Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Author Interview with C.M. McCoy

I'm so excited to share with you an author interview with C.M. McCoy, author of Eerie. EERIE is the debut novel for C.M. McCoy who is an Irish dancer and former Air Force officer living in the Great White North. Though B.S.'d in Chemical Engineering and German, she’s far happier writing stories involving Alaska and a body bag (with an awkward kiss in the mix.) While working emergency dispatch for Alaska State Troopers, she learned to speak in 10-codes, which she still does...but only to annoy her family.
 
You can read my 5 star review of EERIE here - but beware, there are slight spoilers at the bottom of the post. If you haven't read the book, skip the spoilers!
 
Here is a little about EERIE:
Being a ParaScience freshman is a nightmare come true...

Hailey’s dreams have always been, well...vivid. As in monsters from her nightmares follow her into her waking life vivid. When her big sister goes missing, eighteen-year-old Hailey finds the only thing keeping her safe from a murderous 3,000-year old beast is an equally terrifying creature who’s fallen “madly” in love with her. Competing to win her affection, the Dream Creature, Asher, lures her to the one place that offers safety—a ParaScience university in Alaska he calls home. There, she studies the science of the supernatural and must learn to live with a roommate from Hell, survive a tunneling earworm, extract a carnivorous splinter, evade the campus poltergeists, and hope the only creature who can save her from an evil immortal doesn’t decide to kill her himself.
 
And now, to the interview questions and answers!
 
BK—What point in your life did you know you wanted to be an author?
C.M. McCoy—I don't think I ever wanted to be an author. Not in a growing-up-dreaming-and-wishing way, anyway.  I wanted to be a doctor then an engineer then a pilot, but never an author. It never appealed to me as a career choice, but I have always loved writing and story-telling, though. In fact, my family are all great story-tellers, and my favorite memories are of sitting around our family camp, listening to my grandparents, my uncle, my mom, my dad and everyone, really, tell their stories.

It was a little bit of a surprise when I discovered I had a novel on my hands, because I had set out to write a story, not sure it would be a book at all. Once I realized what I'd done, guess it was too late to think about whether I wanted to be an author or not. As far as making it a career...we'll see how that goes.

BK—What motivates you to keep writing?
C.M. McCoy—This is going to sound a little weird, but bear with me. I really like how it feels to create a sentence inside a paragraph inside a chapter that has a good story "rhythm." It's a little like Irish dancing that way: when you finally get the correct order of things in the right rhythm with the proper mood, it's magical. Almost like notes that join in harmony. I can lose myself in writing the same way I lose myself in dancing.

BK—What do you find inspires you?
C.M. McCoy—Alaska is a HUGE inspiration... the people, the landscape, the weather, the dark, the northern lights... I could go on  ...the vegetation, the wildlife, the mountains, the vast expanse of complete, no-cell-phone-coverage wilderness...  Loads of fodder for my imagination here.

BK—Do you have a writing routine? What is it like?
C.M. McCoy—My routine is usually: get an idea, sprint to the nearest pen and paper or keyboard, get half a sentence down, sprint back to the toddler to see what he's just destroyed in the 5 seconds I'd left him alone, sprint back to the keyboard, type like a mad-woman, run to stop the toddler before he can scoop toilet water out of the bowl to feed his stuffed animals, run BACK to the computer to finish a thought, then clean the house, patch the drywall, put out the fire, cook dinner, and if I'm lucky, while I'm peeing, scribble down a few sentences.  <-- that's a little exaggeration.  I don't really get time to scribble down more than one sentence in the bathroom.  

BK—How do you know when your novel is ready for others to read?
C.M. McCoy—I edit and re-read at least five times before showing anyone anything. When I'm fairly sure my words won't cause an Azgoths of Kria poetry reaction, I send those words to my most-trusted, most-snarky friends, who I know will be brutally, asshole-honest about what I've written.

BK—What inspired your novel, Eerie?
C.M. McCoy—Eerie came mostly from a going-to-sleep story that I used to tell myself about creatures that were made of energy. The rest of the story came from the Aether ;-)

BK—What was your favorite part of Eerie to create?
C.M. McCoy—Tooooooo hard to pick just one. I enjoyed writing so many aspects of this book, and it came together in weaved layers, so it's hard to pin-point just one part to call my favorite. Same with the characters. I do remember the funeral was the toughest scene to write. I worked on it for weeks, literally.  And I really did love how it finally came out, but sadly, I ended up cutting it from the book to decrease my word count.

BK—What is in store for the characters of Eerie?
C.M. McCoy—Love and a whole lot of weirdness.

BK—Tell us about your journey to publishing Eerie.
C.M. McCoy—How much time do you have?  lol!  Seriously, the journey felt long and arduous. I learned so much about the craft, about the legalities of publishing, about the market, the mind-set of agents, the value of making connections at conferences, the danger of taking advice from someone who's not invested in you, the "rules" of the industry and when to thumb your nose at them... I wrote a rather lengthy blog post about my journey and a handful of the things I learned. It's on my website and aptly titled "A Journey to Publication." 

BK—What will we see next from C.M. McCoy?
C.M. McCoy—Hopefully, we'll be seeing a feature article in a national magazine. More hopefully, that article will highlight Eerie.

BK—What is the best piece of writing advice you've ever received?
C.M. McCoy—Honestly? There's been a lot of good advice, and it's difficult to pick which piece was best. I tried to capture as many of the good pieces of advice I've come across as I could remember at the time when I wrote my "Journey to Publication" blog post. I'll just mention one thing that I didn't mention in my blog, but it's not fair to say it's the best. I thought is was very good advice for me, my situation, my novel, and the publication climate at the time I was pitching. My disclaimer is that this may not be good advice for everyone: Make an interesting book trailer.

The reason that was such great advice for me--and I can't even remember now who suggested that...I think it was Marissa Campbell, but it might've been LS Hawker, both of whom are authors at Inklings Literary, which represents my fiction. Making the trailer forced me to pitch my book in an audio-visual-slideshow way with short plot snippets written out. It helped me form a PR strategy and teasers to help promote my book, which for me, was a very difficult story to sum up.  I wished I'd done that earlier, when I was pitching to agents, so that I hadn't sounded like such a rambler in my queries.

There is one worst piece of advice that sticks out in my mind, and I know exactly where it came from, but not who served it up. I'd entered a couple contests through Romance Writers of America, which promised constructive feedback from experience, published writers. What I got was a comment on my first 25 pages, which read, "I can tell you're a novice writer who needs a lot of workshop time. Sometimes it's easier to scrap what you've written and start over than to fix all that's wrong with it."  And that was it. Nothing specific. Just a failing score and a suggestion to shit-can a book that has just sold out in paperback on Amazon. 

BK—Who are your favorite authors?
C.M. McCoy—My favorite author is always the writer of the most recent 5-star book or books that I've read. Right now, I'm hooked on Avelynn by Marissa Campbell, and I don't even like historical fiction...at least, I thought I didn't. There are two other books I can't get out of my head at the moment. One is Charming by Elliott James. The other is A Bedtime Story by LC Moon.

BK—What were your favorite reads of 2015?
C.M. McCoy—My Edgar Allan Poe book. LOVE his stories!  I also read DRACULA every year, and it keeps getting better :-)  I loved GREY and also an unpublished manuscript one of my CP's wrote.

BK—Other than writing, what are some of your hobbies?
C.M. McCoy—Irish Dancing keeps me sane. Not sure if that counts as a hobby or therapy at this point.

BK—What's it like living in Alaska?
C.M. McCoy—Read Eerie and find out ;-)
  
So glad C.M. McCoy could join us for an interview, and if you haven't read EERIE yet, go and grab yourself a copy, you won't be disappointed!
 
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