Ask the Author: Jo Cook
Answered Questions (4)
Jo Cook
Go for it! There are writing groups on Facebook, as well as all kinds of tutorials online to help you self-publish like I did. Back in the day, you had to polish your novel carefully in the hopes of attracting an agent who would represent you, and hope they could find a publisher who would represent you, and hope they would decide your book was worthy of a decent marketing budget... but now authors can do all that themselves. It's not easy! It's a huge learning curve. But it's very rewarding to finish a book and get your first good review from someone you're not related to!
Jo Cook
I journal my way through it! If I can't figure out where to go next with the story, I've found that pulling out my journal and writing, "Ok, I'm trying to figure out the next part of the story. What's bugging me is..." and then listing all the problems helps me to see them clearly and inevitably I figure out what my next steps are.
Jo Cook
Getting to create the world YOU want to live in! The real world can be depressing and frustrating, honestly, so creating a world where justice prevails and people learn to settle their conflicts instead of killing each other, where true love wins no matter the time or obstacles... it's completely wonderful. I also love figuring out the puzzle of putting together the plot. The Guarded Heart was my first super-long story (it's over 200,000 words total, which is why I broke it into 4 ebooks), so it was a huge puzzle to put together!
Jo Cook
I actually was planning to write a fairytale. Kate Morton is one of my favorite authors, and I love her book The Forgotten Garden. A book of fairytales plays a bit part in the plot, and I was very intrigued with the fairytales Kate had created and wanted to do something similar. So I started writing the story of a princess who has to complete three tasks in order to prove that she's fit to rule her kingdom (a twist on the standard fairytale where a knight has to complete three tasks to prove his fitness to marry the princess), but I found myself getting farther away from the fantastical elements of the fairytale and instead writing about a heartbroken princess. Heartbreak is something I understand all too well, so I poured a lot of my own feelings into Aurora's sadness.
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