A warm welcome to out next featured author in Love Bytes 2016 GRL Blog Tour, Meg Bawden.
Meg talks her first year as an published author , shares an exclusive excerptof her upcoming release and brought with her a wonderful giveaway!
Welcome Meg 🙂

What I’ve learned in my first year as a published author

By Meg Bawden

 

Okay, so it hasn’t been quite a year, but it’s damn close to being a year since I was first published, which was by the awesome Rawmance Publishing with my short Christmas novella, My Secret Santa Billionaire. I’ve learned so many things in that year and I want to take the chance to share them with you.

 

Writing is Hard

I already knew this, right? I mean, I wrote My Secret Santa Billionaire and North to Zombieville, so I already knew how hard it was. But it’s harder now I’m published. Being published means a couple of things to me:

 

1. It’s real. The dream is happening and I finally felt the excitement of having my book’s release date. Seeing that beautiful cover with a character that I created out there for the world to see. This means that I want to write even more now. And that’s the difficulty.

 

Which brings me to point 2.  Time. There is no bloody time. I am terrible at organizing myself and it’s even worse now I’m published. There  are so many books I want to write and send out into the world, including the rest of the books in my Zombieville series, but it’s so difficult finding time between work, university and my procrastination.

 

3. My books are out in the real world now. People can bash it as much as they want, which brings down my self-confidence. I’ll be truthful, my self-confidence was already low to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a free world, and I’m more than okay with people not liking my story. There are plenty of stories that I don’t like, even really popular books in the m/m genre, but it also makes writing harder because now I have to push past bad reviews. I see it’s part of a struggle of being an author and it can only make me stronger, right?

 

Avoid Goodreads

At first, I loved Goodreads. Even though I didn’t always get the best reviews, I didn’t mind. Reviews told me what I could do better. But after a period of time, Goodreads became a burden on my self-confidence. I already had enough problems with tearing myself down, I didn’t want to see reviews tear my and anyone else’s work down. Becoming an author made me sympathize with others more, so seeing even a friend’s work torn down upset me. Which is why I made the move to avoid Goodreads. As many of my author friends said: Goodreads is for the readers, not the writers. It was the best decision I ever made.

 

Authors are awesome!

I’ve always known authors were awesome, but in the year since I’ve been published, I’ve discovered even more just how awesome they are. While there is competition, it’s rare. I find that ninety percent of authors are helpful, supportive and kind. They will do everything in their power to help a fellow author and I think that’s just amazing. I’ve made some remarkable friends since becoming an author and I couldn’t be more thankful to the amazing men and women who have helped me when I needed it the most.

 

Readers are pretty darn awesome too!

While I’ve only begun, I’ve already realized how awesome readers are. When people get invested in your characters, it’s important to you. It means that you’ve done your job. But not just that, these characters are someone you’ve created. Someone that you’ve given a bit of yourself to, so when a reader contacts you to let you know how much they loved the characters or book, you can’t help but preen in excitement. So thank you. Thank you to all the readers out there that buy our books.

 

Stay strong.

Life is hard. Writing is hard. The important thing is to stay strong. No matter how many times you’re at a breaking point, keep pushing through. Get a story rejection? Stay strong. Get a bad review? Stay strong. Are you too busy to write? Stay strong. Something terrible happen in your life? Stay strong. It gets better. It always gets better. Life would be boring if we didn’t have issues. Trust me, I’ve been through some really difficult times in my life, and I wanted nothing more than to curl up on my comfortable bed and never leave it. It wouldn’t help me to hide from the world though. I got out of bed and faced those problems, no matter how much I didn’t want to. My friends, you must stay strong. You can do this. I have faith you and I have faith in myself. <3

 

A question from the lovely Bru Baker: What’s an unconventional place you’ve seen beauty lately?

 

I had to think really hard about this one. To be honest, I’m an introvert, and there aren’t many places that I go other than home, work and university. So trying to think of an unconventional place that I’ve seen beauty is a really hard question for me. And then there is the word beauty. To me, beauty is found on the inside. It’s the beauty of a person’s personality or gesture towards another. I think I’d have to say at the beach, while people were playing Pokemon Go. We’ve heard so many bad stories about it, but not as many good ones.

 

So here’s a good one. In the city I live, we have a main beach called The Strand. At The Strand, you have plenty of Pokemon Go stops and with that comes Pokemon players, but also those people who get annoyed with the players. But there is beauty in seeing it at the beach because so often you see strangers laughing with each other, helping each other out. You see strangers smiling at each other, asking the other if they’d caught the Pikachu hanging around. To me, that interaction is beautiful.

 

A question for the lovely Lynn Lorenz: If you could give someone only one piece of advice about life, what would it be and why?

And finally, an excerpt!

Okay, so this isn’t about what I’ve learned in the last year, but rather an exclusive excerpt for my upcoming novel, ‘Till Death Do Them Part. I’m hoping to release it at the start of November. Please note: This is an unedited excerpt. Enjoy!

 

Kian would have the curtains open, the brightness of the sun lighting up the room as his music blared from the iPod. He’d probably be in the short shorts he liked, wiggling his butt to the song as he danced around the room with something he deemed as a microphone. Kian, the rock god, he called himself. He was terrible singer. Rhys laughed whenever he saw Kian’s little dance routine. He used to smile and tell his fiancé not to give up his day job, because Kian was a terrible singer. His dance moves were fit for a stripper though, and there had been a few times when Kian was more than happy to do a little strip tease for Rhys while the sexy music played in the background.

 

Rhys smiled at the memory, before he quickly remembered that it would never be like that again. Kian was gone. Dead.

 

The anger returned, churning in his gut and making his face hot. His hands clenched into fists and he kicked on of the bar stools beside him. It went flying across the room, clattering against the floor as it tumbled. The other bar stools soon followed it, before he turned on the kitchen appliances. The toaster smashed into pieces. But even that didn’t cure his fury.

 

Rhys moved into the lounge room. He kicked, threw and smashed whatever he could get his hands on. The anger was controlling his every move and not even his common sense stopped him from throwing Kian’s iPod and iPod dock onto the ground. It shattered so easily, just like his anger did after he’d realized what he’d done.

 

Pain exploded in his chest as he fell to the ground, hands hovering with trembles over the now destroyed iPod dock. “No.” The word came out so strangled that he could barely recognize his own voice. “No. Kian.” Tears swept down his cheeks as he roared in agony. He did this. He destroyed something so precious. He did this to Kian. He killed him.

 

Meg Bawden was born and raised in North Queensland, Australia. She’s loved stories since before she can remember and has always enjoyed creating characters of her own, even if it did begin with drawing faces on toilet rolls and giving them names. Writing has always been a passion of hers and she’s loved the M/M genre since 2004, the first book she read being Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez.

 

Writing M/M since 2007, Meg has never had the confidence to attempt publishing her own stories, but in 2015, she decided that it was all about to change thanks to the amazing friends she’s made in the M/M genre and their support and encouragement. So watch out, world, Meg Bawden is coming out to have some fun!

 

To find Meg, check out her website: http://www.authormegbawden.com/ or follow her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meg.bawden.

Meg brought with her an ecopy of either her book “My Secret Santa Billionaire” or “North to Zombieville”. (winner’s choice)
a Rafflecopter giveaway