Hi Readers,
I am back with yet again another amazing author. Check out novelist Elizabeth Guider, her interview and be sure to one click your copy of her featured book.
Author bio:
Elizabeth Guider is a longtime entertainment journalist who has worked in Rome, Paris and London as well as in New York and Los Angeles. Born in the South, she holds a doctorate in Renaissance Studies from New York University. Currently, she divides her time between Hollywood, where she does freelance writing about the entertainment business, and Vicksburg, MS, where she grew up and where she focuses on her fiction. Connections is her third novel. She is busy this summer completely a fourth.
Follow the author: https://www.ElizabethGuider.com
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7080392.Elizabeth_Guider
- Tell me a bit about one of your favorites that you wrote.
My third novel is called Connections and was inspired by two friends that I have known for several decades and their very divergent yet entangled lives. In the novel they have been transformed into sisters and they choose very different paths in life and in love. Plus, each gravitates to one of the two great cities that have shaped much of my own life, New York and Los Angeles. Specifically, the plot of Connections spans the last 50 years and is told chiefly from the alternating points of view of the two sisters. The story takes us from Princess phones and prom dresses to the Vietnam War, women’s lib, the lure of Hollywood, 9/11 in Manhattan—and a family emergency like no other. Throughout the years the sisters, with their contrasting personalities and attitudes, often misread their own hearts or are mistreated by those they care about, but finally are challenged to summons their better angels when a life -altering crisis arises.
2. Writing is a difficult endeavor. What makes you continue to write?
I don’t think of writing per se as difficult since I’ve been a journalist for thirty years and, well, I learned early on it’s not a good career move to leave the paper in the typewriter blank, as it were! What is hard—-and different from what I have always done in a newsroom or for a cranky editor at whatever remove—is carving out and submitting to a daily routine. A novelist simply has to write on a regular basis sufficient to get into the lives of the characters. When I wake up in the night and am thinking about one or another of my own characters, rather than, say, my real-life friends, I know that I’m into it, and that the juices will flow and the words will come.
3. What do you look forward to every day?
What I most look forward to each day of writing is losing track of the time and finding that three or four or even five hours have flown by and I’m still immersed in fleshing out some scene or perfecting a dialogue or struggling to create a mood or an atmosphere. That feeling doesn’t happen every day; sometimes I simply agonize over a scene, or struggle for the perfect verb, or go back to my outline to rejigger some element that’s not working. Whatever the case, I do try not to berate myself unduly. It’s best, I find, in those instances to take a restorative walk, or sit down at the piano and play Mozart, or just sip a glass of cold white wine and call a friend over.
4. How do you define success? What makes you successful?
Like no doubt many others, I’d like to sell more books and not have to spend undue amounts of time trying to promote them. Famous last words, huh? However, the market is competitive and fragmented and reading novels is just one of many leisure activities people nowadays engage in. So, we all have to do what we can to get our literary efforts in front of the people most likely to be interested in them. I do feel successful though whenever a reader, known or unknown to me, searches me out to say they enjoyed one of my books, or that one of my characters resonated with them, or that — even better — they can’t wait to see what I come up with next. So, there’s that. And it’s invigorating.
5. Any tips for a newbie writer?
There’s so much good advice out there for anyone thinking of writing a novel, but here’s one general thing and one very specific thing, both of which continue to help me. To begin with, make sure that you as the creator of the story are passionate about it — the subject matter and the journey the main character will take. If you as the writer are not excited, it’s hard to imagine the reader will be. Secondly, at the end of every day of writing, stop your typing in mid-sentence, as it were, so that the next day you can pick up and get back into the swing of it without any trouble revving up.
One click your copy of Connections:
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