The Magic of the Emerald Isle: An Interview with Jennifer Deibel

EPISODE 234I

Today's guest is Jennifer Deibel, whose debut novel, A Dance in Donegal, just came out!

Jennifer tells us about life as a debut author, and how she started writing. She lived in Ireland at the time, and felt she'd finally found her heart there. That made her want to write about Ireland in a real way, not how it's portrayed in some movies and TV shows.

We talk about using all the senses when you write, and trying to capture what a place feels like when you write it. Jennifer also talks about starting a book, setting it aside when she had a child, picking it up and working on it again, having to set it aside again -- and how some stories just won't let you go.

You can buy Jennifer's novel wherever you buy books, and find out more about her and her upcoming projects at her website https://www.jenniferdeibel.com/. You can follow her on major social media sites, especially Instagram and Facebook, and join her Facebook reader's group.

TRANSCRIPTION

[00:00:07.770] - Kitty

Welcome to Write Now Workshop Podcast, where you can write a book and change the world, I'm your host, Kitty Bucholtz. And this is Episode 234, The Magic of the Emerald Isle. An interview with Jennifer Deibel coming to you on Thursday, February 11th, 2021. So how is your writing going? You know, I have a little pop up message on my calendar and on the first of every month, it pops up and just says, how's the writing going?

[00:00:36.630] - Kitty

And it gives me an opportunity every month to ask myself, have I taken a step back and looked at the big picture and asked myself, am I making progress in the direction that I was intending to go? This is always a good question to ask yourself whenever you're doing anything that takes more than a day. Am I going in the direction that I'm trying to go? Am I not only am I going off in a wrong direction, but am I taking too much time to do something that maybe isn't quite as necessary as it seems fun, i.e. research.

[00:01:09.510] - Kitty

It's a good time for us to just ask ourselves, is this the right book? And do I need to do more on this particular kind of research or less on this? Am I making enough progress that I will have a book in a while? Could I be doing any more writing? Am I being too hard on myself? And I should just relax a little bit and when I relax, then I'll do better writing sometimes. That's one of the issues that I have to tell myself, you need to relax more because you're freaking yourself out. And I think you'll get more done if you just chill out. So what do you need to ask yourself about your writing also? Do you just need some more energy? Do you need some more people to be around even though you might not be able to physically be with people? You could join My Finish Your Book membership group. We get together twice a week and we do a 30 minute writing sprint. Everybody says this is what I'm working on. And then at the end, this is how many words I wrote. This is how much editing I got done. And we are getting a ton done. And it's also super fun. We've got more people joining and everybody adds their own kind of energy to it. And it's amazing how much faster you write and how much more excited you can be about your project, because in a few minutes you're going to tell a whole bunch of people, yeah, I got this much done.

[00:02:28.920] - Kitty

And sometimes you're saying, well, I only got two hundred words written, but I figured something out in the plot that I wasn't sure about, or I had to go back over my table of contents for my nonfiction book and realized that something...