Staying Grounded with Sarah Williams

Sarah Williams (yes, that’s me!) is a Bestselling Australian Author who was nominated for the Best Debut Author of 2017 for AusRom Today and the Australian Romance Readers Association. Her third novel, The Sky over Brigadier Station was launched last week to rave reviews.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:                  Welcome to Write with Love. I’m your host, Sarah Williams. Best selling author, speaker and creative entrepreneur. Each week I talk 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:                  Good day, good day, I’m Sarah Williams. Thanks for joining me for episode 29 of Write with Love. Today’s episode is all about me, because this past Wednesday I launched my latest novel, The Sky Over Brigadier Station, which I’m going to show you on my eReader. There we go. Unfortunately, I don’t have the print copy just yet. There’s a little bit of a hold up. So that one went to launch on Wednesday, the 4th of July and it’s had some really brilliant reviews. I’ll read some of those in a little bit. I did a Facebook live on Wednesday night, Australian time. It was so nerve-wracking. The first time I’ve ever done a Facebook live and I learned a lot from the experience. So hopefully the next time I do it will be a little bit better. We also had a power cut at the very end. It’s school holidays and it was just before bedtime so my kids were all watching things on their iPads and stuff like that. Our power board obviously didn’t handle it very well and cut out.

Sarah Williams:                  Thank you to everyone who did watch, and who commented, and asked me questions, and congratulated me and everything like that. And who hung around when I did my second little bit at the end. Some of the questions that I was asked, or things that we talked about, I will talk about again in today’s podcast. This is the third novel that I’ve written. It’s the second in my Brigadier Station series, so we met Lucky and Darcy McGuire in my first book, ‘The Brothers of Brigadier Station’, which I also just happen to have here. That one with the pretty cover that’s also in the background. That one was published in May 2017 and this time in ‘The Sky Over Brigadier Station’, we get to meet the youngest brother, who is Noah.

Sarah Williams:                  The blob for it goes: “Noah McGuire stayed away from Brigadier Station for a reason. He spent a decade in New Zealand’s south islands trying to forget his past. But the memories still haunt him and the last thing he wants to do, is see his estranged family and attend his brother’s wedding. However, the only way he can collect his inheritance is if he returns to his family’s property, and faces the demons he’s been hiding from. When it comes to rounding up hundreds of cattle in a day, doing so by horseback doesn’t do the trick quite like a helicopter does. And Riley Sinclair is one of the best pilots in the country. It’s a dangerous job, but she has nothing to lose until she meets Noah, and her bravery is finally tested.”

Sarah Williams:                  It’s the second in the season, but it can also be read as a standalone, and like the first one, it’s set in Julia Creek in the isolated Queensland Outback. Thank you so much and I just want to read a quick review that came in. This one’s from Teresa. A real heartfelt, emotional read. An intense story line with plenty of raw, rough, grueling edges that will forever open the reader’s heart and eyes. A heartbreaking read that keeps you on edge, burning through the pages. Hoping, needing the happily ever after to pull you from the emotionally havoc the gripping drama puts you through. A myriad of emotions, engrossing twists, and tense enjoyable and moving passion-filled chemistry. An absolutely amazing must read. Thank you so much Teresa. I really appreciate that one.

Sarah Williams:                  There you go, you can get ‘The Sky Over Brigadier Station’, it’s available in eBook from all the major platforms and in print. Digitally, print on demand and it should be available in most Australian libraries towards later in the year when I get organized and do that.

Sarah Williams:                  So just a little bit about me. Of course, I normally start these interviews saying, “So tell us about yourself and your journey to publication.” So here we go. I grew up on a organic kiwi fruit orchard in Hawksbury. The lovely wine region of Hawksbury in the north island of New Zealand. I have a brother and my parents, and we lived in this orchard. There wasn’t much to do growing up, and everywhere involved having a 20 minute drive into town. I was always intrigued by storytelling and I loved watching TV shows and movies. New Zealand in the 80s, it was mostly American TV shows, so I was a big fan of things like Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place, Friends, those sorts of things. But I also loved reading and when I was a teenager, like most of us writers with mums who read as well, I went and raided my mum’s romance bookshelf, which consisted of things like Daniel Steele. I loved reading the Danielle Steele novels because I watched her movies when they became mini-sodes and those sorts of things on TV.

Sarah Williams:                  I would stay at home and on the weekends or holidays I’d be watching the soapies with my mum, The Days of Our Lives, The Bold and the Beautiful, that sort of thing. Of course a little romantic. I would just start making up my own stories because we didn’t have Netflix and all those sorts of things. So when I couldn’t be watching TV or reading a book, I would be making up my own stories. So endlessly long bus rides to school and that sort of thing, I would make up these stories. And then by the time I was in high school, my best friend was loving me telling her these stories. She’d ask me at lunch time, “So what story have you made up today?” I’d tell her the story that I’d been thinking about all morning. Then over the lunch time we’d be, “Oh, she could do this, or he could do that.” They were always romantic because we were going through puberty and boys were what we were interested in at the time.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s how it all started and my dad, I said to him when I was 14, “Hey, dad. I want to move to America. Because Hollywood, and I want movies, and I want to be a screenwriter or a director or something like that.” That was the first thing I wanted to do and I said, “Well, if I can’t be a screenwriter, I really want to just write novels.” He said to me, “Well, that’s all well and good, but do you want to maybe do journalism?” I said, “No, I don’t want to do journalism, not interested. It’s gotta be fiction.” And he said, “Okay.

Sarah Williams:                  Well, if you’re going to write fiction, it’s still based on real people and real situations. So go and get some life experience.” He said, “If you wanna go to America, that’s fine. Go and have a great life and get some experience and really take things in and watch people, and learn. Then you can be a writer.” Okay. So I took that on board, my dad’s pretty smart. So thought I’ll do that. When I was 17 I finished school in New Zealand. I didn’t go all the way, I just finished. I went on a student exchange to the United States, and I went to North Carolina, just near Charlotte. That was great because I was also a fan of Dawson’s Creek at the time and that’s exactly where it was filmed, in Wilmington, North Carolina. That was wonderful and I did see a lot, and I love America.

Sarah Williams:                  That was 1999 to 2000. I graduated high school in America in 2000. Got to see a lot of the country, fell in love with it. We went up to New York, we went to Washington, we went to Florida. I’d been to America a couple of times before that too. Then I finished the exchange and I decided I wanted to go to university over there. So I applied to the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. Because they had this course which was all on American history and a big emphasis on Native American history. I love Native American culture, and I’ve always been a bit obsessed with westerns and cowboys and Indians, and that sort of thing. So I thought, “Well, I really wanna do this university degree in Wilmington.” I had to leave obviously because of the visa restrictions. So I left, but New Zealand just wasn’t gonna cut it. So I moved to Melbourne in Australia because New Zealand, once you’ve been out, is a very, very small country, especially back then before technology really.

Sarah Williams:                  I was living in Melbourne, in the city. It took a while to try and get all these visas sorted out and then September 11th happened. There was no way my visa was gonna be approved after that. They pretty much cut them off. So I was stuck with my backup plan. I was working at Office Max, if anyone knows the stationery shop. I had a good fantastic time going out, because I was legal to drink, which I hadn’t been ever before, 18 thank God. And having a great time in the city, doing what my dad said. “Go out, meet people, do things, experience things. Think about situations you can write about later.” That was great and I based myself in Melbourne for a few years and I traveled around Europe. I became a travel consultant in order to get my travel fare very discounted or free.

Sarah Williams:                  That was brilliant. I just had several years just seeing the world, seeing Australia. I’ve done all the major cities. Ayers Rock, Uluru, Darwin. Yeah, Western Australia. Seen pretty much all of it. And then I had enough of the freezing cold Melbourne winters, so I decided to move to Cairns, and at that point writing was one of those things. I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to get around to it and when I’m in my thirties or forties and I’ve got the kids and maybe a husband who can support me or something like that, that’s when I’ll write.”

Sarah Williams:                  So I decided I wanted to go and wrestle some crocodiles because that was my latest infatuation, was crocodiles after a trip to Darwin. So I decided to move to Cairns, and I ended up in tourism again and one of my jobs there was I worked at a helicopter company. And I would book people on these tourist flights over to the Great Barrier Reef and doing day tours and just flights. And I got to meet all these amazing pilots and talk to them about their careers and their training and all these sorts of things. I just loved these helicopters. There were really big ones, six-seaters, they were fantastic, they’re called squirrels. And one of my favorites there was a stinky little Robinson R44. And I really liked this. It was just a little two-seater. It was very maneuverable, so it was really cool.

Sarah Williams:                  So I kind of stored all this information that I took on board and just put it in there. “I might chuck a helicopter and then I will one day … Yes, I’d want to go there. So along the way though, after I’d done that, I tried to do the crocodile thing. Turned out you need a zoology degree and that was like way too much university for me, so I said no. And then I met my husband while I was living in Cairns and we got married, and then I got pregnant and we decided to move to Townsville. We bought a business and I was doing the admin for the business, and it just kind of ended up being that the admin for the business and the marketing and everything was only taking up kind of 50% of my time.

Sarah Williams:                  The twins went off to kindergarten three times a week. So I was like, “Well, I’ve got some time now, maybe I should write that book.” So I started, nothing really fantastic. It was really just an experiment. And then I was reading the paper and they said, “Oh, we’re going to have the Savannah Festival”, they called it. It was a writer’s festival and there were a couple of people in there, no one that I really knew the names of at the time. But one of the workshops that caught my interest was how to write a romance with Barbara Henney. So I thought, “Well, it’s in my town. My husband can look after the kids on the weekends and I’m going to go and do this.” It was free, the council was paying for it, so why not?

Sarah Williams:                  So I went to that and I met Barbara Henney, who I’ve had on the show and she is … one of those moments, meeting her, doing that work shot light bulbs left, right and center. “I want to write romance. I want to write rural romance like she writes Outback Australia, and I want to have a career like her.” So I went home after that workshop, outlined ‘The brothers of brigadier station’. It took two years to write, mostly part-time writing too because I still had the kids and I was doing every single workshop online that was possibly available to learn the craft of writing and also some of the business. I decided once I had this book finished, I pitched it at the Romance Writers Australia Conference in 2016 in Adelaide. I pitched it to three, I got full submission requests from these agents and publishers and  I’ve been told I pitched a couple of other places as well. And everyone really loved the story and a couple felt it was too short or whatever. So that was fine.

Sarah Williams:                  And then I did get seen to contract, which just from the beginning felt wrong. It was from a big publishing house, very reputable. I’ve got nothing against them, but the contract for me didn’t fit. It was digital only and Australian only and I just … Yeah, I’m ambitious. If I’m going to do something I want to go big and I want to make lots of money. And so I tendered down and I decided to go [inaudible 00:15:38] So I continue to learn everything I possibly could before launching ‘The Brothers of Brigadier Station’. Got a few nice little sales coming through, but I didn’t put a lot of effort into it because everything that I was reading said “Wait until you’ve got more than one book out, until you start spending any money on the advertising.”

Sarah Williams:                  So that’s what I did. I had a great writers group in Townsville at that time. And so we all started writing these novellas. So I wrote ‘The Outback Governess’, which I have here. Which I published in November last year. I call it, it’s the sound of music without the religion and the singing. So I put that one out in November and I put it down for 99 US cents. So I had over a thousand pre-orders in the 30 days that I had in pre-order. And so that was like, “Oh, this looks like it’s going to do pretty well.” And by the time that we launched it, it really did. My sales from ‘The Outback Governess’ just played into my sales, ‘The Outback Governess’, which have since played into my sales for this one. So it was definitely one of those pieces of advice that I’m really glad I listened to.

Sarah Williams:                  So, I’ve got the three out now. I’ve also in my spare time earlier this year, I decided to put out your creative journal, which is this one here. This is only available via my website. You’ve got to email me if you want a copy. But basically there’s some blank pages, there’s lots of pretty things you can color in, there’s some advice. So there’s one of those … That’s the adult version there, if you’re interested. They’re 20 Australia dollars. And that’s the children’s version because I was writing the first one and my 10 year old who’s also interested in writing and technology and all sorts of things. He helps me with the podcast actually. And he said, “Mom, can you do one of those for me because that looks really cool.” I said, “Yeah, sure. Okay.” So I altered some of the information, made it a little bit shorter, and did that for him as well.

Sarah Williams:                  So if you’re interested in either of those, you have to go to my website and send me an email and we’ll sort that out. And so technically I’ve written five but three are novels, so I’m going with that. They describe a brigadier station, like I said this is it in the series. I’m going to finish off this series next year. I’ve got two more books, at least two more books planned. Of course the next one has to be Lucky’s journey to happily ever after. And I have a really interesting idea that I want to put into that one, but it’s simmering at the back of my mind because I’m about to start when school holidays finish in a week. I’m about to start a book which will be based here, sorry, which would be based here. So we ended up moving at the end of last year. We moved to Maleny in the sunshine coast, which is just an absolutely beautiful, subtropical location.

Sarah Williams:                  And I jusT adore this region. it’s just beautiful and the people are lovely and there’s lots of dairy farms and cattle, dairy cattle, dairy cows. So I have this great idea for a book and I’m writing that one which will be out before Christmas. So stay change on that. And then of course I’ll go back into the Brigadier Station series next year, so that’ll be great fun. ‘The Brothers of Brigadier Station’ has been free digitally for the last week, so I hope if you hadn’t read it, you’d already picked up a copy. If you didn’t, too late, now you have to pay for it again. Sorry. So as well as writing and running the podcast in Serenade publishing, I also run writer’s workshops and I do some speaking as well. And of course I’ve got the four kids at primary school, so I am pretty busy, but I do some mentoring as well and some business consultancy.

Sarah Williams:                  So, that’s all listed on my website as well if anyone is interested but I do like to keep myself busy. In 2017, of course I published those two books, ‘The Outback Governess’ and ‘The Brothers Brigadier Station’, and I was nominated for the 2017 best debut Australian author for the AusRom today, and also for the ARRA, which is the Australian Romance Readers Association. So I got nominated twice for 2017, so that was really great. That’s nice to be recognized by the readers. So some of the questions that came up in our Facebook live the other day, people were asking me why do I write short novels? So my books average between about 40 and 60,000 words. That’s simply because I am busy and I like things that play out kind of like a movie. So I always like to think, “Well, if Steven Spielberg or someone like that wanted to put it into a movie, which I’d love by the way, what would they have to edit out?”

Sarah Williams:                  And I didn’t want them to have to edit anything out, because everything that’s in there is important. And so I thought, well, you know, I’d rather write a book that takes four or five hours to read and it keeps the fast pace. So that’s what I’ve tried and all the feedback that I’ve had is, “That’s what I do.” So that’s fantastic. It takes me roughly six months to write a novel. So that’s preparation, planning, writing the first draft and editing it and uploading it. So it’s about six months. That’s fine. I put two out a year. I’d love to be faster and I am getting faster. I’ve definitely noticed that. So who knows, maybe one day it will be four a year. That would be awesome. My writing process is I use Scrivener, which if you’re an author you probably know what Scrivener is.

Sarah Williams:                  So I use scrivener to plot and do my first drafts. I also use Dragon dictation. so I read everything, I say it, and that’s all transcribed into my Scrivener format via Dragon dictation. And then I use Vellum to upload it in all my different formats. So if you’re a writer and you’re interested in any of those, I do have links for my tools for writers page on my website so you can go to that and their affiliate links. Be helping me out. I started Write with Love last year, which is obviously my weekly podcast where I interview a different author each week and we talk about their journey to publication. At the moment, those are all either romance or strong romantic elements in their books. So that goes out every Monday morning and it’s on YouTube and it’s on podcatchers, it also gets transcribed.

Sarah Williams:                  So if you’re on my mailing list, you’ll get an email on about the winds afterwards and that’ll all have their transcription in there as well. So I’m, I’m having great, great fun with that. Almost 30 episodes so fast, so that’s brilliant. And I really enjoy that because I know a lot of these authors and I really wanted to talk to them and learn more about them. What makes them tick? What inspires them? All those sorts of things. So I’ve got some interesting people coming up, like Nalini Singh, Grace burrows, Eva Tremaine, Helene Young and Bella Andre will be on the show when I get to interview her live. And that’s going to be from the Romance Writers of New Zealand Conference, which is in August, a little over a month now. I’m loving the idea of being able to go back to New Zealand and go and see this amazing Kiwi Conference that I’ve been hearing so much about for the last few years.

Sarah Williams:                  I’m finally going. So I’m totally excited about that. And of course the week after the Romance Writers in New Zealand is the Romance Writers for Australia conference, which I have attended the last two years. I’m not going to the cocktail party this year because of other commitments and because I’ve just been to New Zealand, so I can’t do everything. Unless you want to be a Patreon supporter and help me out with all these EFEs. But I’ll be at the cocktail party, so if you’re there come and say hi. I’ll dress up in whatever the theme is, I can’t remember. But there are some big names going there and Maisey Yates is going to be there and I love her. She writes American Westerns or Country inside small town. And I’m booked into interview here too on the Friday, so that’s why I’m going to be there.

Sarah Williams:                  So that will be fantastic. Somebody asked who would I love to interview the most and that was pretty easy. I would love to interview Diana Gabaldon from Outlander fame. Oh my God, I would love to pick her brain. I’m sure I would just fangirl like crazy because I absolutely am in love with Jamie Fraser, and I know a lot of us are. And I just adore the relationship that she wrote between the hero and heroine. I just don’t even know how she did that and I can’t say they’re such good couple because it’s just so well thought out that I love it. So I would love to pick her brain and check to her. So if anyone has any contacts to Diana Gabaldon, get her to contact me. I’ll pick them out, trust me, I’ve tried.But I would absolutely love, love, love, love to have Diana on the show. I think that would be brilliant.

Sarah Williams:                  I think that’s pretty much wrapping it up. I just thank you all for watching the show over these past few episodes and I’ve got some amazing huge names coming out, so please do stick around and keep listening. It’s less than 30 minutes so, yep, do that. You can find me online via my website, which is sarahwilliamsauthor.com. I have ‘Readers of Sarah Williams’ group on Facebook, so feel free to request to join that group. I’d love you to. Write with Love has a new Facebook page, it’s Write with Love. So go on there if you like, and I’m personally also on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as well. So, if you go by my website or my Facebook page, you can join my mailing list, which will give you the weekly podcast nights and it’ll update when I have something coming out. Usually once a month I’ll talk about something and I like to review other authors and talk about if I’ve read anything good and any primaries or updates that are going on.

Sarah Williams:                  So, if you do enjoy a book, the best thing you do for an author is leave a review on Goodreads, Amazon, those are the main ones, iBooks, Kobo as well are helpful. So leave a review, recommend it to someone. It’s the absolute best thing you can do for an author that you love. So coming up next week on the show, I’ve got Writer nominee Amy Andrews who’s in Jose who just lives up in Rockhampton now. She’s nominated this year in the Writers. So that will be a really, really great show I reckon. And of course that’s going to be tying in, It’ll be Romance Writers of America week. So it’ll be all fun and thank you so much for joining me today and I hope you enjoyed this little look into my life and my journey to publication. So thanks so much and I’ll see you next week. Bye.

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 free preview of my books and lots of other inspiration. If you liked 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, 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. We’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye.