[00:00:00] Hello Authors. I'm Joanne Morrell, children's and young adult fiction writer and author of short nonfiction for Authors. Thanks for joining me for the Hybrid Author Podcast, sharing interviews from industry professionals to help you forge a career as a hybrid author both independently and traditionally publishing your books. You can get the show notes for each episode and sign up for your free Author pass over at the Hybrid Author website to discover your writing process, get tips on how to publish productively, and get comfortable promoting your books at www. [00:00:34] Let's crack on with the episode. [00:00:42] Hello authors. I hope you're all keeping well in whatever part of the world you reside and listen to the podcast in today's episode is an Almost Merry Christmas mashup featuring snippets from all podcast guests who have appeared on the show since June 2025. [00:00:59] No author adventure update for me this episode as I will be releasing episode 200 this week, which is a solo episode for me and will share the beginnings of this author Adventure to burn out to a bright future. [00:01:18] A 109-year-old man on his deathbed tells a amazing story to his son about your time in his youth when he wins in into the Amazon behest of the Queen of England to find gold. This was in 1806 during the Napoleonic War. I know they tried to cover it up, but they were bankrupt back then. They were in dire straits for money. And there's also a lot of rumors going around that the King wasn't really running the show. Greenland with Carolyn of course wife doesn't step in when their husband is down, they step in. But of course they had to do it incognito so no one knew about it was all down to the down low. And it was it didn't turn out to be disaster, but they lost a lot of lives in the way. But then he asked his son to go back and deliver a letter to one of the Amazons called Ivy that he met and fell in love with. And then he found out he had a sister so he had to start from there. A friend whose Indian background mother died and her father and he's I think it was late 60s, early 70s, started dating again and it was a real shock for the family. [00:02:18] And I also and then I wondered whether that would happen. What would like when my mother died I wondered oh, would my father ever do that? And definitely not. That was something he was never going to do. But I started to explore what would happen if someone in a Latin American culture like my own did start to date someone. What would it look like? What Would it happen? What elements would be brought in in terms of the family's reaction, the community's reaction, and what would it look like for that character? Like an older migrant man. So I wanted to look at some of that. That was one of the themes you definitely like throughout the story. But I also wanted to bring in other things too, like one of the characters has a mental illness, lives with an anxiety disorder, which I myself have an anxiety disorder. And I really wanted to put that into a book as well, because that's another thing. We don't often get real authentic stories about people living with mental illness and how people function in society. That's very important for me as a writerly device to surround and overwhelm the reader with minute detail of the landscape. And that creates mood and texture to the writing. Language plays a big part in that for me. I always say that I like to use language to seduce a reader, to draw them into my world and trap them. So that creates its own kind of atmosphere. When you read the book, you'll see a lot of elements, mental stuff, aside from the landscape, the color and the light I describe the texture of heat and sand. All of that adds to the story. Particularly when you're writing the Gothic. The atmosphere has to permeate every aspect of your page. The way a writer uses words has a lot to do with that. This is where Virginia Woolf comes in. It's in the way you place two words next to each other to create a certain kind of music and rhythm and pace that guides the story and hopefully the reader along into the story. The reader doesn't necessarily have to be aware of that when they're reading it, but it plays a big part in how the story unfolds, but also how they respond to it and how it resonates in the mind when they finish and set the book aside. This book started off as a scene writing exercise that I did late last year just as part of improving my craft. But after I'd written that scene, you know, the whole story, I just envisioned the entire story and I got really excited, excited about writing it. So I just like spent probably about six weeks drafting that first draft. I just loved it so much. So I thought, you know, this is actually publishable. I think I want to develop this and publish it. But because it was novella link, that's a bit of a hard sell to a traditional publisher. But also, I'd never even really considered that because I thought this is the perfect way to dip my toe in self publishing. Learn on a lower stakes Project, build the audience up. I sort of saw it as this would be like the perfect entree before my main course. So it was always going to be a self published project for those two reasons, so I could learn the ropes, make the mistakes on the small project rather than on the big one. In terms of junior fiction, you know, the major things that I've taken away were take your time to brainstorm. Don't just jump into the story. It's very tempting when you've got an idea. I mean, that might work for some people, but for me, just have a few weeks to brainstorm and let it mull around in your head. And it just made so much difference to do that process that Jen taught us about creative and just letting yourself play. Really. I think I was right. We can take things too seriously and we can think we need to get this work done and sometimes we just need to sit down and just play. Even just draw our characters. Even if you're not an illustrator, just draw them and have fun with them and work out who they are. I think that was really important and it's a really nice part of that process. And make sure that you have Virginia fiction, light idea for a plot, something that's fun, something that's not too dark, and making characters relatable to the age group. If you read the book and you discover the meaning of Yuri, yuru is not a real word. I made it up, but I'm hoping to make it a real word that ends up in a dictionary. Perhaps if you do come to understand the meaning of yuru from reading my book, it means that you will have come to understand that even in the darkest moments, there is a light within you that you can draw on to cope. And you don't need to keep living your life, importing happiness and joy from out there. You know, we live our lives. I will be happy when I have more money, or I will be happy when I have good health or when I get married. When you've discovered yuru and you've gone within, you can experience the full spectrum of what it means to be human right now. And the teaching of the Vedas is that you are already fulfilled. There is nothing in the world that you could gain pain to make you more whole than you already are. And equally, there's nothing you could lose because you are already unbounded, infinite pure potentiality. And so learning that stress is the impediment to enlightenment and that you're already enlightened, that's part of what the book is about. But It's a book that will hopefully make you realize that you've been giving away all your power to a bunch of people or events or things out there that you can reclaim. Don't live your life dependent on something outside of yourself changing or coming true, because it's a recipe for suffering. In a way, the book will really help you make sure that your happiness is only dependent on your own state of consciousness, which you can elevate at any time. If you're an emergency response technician, a rescue worker in any field, particularly a volunteer or part time basis, know that there's, there's great people out there that want to see you thrive and grow and that want to support you. So don't be afraid to reach out to those people. If and when you come across the sort of bad actors in our world, skip over them and connect with people that want to see you thrive. And don't be afraid to do that and constantly work on your skills because it's places like this and by reading content like this that actually saves lives before the fact. And that's a never ending journey. I think it's important to not give up on your manuscript if you think it's one that you really want to write and you really want to see out there. I could have easily just thought, well, that was a novel that I'll never get to publish. But it really did take a great deal of persistence. So I guess one of my main message of the sport waves is persistence and to have confidence. It's very hard and maybe particularly for women writers who are starting up to have the confidence that their material is really important. I grew up in apartheid South Africa, immigrating to Australia in 1986 when the state of emergency was declared in South Africa. But when the state of emergency was declared and civil liberties weren't guaranteed and people could be incarcerated without recourse to getting a trial, that's when we decided we are now leaving this country. So the motivation for this book comes from a family that I knew and I know very well and lived in South Africa, in the rural part of South Africa, and they established on their farm a school for the black kids. Huge undertaking endeavor and very brave because, I mean, one of the reasons that they established the school was that the education for people of color was inferior. They wanted to give the opportunity to these kids. And that's what I have in my novel too. In rural South Africa, there was the people that surrounded them. They were great supporters of the nationalist government, the government that was in power. So if you established a school or acted in the most decent way towards people of color. You were ostracized by the people around you. In my book, you have these people who forming the school on their farm against this background of astonishment for the people around them. The main protagonist is someone called Ada. In the book. She's a girl of 12 years old and she lives a privileged life in South Africa on this farm. She loves this farm. She doesn't look beyond the confines of her world until she comes into contact with a girl of mixed descent who brings with her another complete world which opens up the world for Ada. I've brought my story into that because even though it's completely fiction, it's not because it's historical. It paints the divide between white people in South Africa and a young person growing up and a person of color whose every day there would be harassment. There would be. Every day was the struggle. I didn't want to write a book about someone who wants to lose weight. I wanted to write a book about something a little bit more subtle and a little bit more complex. Someone who isn't really big, but it has a disconnect in their mind and is drawn into a very dangerous world of perception versus reality that's compounded obviously by the digital life that we live today, where nothing is as it seems, losing her sense of self, disconnecting from friends and family, ironically, the people who could help her most, and then finally clawing her way back with a sense of hope and resilience to start another, more compelling journey. I made it a point of not actually describing Harley too much in terms of what she looked like, because I want readers to bring their own biases and presuppositions to the page. And having had a lot of eyes on the manuscript in earlier iterations, I could say readers. I mean, the beautiful thing is some of them are assuming from page one, no, she's probably not even overweight at all. She probably just has issues. Others are assuming she's quite big, you know, and that's why she's gone on this journey. And maybe later in the book go, oh, now I'm actually questioning that. They bring their own experiences and their own presuppositions to the page. I don't want to tell them what to think or what she looks like, because then it's just a bit didactic and formulaic, commercially satisfying. But in my view, it doesn't go to the heart of the issues, which are gray and complex and odd shaped with rough edges. That's what I want to get my teeth into. When I went to the writer's studio the first night, I walked up the stairs, and at the top of the stairs, there was a handwritten poster that said, writing is what writers do. And I'll never, ever forget that. Other than also that downstairs was an organic food store and it was a bitterly cold night. And I remember the organic hot chocolate. So the writers group opportunity gave me the discipline of at least five stories per year. And that really helped me to develop a writing habit. I would say the writing discipline came a little bit later after I connected with Bernadette over the last seven, eight years. Years. I probably write about six to eight hours a day. And they're writing, researching, or reading. And I know it doesn't happen unless you sit down and commit, but I guess there is a balance between you wanting to educate children and entertaining them at the same times. How did you balance that with flute? Well, flute was a long process. So that was what would be about nine years ago from when I sparked that idea. That one. I basically did a brain dump to start with. It was 4,000 words. Got out all the fat, got out all the information I wanted. And then I was like, okay, I need to find the theme and I need to find the story. So that was the main thing with that one. And then looking at weaving the facts in, it's a balance. A bit of a hybrid, you would say. [00:13:41] Yes, we love that over here. [00:13:43] So, yeah, it was a lot of thinking about what can be included and what should go in the back matter. And there wasn't much wiggle room. You know, I wanted it to be as truthful as possible. It was peak Covid time. The news was a really scary place for not just children, but anybody. Because of all the uncertainty and so much bad news, there was still a lot of good in the world and a lot of love around. And sometimes we just needed to be reminded of that. We can't control what goes on outside. But remembering that there's love inside us and love in our homes and within our families and our friends or anywhere that you find love, we needed to remember that it was always there. Just something you kind of forget about. Like, and even me thinking about the situation and what you've gone through, how scary it must have been. Even with the children. It was actually the time that the side effects of chemo kicked in. And it was the day that I shaved my head because I was losing my hair. It was so patchy. My daughter was with me at the time. And I remember the fear in her eyes. It's actually a part that is embedded in my brain now that I kind of raise that memory. Everything that I've built today based on that. And I remember tucking my daughter into bed and telling her that day that it didn't matter what Mummy looked like. My love for you wasn't going to change. There is always going to be love from. [00:15:02] I like the challenge of thinking, what are kids gonna like? And of course, you never exactly know, but you kind of have to have your idealized reader or readers in mind. But it's a challenge every single time. [00:15:15] It gets easier or clearer. I don't think there's any magic formula. Maybe some other people have one, but to me, it's just about trying to challenge myself as a writer and to try and engage the audience. That's kind of interesting. [00:15:29] Aspired to do was something that I always thought, oh, it's really neat how people can write books, like, good for them. So, yeah, it was just something. I had a conversation with my mother about my sister, that how I sometimes didn't feel good enough around her. I felt that I put too much pressure on myself to be someone for her. So after we had that conversation, I was going to bed one night and I just got this sentence in my head and it was basically something along the lines of, what if something happened to me that allowed me to. To see my sister's life, if I could see her life through her eyes? So I said, that will be tricky to write as a memoir because I have to have some sort of creativity, imagination. [00:16:09] So that's where the fiction element came into play. Because I tried writing memoir, it felt very flat. I had a really hard time connecting different events that actually had happened and keeping the flow of the plot going. So I did choose to write fiction. And once I. I decided that I hit the ground running. There's so many concerns that we can have for AI on a society level, and we shouldn't ignore those, I think. I mean, we saw what happened with social media. Everybody thought it'd be awesome. And it turns out it hurts a lot of people if you don't use it right. And most technologies are like that. And so these fears about AI think we should pay attention to those fears and not use it in a way that could hurt people or make them less creative or. Or make them do the parts that we need to do the hard work, that that makes us better people. But at the same time, there's some things that. That we can't do that AI could do for us, that would be really useful. And I think this is one thing that we found that could be really helpful for people. The other thing that story Snap does is it does a virtual beta reader experience where there's a team of beta readers that will read through your book and it'll give you five different personalities and they'll tell you in those personalities whether or not they liked it. The ending didn't land, this character didn't land those kind of things. And it's kind of fun. And I think it's useful to get that beta reader feedback. Virtual beta reader. Yeah, just AI personalities. Yeah. Right. [00:17:26] But I discovered that there was this walled city on the Tibetan plateau, really remote. Never heard of it. This place called lo Mantang, it's 700 years old, had hardly changed in all that time. It still had its own king and queen. And so I was fascinated by this place I'd never heard of. And I tried to find something to read about it. There was only one book that had ever been written about it, and that was in the 1960s. There was a guy called Michel Peacel who was a French adventurer and writer and he managed to get permission from the king because no one was allowed in there. Foreigners weren't allowed there till 1992. But he managed to get permission to travel up there. It was very dangerous at the time because the camper guerrilla fighters were still in that area fighting against the Chinese who had invaded Tibet. So it was a very precarious journey for him. But he went there anyway. He wrote this book about it and it was still really the only in existence and there was very little on the Internet about it. And in the end I thought, God, I really want to go and see this place for myself. I really want to know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of school events or social events that I say no to or I cap it at 90 minutes. I recently realized that as a person I have a word count, like a daily word count. [00:18:46] So if I speak or listen to more than X words, I start to just kind of of fake. Wow. Yeah, yeah. So I realized, okay, so if I want to go out and do a parents catch up, I'll just do 60 minutes because anything more is just going to like reverse, reverse charge me. Like, you know when you do facial masks and they say you can't put it more than X minutes because then it starts to dry your skin. That's how I feel like I start to feel really dry. The face mask method. It actually started the second I was born. I was put on my mother's chest. She looked deeply into my eyes and she said, or so I'm told, oh, how nice to see you again. It was the again part that always intrigued me. I always wanted to do something with it, and I later wanted to write something that involved that. And my mother was also an editor back in the day. She worked for New York City publishing firms. And I'd also learned something from her because I distinctly remember seeing her on a when I was young, seeing her on a Saturday morning sitting cross legged on the bed, manuscript pages strewn about, her red pencil in hand, marking up all of these manuscript pages with her editorial comments. [00:20:00] So when I finally wrote my book, what Goes around and got my editor's comments, you know, they weren't in a red pen or pencil, but the comments in the margins of the word document were just as was instructive. I didn't want to educate people in what bipolar is because I heard Isabel Allende, the best selling author, the chilling author, she said, when you write fiction, you're not trying to teach your reader something. You're trying to create a story that speaks to their mind and their heart. And that's what I wanted to do. I wanted people to get lost in the story, to be entertained. It all started with a short story that I wrote way before I started writing or thinking of writing Exuberance. And it was called Avoiding Elena. Some people say Elena. I say Elena, which is the Spanish pronunciation, a Spanish woman who was so exuberant she sort of jumped off the page. And I said, I have to do something more, something longer with Elena. And I came up with the idea of using Elena as an alter ego with Angie. So when Angie is going through a manic episode, she becomes Elena. She becomes this exuberant, exotic woman, which she's not in real life. [00:21:16] So there you have it, folks, the truly remarkable, wise and inspiring words of all guests who have been on the show since June. Next time on the Hybrid Author podcast, we have a solo episode from me. Hitting 200 episodes blows my mind. It's a raw one, full of reminiscing and reaching for the stars. I wish you well in your author adventure. That's it from me. Bye for now. That's the end for now. Authors, I hope you are further forward in your author adventure after listening, and I hope you'll listen next time. Remember to head on over to the Hybrid Author website at www.hybridauthor.com to get your free author pass. It's bye for now.