Author Bio:
We are a brother and sister writing team. We have been creating stories since we were very young, it wasn’t until about 2003 that we started writing our stories down. Billy Scarlet was not our first story, but somehow this story entangles itself with just about every other story we have written in one way or another.
We grew up in a large family and spent a lot of our childhood around the water. This story being one of the many that came from our time around the ocean. We live in Georgia on their family’s farm. I (Savannah) am getting a bachelors degree in theater while Zeke finishes high school. All the while both of us continue to learn more about and delve deeper into the worlds that we have brought to life through the written word.
We have been writing together since we were 11 and 6 years old. The Secret of Nautilus Island was the first story we wrote together. The story began to develop when we would spend time around the ocean as children. Every time we would get the chance the two of us would be off to themselves spinning more tales about Tylar Morgan and Jonny Ford’s adventures at sea.
What inspires you to write?
We can be inspired by many things. Sometimes we are inspired by a movie we watch or a book we read. Other times we are inspired by people that we meet. We love to listen to people tell stories. That’s where a lot of our inspiration comes from. We have spent hours just listening to our grandparents tell stories about when they were growing up, or about things that our daddy did while he was in the navy. All of that just builds on different ideas that we turn into books.
Tell us about your writing process.
Our writing process can be quite peaceful where we just talk out what we are going to write or it can become full on chaos. We don’t outline things like usual. Mostly we just talk out what we are going to do. There are times where we will get so intense with what we are talking about that we have to get out of the house and go for a walk just so everyone else in the house won’t have to listen to us. We get loud and crazy, but that’s how we work when it comes to writing.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
We do talk to our characters a good bit actually. While we write it can be like our characters are actually talking to us as the words get put down on the paper. There have been plenty of times when we are working that we will talk back and forth with our charters to try out dialogue or to just get the character to slow down with what we are trying to get written down. Sometimes it does feel like the character is even really excited about what’s fixing to happen and the thoughts start coming to fast so we’ll have to sort of talk it out, just to get things to slow down a little.
What advice would you give other writers?
Our advice to other writers is to never give up on your dream. If you’re already published just push that book as far as you can get it to go. Being published can be hard and it takes a lot of work to get your book out there, but you can do it. If you’re not published, keeping working on it because you can get there. Don’t back down after a few rejections. We went through well over two hundred rejections before we got our book published. We know how it feels to get two of even five rejections in one day sometimes within an hour, but that should just give you more strength in knowing that you got those rejections out of the way so you are now closer to getting where you want to be. So basically all around our advice is to not give up.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
We looked at self publishing for a while, but decided that we wanted to see if we could get published traditionally, which we did. The biggest reason for choosing traditional publishing was simply to see if we could do it. We would advise other authors to explore every opportunity for publishing, but to keep an eye out for scams. We were almost taken by two different scams, so watch for them.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
We think that the future of publishing is leaning more toward ebooks. We’re not saying that all books will be nothing but ebooks in the future, but more and more people are working with ebooks these days, so that’s probably the biggest direction that the publishing industry will go in.
What do you use?
Professional Cover Designer
What genres do you write?
Adventure/fantasy
What formats are your books in?
Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Savann ah and Zeke Parker Home Page Link
Link To Savann ah and Zeke Parker Page On Amazon
Link to Author Page on other site
Your Social Media Links
https://www.facebook.com/SavannahAndZekeParker?ref=hl
https://twitter.com/Billy_Scarlet
http://www.pinterest.com/piratewriter/
