Glorious sunshine and a lazy Bank Holiday welcomes me to the week. A day of relaxation and writing, it doesn’t get any better. And to start the week let’s welcome J S Riddle to the guest author interview.

Please introduce yourself, who are you and what do you do?
I will introduce myself simply as J.S. Riddle. I may live in the southeastern United States but I was born in Oxford, UK and lived there close to my entrance into primary school. I am lucky (or cursed) to be able to have my time devoted to family and my writing. Okay, I fudge. I love my movies, music, and video games. I should add that too.

What first inspired you to start writing?
Reading. So cliche right? But it did. It opened up a whole world that I didn’t realize existed. Then came the dreams, so vivid as if I were standing in the middle of them. Soon enough I found it was easy to turn those dreams, those ideas, into something on paper form no matter how raw. Things progressed from there. I suppose I was just starting to be a teenager at that time.

If you could work with any author, who would it be and why?
Being the genre that I tend to write, I would love to say Anne Rice, although she is a whole other league than I am. She is definitely a calibre above me, and that is being conservative. Stephen King was my first love, though. To crawl inside his brain and throw ideas back and forth? it would be amazing.

How do you get in the mood for writing?
Silence and darkness sometimes. Everyone has to disappear. No family, no tech, completely alone. It is the easiest for concentrated flow. Certain music helps if I know what I want to write and need a little “background music”.

What do you enjoy most about writing?
Being able to control the characters on the page and bend them to my will. Deciding who lives and dies. No, that sounds slightly devious. Actually what I enjoy most is to be able to take something that floats around in my noggin and turn it into a living, breathing, piece of work. When that happens I truly enjoy writing because I am in my own book, experiencing everything my characters are experiencing. I become my work.

And the least?
Editing, editing, and oh yeah did I say editing? I despise is. It is a part of the process though. Having to take my chicken scratch from paper and typing it on the computer, too. Have you ever attempted to decipher a doctor’s handwriting? Try having to do that, with your own words. There really should be a magical button to take your words, put them perfectly formatted in final form on the computer.

What is your favourite song lyric?
There aren’t any lyrics to the theme for Game of Thrones are there? If that were the case it would most definitely be that. Music speaks a thousand words.

For a true lyric I will say “Seize the day or die regretting the time you lost” from Avenged Sevenfold (Seize the Day)

What advice would you give new and aspiring authors?
Research and listen to your peers. There are some out there that may not feel all too well you have added to their can of sardines, but there are some willing to take their time to really help you maneuver around. Learn about marketing. Even if you go traditional publishing you will still need to learn the in’s and out’s of marketing and technology. Don’t find yourself under the same rock I have found myself under. I am still trying to figure things out.

What are you working on at the moment?
The second book in The Vampire Realm series, unnamed as of yet because I cannot find a suitable title that won’t give away important information from Rise of a Queen. It wasn’t even supposed to be a series actually, but I realized the word count was getting bigger and I found an excellent stopping point to leave people satisfied with the ending. Needless to say I already had half of this book written before I even made it the second book of a trilogy.

Tell us about your latest work and how we can find out more.
Rise of a Queen (The Vampire Realm)is what I currently have out.
The best place to look is http://www.jsriddle.com since it has the most up-to-date information.

It is in e-book form at Amazon, Nook store, Diesel, Kobo, and by the time this is printed it should be in the iStore and Sony. The paperback can be found on Amazon at this moment, I am slowly working on other means of distribution.

Buy now from Amazon (US) | Buy now from Amazon (UK)

Thanks to J S for sharing her thoughts with us