WHAT ARE THEY UP TO NOW? Featuring Helene Dunbar

Today's author: HELENE DUNBAR

Here is Helene's ORIGINAL ENTRY ON THE BLOG.

Here is Helene's SUCCESS STORY PAGE.

QUESTIONS FOR HELENE:

1. What role did your participation in a Miss Snark's First Victim contest or critique round play in your ultimate success as an author?

Since I began writing fiction in such a tentative way, I’m not sure that, at the time, I really believed in my dream enough to keep plugging away without some sort of validation. Looking back, this was a short-sighted attitude ☺

In effect, participating in this content and receiving such wonderful feedback and THEN hooking an agent, was just the kick in the butt I needed to take this writing thing seriously.

2. Tell us what your journey has looked like from your MSFV Success Story until now.

I’m not sure there is enough server space on Authoress’s site, but….I’m now on agent #4. My “perfect” agent. The agent I will cling to as long as she’ll let me. ☺

Although we subbed Ghostlight (which became What Remains) to start, Melissa and I sold These Gentle Wounds first. Flux actually bought both books and pubbed them out of the order in which I’d written them.

The next manuscript I wrote, BOOMERANG, is pubbing in March 2018 by Sky Pony. I was able to pour years of writing experience into that book in a way I wasn’t able to with my first two. It is truly the book of my heart.

PRELUDE FOR LOST SOULS, a kind of contemporary-reading paranormal about kids living in a town of mediums, was recently bought by SourceBooks and is scheduled to release in August 2019 with a sequel to follow in 2020.

3. What has been the best part of your experience as an author? What has been most difficult/challenging?

BY FAR, readers are the best part of the experience. Hearing that a reader connected with, and were even helped by, these stories and characters makes all the blood, sweat, and tears worth it.

For me, the most challenging part has been the isolation. Writing can be very solitary and although my writing friends are all located elsewhere, they have been my lifelines. My CP, Beth Hull, and I actually met because we were both Authoress winners so thank you for that as well.

4. What's your latest offering, and where can we find it?

BOOMERANG is the story of a boy who returns to his home town after having gone missing for five years. Everyone thinks he was kidnapped, but that isn’t the true story, so he has to wrestle with the weight of everyone’s assumptions.

More, he has actually spent his time away in a place he felt was near to perfect and in a massively complicated relationship with the boy who is living next door and is in a precarious situation himself.

It’s a story about love and self-acceptance and the grey areas of life.

Here is the Goodreads link and it’s up for presale in all the usual places as well.

5. Please leave us with some words of wisdom for all aspiring authors.

The one thing I always tell aspiring authors is this: Don’t let anyone tell you what your writing process should look like. I assumed I couldn’t write fiction because I am incapable of outlining and don’t always have time to write every day and all of the other stuff the internet tells you that you MUST do. My own process breaks so many of the expected rules, but it works for me and at the end of the day, that’s all the matters. Listen to your gut.