A few months ago I was interviewed for a special young author post on Xulon's Blog and it was just a posted a few days ago. Below is the interview and you can click here to view the post on Xulon's blog.
Lauren Lotter
Stats: 18-year-old homeschooled student in Michigan
Book: Rustlers and the Texas Trail – book one of the Christian Cowgirl Adventure series, a book series focused on combining love of western culture with biblical values.
Xulon Editor Blair Townley: What is the storyline for Rustlers and the Texas Trail, and how did you come up with the idea?
Lauren Lotter: The story follows a young girl named Amy and the
different adventures that she encounters. It also teaches life lessons with biblical principles that are contained in a fun and exciting historical story.I always loved horses and western stories, but I was having trouble finding exciting and thrilling stories that had a strong Christian standpoint.
BT: Describe the writing routine that you created for writing your
book, and what you experienced during the self-publishing process.
LL: I didn’t plan ahead on where the story was going to end up, so I
picked the name and let the story flow out. It took thirteen months for the first draft and went through ten revisions. There were times where I had all sorts of ideas and had to decide where to put them in the story; and then there were times when I needed to work on this, but couldn’t come up with anything.
There were definite moments of writer’s block. I had other books I was working along with this book, but this series seemed to be one that I really felt comfortable with. I felt a little overwhelmed putting all the pieces together for publishing, but I had a lot of people helping me along the way, as well as the Xulon staff. It was definitely a good experience and I learned a lot of lessons from it.
BT: How will you be promoting your book, and what do you hope
readers gain from the series?
LL: It feels strange being a published author, but growing up I always looked at book covers with the author’s name on them. It is different now seeing my name on a cover. I will be promoting the book on my family’s auction website, which gets about one million page views a month, and I have my own website also, www.heritageliterature.com. I’m already editing the rough draft of the second book in the series, which I hope to publish next spring, and am halfway through the rough draft of the third book. I do want to keep writing seriously and hope young girls read the books, giving them something to enjoy but taking something good away from it.
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