Wow 'Em Wednesday – Kayleigh Sky

Welcome to Wow ’Em Wednesdays! Interesting conversations with interesting authors.

Today’s interview is with the lovely Layla Dorine. As you’ll see in the interview, Layla clearly puts the heart in story. I have a book link and an excerpt for you after the interview, so don’t miss out on that. Enjoy!

A lot of writers are introverts and get their energy from solitude. Writing is usually a solitary pursuit. Are you the kind of writer who can keep going for hours, or do you get worn out from all the drama on the page?

I’ve done 24 hour marathon writing sessions, crashed for 12 and got up and started again, though in those days, I was writing with a friend and the fun was in seeing what her responses were going to be. The twists and turns were what kept us both going.

Still, I tend to write for hours if I can get the uninterrupted solitude and silence to do so. Its gotten easier the older my kids have gotten, the last one is almost seventeen and rarely interrupts these days, which is both a good, and a sad thing. Its hard seeing my last baby almost an adult and knowing he’ll be leaving the nest soon, though I am proud of him too.

These days I prefer to write at night. Its easier to hear the characters that way. Easy to loose track of time too and write until I am falling asleep on the screen. I prefer the solitude of late nights and early mornings, especially when writing in hotel rooms where I know that no one is going to come knocking on a door looking for me.

Do you think writers need loads of confidence or a big ego to make it in this business?

No, I think they need to have the passion and desire to tell a story and the grit and gumption to keep at it even when people try to cut them down. Ego gets in the way of learning and no one ever starts out knowing how to write, it’s a skill, like any other art, one that has to be honed and sharpened and even unraveled from time to time.

When I release a book, I only do so when I am confident that I have told the story that I set out to tell. How it is received is up to the reader. You cannot make someone love a story that doesn’t speak to them, and you should not try and stop them from speaking out about why they don’t like it, even if, at times, it is very difficult to hear.

I am constantly striving to improve my craft, and sometimes that means reading a review and then rereading the story to see what that person responded so negatively to. Sometimes it also means admitting I screwed up and going back to fix it, listening when someone says, hey, this thing you wrote is problematic, apologizing, and seeking out greater knowledge and understanding so as to not to screw up the same way again.

The last few years have seen a significant influx of books on the market. Competition is huge. Do you take the market into account when you write your stories, or is it all from your heart?

I write from my heart and I tell the story that the characters share with me. Really, I feel like I am just the conduit for them to get their words and experiences out there. Maybe that means I will never be a popular or well known author, but, it does mean I will have accomplished the goal I set out to accomplish, in telling stories and creating worlds in which the characters come alive and every experience in every story is different.

What is your favorite inspirational saying and how does its meaning work in your life?

“Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell, leads up to light,” -John Milton.

Years ago, when I first read that quote, it struck me as personifying the character I had been writing for over 15 years as part of an online roleplay game. His struggles to see the good in himself, his struggles to move past mistakes of the past, his struggles to find joy in being around friends and family members. Really, that character just struggled to get out of his way. He self-sabotaged. He used snark, sarcasm and standoffish behavior to keep others at arms length, and he told himself over and over that he didn’t deserve good things, and so, when good things came his way, he ignored them, avoided them, or outright fled.

There are pieces of that character in every character I write. The journey of the characters to get to a good place, to find love, to find joy, to learn how to embrace it, those are things I love to explore. In my stories, there is always a glimmer of light, even in the beginning. It gives the readers something to look forward to and it gives the character a goal. Will they chase it? Will they grasp it? Will they cling to it or will they throw it away.

In my own life, there was always this goal, from the time I was ten or eleven. I was going to write and tell stories. I was going to create characters and worlds. The path there was never straight. At times it was narrow, at times it was blocked, at times it twisted and curved and bent back on itself and led to the edge of a cliff. I’ve never been scared of leaping off. I learned not to be scared of moving some of those obstacles out of my way and never looking back.

Am I there yet? Somewhere. I don’t think there is an end to this path. I think I have found my first point of light in becoming an author and sharing my stories, but there are many different colors of light left to explore.

Do your books have a moral/message, or are they focused on entertainment only?

I try and balance my entertainment with messages and social issues that I feel are glossed over. For example, in my novel ….And All Shall Fade to Black, I tackle the issues of domestic violence between two males, as well as an eating disorder in a male character. Romance does bloom over the course of the book while the characters share their struggles and learn healthy ways of coping with them, but there are no quick fixes, and their problems are not magically solved over the course of the book, but they do get a happy ending.

I do love writing banter between characters though, and giving a character a buddy that they can have honest conversations with but still have humorous interactions with, is something I strive for in all of my book. My books tend to be a little dark, a little angsty, a little gritty and raw, but the characters I’m writing about are living their lives to the best of their abilities and handling whatever challenges, and triumphs, that come their way.

HALFWAY TO SOMEDAY

Warnings: Flashbacks of domestic abuse, and combat situations, suicide ideations

Heat level: Nonexplicit (though there is frottage at the end)

Tags: self-harm, cutting, stalking, PTSD, domestic abuse survivor, musician, ex-military, insta-love

Rocker Jesse Winters just wants to be left alone. If he could melt into oblivion he would and bid farewell to the wild child of rock n’ roll so many have dubbed him in recent months. Truth is, there was never anything reckless, wild or even deliberate about most of the things that had happened on Wild Child’s last tour, but had anyone cared to listen? No! Which was precisely why he was sitting in a cabin high up in the Colorado mountains, hoping the incoming blizzard would bury him forever.

Ryker Jorgensen left the VA hospital with a bunch of prescriptions and pamphlets on how to deal with reentering the civilian world, not that he’s in any hurry to do so. His nightmares still keep him up at night, and every new limitation he discovers gives him more reason to believe that he’s hopelessly useless now. Better to drive up to his cousin’s cabin and lick his wounds. Come spring, maybe, he’d look into being around people, if only for long enough to make the kind of money he’d need to buy his own secluded place.

The last thing he ever expected to see was the man whose face had been plastered in his footlocker and his dreams for the better part of the past six years, but Jesse Winters is nothing like he imagined. When trying to leave Ryker out in the storm doesn’t work, Jesse resorts to ignoring him. But two wounded souls trapped in a snowed in cabin have little choice but to reach out for one another when emotions get frayed. His only hope is that Jesse will trust him enough to let him drag him back from the edge before he’s just another burned out star in the legacy that is rock n’ roll.

EXCERPT:

The winds whipped against the truck so hard, it rocked, throwing him out of the past. A mercy, despite the violence of the storm. He took that as his cue to get out, grab his duffel bag, and head for the door. Every step took effort. The snow was piled high, and some of the drifts were well past his knees. How easy would it be to lie down and go to sleep in it, never to wake again? He forged a sloppy path to the door, complete with an outline of his body when he face-planted inches from the steps. He didn’t want to think of how painful that misstep could have been had he actually struck the steps, or perhaps it would have made life easier for him to give himself over to the cold. Instead, he gripped the handrail and climbed the steps, coming to stand before the door of the cabin.

Knocking loudly, Ryker shivered, pulling his coat tighter around him as he waited. He was about to knock again when the door swung open to reveal wary green eyes in a too-pale face framed by dark, cascading waves of blond hair. Ryker blinked, stunned at the outright hostility that pulled the man’s lips down into a scowl, his trim beard and mustache only serving to emphasize it more. His wrinkled long-sleeved T-shirt was backward and inside out, and it twisted near the waistline, revealing a swath of pale abs. It looked as though he’d hastily donned it on his way to the door.

“Pretty sure you’re at the wrong cabin,” the guy growled, moving to shut the door in Ryker’s face. Slamming his hand against it kept Ryker from being left out in the cold.

“Even if it’s the wrong cabin, which I don’t think it is, there’s a storm coming, in case you hadn’t noticed, so I think I’ll just come in out of it, thanks.” Ryker took a step forward and trying to wedge through the opening. The other man held firm, however, and they stood there glaring at each other.

“Look,” the man snapped, “you could be a psycho or a serial killer for all I know, so you ain’t getting in here. I’ve got enough problems without accidentally ending up dead.”

Ryker felt the impatience radiating off the other man, which was fine by him; he was getting pretty goddamned impatient and cold himself.

“You look—” Ryker retorted, studying the guy more intently through bleary, snow-clouded eyes. Something about him looked really damned familiar. “I’ve been on the road for hours. It’s fucking cold out here, and it’s snowing buckets. I’m supposed to be at my cousin’s cabin, which the GPS says is right here. So here I am, and I’ve got no intention of driving anywhere until the shit lets up. My cousin’s name is Kyle—”

*****

Jesse couldn’t believe this shit. When he saw Kyle, he was gonna choke him to death with his own bass strings.

“Morrison,” Jesse finished with a sigh.

BUY LINKS:

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083YW8DLW

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Halfway-Someday-Wild-Child-Book-ebook/dp/B083YW8DLW

Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/Halfway-Someday-Wild-Child-Book-ebook/dp/B083YW8DLW

Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/Halfway-Someday-Wild-Child-Book-ebook/dp/B083YW8DLW

AUTHOR BIO:

LAYLA DORINE lives among the sprawling prairies of Midwestern America, in a house with more cats than people. She loves hiking, fishing, swimming, martial arts, camping out, photography, cooking, and dabbling with several artistic mediums. In addition, she loves to travel and visit museums, historic, and haunted places. Currently she has seen forty-nine of the fifty states, with plans to visit her final one, Alaska, in the upcoming year. Every journey is an inspiration and every shred of inspiration gets sprinkled into her tales.

Layla got hooked on writing as a child, starting with poetry and then branching out, and she hasn’t stopped writing since. Hard times, troubled times, the lives of her characters are never easy, but then what life is? The story is in the struggle, the journey, the triumphs and the falls. She writes about artists, musicians, loners, drifters, dreamers, hippies, bikers, truckers, hunters and all the other folks that she’s met and fallen in love with over the years. Sometimes she writes urban romance and sometimes it’s aliens crash landing near a roadside bar. When she isn’t writing, or wandering somewhere outdoors, she can often be found curled up with a good book, a kitty on her lap, and her dog, Jinxx, by her side.

Email (public address): layladorine13@outlook.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100005197938547

Twitter: https://twitter.com/layladorine

Website: http://layladorine13.wixsite.com/layladorineauthor

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9814124.Layla_Dorine

OTHER NOVELS BY AUTHOR:

Guitars and Cages

Guitars and Choices

Roadhouse Reds

Gypsy’s Rogue

Desolation Angel

…And All Shall Fade to Black