Hi!

[Joely]

The instructions at the top of the page suggested I introduce myself here first, so that's what I'm doing. I'm an author/writer living in the northwest of England and I first found my way here via a rather protracted route. I happened to be reading something about the law of attraction and saw a link to Steve Pavlina's blog post on skepticism. Since I veer between skepticism (well, ok, fear) and having much more faith and confidence, I had a read and found myself hooked. It was just what I needed to read this morning.

A little about me, I suppose. I'm an author and writer living in the beautiful city of Manchester, in the UK. With twelve books written in the last four years, I have an agent and am working towards getting my first major deal with an international publishing company. As my agent works on that, I'm in the process of recording the first book of my fantasy fiction series Amnar with the help of a radio producer friend. We're due to launch the first podcast on March 1st, and I have the advantage of, for the present, being able to work on that and my writing full time for the moment at least. This is obviously both very exciting and very scary for me, as it's the achievement of a dream that I've had in my heart for as long as I can remember.

J x

[Dan.Linehan]

Hi Joely,

Great to hear about your career progress! Twelve books in four years, that's great! Are they fiction? What genre?

[Joely]

Fiction, but in a variety of genres. Most of them are fantasy fiction though.

Of course, after all that writing, I have worn my fingers down to nubs.

[Dan.Linehan]

I was up until really late last night reading a Christopher Pike book about cursed astronauts on Mars.

I only got a couple hours sleep because I just had to know how it ended.

Its nice reading some fiction again, after a slew of non-fiction over the last couple of years.

Who are your favorite authors?

[Joely]

I've been through a bit of a non-fiction phase myself. It's difficult to write and read fiction at the same time, for some reason. I imagine characters showing up in the wrong book saying "What am I doing here? Why are all these dragons everywhere? This is Ukraine!" - Sorry that's a reference to my imagination, I think.

I discovered Paulo Coelho last year, as well as a lovely book by a woman called Monika Lewicka: "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian". It's a lovely story. I'm (obviously) a fan of Tolkien, Carroll, Lewis, people like that, but also Stephen Kuusisto, Mary Carr and some of the more unusual poetic writers out there. And I have a bit of a passion for inexplicable Russian fiction.