AMA - You Ask, Bethany Answers!

Hi, loves!

We’re back for another round of AMA where you ask me all your burning questions, or three to five, and I do my best to answer them. My AMA is not a place for outtake requests, and I have done a lot of these, so it’s amusing to run through old posts and see my previously answered questions because there very well might be something else in one of those that answers your question.

Do you have a question for me?

Cool, you can drop it into the form HERE, and I will get to it. Just note I do all of these posts a month ahead of time, so it could be up to a month before you see your question get posted.

Enough of my ramblings. Onto the questions!

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1. Can you write another epilogue from your book Cozen?

Maybe, maybe not. Sounds like an outtake request and I have a form for that which gets posted every Friday, so you can totally put it in then and maybe I will get to it. Really just depends on the muse.

2. What were your support networks while overcoming the attack?

I didn’t have any support network(s), and I didn’t deal with it until years later, and it was more than one incident.

For future reference, I don’t think these kinds of questions are ones I will answer if they come into my form. I share things like that because I want to, but I don’t want to share otherwise personal details about me or those events in my life unless I go ahead and offer it first.

Please don’t take that in a bad way, I just think it should be said so people know. Thanks.

3. How did you start writing? Was it difficult to release your first book? Where do you get your ideas from?

Hi there.

So I started writing when I was nineteen, and pregnant because I just woke up one day and wanted to do that. I wrote online for free for several years. It helped to get me through the bad postpartum depression I suffered with after the birth of my oldest son. So, that’s how me writing came about.

As for releasing my first book – I kind of got tired of having demands put on me by people reading my online work for free. I was getting nasty messages, a couple of death threats, not that I ever took them seriously, you know. But nonetheless, here I was posting a chapter a day, and usually long ass chapters, and still it wasn’t enough. People forgot I wasn’t writing to get paid, I was doing it for free because I wanted to and I enjoyed it. My husband told me to stop giving it away for free, so I decided to look into how I would go about getting something published officially … to get paid for this work I did.

I submitted a couple books to some publishers, got a few rejection letters, and then my first book to be picked up was a short novella titled A Mile High by Evernight Publishing. It’s not that great, way too short, and they charge way too much money for it. My second book to get picked up was actually the first book I ever wrote – Lynked. It’s no longer available, I might eventually rewrite it, and publish it again, but I don’t know.

That takes time I don’t have, and a desire to do the work that I really don’t want to do right now because it could be better spent on new projects, I suppose. I don’t think those things were hard to do, however, like the publishers and whatnot, as it was just a matter of figuring out how to do it. The industry has changed a bit since then, and so have I, obviously, as I no longer use publishers, and haven’t since I release The Life. Which is a whole other story as to why that happened.

As for where I get my ideas from, well, I kind of get them from everywhere. Real life events, shit I watch on TV, when I people watch while grocery shopping, etc. Lots of different things give me ideas, and that’s kind of how all this stuff starts. Something little sparks something huge, and I just go from there.

All right, loves. That’s all for this week. Until the next.

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