This afternoon it's my absolute pleasure to introduce you to Liesel Schmidt whose debut novel
Coming Home to You is being published next Monday by
Carina UK.
Liesel Schmidt lives in Pensacola, Florida, where she spends her time writing, drawing, and reading everything she can get her hands on. She is currently working on her next novel and spends most of her days busily writing freelance for a list of local magazines that sometimes keeps her head spinning in a dizzy attempt to keep all the deadlines straight!
When she has a few free moments, Liesel plnks away at her blog, Finding Words (
http://fyoword.blogspot.com/), where she posts product reviews and offers her readers a peek at the inner-musings of a writer slogging her way through the challenges of living a creative career and early-widowhood.
Having harbored a passionate dread of writing assignments when she was in school, Liesel never imagined that she would ever make a living at putting words on paper, but life sometimes has a funny way of working out... When she's not writing, reading, or drawing, Liesel likes to indulge her guilty pleasure of watching competition television shows like
Top Chef, Chopped and
Project Runway. Follow her Twitter at
@laswrites
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Actually, no! When I was in school, I always hated writing assignments! They terrified me––so much so that I literally could not even hold a pencil! I panicked every time I was given a report to write, and I remember dreading research papers with a passion. I never quite felt like anything I wrote was very good, even though I seemed to have a million ideas for stories I wanted to create. Later on, every time I started trying my hand at writing a book or short story, I wrote only so far before getting frustrated and giving up.
How long did it take you to write the book and get it published?
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you start to finish. The manuscript was begun as a hobby, something I did here and there on weekends. But with a full-time job, I didn’t have much focus on getting it done within a certain time frame. I decided to make a full-on go of writing it and completing it, though, in January of 2008. I was finished with it in April of that year, and then it took a very painful, stressful year of query letters, proposals, rejections, and tears––many, many tears!––before I finally found an agent. I was with that agency until early this year, when we came to the decision that the lack of success in finding a publisher probably meant that we should part ways. A bit depressing, of course, but after five years of getting rejections from publishing houses, I wasn’t terribly shocked at the suggestion. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up, and I started scouring Twitter for advice and for new agents to approach. Back to the query letter drawing board, so to speak. And then I found Carina...
