Hello and welcome back to my blog! ❤️
Crystal L Kirkham – another of the many small authors whom I admire. I read her book, “Falling Light”, and was hooked! – I instantly committed to ARCing the rest of her trilogy! This was a year ago, but the story was so good, I still remember it and my feelings as I was reading it!
To-day, Crystal has agreed to come to the podium and guest post for me on this blog. She shall be talking about her writing journey and how it all started and where it’s going now.
Before reading the article, here is an introduction:
Crystal L. Kirkham is a multi-genre speculative fiction author and podcaster. She has published several full-length novels and has been a part of multiple best-selling anthologies.
Originally from the west coast of British Columbia, she now chooses to call a tiny hamlet in central Alberta her home. She is an avid outdoors person, unrepentant coffee addict, part-time foodie, and companion to several delightfully hilarious canines.
She will neither confirm nor deny the rumours regarding the heart in a jar on her desk or the bottle of readers’ tears right next to it. However, she will confirm that she once broke the metal handle to a 4-tonne car jack with her bare hands.
You can find out more about her and her work at http://www.crystallkirkham.com or find her hanging about on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/canuckclick.
I am the writer who is always trying something new. I love to expand my knowledge and abilities at every turn. So, when I am asked how many stories I have written and how many have been published, I freeze. I can’t even contemplate what those numbers may be.
Since I started writing and publishing professionally, I have kept a bibliography of published works on my own website. However, even that page doesn’t actually have everything on it. It only has the things sold to publishers, not thing published in newsletters and on my own website where I do offer free stories as well.
From microfiction to poetry to full-length novels, I have experimented with form and genre freely—and I have published something to represent most of the things I have attempted. Of course, I haven’t published all of them because I’ve been writing since I was fairly young and my first attempts at publishing my work started in the late 1990s. (Yes, I am that old.)
One of the most common questions I get asked is, ‘what started it all?’ For me, I fell in love with writing when I was a child after a teacher gushed about a story I wrote for a class assignment. It was something about a caterpillar searching for… well, I don’t remember exactly. I was maybe eight years old at the time. I continued to create stories into my teenage years—including the standard foray into terrible, moody poetry. Though, to the credit of my terrible teenage poetry, one was published in the yearbook. (Yes, I was on the yearbook committee and I swear that had nothing to do with it…)
Sadly, I stopped writing when I went to college after being convinced that writing wasn’t a real career. Coming from a working-class family, my parents wanted me to have a good life and tried to push me into being realistic about the future. So, I went as far as I could from writing and studied biotechnology instead. A career I never ended up pursuing.
In 2008, I was unemployed and miserable. I did the only thing I could think to do and started writing again. I haven’t stopped since. Thankfully, my friends and family have all come to support and encourage me in my endeavours. My parents have even gone so far as to mention how proud they are of me.
Currently, I am working on about six novels in progress and about the same number of short stories. And let’s not talk about the everything I have planned for the future. Most of the novels will eventually see the world beyond my screen. The short stories have a less certain fate as that market can be harder to break into.
One of my novels in is progress is Rising Darkness which has been sitting in that final stage of revisions far longer than it should be.
It’s the follow up novel to the last one I published, Falling Light. Both are a part of the planned Shadows of Fate trilogy. I have even started in on the first draft of the last book in the series, Penumbra. Although, if I find myself inspired, I may write more in this world some day.
Falling Light may be my one of my favourites among my completed novels. It was my first try at any story that contained a major romantic plot. In fact, the plot is so critical to the urban fantasy plot that it parallels, one cannot exist without the other. This is a series I am mostly writing for myself because it’s the combination of hopeful romance and dark fantasy that I love. It’s full of LGBTQIA characters with a truly slow burn romance that takes until the end of Rising Darkness to really work itself out.
Of course, much like this post, my life tends to be a lot of things smashed into a small space. The release of Rising Darkness was supposed to have been this past summer, but that didn’t happen. Between crises, day job chaos, and dog shows, my time was rapidly stolen from me. It is something I am working on rectifying. So, it is now scheduled for a release this coming spring (fingers crossed). All that needs to happen is for my life to take a small step aside so I can just focus on what I love. Even if that doesn’t happen, I will find a way.
This is what I was always meant to do.
To support Crystal, do buy her books and/or subscribe to her newsletter. I bet she has the most interesting things to say and does not spam at all!
Thank you so much for speaking to my readers, Crystal! It’s been such an honour to have you. I hope your life comes back to a normal pace once again and you can continue sharing your lovely stories with us.
You can follow her on Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and YouTube.
You can also read other guest posts by Dr. Watson, Sylvia N Gould, and Natasja Eby.
See you all in my next post!
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