My Life Next Door -- Interview with Huntley Fitzpatrick

Welcome, all! Suze here, wishing you a lovely day. If you love Secrets as much as the Scribes do, then you’ll want to check back on July 4th when we’ll reveal a wonderful one!

I am thrilled to introduce you to  author Huntley Fitzpatrick, whose debut book, My Life Next Door, just released. Let’s give a big ole Scribes welcome to Huntley!

How do you battle the doubt monster? Doubt Monster: the nagging feeling that your prose is terrible, your plot is silly, your characters are insipid and no one in their right mind would read this drivel, let alone buy it.

You accept that the doubt monster lives in your house and will occasionally wander into your living room and take up all the space. You try to ignore him the way you would an annoying, too aggressive roommate. If necessary, you placate him with chocolate.

Have you thought about writing something that is completely different for you? Perhaps writing in a new genre or just taking a story someplace that you haven’t done before?

I’m hoping to do that every time, in my own (maybe limited) way. I love paranormal, and I’ve tried to write it, but it doesn’t flow the way contemporary does for me. It feels forced. I admire it, I just can’t do it.

What story haven’t you told yet that you want to tell? What is holding you back?

I’d love to do Tim’s story (minor character from MY LIFE NEXT DOOR). We’ll see if anyone wants that.

I’d be surprised if someone didn’t want it, Huntley! What is the most surprising thing that has happened in your writing career?

Besides that it exists? Getting an agent, getting a publisher….nothing about it isn’t a surprise.

What would you do or be if you weren’t a writer?

I love to cook, and I catered for a long time. I might go back to that. Or editing, my second favorite job ever. The next best thing to writing is reading other writers and finding what they do well.

We’ll have to have you back and force you to give us a recipe! Or edit a manuscript for us They say that every author has a partially completed, quite-possibly-terrible half a story shoved in a drawer somewhere. What is yours? What is it about? What makes it terrible? Would you ever consider picking it up and finishing it?

Oh, my first book. Heavily autobiographical (way more so than any fiction should be). The germ of the story is great, but when I wrote it, I didn’t know how to get any literary distance. Every once and I while I remember that story and think “I could do it so much better now!”

We know you could, Huntley! Can’t wait to see more from you. Thanks for visiting with us today. You can connect with Huntley at her website (click here), or on Facebook (click here), or on Twitter (click here).

Take it away, readers. Any questions or comments for Huntley?

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