Saturday, May 13, 2017

My Writing by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey


http://bookswelove.net/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/
Romancing the Klondike is available this month at book stores and on line.
 
I had worked off and on at various jobs for many years while raising my children and when I began taking writing courses I still had teenage children at home. I wrote some historical and travel articles and had them published in Canadian magazines. My children had left home when I got my first contract for a non-fiction travel book, which morphed into seven travel books about the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, and the Yukon and Alaska. Researching and writing each one of those took up my days, evenings, and nights for a year. When I finished the last one, I decided to try fiction writing.

     I also decided to get a job since writing can be very lonely. I took training to be a nursing attendant also known as residential care aide and began working in a long-term facility. I also started writing my first mystery novel. Then my husband and I moved to a small acreage Vancouver Island and I got a job in a group home looking after disabled adults.

     I do not like getting up to an alarm clock so I took a position in the afternoons from 4-9 pm. This gives me time during the day to work in my yard, hike, dragonboat, pick and can or freeze fruit from my trees, and of course, write. I am thinking about retiring so I could have more time to write, but I have a feeling that I would also travel more, sit and enjoy the sunsets more, visit family more.

     I try to write something every day, even if it is just some ideas for a scene or someone the main character of my WIP will meet. Usually these ideas occur in the middle of the night so I always keep paper and pen by my bed to write this down.
     And I must be doing something right because I have had seventeen print and e-books published since I began my writing career.