The Evolution of an Author: From Young Reader to Award-Winning Writer

Amra shares her personal journey from childhood reader to award-winning author, exploring how she discovered her authentic voice after years of commercial detours and rejections.

• Growing up as an avid reader who found escapism and hope in books
• Finding early success with a fiery article about racism and injustice
• Navigating the traditional publishing world with a literary novel
• Detour into romance writing that ended in disappointment
• Life-changing advice: "Write something no one else can write"
• Writing a memoir about her mother's mental illness and migrant experience
• Discovering her strength in using personal stories to find universal truths
• Current focus on crime fiction that incorporates human rights advocacy
• Learning that authentic writing is more fulfilling than chasing commercial success
• Embracing evolution as a natural part of the writing journey

I'd love to hear about crossroads you're facing in your writing journey and what you're struggling with. Let me know if there are specific topics you'd like me to address in future episodes. You can find show notes and a special handout at amrapayalich.com/podcast. Keep writing and remember that your story matters.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Amra's Armchair Anecdotes
• 2:29 My Early Reading and Writing Journey
• 6:04 First Successes and Professional Writing
• 12:01 Navigating Traditional Publishing Challenges
• 18:07 The Memoir Journey and Finding My Voice
• 31:13 Freelance Writing and Human Rights Focus
• 42:22 Writing Authentically: Lessons and Advice
• 51:53 Closing Thoughts and Thanks

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Amra's Armchair Anecdotes. I'm Amra Payalich, writer, teacher and storyteller. Pull up a chair and let's dive into stories about writing, life and lessons learned, sharing wisdom from my armchair to yours. You can find the episode show notes, your free episode handouts and my how-to guides at amrahpayalichcom slash podcast. And now it's time to dive in. Welcome to Amrah's Armchair Anecdotes.

Speaker 1: 0:36

Today I'm talking about the evolution of an author, using myself as a case study. So I'm going to talk about the way that I have gone through different things as an author. I'm going to be talking about finding your voice. So it's not just about your writing style, but what it is, what you want to say and really understanding who you are as a person. I feel like that's been the biggest part of my journey discovering what it is that I want to say and what it is that my writing is about. So I'm going to share my personal journey, you know, from starting out as a child to becoming an award-winning author and an indie publisher, and how, along the way, I have learned to embrace my voice, and I'm hoping that my story and my takeaways will help you discover your voice. So writing has always been more than just the words on a page. For me, it's about my journey of self-discovery and about empowerment, and this evolution did not happen overnight. In fact it has been I don't know when to start, I think, you know, as a professional writer, 28 years, but as a emerging writer longer than that.

Speaker 1: 2:06

So I was always that child that was reading, that found escapism and hope and joy through reading Not really a surprise, because I did have a chaotic home life, and so reading gave me the opportunity to sort of experience things that were different to my home life, but also the opportunity to learn about the world and learn about different things. And I was always interested in writing and I was always writing stories and I was always the person who I loved hearing stories and I loved people telling me stories, and so in my memoir I talk about being the confidant to the adults in my life and the way that the women in my family especially, you know, lonely women like my grandmother and my mother really sort of turned to me and would tell me their stories, because I was one of those children who knew how to be still and be in the moment, and I was just always enthralled by stories, by stories, and in high school I had some early successes where I had teachers really praising me and giving me the acknowledgement of myself as a writer and my writing identity, and when I had my first book published I tracked down those teachers and I sent them a copy as a thank you. And that's something that I'm really aware of now as an English teacher myself about acknowledging the students who really enjoy and embrace their creativity and lifting them up, giving them that boost and giving them that acknowledgement that they might not get anywhere else. In high school I wrote in the school setting and had pieces published in the school journal. And then I had my first public recognition when there was a competition from the local newspaper and my newspaper article won Story of the year and it was published in the newspaper and a photographer came to the school and took a photo of me and there was another girl who had also um won for photography, and so we had this moment, uh, that we were acknowledged publicly by the community.

Speaker 1: 4:46

And that first story I wrote it was called Bystanders Ignore Racist Attack, and so it was about a friend of mine who was of Indian background and she had been beaten in a public place by other young people and everyone just walked past and pretended it wasn't happening, and it was really distressing to her because she'd come to Australia as a migrant, from a place where usually people would sort of you know, stop and go, no, you don't do that. And so she was very heartbroken by it and that really inspired my sense of injustice and so I wrote this really fiery piece about the way that this was possibly racially motivated, because she was a person of color, and when I look back on that experience now I can see how, in one sense, I had my voice. In one sense, I had my voice, I had what it is that sparked me up and that made me want to write. It's just that I got lost along the way, and so, as I tell you my story, you're going to see how this comes back to where I am now, in a sense of sort of going around in a loop. So that was my big moment of recognition, and I always knew I wanted to be a writer. But the thing about it is you don't know how to be a writer. You're not really given sort of the keys to the kingdom and told how to do this, and I did some silly things in high school in terms of stuffing up my opportunities for university, because I was too intimidated about going to university.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Coming from a migrant background where no one in my family had gone to university, my mum hadn't finished high school. My grandmother was illiterate you know, this was a new world. This was a world I was so intimidated and afraid of that I couldn't envision myself stepping into it. So I stuffed up my uni preferences and I didn't get a place into university and my careers counselor supported me by finding an admin course, and so I went out into the workforce and I was working full-time, but I was bored, I felt really adrift, and I ended up discovering a diploma in professional writing and editing, and this was the first opportunity I had had to speak to people who were writers, because all of the tutors were professional writers who had been published, who had achieved some degree of success in their fields and they could speak from experience. So it was the first time that I spoke to people and was learning from people who are writers.

Speaker 1: 7:36

But, more importantly, I was interacting with people who are also like me, who were creative, who wanted to write, who were searching for their voices and searching for their path forward, and that's the thing that really makes a difference. You really need to find your tribe, you need to find your community. Even now, as an indie author, I am in online communities, in Facebook communities, and I know people in that online world. I'm attending my first in-person indie conference in December and I'm really excited because I am looking forward to the opportunity to actually meeting people face-to-face and to actually sort of create more of a bond and create more of a community in that face-to-face setting, because when you're stepping into a new world and then you are talking to people who are also in that world, it is so validating and also they are the ones who understand, who understand what you're talking about.

Speaker 1: 8:41

And so being in this writing course with other emerging writers who, like me, were looking for opportunities to get published, to become a writer, to become validated, was wonderful and very early on, because I had excellent tutors and I had that drive. I submitted pieces and I had three publications in a very short period and then I was acknowledged with short story prizes and winning money from short story prizes, and there is something amazing that happens when you get that acknowledgement, and it's also really strange how monetary acknowledgement really does help in terms of validating because no one thinks anything of, oh, I got published or this or that, but when you attach money to that. I remember one of the first things that I had published was a romantic short story in Woman's Day. So in the magazine Woman's Day and I was speaking to family members who were kind of mocking me about being published in this and about the fact that I was so proud about being published in this, and they were kind of looking at me in a condescending manner and then I said, well, I got paid $300 for 800 words and remember that this is 28 years ago, so this is a significant time ago where $300 meant even more. It's probably the equivalent of $1,000 today. And their faces changed and they were like, oh, that's how much money you got for that many words. And suddenly they were interested in my writing career and they thought that maybe it had some value and some validity.

Speaker 1: 10:32

And so that was my first entry point into this world, into the professional writing world, and my first successes were with short stories, with writing fictional short stories and having them published. And the first short story that really validated my voice was my short story Siege, which was about a couple, a Romeo and Juliet romance between a Serb boy and a Muslim girl during the time of war, while they were under siege, and it was the first story that I had used research to recreate. So I had used research that I found online in terms of a real life couple that I was sort of basing this on, and then I also had letters from my husband's family about what it was like under siege, and so this story got published and got acknowledged, and it was about Bosnian characters. It was about people like me. It was the world that I knew and that I understood, and so seeing that recognised out there in the world made me realize that had value.

Speaker 1: 11:49

However, I was caught up in what sort of a writer I wanted to be, and I was torn because I had spent my adolescence reading romance novels, which I still love. I love romance fiction, romance movies. It's my happy place, and so I wanted to be a romance writer because that was the world that I really, you know, enjoyed reading, and so I started writing a romance novel. And this is the thing when you're writing your first book it takes much longer because you're battling self-discipline, motivation, self-confidence, the real world, and so I was battling this book for three years and trying to write this book and in the process I have felt like I had evolved and I felt like maybe I didn't want to be a romance writer after all and I decided not to submit that novel and to just sort of leave it as my practice novel. And I don't.

Speaker 1: 12:56

I can't remember now what conference I went to. I actually think it was the Romance Writers of Australia conference, which I've got to give a shout out. Romance Writers conferences the Romance Writers of Australia Conference, which I've got to give a shout out. Romance Writers Conferences and Romance Writers Organizations are amazing. They are so good at self-promotion.

Speaker 1: 13:13

And there was this course. I think it was Donald Mass, who is a big New York literary agent and he had written a book about writing. And I went through this course and as I was doing it, I was sort of filling out notes and I started coming up with this idea about writing a book about myself, about writing about being a young adult, having a mother who had bipolar, about being from the western suburbs, being from a migrant background, and so I thought, okay, this is what I need to do. Okay, this is what I need to do, this is what I need to focus on, and it does get easier. The second book was easier to write because I'd had that practice of the first one and everything sort of clicked in place with that book where I wrote it and I entered it into a competition.

Speaker 1: 14:09

So we have still in Victoria an unpublished manuscript competition, and so I got shortlisted and I got attention for that and I had already sent it out to agents on submission and hadn't heard at that point anything. So I contacted the agents because while I was at this amazing ceremony where my face was up on a big screen that I was shortlisted, I had this amazing experience where publishers and editors were coming up to me and giving me their business cards and saying, oh, can you submit this novel to us? And so I contacted the agent I had submitted to and said that I was shortlisted for this prize and that I had now received contact from all these publishers who wanted me to submit. And so the agent signed me and then they took on the submission process and I have to say I sort of had a dream run with that first submission. The agent submitted to five publishers and I went and met with a few of the publishers which was amazing hearing people talking about your novel and hearing people talking about you, know the marketing of it and what they thought the value of it was, and got an offer very early on from one publisher and then got a rejection from publisher two, three and four and then got an offer from publisher five. And so I was in this amazing position of choosing which editor I wanted to go with, and I went with the editor that I thought aligned the most with my book vision. Um, and so that was who I. I went through and the you know.

Speaker 1: 16:09

When the book was eventually published, it was a wonderful ride. I got shortlisted for a competition, I won a competition, I got all these great award, these great reviews, well, appeared in public appearances, had interviews done, so it was amazing to sort of step into this world and be an author. But on the other side of the coin, it took 18 months. It took 18 months from signing to my book being published. Before that, it took a year for the agent to sign me. So this was a very long process and when my book was published, I had given birth to my daughter and I was now also a mother and I made a silly mistake. Now that I look back on. I mean, it worked out, but it wasn't great.

Speaker 1: 17:13

I had gone on maternity leave from the job that I was doing at that time because I was like I am an author now and this is what I should be doing with my life. The problem with that is then there was nothing, and so I really struggled in terms of finances and being home with my daughter. I applied for a grant and I got a $12,000 grant, which helped support me in writing my second book, and at this point I was really committed to this novel that had been published the first one and I still wanted to continue the story of these characters, and so I started writing a sequel. At this time, two things were going on. One of them was that I fell pregnant with my second child and I had a miscarriage, and this miscarriage was quite traumatic and quite difficult, because I'd had one pregnancy and it took me a long time to get pregnant, and so then I had this one pregnancy that was successful. I was, in a sense, unprepared for the fact that it doesn't matter. Fertility is a big question mark and you are at the mercy of mother nature, and so this miscarriage was really a shock. But then it was also complicated by the fact that I developed an infection that wasn't picked up for a very long time, that when they did the curette they had actually left behind some of the fetus which led to the infection.

Speaker 1: 19:00

So there was months and months of agonizing, pain and real health issues that I was going through, not to mention the grief and the heartbreak of the miscarriage. And so in this space, my agent had submitted the second novel to the publisher who had published the first novel and they rejected it. And up until that point, writing had been everything for me and I had genuinely thought I would like die of a broken heart if I received a rejection. I thought this is not something that I would be able to survive. But when you have been through some truly life-altering events and experienced profound grief and loss and also experienced that thing of life where you realize not every dream is going to come true, that life will come at you and things will happen that you don't expect and you just have to move on. And so this miscarriage was my first big loss and my first big grief and my first realization of heartbreak and how you are just going to experience pain at some point in your life if you live long enough. And so when I received this rejection, I remember my agent actually called me and I was on the phone with her and she said they passed. And I had this moment where I thought, oh, this isn't the worst thing that's happened to me, I'm going to be okay. And so, even though it was really disheartening to be rejected within the context of what was going in my life, it was survivable.

Speaker 1: 20:58

After my health issue had had resolved, I was looking at my writing career. At that point my agent was calling on Young Adult Fiction. She could not submit the second book anywhere else because it was a sequel and the first book was published by the publisher who had rejected it. She didn't see any point submitting it elsewhere. I actually look back on that and I'm like, well, I actually could have changed names, I could have changed things and probably submitted it elsewhere, but at that point I did not feel I had the power to take on my writing life and to make those decisions. I was being guided by my agent, and so we did sort of a strategy, talk about how we wanted to move forward. She wasn't interested in young adult. Young adult fiction was sort of constricting. So it was like, what else did I have? And so I told her about this romance novel that I had written and left in my drawer and that that was something that I had been interested in pursuing. So she asked me to submit that novel and left in my drawer and that that was something that I had been interested in pursuing. So she asked me to submit that novel. At that time there were these publishers that were looking at digital first. It ended up being a disaster, but more on that in a minute and so she read this romance novel. She went, yeah, this, this is good, this is something I can sell. She submitted it to two publishers at that time who were looking into this digital first model, who were looking for romance novels, and they both offered me a contract. So again I had the choice and I chose one of the publishers and so now I was embarking on a career as a romance writer.

Speaker 1: 22:47

At this point we made the decision because I had been a young adult author and also because I was a teacher. I wanted there to be a clear differentiation between my young adult fiction and between my romance, and I also wanted to be very clear so that my young any students, you know would not read this fiction because it was adult, it was geared toward adults in terms of romance and in terms of sex scenes, and so I chose the pen name, may Archer, and the first novel was published, had some publicity, had some opportunities, but, um, it was very limited and the I was caught up being a full-time teacher and I was not really savvy with social media or knowing how to manage that or really having the space and time to do it. So they wanted a second book. So I wrote a second book and at this time I was thinking a series. So, just to go back, the first novel that was published is Return to Me by May Archer, which has now been republished under my imprint. And then the second book was Hollywood Dreams, which I was thinking as a series, the Dreams of Destiny series. So they published the first book, hollywood Dreams, and I started working on the second book in the series.

Speaker 1: 24:23

In that time, these digital first publishers because when I had gotten the publishing contract, my agent and I had talked and she had said that I needed to commit to writing one book a year because this publisher was sort of keen on having books and continuation and sort of building that progression, and they were actually basing their business model on indie authors in terms of selling, doing the digital first, selling ebooks for the price points that indie authors were doing, using reader magnets to try and capture readers. The problem is that in a sense they were a publisher trying to do those things but they did not really know and this is the problem I find with the publishing world they don't really know how to get the authors as their partners. We actually need some training. Publishers should be actually doing some brief training in terms of how to support writers to actually market their books and what their role is in marketing their books.

Speaker 1: 25:36

So I wrote the third book and submitted and it got rejected and at this point point I had not made much money from these books at all. I think I made about ten dollars per book, which is pretty disappointing. So the returns on these books were very disappointing because they were sort of doing the spaghetti on the wall and just doing a bit of everything to see what would stick, because they weren't paying any advances. They could give a contract to anyone. They were offering higher royalties because it was the ebook model. So I think I was getting 25, so they were still taking the bulk of it and they rejected this third book and the very soon after that they shut their doors. You know, these digital first models shut their doors because they had expected that this was going to lead to revenue and it didn't. So at this point I was actually feeling pretty bitter and angry.

Speaker 1: 26:47

I had been working full time as a teacher, and very early on in my career. So this is the first five years of my career as a teacher, which is so demanding and so difficult. Not to mention, I was the mother of a young child. When I started teaching, my daughter was five years old, and so you know, this is between the ages of five to ten, and I felt really angry about the fact that I had tried this only because I thought this was the way to make money. And while, yes, I do like writing romance novels and I do love these romance novels, there were other ideas that were percolating and there were other things that I sort of wanted to do, but I pushed them away for this commercial pathway that I thought would lead to success. And that was sort of my first lesson in not doing things for only the commercial value, because you cannot judge whether it will succeed. You don't know. So when you're chasing that commercial success and not following your heart, and then that commercial success doesn't pan out, that bitterness takes a while to process.

Speaker 1: 28:12

And so that's where I found myself and that's when I had a conversation with my husband who gets me and gets this world, husband, who gets me and gets this world and I was telling him how angry and bitter I was and I felt like I had wasted my time and I had put all this energy into something and into these romance novels and they didn't go anywhere. And now I just lost time when I could have been working on building something else. And he said to me well, you need to write something that no one else can write. You need to do the things that no one else can do. Anyone can write a romance novel. That is a big genre. You're not contributing anything unique. In one sense, you know, because I was writing romance novels that you know I found really interesting and tropes that I found really interesting and tropes that I found interesting, but I wasn't using my culture or my identity in that I was using Anglo characters and just sort of doing that romantic aspect and that romantic story and that really made me look back at what it is that I wanted to say what it is that I had that was unique.

Speaker 1: 29:27

And after I'd had my daughter, I had been experiencing some PTSD about my childhood and I had experienced postnatal depression when she was 10 months and I had gone to counselling. And I started writing about my childhood when I did my first, my debut novel. I started that out as a memoir, but it felt too raw, it felt too much, it felt like something I couldn't do at that time. I wasn't ready to be truly honest and to truly look at it and so I fictionalized it and I still sort of got my story out, but I protected myself and protected my family. Now I found myself as a mother going back to things that had happened in my childhood, going back to my mother's life and having a different perspective. And so I started writing that memoir and I started writing what that story was.

Speaker 1: 30:28

And at first I tricked myself. I wasn't writing memoir, I was just writing pieces, I was writing essays. I had them published in different journals, I got some recognition and then I realized I needed support in order to continue writing this memoir because I was working full-time. I was really tired and writing a memoir is really emotionally taxing. It is very, very difficult. And then there are the ethical issues about writing about someone who is mentally ill, writing about your community, and so I really felt like I needed support with that and I applied and got funding for Alice Pung to mentor me, which really helped me get through the writing process. And the interesting thing with the writing process is I wrote one version of that memoir and in one version of the memoir it was dual point of view, so it was my mother's story in her point of view and her chapters, and then it was my perspective as a young person and how I experienced that. I was kind of really happy with that.

Speaker 1: 31:32

But my agent didn't feel like that was commercially viable and so she encouraged me to change it all to my point of view. And I remember having this conversation with Alice where she's like she's, you know, your agent is advising you based on what she thinks is the commercial success. She goes. Your memoir, the way you wrote it, was beautiful. Um, you know, I think it's publishable as it is and I have no regrets about the decision I made. I think that was a lesson that I needed to learn, but I do think now, looking back on it, that was also another example of me not being true to myself and me just bending in to fit in with what commercial expectations might be and how it might lead to greater commercial success.

Speaker 1: 32:22

Plot twist, as usual, my agent submitted my memoir to five publishers and she was kind of lukewarm on it. I'm going to be honest. It really wasn't her genre wasn't what she was really interested in or, you know, had in her wheelhouse, was really interested in or, you know, had in her wheelhouse. But after the romance fiasco I was like no, I'm going to write what I want to write. I'm going to write the things that matter to me. So she submitted it to five publishers. It wasn't picked up, they didn't want it and at this point she was done. She did not want to submit it elsewhere. I was not.

Speaker 1: 33:05

I really believed in this book and I really wanted to fight for this book and I wanted it to be traditionally published, even though at this point I'd started looking at and thinking about the self-publishing world. But I really wanted it to be traditionally published and that was more for my mother. I really wanted my mother's story to get that validation and so I took on the submission process and I submitted to five publishers and I had publishers interested publishers asking for full manuscripts, because you submit a query letter in some instances, a partial in others, and then it's a matter of whether they want to request a partial or they want to request the full manuscript. So there was interest in it and also my agent had submitted to like the five big publishers and then I went down the list to the five independent publishers. So there was still like a lot of publishers that I could go through. It was just sort of working down the hierarchy in terms of the big publishers and then the smaller independent publishers.

Speaker 1: 34:05

And I wasn't interested at this point in commercial success. I wasn't interested in making a deal. All I was interested was getting this memoir published and so as soon as I had the first offer, I took the first offer and I withdrew it from the other publishers and I have no regrets about the decision. I'm really happy because that memoir was published very and my mother passed away I think within five months. It was published in May. She passed away in November of that year and so having that moment with her is worth more than words. The interesting thing is, though, that that memoir being published you know, I got all these beautiful reviews, and then my publisher submitted it for a prize and I got shortlisted for the National Biography Prize, which had prize money attached to it, so I won $2,000. So I actually didn't get an advance on that book. I was only being paid and I'm only paid for sales and royalties, but winning that prize actually gave me some money and, you know, led to commercial success in one sense for that book.

Speaker 1: 35:21

For me, at this point, I was rethinking my direction and my voice, and I knew that it was time to part ways with my agent. And this was a very hard decision because she was an agent with the biggest agency, curtis Brown, and so there was a certain amount of credibility in having her as an agent. But I knew that we weren't a good fit, and I also knew at this point that I was done with the traditional publishing world. I really wanted to take my my strength back, my story back, and I wanted to make all of the decisions, and I wanted to just follow my voice and not sort of be led into certain directions based on possible commercial successes. The one thing I will say is my agent was really wonderful where she let me make that decision.

Speaker 1: 36:26

She, um, it was fairly obvious to me that we weren't a fit, and it was fairly obvious to me that she didn't think. You know also that we were a fit in terms of what I wanted to write and what I wanted to explore, but she did not, um, you know, do anything other than support and sort of give me the green light to submit further things to her. I was the one who actually, um, said that I would like to part ways and went through the process of that, and I I really appreciate that about her. I really appreciate her, um, being so supportive of writers and understanding that. You know, it is very heartbreaking, and if she had been the one to like dump me, in a sense it would have been, I would have been able to cope with it, but it would have been still a little bit disempowering, and so she really left it the ball in my court and let me feel empowered, you know, by making that decision and by taking control of that. So I'm very, very grateful to her and I am very grateful for the experience of her taking a chance on me of her working with me and trying, um, you know, to get my traditional writing career in a commercial direction.

Speaker 1: 37:50

I've just realized that I have different values and different things that I want to explore and that, um, you know that that wasn't quite the way for me. So I have now um being, you know, published with this memoir, and the one thing that this memoir also did for me was it made me realize the value of non-fiction. Um, I actually was not a big reader of memoir when I was writing and when I was submitting memoir which is terrible, like I would not give that advice to anyone at all read in your genre, and so you know that presented some difficulties for me during the writing process. I'll be very honest, if I had done some reading and some, you know, immersing myself into that genre. But I was just sort of in a very overwhelmed place at that time in terms of juggling full-time work as a teacher, being a mother, and then trying to write the memoir, and I just sort of had to focus on the writing as a way of getting myself out of. You know, I think when you're working full-time there's this fear, especially in a career like teaching, that really takes everything from you. There is this huge fear about losing yourself and losing your creativity. And so I had to keep writing the memoir in order not to do that, in order to not lose my identity as a writer. To do that in order to not lose my identity as a writer.

Speaker 1: 39:31

And so when I wrote this memoir and then really started immersing myself into the world, I started seeing opportunities about being able to write memoir pieces for publication, opinion pieces for publication, and so I slowly embarked on that world, and that was something I had wanted to do for so long. I had wanted to be a freelance writer and I wanted to have articles published, but it was this world that was beyond me, and, as usual, I had many supportive people who I spoke to, who helped me think about how to do that, and all it takes is one. And so the first article that I had published I remember it was somebody had written about delivering a writing course and EAL the English teachers interfering with their writing. So I wrote a rebuttal and I had people encouraging me. We were out of contact and I was like, oh, I'm thinking about doing this, and they were like, well, do this and do that and the other thing, and so I got into this freelance writing and it's just so fascinating how, when you enter a new world, at first it's so hard and you don't know what you're doing, and thankfully I had editors supporting me and helping me develop my voice, and then ideas just keep coming and ways of using this as a method of promotion and of advocacy just started coming together for me. Just started coming together for me, and I think also because I had started, you know, looking at the self-publishing.

Speaker 1: 41:12

I'd already embarked on the freelance writing, but then, when I was becoming an indie author, I was really looking at ways to monetise my skills and what I had to offer, and so freelance writing became an even bigger aspect of my life, and I'm now at the point where I have enough recognition where I actually get editors contacting me and commissioning me to write articles, which is beautiful and heartening. But I found that my strength is delving into personal stories and finding the universal in the personal, and so I'm not a freelance writer where I can look at something as an issue and I can just write an article about that or hit on things that are, you know, issues at the time. It has to be something that is personally connected to me, something that I can see myself in. So I always need that personal in order to be able to write it. And so, during this process of discovery, I've sort of gone deeper into what it is that I'm writing, what it is that I want to say, what it is that's important to me. And you know, I've realized a few things in terms of my evolution as an author, which is I have to write things that are personal, things that I think are doing something in some way to change the world and that have meaning to me.

Speaker 1: 42:48

So currently I'm pivoting again. I am looking at a another type of writing. So I'm entering the crime world and writing a crime series, but I'm focused on telling stories and advocating for human rights. So you know, the first book is set in a steppard and it deals with the genocide that happens. It's a war story and it deals with nationalism and othering, and I have all of these things I'm going to be doing in terms of promoting this book, but also in terms of sharing things that I think are really important. So, you know, looking at doing talks and articles about these issues in order to promote the book, but also in order to get people to think about these things.

Speaker 1: 43:40

So book two is about genocide denial and war criminals hiding in Australia and about, you know, migrants in Australia and that experience. Book three is about mental illness treatment in migrants, about national servicemen in Australia during the Vietnam War and about LGBTQ rights, and all of this happened organically. I was just writing things and ideas were coming to me, but then, when I started thinking about the marketing side and preparing blurbs and preparing all these things that I can do to market it, I realized that there was a theme and so I realized that, you know, it's about human rights, and so I've actually now mapped out this series and I've mapped out, you know, book four, five and six in terms of human rights issues and in terms of advocacy work that I want to do, but also writing just, you know, crime novels that operate on that level, and I've also. One of the things that happens is when you are writing series, especially in the indie world, I've been seeing a lot of talk about how do you create interconnected series, how do you sort of get people into your fictional world and then they continue reading through that fictional world. So I've actually mapped out two other interconnected series.

Speaker 1: 45:06

And so at this point I'm at a crossroads, because I published my romance novels under May Archer and I was going to continue the series. So Return to Me was going to be part of a series Leap of Faith and it was going to be following characters two and three. But when I published that, um, I realized that had been too long since I had written that book and so I was like I don't think I'm going to continue those characters. Then I published hollywood dreams and vintage dreams and I was going to work on the third book in the series. But then I saw this opportunity to be a part of an anthology where it had to be a beach theme, and so I wrote a novella to be a part of that. And then I mapped out a romance series I was going to write in that world, since now that anthology is not published anymore.

Speaker 1: 46:03

But I haven't published that novella because I'm not sure what I'm doing with it. I think I need to just offer it to my subscribers as a free book, um, but then I'm also concerned about building, uh, my newsletter with romance readers when I'm not pursuing that. So I think, think, possibly, but you know, it all depends on the news. I think possibly that romance part is going to be left and I'm just going to pursue and dedicate myself to this crime series and to writing the six books of the main series and then looking at the other series that I want to connect. So, remember, the first three books are done. I'm actually just trying to prepare the first book for publication, but I've got all these things that I want to do with it and I'm also in thesis hell right now with my PhD, so I need to sort of, you know, clear the decks, clear some space. So, yeah, that evolution of what am I doing.

Speaker 1: 47:16

I'm in that crossroads again and you know, things might change in terms of what I want to do. So I think I just want to wrap up and talk about lessons and talk about, you know, some advice that I would give you if you are looking for your voice and looking for things that happen, looking for things that you want to do and are at crossroads. So I would say to you write what feels true to you, not what others expect. While I have no regrets about the detours that I have taken and the way that my writing journey has progressed, I did delay things. I did sort of do the long way around. If I hadn't done that detour with romance, I might have advanced sooner with other things, but you know. Then again, you don't know. So I do think that focus on you and your voice and not what others might expect.

Speaker 1: 48:21

Don't be afraid to tell stories from your lived experience. You know they are uniquely yours. Each and every one of us has been through a unique life journey and we have a point of view and we have something worth saying. So if you can get in touch with your core values, get in touch with your core truth and use that to guide you in your writing, so write often and give yourself permission to evolve as a writer. I actually haven't done a counter right now as to how many books I've written, because I've actually not published all of my books that are hidden on my hard drive because I have not had the time. Uh, so I don't know. I might have written 15 books, to be honest. And you do evolve as a writer as you go, and so just give yourself permission to do that, to write different things, to do different experiments and to see what works for you and what leads you to that and I think the last tip that I think is really, really important is your voice doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be authentic, and that is something that I've realised in terms of my writing.

Speaker 1: 49:38

I go back to my core value and, you know, being authentic, being real, not sugarcoating anything, not trying to be anyone. So, for me, it's been a long journey to get to this point of complete confidence and complete strength in who I am and what I want to do. It has been a wild ride. It has been, you know, a lot of heartbreak. I think that is the truth of life. We do have to go through some things, but I think we also do lose ourselves. We lose ourselves in other voices and in what other people are doing, and I'm learning not to do that anymore.

Speaker 1: 50:23

So, in the indie world, things are changing very, very quickly and there are lots of shiny new, wonderful things, and I'm learning now to pause, to evaluate and to really, you know, think about whether that is something that I want to do. And, in terms of my writing, I am learning that I have to write what is truth to me, and I'm also, you know, I've gone through a midlife crisis and I will do an episode about that. But, having gone through a midlife crisis, there is this element of how much time do I have left and what do I want to do with this time, what is the legacy that I want to leave, what are the books that I have to write and have to leave? And so when I look at my writing life through that lens, it becomes really simple. It becomes really simple about what I need to work on and what I need to write, because it's these books that I'm working on now that are really addressing human rights issues and that are really giving me that opportunity to do advocacy and to continue to build on my career as a freelance writer and as well as a speaker, and also to look at, you know, academic opportunities and academia and possibly stepping into that world through some of these passions. So thank you for joining me in this episode.

Speaker 1: 51:59

I hope that this has inspired you to trust in your voice to share your stories. I'd love to hear from you, so let me know if you enjoyed this episode, what you found helpful. Let me know about crossroads that you are hitting and where you are in your writing journey, and what are the things that you are struggling with and also let me know if there's anything in particular that you would like addressed in episodes you would like to hear from in the future. So don't forget that there are show notes, there's a special handout, it's all on my website. So go to amrapayalichcom slash podcast and you can find all of that information there. And, yeah, keep writing and remember that your story matters. What you have to say matters, thank you. Thank you for tuning in to Amra's Armchair Anecdotes. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe and follow for more insights, stories and inspiration From my armchair to yours. Remember every story begins with a single word.