JAI BAIDELL writes about mysteries, detectives, spies and romance. Sometimes she dabbles in science fiction as well.
I haven’t always wanted to be a writer. What I wanted to be was a reader. A voracious reader. And I was. As a child in Adelaide in the 1960s, I caught the bus into the city every Saturday to visit the Children's Library. My goal was to read every book in the collection. The borrowing limit of four books a week was a bit mean, but thinking back, I doubt I could have carried more anyway.
The library opened up new worlds for me. Later I became a librarian for a while. Best job ever!
I didn’t think about writing until 2012, when Amazon opened their Kindle store to international
indies. I read ebooks in vast numbers, and thought I could do better, or certainly just as well.
I couldn't find enough books I liked set in Australia. We have many tough outback adventures and gritty urban tales, but I wanted something else. I wanted suburban Canberra, where I lived at the time, with its strong ties to rural towns and villages, its amazing scenery and its diversity of people. So a late-blooming author was born!
Characters always try to hijack my stories, but I'm getting better at reining them in. In my debut novel, Runaway Spy, my protagonist's mother, Susan, was so stroppy I had to kill her off. Doing that created an entire new thread in the plot and probably improved it dramatically. Susan was meant to be an overbearing and unloving mother, just one more burden for Joanne to bear, but she blasted her way onto the page and insisted on being the centre of attention. I had to do something! I swear, it was self-defence.
All my characters are completely imaginary. The settings are often based on real places, but the people, no. Once I’ve created them, though, they become disturbingly real. I sit in the corner and rehearse conversations with them. Not that authors are weird or anything.
I love ebooks. I love the lower prices that let me read so many more stories. I love getting rid of dusty bookshelves. I love the trees that no longer have to be chipped for paper and printing. I love the international markets that let me read authors I would never otherwise have found. Changing the text to a readable size is fantastic. And ebooks are great for genre fiction, which is what I enjoy most. I do worry about the long term availability of digital books though.
I love my computer. Not just for writing, but also for research, for sharing with readers and other authors, and for learning. I have lots of tools; Scrivener for writing, but also software for creating images, for proofreading, and for file backups, as well as publishing tools like Vellum. And social media, on good days.
My inspiration comes from images. I'm an avid watcher of Netflix and its rich feast of action- adventure stories like Arrow and The Musketeers. Spy movies, too, and westerns and science fiction. I love The Expanse and Killjoys. Recently I've absorbed many hours of Spanish (Velvet) and Turkish (Black Money Love) soap operas. And martial arts, The Brothers Sun and House of Ninjas. I love any story with heroic battles against evil conspirators and darkest fate.
I use iStock for book cover images, but it's also a wonderful place for finding inspirational ideas.
I don't plan out books in advance, although I do create a rough framework. I've tried detailed plotting chapter by chapter, but the results were uninspiring, and it was too much like work. Like painting by numbers. I wanted more excitement. The story emerges from the response of the characters to their situation, and I like working that out as I go along. Sometimes I'm surprised. And sometimes I have to rewrite the whole thing several times. It’s all good.
I love writing and trying out different genres. I've written spy dramas (Tender Spies series), crime (Detective Jud Jeffreys series) and rural romance (Rakali Springs series), and I'm working on some fantasy novels to be published under my Cara Bruar pen name. And recently I've become interested in poetry. As a writer, there's always something new to learn.
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