Thursday, January 12, 2012

Blog tour: Darkness Falls by Cate Tiernan


I am so pleased to take part in the Darkness Falls blog tour! I absolutely adore the series, see my review here, and am so excited to have Cate Tiernan on the blog today! Darkness Falls is the wonderful sequel to Immortal Beloved, which is a brilliantly addictive and romantic story of immortals.

To find out more about Darkness Falls, the series or about Cate Tiernan, please do visit the following websites:


Cate Tiernan ... Cate on Facebook ... Cate on Twitter


My Writing Journey
by Cate Tiernan

People always ask how I got started, how I first got published, and I have to say, the story of my first book is short and boring: I decided to write a children’s book, for ten days I closed my office door at work and wrote during my lunch hour, then I submitted it to a publisher, and they bought it. I’ve made other writers cry with that story. It’s a completely useless tale to tell anyone—it teaches them nothing, it says nothing about me, and I’m sure if I were starting my career now, my story would be quite different.

I took writing classes in high school, where writing was explained to me in a way that I could understand but not replicate myself. Mostly I learned in how many different ways my work fell short. My pieces were flowing words that had no layers of meaning. They were to show how well I could write, but made no attempt to show how well I could communicate.

I took more writing courses in college. There a teacher once told me, You have a genuine stylistic gift. That memory still gives me a warm glow—but it didn’t mean, You write well, I understood you, your work moved me, your words made me realize something I’d never realized. My work was appealing but without substance.

Then, twenty years ago, I decided to write a children’s book, and I wrote it in ten days, and sold it to the only publisher I submitted it to. It was the first thing I’d written that was more than three pages long, but more important, much more important—it was the first time I tried truly to communicate with an audience. It was the first time that I knew what I wanted to say, and the first time I knew who I was saying it to. It was about a girl who had a problem, and she solved her own problem without having her brother or her father fix it for her.

All my work since then has had that same theme, more or less: that girls and women are stronger than we know, that we can own our strengths, and we can determine the courses of our lives. Boys or men do not know us better than we know ourselves—they can be wonderful, valuable counterparts, but they don’t have all the answers or all the power, and we don’t need them to. By ourselves, in ourselves, we have the answers we seek and the power we need.

Today, when people ask how to get started, I skip over the articles about how to get an agent or how to network at writer’s conventions. For me the truth always comes down to: know what you want to say, and why, and who you want to say it to. That’s the first step—and it might just take you as far as you need.

2 comments:

  1. I really love this post, thank you so much Cate! It's interesting to see how things had changed throughout your writing. I think the Immortal Beloved series is amazing and you've really written something special. So thank you.

    ReplyDelete

HI! Thank you for leaving a comment, you've just become my new best friend :)