18Q Kate Austin

Kate Austin

1. Did you choose the writing profession or did it choose you?

A little of both, I think. I’ve been an avid reader all my life but I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up (I’m 50 now). I thought I might be an ivory tower economist, a financial planner, a museum curator, a lawyer, an English professor - but when I started writing, I knew that was for me. I wasn’t sure of it as a profession, but after 20 years the profession part of it chose me.

2. What is your background?

I quit high school in Grade 10 - bored to tears. Then spent the next 20 years going to school. My university degree is in art history and Canadian literature. I’ve worked as a paralegal, a brewery manager, a technical writer, a teacher, and many other things.

3. When did you know you were a writer?

When I put writer as my occupation on my passport.

4. How would you describe your style of writing?

I use my friend Mary Forbes’ description. I’m a fogwalker. I start with a sentence or a title and then start walking. I have no idea what’s out there, not even the next sentence, but I just keep walking until I reach the end.

5. What is your writing process?

I write every day and I just keep writing.

6. What was your path to publication?

Like everyone, I think, my path to publication was complicated. I began my writing life as a poet and a short fiction writer. Lots of stories and poems published, not much money, so about 15 years in I decided to write novels. Wrote a couple which no one will ever see, then wrote one I thought was publishable. Short-listed in a good Canadian contest, but didn’t worry too much about getting published - I was finally writing what I loved - women’s fiction. Met my agent, three months later I sold two books to Next. Have sold them 8 books in the past year and a half.

7. What is your favorite self-marketing idea?

I wish I had one. What I do try to do, in everything I do in terms of marketing, is to build one reader at a time. So I talk to people, I email back people who email me, I send my books to conferences and contests.

8. What are the biggest surprises you’ve encountered as a writer?

Getting published - and I’m not kidding. I still grin every time I see my book on the shelf of a bookstore or a drug or grocery store.

9. How do you inspire yourself? What are your sources of creativity?

Every thing I do inspires me - I never seem to lack for the next idea - the only thing I lack is the time to get all those ideas on the page. Books, movies, music, art of any kind, walking on the beach. Art galleries, museums, graffiti, photographs. I can find a story anywhere.

10. What is your proudest writer moment?

Opening that first box of author’s copies.

11. What’s the best advice you were given about writing?

It’s the best advice I got about life and I got it from my mother. Life wasn’t meant to be easy, but it was meant to be fun. Insert “writing” for life and you’ve got the best advice I ever got or could give.

12. What is your most embarrassing writer moment?

Hmmm, I probably have one, but I guarantee that I’ve very carefully buried it so deep in my psyche that I can’t get at it.

13. What business challenges have you faced as a writer?

I think making the transition from unpublished to published isn’t easy. I quit work as soon as sold my third and fourth books so I could write lots of books in the first couple of years. But it’s probably going to take a couple of years to get to the point where I don’t need to work at all, so I’m often scrambling to pay the rent. The other thing that I think newly published writers don’t think of is that I spend a whole lot more money than I used to for marketing - going to conferences, maintaining my website, promo materials.

14. What is your writer life philosophy?

Enjoy the process, because that’s the only part of this business I can control. I love writing, love the process of getting words on the page.

15. When you’re not writing what do you do for fun?

I read (a lot), walk on the beach, have lunch or dinner with friends, practice my cello (although rarely in the past year), go to concerts or the theatre or the art gallery. Listen to music. Try to do something new as often as I can. I even watch TV occasionally.

16. Who do you like to read?

Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Suzanne Brockmann, Leonard Cohen, Eileen Wilks, Connie Willis, Yasmine Galernorn, all my fellow Next authors. Jane Austen, James Joyce, Linnea Sinclair, Faulkner, Anthony Bourdain, Timothy Findlay. I could go on and on - I read an average of a book a day - but I won’t.