Hi there, guys and dolls!  Andrea and Heather here, taking over the blog from Barbara Jean once again.  This week we wanted to talk about our lives outside of the alter ego domain.

Being that we are relatively new to the professional author’s world, we still have day jobs.  We plan and dream about one day being lucky and prosperous enough to write and pursue independent creative endeavors as our full time livelihoods.  Currently we are working very hard to build that up (our tentatively titled DEATH OF A BEAUTY QUEEN is getting polished up before we send it off to Patricia Rockwell at Cozy Cat Press), patiently and persistently, but we also enjoy our lives and work we do now.  We feel very fortunate to have the current positions in the world we hold now and would like to share with you our perspective on why our world is a good place to be as we grow.

We are both employed in the retail industry.  As writers, you couldn’t ask for a better place to be.  We see all walks of life — young, old and in-between.  We see good and bad behavior, kindness and rudeness, generous and stingy souls.  We have and overhear various conversations all day, long.  It is a rich hotbed of dialogue, stories and characters.  We’ve made friends with our people and also learn whom in the clientele to stand back from.  As the observers, then writers, we feel like a couple of magpies, gathering snippets and gems of social vignettes.

We write fiction, and we’ll make that very clear.  None of our characters or situations are directly from actual, literal reality — more like amalgams of our experiences and involvements between what happens as the day goes on and the imagination we creatively develop in our own writing space.

Having other responsibilities and focus than just writing at this stage helps us keep the desire and momentum to remain writing, especially when the creative well runs dry or word fatigue sets in — that feeling of what do I write now, what should we do with that scene and when you need time to mull over a passage.  We get involved in our other paid profession, and the higher mind takes over of the writing process and by the time we sit down at it again, we often have a solution to our writing dilemma.  All in all at this stage, we are truly grateful that we have had to foresight to resist the urge to quit the day job just yet and find the reward in every aspect of our double careers.

Warm Regards,

Andrea & Heather

aka Barbara Jean