Please welcome Vikki Patis to the blog today.

Vikki Patis: Advice From Authors

Vikki Patis is a writer and blogger at The Bandwagon, where she reviews books, interviews authors, and gives her opinions on a wide variety of topics, from feminism to fibromyalgia. She’s recently published a collection of short stories, Weltanschauung, and is here today to talk about the authors who inspire her.

Over at The Bandwagon, we speak to so many different authors. We interview them, review their books, and do our best to help them promote their work. Because of this, we’re able to ask them about their writing process, and get in on some tricks of the trade.

I admire so many authors, big or small, mostly for their determination. Back when I started The Bandwagon, I was what one might call an aspiring writer. I aspired to write, but I wasn’t writing. So I started writing about other people writing.

Gathering advice from seasoned authors gave me the push I needed to write my own stories, but it wasn’t all plain sailing. There were some false starts, some projects that didn’t pan out, and there were times when I thought I’d never finish anything. Then I decided to actually take the advice I’d been writing about all this time.

Make sure what you’re writing is important to you, advised Mark Lawrence. “Put your butt in the chair and write the book,” said Charlaine Harris, author of the books that inspired True Blood. “Don’t stop until you finish. You’ll never sell a book you haven’t written.” Leigh Bardugo assured me that “there’s no expiration date on your talent. If it doesn’t happen when you’re 20, it doesn’t matter, it can happen when you’re 30, 40, 50. If you have a story to tell, that’s all people are going to care about.” Tiffany McDaniel told me to never give up.

In 2014, I interviewed George RR Martin himself at WorldCon. The experience was amazing, and not one I’m likely to forget any time soon. He told me to write short stories. But I don’t like short stories, I protested. Exactly, he said. Challenge yourself. So I did, because no one ignores George RR Martin.

The result is Weltanschauung, a collection of short stories that traverse genres, but all with the same goal in mind: to make you challenge your worldview. Inside are five short stories: Zombie, Only If, Grave Oversight, Harbinger and Bane. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Weltanschauung is available on Kindle and in paperback now. From 16^th– 18^th December 2016, Weltanschauung will be available for only 99p! For more information, join the Facebook event here. Follow Vikki on Twitter: @VikkiPatis