Following last week’s post, i wasn’t surprised with the feedback i got – especially from fellow writers. One of which was Dark Fiction writer J.D. Phillips. I asked her if she would kindly give me an interview and she agreed. I was dying to know how art worked for her. Here’s the interview:
Hi JD,
thank you for your interest and time. I’ll get straight into the questions:
T – For my readers, please can you list your works and what genre you normally write in?
JD – I’ve published 11 works so far: Dreaming While You Sleep (books 1 & 2), Tainted, The Dead Pool, Mad Angel, Eyes of the Bersai: The Relic, Chasing the Ghost, The Reckoning, In the Calm, From Ashes, Touching Spirits: Contact.
I don’t usually write in any one genre but all fall into dark fiction.
T – What age did you start writing and do you use any other medium to express yourself?
JD – I started doing short stories in 4th grade and kept dabbling throughout my school days. I didn’t get serious until college. Writing is my main vehicle but I also sing, sew, and do photography (some of which I sell at my Esty shop BonesnStitches).
T – I’ve been exploring the idea of art helping people through their problems and sometimes even healing them, can you describe for us how writing/art helps you, and when you first discovered it as a way of coping?
JD – It’s always been my outlet. I live inside my head and my head’s a noisy place – I need a way to focus and work through it or I start to go a bit crazy. That’s even more true now I’ve been diagnosed with chronic illness.
Writing takes me outside myself and whatever pain I’m in. Even on bad days when ordinary tasks are hard to carry out I can still feel I’m doing something worthwhile by writing a few lines.
T – What is a typical week for you? For instance, what is your writing routine and how do you balance the creative part of your life with all the necessary business and social networking tasks we all have to do? Does it all help or just the creative part?
JD – I don’t really have a writing routine. If a story’s talking there’s pretty much no stopping me. I’ll write wherever whenever I possibly can. I have a night job that allows me to write/edit after my main work is done to allow more time for the business end of things after I get off.
I really don’t enjoy the business end at all, it can be pretty disheartening, but those moments where you connect with readers and other writers do make social media worthwhile.
T – If you had a single piece of advice for someone who suffers with a problem similar to yours, what would that be?
JD – I try to work the message that you can’t have life without darkness or appreciate joy without first knowing sorrow into just about all of my stories in some form or another. My advice is to keep going no matter how dark the day because you never know when that moment of light’s going to come. Those moments are all that matter in the end.
T – And lastly, what are you currently working on, and when will we get to see it?
JD – I’m about 100 pages into the sequel to the novel I just published (Touching Spirits). It’s too soon to guess exactly when it will be finished but it’ll definitely be out sometime next year.
here is the link to JD’s latest release – Touching spirits on US Amazon
The book page to get in touch is:
https://www.facebook.com/Touching-Spirits-1662305970683517/
