Meet the Author: J.D. Watts

Thank you for joining us on our stop off of The Young Adult Blog Tour. Our date on the tour has been broken up into four sections: The review, giveaway, guest post, and this interview with J.D. Watts! This is all thanks to J.D. Watts and TWCS Publishing House.

How long have you been writing?
I always tease that I was always a ‘writer,’ forever thinking up cool plot twists for my favorite shows or dreaming up my own little stories in my head from the time I was a little bitty thing, but I didn’t really sit down and start putting pen to paper until about six years ago. It was horrible though and it didn’t take long before I gave up on the idea and put it away. (I hope to come back to that story again someday with the benefit of the experience I’ve gained in the years since). I really started writing much more fervently about three years ago. I was home with my three year old son and my two month old daughter and was going stir crazy. I happened across a writing community online and started playing around with a few ideas and next thing I knew, I was writing up short story after short story, that then turned into long stories, but even then I never thought about publishing. It wasn’t until The Writer’s Coffee Shop announced that they were opening a publishing house and were running an original fiction contest that I entered and won the young adult division with the first few chapters of Convergence that I ever really believed that any of this would ever be an actual possibility for me.

What inspired you to write Convergence?
Convergence was inspired by a dream coupled with my long time fascination with the idea of spiritual warfare, the possibilities of angels among us, and the places in the Bible where angels are mentioned. It all sort of melted together into this idea where I sort of played with the unknowns in life.

When you started writing Convergence, did you plan for it to be a series?
Yes, from the beginning I knew it would be a series. There was no way I would be able to portray the full progression of Dani and Nate’s evolution in just one novel.

Which of your characters do you relate to most and why?
I would say I relate most to Dani. I spend a lot of my life wondering where it’s going and getting frustrated at not KNOWING what lies ahead.

Is anything in your book based on real life experiences or purely imagination?
A lot of the places and little details in Convergence are based on my real life experiences. Everyone says to write what you know, and what better to write about than your own back yard? As the series progresses, we get away from the sprawling farmlands of Illinois, but it was nice to play with it in the first book.

If your real life was a young adult fictional novel, what would you, the main character, be like?
Boring! I am a mom of two young kids who spends most of her downtime taking cake decorating classes and writing…not a very riveting plotline! I guess I’d be the dreamer, my mind always dreaming up more exciting and wonderful things that I will probably never get to experience personally.

What do you like to do when you're not writing?
Play with my children, watch movies, read, chat/skype/facebook/email/etc with my friends, and learn to decorate cakes.

What project are you working on now?
Right now, what writing time I do manage to find is being completely devoted to the final book of the series, Maelstrom. It’s been the most difficult of anything I have written to date.

What is the best piece of writing advice you ever received?
Never delete anything. If you write something and don’t like it, cut it out and paste into another document and keep it saved somewhere just in case you want to revisit it, or it helps inspire something else someday. You never know when a bit of writing that feels all wrong in one place might be perfect someplace else.

What is a little something about yourself you'd like your readers to know?
Why is this the hardest of all of these questions? (chuckles while shaking my head) I guess that writing isn’t something I do, it is what I AM. Even before I started letting my fingers fly across these keys to capture my ideas, I always had a story to tell. If I somehow lost my writing, I feel like I would lose a massive part of my identity…which is really ironic since I really only discovered my penchant for the written word three years ago! Oh, that and I talk to myself…all the time…especially when ‘plotting.’ It’s not unusual at all to catch me muttering to myself as I type or talking to myself as I lie in bed, sorting out a little dialogue or a plot point. Yeah, it may be a sign of madness, but boy is the madness fun!

We all need a little madness. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions. I look forward to reading the rest of your series.

To learn more about the lovely J.D. Watts and her books, visit her Website. You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

If you haven't read her wonderful books yet, be sure to check out my review of Convergence, the first book in the Children of Creation series.

You can also read this interview on Examiner.