A cuppa and catchup with Author Liz De Jager!

It’s time for another cuppa and catchup! This time I invited the lovely Liz de Jager along to talk about writing YA, bullet journals and pearls of wisdom for her younger writing self…

Rachel Connor: Welcome to my humble blog, Liz! Tell us a bit about yourself and what creative stuff you’re working on at the moment.

Liz De Jager: Hi! I’m so pleased to be here – thanks for the invite. So, I’m the author of a completed trilogy for YA (and other discerning readers regardless of age) called The Blackhart Trilogy.

The series follows Kit Blackhart who gets thrown in the deep end when in the first book she saves a Fae prince from becoming a snack for some bad guys and then: shenanigans!

What I’m up to at the moment: I’m editing a new book. It’s full on fantasy and I have no idea if its good. I hope it is! I’ve also become a bit of a crafter and mixed media enthusiast, making stuff and selling it on.

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Competition is bull**** and winning won’t make you happy. Here’s why.

Winning used to mean everything to me.

I was brought up in a household where if I wasn’t the best in my class, I wasn’t anything. I went to school with kids who would literally tear one another’s faces off over a football score.

I live in a country that was so big on ‘winning’ that it enslaved half the world.

The creative industry I work in is reminiscent of Game of Thrones for all the backstabbing, politics, sycophants and uneasy alliances it’s filled with. From all of that I take this very important lesson:

Winning is overrated, and isn’t half as important or beneficial as you think.

How to fall in love with writing again

I hate writing.

At least right now I do. 

The problem is that I dwell too much on the end result. I want the end result – a finished, polished story – right now.

All that other gumpf in between – the typing, the self-doubt, the numerous, numerous revisions – makes my teeth itch. Sometimes when I’m in the thick of that stuff, I enjoy it. Right now, I loathe it, which means that I unfortunately loathe a rather sizable part of the writing process.

So many writers I speak to deal with the conundrum of loving writing and hating it at the same time. So what can we do about it?