My second interview is with Loretta (Retta) Wood, who I first met as Pyewacket.

Links:

Fanfiction.net: https://www.fanfiction.net/~pyewacket75

Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/retta.wood.5

Interview:

1. What genre(s) do you write in and why? Do you write flash fiction, short stories, novellas and/or novels? If you do multiple genres and/or lengths, which do you prefer? Have you ever written any poetry?

I mostly write romance/fiction because that’s what I usually read myself. I have written some short stories but I find I mostly stick to novels.

2. What writers do you admire? What are you currently reading?

I like Nora Roberts/JD Robb for the most part. I seem to read mostly her stuff these days. Right now though I’m traveling back in time and reading a Jackie Collins book in the Lucky Santangelo series, since I loved them when I was younger.

3. How do you pick character names? I choose ones I’ve always liked or that sound cool or unique.

4. How long have you been writing? Since I was fourteen, so nearly 30 years.

5. What kind of support do you get from your family and friends? I get positive support from them. They like that I write, even though some of them have never read my stuff.

6. What social media do you use to spread awareness of your work? Live journal mostly, since most of my writing friends/fans are ones I met there first, but I also use Facebook to promote if I want more people to read.

7. If you had unlimited funds, how would you advertise your work? Id probably make FB ads.

8. What are you working on now? I’ve been working on this one story for months and I need to get it finished so I can start something new. It’s a fiction/romance about a girl who comes back to her hometown 20 years later and they still don’t accept her. She falls in love with a man escaping his own past.

9. Have you self-published anything? What was your experience like? Not yet.

10.What's the one piece of advice that has helped you, and where did you get it? What advice would you give a beginning writer? “Write what you know.”

11.If you had it to do over again, would you have started writing sooner? I doubt it.

12.Which do you find hardest: coming up with a story idea, writing, revising, or marketing? Coming up with an idea.

13.Are you a plotter or a pantser or a hybrid of the two? Pantser 100%

14.What are the hardest kinds of scenes for you to write? Romantic? Sex? The death of a character? Fight scenes? Others? I used to have issues with writing angst but I’ve gotten past that. I suppose I find it hardest to write scenes which I believe might be disturbing to my readers, like violence etc. I hold back a lot for those reasons.

15.What's your solution to writers' block? Leave the story alone until more ideas come to my mind or play music that usually works to inspire me.

16.How much time do you spend on research for your writing? Not a lot, unless I’m writing about something unfamiliar to me, in which case I’ll look it up to make sure it’s correct.

17.Your character decides to go a different way than you planned. What do you do? Go with it. It usually ends up being better than my original idea, anyway.

18.Have you ever used weather or setting as a character? Nope.