Monday, August 21, 2017

Money-wise, Writing Is Often Iffy. So, Why Write? l Evy Journey @eholychair

Someone once said the urge to write is born. I know people who write volumes of journals that hardly anyone but they and someone close to them ever read. They are driven by those words.

Writing is not exactly what you do if you want an adrenaline rush. While it’s an adventure, it is a solitary one and mostly of the mind and, often, also the soul (or spirit or whatever you call that nonmaterial sum total of who you are). And it can be punishing in its own way if you want to push it further than your hard drive—from nights glued to your computer, to months of editing, revising, and proofing, to the ego-busting heartbreak of rejection letters—all before you see your words in print.

You may actually wonder why anyone would go through all that, particularly because monetary returns are usually iffy unless you’re a salaried writer or a fiction writer with a large following. Or you’re a celebrity or someone who’s gotten media attention for doing something notorious or crazy.

Or, unless you’ve written erotica.

But people write books for reasons other than money. Just ask memoirists for whom the need to get rid or at least make sense of psychological baggage finds expression in words on paper. Writing about a painful experience is cathartic. Even the process of turning your draft into a work worthy of publishing and sharing with a broader audience can help heal your psyche. More detached from the experience, you see it in a different light, changing your perspective and teaching you a useful lesson.

But you don’t have to spill your guts in a memoir. You could write fiction. Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple says writing is

“a matter of necessity and that you write to save your life is really true and so far it’s been a very sturdy ladder out of the pit.”

Writing can and does heal. In fact, Writing Therapy joins Music and Art Therapies in the arsenal of psychotherapy/counseling techniques that professionals use.

After spending my first six years with my grandmother in a quiet house full of books, I returned to live with my parents and three rambunctious brothers. To cope with feeling out of place, I wrote my thoughts and feelings in a notebook. Nowadays, I think I’ve finally matured and I’m reasonably comfortable with myself. I write, not out of psychological pain. Instead, I write about what fascinates me: exploring what it means to love, mostly from a heroine’s viewpoint. But you cannot take loving outside the context of a how you live your life. So, ultimately, my stories are about life, about real issues women and men face.

I love this particular quote from Ray Bradbury:

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

Evy Journey, 2015 SPR (Self Publishing Review) Independent Woman Author awardee, is a writer, a wannabe artist (since she was nine years old), and a flâneuse (feminine form of flâneur). Her pretensions to being a flâneuse means she wishes she lives in Paris where people have perfected the art of aimless roaming. She’s visited Paris, even lived there a few times as a transient; that is, she stayed from two to six months.

She's a writer because beautiful prose seduces her and existential angst continues to plague her even though such preoccupations have gone out of fashion. She takes occasional refuge by invoking the spirit of Jane Austen and spinning tales of love, loss, and finding one’s way—stories into which she weaves mystery or intrigue and sets in various locales.

In a previous life, armed with a Ph.D. and fascinated by the psyche, she researched and shepherded the development of mental health programs. And wrote like an academic. Not a good thing if you want to sound like a normal person. So, she began to write fiction (mostly happy fiction) as an antidote.

Evy’s latest book is the contemporary women’s fiction, Hello, My Love.

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About the Book:

Title: HELLO, MY LOVE
Author: Evy Journey
Publisher: Sojourner Books
Pages: 317
Genre: Contemporary Women’s Fiction

BOOK BLURB:

In this modern-day tale inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, bright, beautiful law student Elise Halverson looks forward to a promising career. Falling in love is low in her priorities.

Well-known playboy Greg Thorpe is engaged to be married when he meets Elise. He finds her so unlike the women he used to date and he’s deeply intrigued. Distrusting the image she has of him, Elise avoids him.

But Elise’s parents invite Greg to their frequent dinner parties. There, Greg and Elise butt heads. She’s surprised to find that, behind his rich playboy persona, he’s intelligent and engaging.

The night before his wedding, they give in to their mutual attraction. Although Elise expects nothing more from that night, Greg is in for trouble. His jilted fiancée strikes back, intent on revenge.

Two years later Greg and Elise get a second chance but they find that the way to their happy-ever-after is not so easy.

At the core of this women’s fiction is a literary and realistic romance spiced with a twist of mystery. Hello My Love is Book 1 in the series Between Two Worlds, a family saga about three strong women.