The 2018 Interview Series Featuring Audrey Driscoll

It’s time for the next subject for my 2018 author interview series. Author interviews are posted every Friday throughout the year.

I am honored to continue this series with Canadian author Audrey Driscoll.

You can catch up with all of my past author interviews (nearly 200) on my Author Directory page.

If you’re an author interested in being interviewed in this series, I still have limited spots available for 2018. You can email me at don@donmassenzio.com

Now, please enjoy this interview with Audrey Driscoll:

---

Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they want?

The premises behind my books don’t come from any sort of rational intention to deliver a product to a target market of readers. They all arise from some mysterious conjunction of ideas in my brain. Some of them are probably more original than others.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Publish on Amazon sooner.

What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel?

It has to be Islands of the Gulf Volume 2, The Treasure. It’s the third book of the Herbert West Series, and the only one narrated by the main character of the series. All four books are in first person, but by other characters. In a sense, this book is the heart of the series.

Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?

AD: I read the good ones once. They make me blush. The bad ones I try to analyze, to figure out if there’s something I can learn from them.

Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?

Yes! Lovecraftian Easter eggs! My first book, The Friendship of Mortals, is based on a story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. There are references in it, and in the subsequent three books of the Herbert West Series, that Lovecraft fans would recognize. There are also references to alchemy, both obvious and subtle.

Do you Google yourself?

All the time. I’ve found mentions of my books that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise. And it’s a good way find those suspicious free PDFs and blast them with Blasty.

What is your favorite childhood book?

Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Not only did I read it dozens of times, I drew pictures illustrating scenes from it and made my friends act them out. I was obsessed with it for a while. Just the book, though; I didn’t want to watch the movies based on it because I was quite sure no movie would live up to the one in my head.

If you had to do something differently as a child or teenager to become a better writer as an adult, what would you do?

Learn about getting published so I would have had a track record by the time I started writing novels. That might have helped with getting traditionally published before self-publishing became respectable.

How long on average does it take you to write a book?

I’m definitely slowing down. I wrote my first novel in fewer than 6 months. The next four took a year or more. I have been working on my current work in progress for a year, and haven’t quite finished the first draft. Which means I’m a long way from done.

About Audrey:

Audrey Driscoll grew up reading books, and found she was as interested in how stories were constructed as in how they turned out. She worked out scenes and bits of dialogue in her head, and made her friends act out little dramas based on her favourite book at the time – Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book.

With that background, it was inevitable she would become a writer. It just took a while. After establishing a career as a librarian – first at the University of Saskatchewan and then at the Greater Victoria Public Library in British Columbia – Audrey had a meaningful encounter with H.P. Lovecraft’s character Herbert West.

Audrey was fascinated by HPL’s corpse-reanimating physician and his friend the nameless narrator. The result was The Friendship of Mortals, which was followed by three more novels to form the Herbert West Series. Self-publishing became respectable and relatively easy just in time to rescue Audrey from the sad fate of the Unpublished Writer.

Audrey has recently published several short stories as supplements to the Herbert West Series, and is currently at work on a sequel.

Audrey Driscoll lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Audrey’s books:

Amazon.com:  https://www.amazon.com/Audrey-Driscoll/e/B00J7X7QVC

Amazon.uk:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Audrey-Driscoll/e/B00J7X7QVC

Amazon.ca:  https://www.amazon.ca/Audrey-Driscoll-Books/

Apple:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/author/audrey-driscoll/id380553438?mt=11

Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/”Audrey%20Driscoll”

Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/audreydriscoll

Connect with Audrey:

Information about Audrey Driscoll’s writing and her opinions on a variety of topics, including her other avocation of gardening, may be found by visiting her blog at:  www.audreydriscoll.com

Audrey is on Goodreads at:  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4202146.Audrey_Driscoll