ireland:                  We pitched that to Escape, and Kate thought it was a great idea, and then once they saw the stories all together, then it went on to be a print book for Harlequin. That was huge fun. There was a bit of planning involved in that because obviously it’s a shared universe, a shared world, a shared town, and each of our characters appear in the other books, so we had to have a set of characteristics, I guess, and physical characteristics as well as personality quirks, and we worked quite closely on that. We were all reading each other’s work as it was developing because … I’ve got a mother, like an older woman, sort of a matriarch, in my book, who’s got an important role in all three books, and Cath had written some stuff, and she sent her to me. She’d send it to me, and I’d read it, and I’d say, “Oh, no, I don’t think everyone would talk that way. You need to tone it down a bit.”

Lisa Ireland:                  Then we had this great idea about two of our characters having this really close friendship, and then we realized that her character, her female character, was very young. She was, like, 21, and my male character was, like, 30-something, and we went, “Yeah, that’s not gonna work.” But so that was a lot of fun, and so there was a bit of planning that went into that, but as far as the story itself went, I just sat down and I wrote it, and it’s probably the quickest book I’ve ever written, and it just happened organically. It was a very quick write, and yeah, no plotting in that one at all, and in fact, I was starting to panic towards the end of it because I wasn’t really sure how it was gonna end. I mean, you always know how a romance is gonna end, but I didn’t know how I was gonna get there, because I did some terrible things to those characters, and I didn’t know. How else can you get out of it?

Lisa Ireland:                  But I did, and then the next one, which was The Shape of Us, and that book’s truly the book of my heart, and I was actually writing another rural, and it wasn’t working. I just didn’t have the right enthusiasm for it, I guess, so it was coming along, but I wasn’t enjoying writing it, and I felt like I just wasn’t hitting the right notes with it, I didn’t think, and I was talking to … I think it was to Rachael Johns about it, and she said to me, “Why don’t you just write … If you’ve got another idea for something, why don’t you just go and write something else for a week or two, just to sort of clear your head,” and I started writing [inaudible 00:25:37].

Lisa Ireland:                  Had that idea, had it kicking around in the back of my head for about two years, or maybe even more, and I thought, “Yeah, I’ll just get a few ideas down,” and so I started writing down, and I didn’t stop, and that had no plotting whatsoever. It was just 120,000 words of completely and pure pantsing. Yeah, and it got there in the end, and then The Art of Friendship was totally pantsed as well, because I figure it worked for Shape. That one was a bit trickier. It took a lot of editing because I wrote myself into a few corners in that book, and there are some quite dark things in that book. When the first draft was finished, my editors were concerned that the characters, one in particular was a little bit too dark, and so it took a bit of massaging to get her to be a bit more relatable.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, so that’s, I guess, the drawback of pantsing, is that you can get yourself into trouble, and it does often require quite a large and thorough edit, structural edit, I mean, at the end. For this one, because of what happened with The Art of Friendship … I’m writing a book at the moment titled Pieces of Me, just working title, and I’m very good friends with Sally Hepworth, who is another Australian women’s fiction author, an internationally published author, and she’s had lots of success, and she’s a huge, huge plotter. We were talking about process, and so I kind of decided that I was gonna give this plotting paper a go, and I have turned myself inside out trying to plot this book. I’d already written 45,000 words before I decided that maybe, because I got a bit stuck, so then I thought, “Oh, maybe I’ll give the plotting a go.” Hasn’t worked.

Lisa Ireland:                  For me, I think plotting rocks my confidence, and it sort of kills my creativity. I start to second-guess everything, and decide, when I see it in those plotting graphs, I decide that it’s useless, and there’s no story, and I might as well give up now, whereas if I’m just writing, I just keep writing and writing. I think when I teach, like when I teach writing to other people, when I run workshops and stuff, I always say to aspire and write as … If plotting’s not your thing, if it doesn’t feel good to you, it’s something that can be superimposed. The structure can be superimposed in the second draft.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yes, it will be hard work. It’s not gonna be easy to do that, but it might be better for you to just write your whole first draft and get all that, run with your creative spark, get your idea down on paper, and then when you’re satisfied that you’ve finished, that you’ve told the story that you wanna tell, then you can go back and massage it, and pick it up, and cut and paste, and yeah, put the structure into it then.

Lisa Ireland:                  That would, I guess, be my advice. If plotting comes naturally to you, lucky you. Go for it. But if it doesn’t, I think maybe my advice would be don’t try and force it, just go with what feels naturally good, and it might take you a few books. It might take a few goes before you actually understand what your real process is.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, and there is no one size fits all philosophy, so yeah, that’s really good advice, and I did hear something the other day, and it said you’ve gotta write, what was it, 100,000 words before you’re a relatively good writer, you know? Habits, and these sorts of things.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. It takes time, perseverance, and obviously you’ve had to persevere a lot, so yeah, no, that’s great to hear. Are you coming to Romance Writers of Australia here in Sydney?

Lisa Ireland:                  I am, and in fact, I am the newbie coordinator this year, so if you’ve not been before and you’re thinking about coming, I’ll be there to hold your hand and help you. I’ve got a little team of newbie helpers who I’ll be announcing next week, and we will run some … We’ll have a meet and great on the Friday night before the cocktail party, so that if people are thinking about coming to the cocktail party, but they’re a bit shy and they don’t wanna walk in on their own, that’s fine. You can come, and I’ll hold your hand and walk in with you.

Lisa Ireland:                  You’ll be fine, and we’ll be available at all the main breaks, at morning tea, lunch, et cetera, on the Friday and on the Saturday. Usually you find by Sunday you’ve made your own friends by then and you don’t need us anymore, but we’ll be available. There’ll be someone from the newbie team available to just direct you, or stand and have a cup of tea with you, and find out how your morning’s been going or whatnot. Yeah, so I’m definitely going, and I’m also on a panel with Haylee Nash, Christine Wells and Rachael Johns, which is called What’s So Romantic About Women’s Fiction?

Sarah Williams:            Oh, cool.

Lisa Ireland:                  That talks a little bit about the differences between writing romance and writing women’s fiction, and why we write what we write, and help people define what they’re writing, because we often find that people will tell us they’re writing women’s fiction, but they’re actually writing long-form romance, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so we’re there to champion both genres, and romance in particular I think is such a high-selling genre in this market, in the Australian market, that I’d be really encouraging people to, if you are writing romance, own it. Don’t pretend that it’s something else, because there’s really no need, and be out, and loud, and loud and proud.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah.

Lisa Ireland:                  Because it’s a genre that is the bestselling, so ….

Sarah Williams:            Not just in this market, in the international market, it outdoes everything else.

Lisa Ireland:                  I think sometimes there’s a bit of … we’ve all experienced this, I guess, romance cringe, but you know what, there shouldn’t be, because good writing is good writing, no matter what genre. Whether it’s romance, whether it’s women’s fiction, whether it’s crime, or whether it’s literary fiction, good writing’s still good writing, and there’s a huge market for romance. I just think that a lot of people are cutting themselves out of markets by branding themselves women’s fiction when their book actually isn’t women’s fiction. It does fall under the bigger umbrella of women’s fiction, but what we’re kind of trying to get people to see is that if you’ve got a strong romance theme, then you’re maybe to market it as romance primarily, rather than women’s fiction.

Lisa Ireland:                  Anyway, obviously there’s 90 minutes worth of discussion there in the panel, so I probably can’t do it justice here in five minutes. If you write in either genre, or you’re thinking about crossing over from one to the other, that might be a panel to stick your head into at RWA this year.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, definitely. That’ll be in Sydney in August this year if you are interested. The registrations are open on the romanceaustralia.com.au site, so head on over to that. My little plug for them. The other thing you’ve got going on in November is the West Coast Fiction Festival. I’ve not been to that before. Tell us, what do we do? What is it about?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. Now, this is the inaugural one, so hopefully it’s gonna be huge. From memory, I think there are 60. I could be wrong, but it’s around that number. It’s 60 authors, indie authors and traditionally published authors. I think the organizers have tried to get a balance between the two types of authors. I’m super excited about it because there’s so many people going. Just trying to think which authors were. You’ve got people like Rachael Johns. I’m just thinking about in the women’s fiction market. You’ve got Rachael Johns, Tess Woods, and then you’ve got lots of rural romance people, Jennie Jones, lots of indies. I’m just trying to think of who we’ve got in indies. I know [inaudible 00:34:20] just signed, Rebecca Raisin, who has had lots of success overseas in the UK, but is a passionate Perth author. She is coming.

Sarah Williams:            Natasha Lester is gonna be there, I think?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah. I don’t know that Natasha … I’m not sure. Maybe, but I’m not sure about that. Anyway, there’s 60 of us chalking along, and it’s a really great event because, apart from anything else, it raises money for Share the Dignity, which is a national charity that provides mainly sanitary items, but also other items for homeless women. People might have heard of Share the Dignity through the … I can’t remember what it was called. They have a handbag collection in about November every year. I’m just trying to think what that particular drive is called. It’s gone out of my head.

Lisa Ireland:                  Anyway, so all money raised goes to Share the Dignity, and it’s actually really all the profits are going. It’s covered, it’s got lots of sponsorship, so ticket sales, if you buy a ticket today, your whole ticket price will be donated to Share the Dignity, I believe, so it’s a really great cause. What they’ve got going on is there’s a signing, so we’ve got all the authors will be signing. There are books available for sale. There’s also, if you get a VIP ticket, there’s a big author party after the signing, so you can boogie the night away with your favorite authors, and there’s also art and craft markets. It’s a big festival, so it’s gonna be fantastic, and I personally can’t wait to go.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, fantastic. I’m just having a look so we can throw some other names up there. Amy Andrews, Alissa Callen, Vanessa Carnevale, TM Clark, Claire Connolly, Pamela Cook. Oh my gosh. Some huge names, are going, so yeah. Tania Cooper. That’s gonna be gigantic. Obviously I can see why I got knocked back. There’s always next year.

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, well hopefully, if this one goes well, it’ll be an annual event, and I’m sure … I think this time they were kind of conservative in how many people could go because, you know, it’s never been run before, so it hopefully will be even bigger next year.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, and that sounds like a great idea, obviously, with [inaudible 00:36:51] not doing their signing events now and that sort of thing. It is nice to have something else there to take over a bit. Well, we’re kind of running out of time. There’s a still a couple of things here we need to talk about. The Shape of Us, you’re offering a print giveaway for The Shape of Us, so all the details on this will be on my Facebook page, so if you would like to read the book of Lisa’s heart, please hop onto my Facebook page, which is Sarah Williams Writer, I think, on Facebook. On my website we’ll have the details, too, which is sarahwilliamsauthor.com. What are you working on at the moment, Lisa?

Lisa Ireland:                  I’m working on a book called Pieces of Me, which is really a book about motherhood, and it’s set partially in Victoria and partially in Brooklyn, in New York, and it’s about a woman who is running the New York Marathon to deal with her grief over something that’s happened in her past, so yeah, that’s essentially it.

Sarah Williams:            Well, fantastic. Oh, that sounds brilliant. Excellent. The Art of Friendship is out now throughout Australia and New Zealand, and yeah, so where can we find you online and see where you’re selling it?

Lisa Ireland:                  Yeah, if you just got to my website, which is lisairelandbooks.com, you can find all my social stuff there, all of my stuff on my books, and I’m all over social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. I’m a big chatter on Facebook, so you can … I’m happy to have a chat on any of those mediums.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. That is great. Well, thank you so much for that today, Lisa. That was really fun.

Lisa Ireland:                  Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:            Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com, and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my book and lots of inspiration. If you like the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/SarahWilliamsAuthor to find out more, and remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel, and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye.