[00:00:00] Speaker A: 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 interview is with Maggie Walters and we chat. What motivated Maggie to write, split and share her story? A very intimate look at living with multiple personality disorder MPD how she approached writing about such a personal and complex experience, balancing being open about her struggles and crafting a narrative that would also.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Educate readers about the realities of this.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Condition fear Feedback she's received from readers who may be dealing with similar experiences. How sharing her story has impacted her own healing journey and much more.
[00:00:46] Speaker C: So.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: On my Author Adventure for the second time this week it just means that the personal author adventure segment that I usually share is going to require a little more structuring. I don't update all in one episode like I have done for almost the past four years. It's four years anniversary of the podcast in May. You know, I've got nothing left to report in the second if I tell in the first. So I have been running a to do list for what feels like well.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Over a few weeks now.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Items are slowly getting ticked off, but I have felt like I've been doing this very slowly. I don't know if anybody else feels this way, that everything is moving fast around them, but they're traveling so slow. Some days I felt like on more than one occasion recently being asked a time frame of question or you know, I was recently at a dentist visit, when are you asking the dentist? And I've said oh, you know, one to two years and when in fact it's been more like four to five. It's just madness and a little scary that like the motto of the show, life is truly too short to wait. So consider this in your writing career, is there something you've been holding off and why do it my friend, get it done. Because you might spin around one day and be like me thinking where the bloody hell has the time gone? It's just crazy. I also just wanted to touch upon rejection based around the traditional publishing side and mainly about a conversation that I had with a dear friend recently. So if you're received one or some recently a rejection that is from the traditional publisher, I feel your pain. The rejection in the industry can be brutal and really suck you dry. Hence why I've stepped away from the traditional side for a while and perhaps you need to do the same. All is never lost.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Reuse.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Repurpose. This has been something I've been thinking on this week. Adaptation book to film, book to play. Review your work and submit elsewhere or reconsider if you can adapt it to fit another format. I'd love to know who has had any success repurposing their work. Please reach out to me joannebridauthorpe podcast.com or leave a comment on the podcast on this podcast post
[email protected] podcast find this concept really, really interesting. Nothing is ever lost, especially I was looking through some files on my computer lately and I found old YA fiction books that I had started and stopped. It's worth reviewing old works and repurposing. Coming up on my to do list is making a plan to start selling my first and women's fiction series, the Right to the Hairdresser and the Nurse. Yes, that was last year. Although I have done various market events, I haven't been actively getting the word out there about this book. It's written under pseudonym Zara Ellen. I'm starting with building some reviews, so if you have read my book and would like to leave me a review, please do so over at my website, hybridauthor.combooks or Amazon.com au Exciting news. The Hybrid Author Podcast is currently open for guests, so if you're an author or industry professional in the publishing writing world, reach out and pitch me joannebredauthor.com and make sure you're familiar with the podcast content. Episodes are topic based and proactive in encouraging writers to have a hybrid author career which is all inclusive. I look forward to hearing from you soon and sharing how the podcast works. If you are successful.
[00:03:48] Speaker D: Thorn Creative where beautiful websites for authors are brought to life. No matter what stage you're at with your writing, your stories deserve a dedicated space to shine. Whether you're just starting out or have a bookshelf full of bestsellers, your website is the hub of your author business. Finding everything you and your books offer together, Thorne Creative can nurture all aspects of redesigning your old site or start afresh from the initial design. They can provide ongoing hosting and maintenance to marketing your books online, saving you time, money and stress trying to wrangle your site yourself. An author website built by Thorne Creative can easily direct readers to your favorite retailers, your publisher, or simply set you up to sell to them direct. The options are endless. Thorne Creative have worked with many authors across all genres and know what goes into good, functional working author websites to sell books. Head on over to thorncreative.com websitesforauthors to read author and publisher testimonials and to see what they offer and some of the sites they've created.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Maggie Walters lives in the Northern rivers of New South Wales where she spends her days developing her writing skills and raising three teenagers. After meeting her husband, she immigrated to Australia from the US and spent the bulk of her career in various marketing roles before returning to her long held love of the written word. Expression through words has become a driving passion in her life, a tool for healing her own abusive past. Maggie is an active member of Byron Writers Festival and a member of several writing groups that meet regularly and continue to nurture her craft. As a trauma survivor, she shares her courageous commitment to wholeness while confronting stereotypes surrounding multiple personality disorder, also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. She educates and encourages others to break down the barriers and stigma around mental health. Welcome to the Hybrid Author Podcast, Maggie.
[00:06:14] Speaker C: Thanks for having me, Jill. Really appreciate it.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: We're really honored and thrilled to have you. Thank you for joining us. It's such a powerful bio and it's obvious you've got a passion for writing in there. How did that start and how has your author adventure progressed to the writer you are now?
[00:06:30] Speaker C: I have always so jumping in the deep end between me and my alters. There's always been a long held love of writing just in my whole way of being and early on in life it was very, very important to just write and express and I'd write lots of poetry and it just thoughts and things would come out and did lots of stuff in school. It was when I started seeing my second therapist that they really encouraged me to express myself in a journal, in a journal style. And I think that's when the floodgates really, really opened and I started looking at my own internal way of expressing things. So having that whole writing journaling was cathartic and it helped me get through a lot of stuff. But you know what else it did? It. It also created lots of notes that I could go back to when I started putting split together. So yeah, it was. It's been really important to me.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's amazing that journaling's helped you so much and you've been able to repurpose that format.
[00:07:28] Speaker C: It helps a lot of authors. It's just a way, you know, some people use it professionally, but just to express and work through the ideas and issues that they're trying to resolve. It's just great.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: It's absolutely how I use writing. I find it really cathartic, but I need to be a bit better with my mind. I tend to write down stupid notes and on different bits of paper and then it doesn't make sense. I need to be a bit more. More organized with that. So Splits is. Are you calling it a memoir?
[00:07:54] Speaker C: Yeah, it is, It's a memoir. A lot of times people see it as a trauma memoir, and there is that element to it because being MPD develops through trauma. You know, there's lots of little things that cause it, so there is that trauma element to it. But I really see it as a memoir that's a lot more about hope, about changing the narrative and understanding that there's lots of people with really complex mental health challenges out there in the world who, you know, struggle day to day and we live in secrecy. So for me, writing Split was really important to voice that.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: So I guess if you can share. How did you become aware that you had MPD initially?
[00:08:33] Speaker C: Yeah. Okay. So what I have to do is I have to give you just a little bit of a 30 second storyline because listeners won't get it otherwise. When you develop alters, the primary personality, who is me, I kind of went away to the back of my brain and other literal people came out and they lived my life for me. And so I was not around basically from the ages of three. My family immigrated from the UK when I was three years old. And that was about the time I disappeared until my young adult life when I met my Australian partner and moved to Australia when I came back. And that whole period of time was when the abuse happened and when I developed all these alters that came out and, you know, caused us to be who we are. We're split.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And take it through therapy, you learn a bit more. So do you want me just to start with, like, the second question, which actually goes on about, you know, provide an intimate look at living with multiple personality disorder.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: Yeah, let's try that.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Sure. So in Split, your memoir, you provide an intimate look at living with multiple personality disorder, which is mpd. Can you share how you first came about knowing that you had that was it through therapy or.
[00:09:46] Speaker C: Yeah, I and my alters, we didn't know that we were mpd. It's something that gets really easily hidden away. So when we were in our young adult life, I had a lot of relationship issues. Anger management just didn't work very well. I had a very kind boss who said, here's a name and a phone number. You need some help in a very nice way. And I can look back now and see that they were trying to be really helpful. So I went off and I saw someone and didn't realize, had no idea. We started talking about the stress of trying to relate to my family and all the things that went along with that. As I started trusting him more, it just started becoming, coming out that I had a dream at one point where I felt this child attached to my leg and I couldn't get rid of them. And. And so that's when we really started just uncovering the mpd. What I didn't know at that point in time, too, was that my therapist at that point, he actually was an expert on mpd.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:10:48] Speaker C: So he picked up on the science and was able to help really unravel quite a few things that made it really clear. And that's when a lot of the journal writing started. That's when he was saying, you know, write stuff. I would let my altars write, and they would, you know, try to process some of their stuff and what was going on for them as well.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. Amazing. And then, so what motivated you want to share your story outside of the journaling, you know, with others?
[00:11:13] Speaker C: And I think there came a point when I had to believe that my story was more than just a story of survival. That me getting through, getting the help that I did, having some relationships that I had could be an example to other people on how they could survive, and that I wanted my story to actually bring hope to other people. I set that story aside for decades and didn't come back to it. It wasn't until I'd moved to Australia and I started discovering my love of writing again and got involved with Byron Writers Festival, and I started writing this novel, and I didn't like my main character. I was trying to model it, as a lot of authors do, on some elements of a traumatized childhood, but I wasn't bonding with my main character. And so I went, you know, just as an academic exercise, I'm going to go away and I'm going to write my memoir. Yeah, well, it took on a life of its own, and, you know, it ended up an early version, got long listed for the 2022 Rochelle, which was fabulous. So that really gave me the impetus, and I've gotten some great mentoring. Lee Kaufman, Al Close have been great ment mentors for me and really helped me pull it together. I remember when I had my first draft ready to go. Every first time author goes through this, you think you've got your first draft together, and you go, this is practically perfect in every way you send it off. And so Lee was my mentor, and I adore Lee. I still do occasional courses with her and stuff. And I consider it a very dear friend and she ripped it to shreds. The thing is, it was written in a very kaleidoscope way. Cause I thought this is my neuro divergent brain trying to communicate in my own way as to what made sense. And it was bits and pieces all over the place, didn't make any sense. And she just basically said, you've got some really good ideas here, but you need to put a linear thread together through the whole story. And so I went back and did a massive rewrite and even renamed it because it wasn't called Split at that point in time. And here we are today. We've got the final product. Took about 5 edits, major massive edits to get through it. But I'm really happy with what it is today.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: It's amazing. I haven't made it quite all the way through yet, but I've started reading it and it absolutely just hooks you in because I mean, it's very unique, isn't it? MPG it's not. It's not really talked about a lot and there's some media formats out there. You know, there's a couple of movies and things like that, but it's.
[00:13:47] Speaker C: And it's all sensationalized.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:49] Speaker C: You know, it's not real. And. And I think that's probably one of the things that I wanted to get across was that, you know, it's not what the movies like to pray. It's not like when rabbit Howls or this, you know, the Three Faces of Eve. Nobody would know that I was multiple because I'm high functioning and I'm no longer in an abusive situation. It actually stays quiet in my head, except that I've got all these girls that talk to me all the time and give me their opinion on life. It was funny. I was doing a library talk. In fact, I was with Anna Featherstone.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Shout out to Anna.
[00:14:23] Speaker C: I love you, Anna. Love you. And how can you not love Anna Featherstone? She's amazing, she's gorgeous. And one of the guys in the audience that was at Port Macquarie Library asked if I would ever get a movie made. And I was like, yeah, no, no, I'm not really interested in that. And he said, what about a musical me? And I just went. I got really quiet and then I went, you know, I could see it in my head, there's a main character going through life and in the background you've got this chorus of people doing all these different things behind it would be hysterical. And that's probably one of the really things that's really Important to me about this story is, yes, there's trauma, but the other side of that, it's about the healing and it's about the growth journey and. And about how there is always hope, there's always a way to move forward. And so the first 50 pages or so is full of pretty intense trauma, but the rest of it is about how I and my alters explore how we can live a healthy life. It was really important to me to be that vulnerable because that lets someone see inside my head. If you've read the first few pages, then you understand that there is one particular chapter called Working Girl where that's actually seven different alters actually wrote that. That chapter.
It was a very intense, emotional, cathartic experience. And obviously it's been edited back, but it was still their voices telling their stories the way they wanted it to be heard. And I hope that inspires people.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: So how do you do that? How does that do you. And I read in your work as well? Is it like you said, you step aside to let that voice come through, tell their story?
[00:16:08] Speaker C: It's. So I'm. And every author, I think, would probably be very jealous of this. I actually have an altar called writer there.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: So no writer's block for you.
[00:16:19] Speaker C: In fact, sometimes it's like, shut up and leave me alone.
But their whole purpose in of existence is to get us to write.
So I realized it was when I was going back and I was putting this linear story together, and I looked inside in my head and I went, okay, who wants to participate in this? Because if it's going to be a linear story, it's got to be accurate and it's got to represent them, doesn't it? And so there were seven of them put their hand up and said, yeah, we want to be a part of this. Some of them are very small, and a couple of them are teenagers, so they're different ages and ranges. What I did is I changed my environment completely. I took my computer, went outside and sat on the patio, and I basically just went, okay, my hands are your hands. And Ryder took over and conversed with them and they discussed and I basically disappeared, which is. I know for a neurotypical brain, it's really hard to do.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: It's mind blowing.
But it's super interesting.
You know, I'm definitely interested in. And I love what you're doing because, yeah, it's sharing that with others. And like you said, people who are probably maybe just quietly unaware or living with this as well, you're going to give voice to so many people. My, my only contact with it is, as I said, through movies which are the Hollywood, the Americans. So the movie split.
[00:17:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: I love it for what it.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: Is because it's different, but it's just sharing a serial killer person that's kidnapping girls and they've got to try and get out of the situation through the alters because there's obviously some okay ones, but there's some really not nice ones. So it's more of a thriller, cat chase, mouse thing. And then the other one, which is obviously quite Famous is the TV series the 50 States of Tara for many years back.
And I love that, but it doesn't show. So it shows the family living with the mother and the altars, but I don't think it delves into why she has mpd.
Your story is showing like it's something that you're not born with. It's something that comes from trauma.
[00:18:33] Speaker C: That's exactly right. George Blair west, who wrote the forward for my book, he states very clearly and he is a nationally known trauma and dissociative specialist. And he basically says it's not a mental illness, it's a creative coping mechanism.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: When you boil it down, that's what it is. You know, it's really interesting you may mention that movie split because my three kids, they're 17, 19 and 21. My daughter's 21 and she. And they know now as they've gotten older, I've told them more about my life and my story, age appropriate stuff. And she said, mom, I went and watched that movie split and I said, yeah. She said, that's not you at all.
I had someone here who is a writing coach and I was doing a day long course with them. They had been working with some people in, across the border in Queensland and she said, I've got one student who is writing a fiction story about someone who's multiple and kills people all the time.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:36] Speaker C: And it's like, it's that whole thing where they assume that you know, anybody who's multiple, it's all about evilness, you know, getting even, you know, where it's actually the people who are the perpetrators that cause the trauma, that are the evil people.
My alters, I mean, I've got some that are pretty, they're assertive. I've got one that I call angry woman. And she gets really ticked off at social injustice. But shouldn't we all get really ticked off at social injustice? You know, and so it's one of those stigmas that you really have to work with. I've been called psychotic on a number of occasions. I mean, even recently, I was speaking in the Blue Mountains and I had a guy, he didn't say the word psychotic, but he really challenged the notion that it was a creative coping mechanism. That I was mentally ill in front of a group of 50 people.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. And it's like, go away, just go away.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: Angry women.
[00:20:34] Speaker C: Pretty much. Pretty much.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: I don't know how you function or can cope with that noise going on in your head. I jump from thing to thing to thing sometimes and it can get so much much that I just sit down and be like, oh, but to switch off.
[00:20:48] Speaker C: I don't know, I'll turn the tables on you. And I will say, because I've had people go, you know, what's your goal? Do you want to integrate? Or anything like that? Because the integration is an old fashioned concept where all the altars would combine into one and you'd be just one person again. And I'm sitting here going, you know, at the ripe old age of 63.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:21:08] Speaker C: I don't know anything else.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:11] Speaker C: And I'm going, I cannot imagine how silent it would be in my head.
And I think that would be really boring.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, you said you've known no different. How do you integrate then?
[00:21:25] Speaker C: Do you sort of, I don't know.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Give therapy off to each one?
[00:21:28] Speaker C: So they're, oh, look, it's not done anymore. What it's. That's. That was something that was done back in like the 80s and 90s, in the, in the early days when MPD was just becoming really known and started being accepted.
People don't integrate anymore. My current therapist, I have a dysfunctional family living in my head. That's really the easiest way to put it. So basically we do family therapy. It's really that simple.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Well, back to the book.
No, this is all context towards it and things like that. My, you know, you've written it and how you have obviously, like you said, you've journaled, you've got your personal thing down. You've had outside help to help you add it into a cohesive narrative.
[00:22:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: And now it's a finished product and kind of out there. How have you found the publishing and stuff?
[00:22:20] Speaker C: As an indie author, it's been fascinating. I love being in control. I don't know if you've seen the COVID of my book. It's a stunning cover. I chose that and I chose the designer and she's an award winning designer who designed it for me. And when you've got people like Anna Featherstone in your corner and like Ally is also a really good resource, it makes it easier, but it's really hard. It's not an easy process. You go through these ups and downs of selling and not selling and promoing. I'm working on my second book now, but I'm trying to take a bigger picture perspective. If I wrote this book in order to change minds, to change the narrative around what mental health is and how we need to be with each other, I have a philosophy that says we just need to be kind to each other. If we were kinder to each other, how much better would the world be? If I can reduce stigmas and use SPLIT as a tool, because this is Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm getting out to lots of libraries and doing lots of talks and I hope I sell a couple of books. But at the same time, if I can have some great conversations with people about how we live in this world, with people who struggle, especially with complex mental health challenges, then that's satisfying for me, you know, and that's what's really most important. I have quickly had to get over being so exposed with my life. It used to be that only a few people knew I was mpd. Guess what? That's the same anymore. And I find that people, once they realize that I am, I'm not fragile, and I'm actually happy for them to ask me hard questions. It makes it a lot easier and I think that helps to change their perspective.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really, really powerful what you're doing. How has the feedback been from going out there and putting yourself out in your story? Have you had people with similar experiences reach out?
[00:24:20] Speaker C: Yes, I have. It's great. I've had some online and I don't know what it's like overseas, but regional Australia, getting the best help you can as far as mental health and therapists is next to impossible. Some people have been really frustrated, but I went to a talk in the Blue Mountains. I was so happy when I left that talk. There's three things that are required to develop MPD.
This is MPD 101 for you.
So the first is it usually happens to a child because a child's brain is very plastic and malleable and can be a lot more creative in many, many ways about dealing with trauma. The second is called betrayal trauma. And that means the abuse would have happened from someone who's very close to that person. Normally parents, but can also be siblings. It could also be very Just close family members. And the third is an inability to actually get out of those circumstances. Whether it's perceived or actual, the child feels like there's no escape for them. So ergo, they disappear and alters come out. I was up in the Blue Mountains doing this talk, and there was. We had. We always have a Q and A time at the end. And this woman, she stood up and she said, you know, when you were talking earlier and you talked about what it requires to develop mpd, you forgot the third point. And I had forgotten to talk about how a person couldn't escape. And she said, you couldn't escape. And the reason I can say that. So it is because I have did, which of course is mpd. She is this in group foot of a group of 50 people. And she was so brave.
And I, you know, we talked afterwards and she was like, are you getting the help that you need? Thank you for coming. Here, keep. And so it's. When I meet people like that who are actually willing to stand up and own who they are, it makes my heart so happy. Ironically, at the same talk, I was signing books at the end, and this woman leaned over the table as I was signing her book, and she said, by the way, I haven't come out of the closet yet.
And I was like, you know what? Just telling me was a huge, huge step for her. And I said, you know, you take it in the safe way that you can for yourself, and that's okay. Yes, I'd like to sell books, but when I get approached by people like that, or I know that my book is helping others, I had a couple of psychologists who started to reach out and want to read the book to help them with their own clients. That's the beauty of this thing. And it makes that dream that my autism I had when we were. When we were younger, it's that dream of sharing that our life could help someone else. It's actually starting to happen.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: I know.
[00:26:57] Speaker C: And that makes me really happy.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: That's amazing. It is amazing. I used to always wonder and think, oh, you know, I'd really like to help people. And my. I feel like saying small mind, but is always thought helping people is the physical thing. You know, you go and you help with the housework or you help the help them do something, or. And I think the penny dropped a few years ago, that writing is a powerful way to help somebody by sharing a story. And, yeah, it's amazing. So, no, I'm excited that's happening for you, how special that is for people to come forward. Such a personal thing, isn't it?
[00:27:29] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: What advice would you give to others who are maybe acknowledging their feelings of past traumas dealing with NPD? Why has it changed from MPD to DID? Do you know why they've.
[00:27:40] Speaker C: So back in 1994, the name changed, so we'll deal with that first. It was interesting. I was doing a library talk yesterday, and I have never understood the importance of why it needed to change from MPD to did. And a nurse was there and she actually explained how having SO DID is dissociative identity disorder. And for her as a medico to go, this person has dissociative issues, helps her put it in the medical linguistics that works for her in their treatment. And she was working in triage and stuff like that, so that's really important. Rather than mpd. Multiple personality disorder, doesn't have the medical lingo around it. And I went, that was the first time that actually ever made sense to me. I still say MPD just because that's what I was diagnosed with. And it rolls off the tongue for me a lot easier. But it is what it is. As far as people who are struggling with complex mental health issues, having a therapist who gets you is really important. But I also know that's out of reach for a lot of people these days, whether it's financially or regionally based. Having a support network is so important. I've got, you know, a lot of people obviously know that I'm npd, but I have got a small group of probably a dozen people who I could call at any moment of any day and say, I am falling apart and I just need you to sit with me. And they'd be there in a heartbeat. I went through periods when I didn't have that, and I know how alone and devastating that can feel. To actually trust that you're valuable enough to warrant having friends who would care for you. That's a whole other psychological layer that people have to get through. And so, you know, finding those few friends, even if it's just one person who, when you're feeling like absolute crud, will sit next to you or have a cup of coffee with you, and even if they're talking just about their lives, it's grounding. That would be my big advice. And to write and keep a journal. But, you know, to just to be able to have that person who can really support them is really important.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd say that's true of anybody struggling with internal stuff, isn't it?
[00:29:56] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: To come around what Advice would you give to people who want to navigate their own emotions while maybe writing a book? Yeah. Sharing their story in the book format. Have you got any advice for aspiring authors who have big topics to write about?
[00:30:12] Speaker C: Journaling is like. I mean, I've got constant notebooks that I keep with me and it's just writing those random thoughts down. I think processing through writing. A good example for me is the current book that I'm working on. We've got three adopted kids from the Philippines and I'm using that adoption process to wrestle with the whole idea of generational motherhood. And how is it that my mother abused me, but I haven't passed that on to my kids? Was she abused? And it's creating a lot of stuff in me that I'm having to wrestle with. So I write that stuff down separately from what I'm writing about the book. The other side of that is my therapist is he. He always worries about me when I'm not writing. And I think it's such a cathartic experience for us as writers that we get it. It's. And it's not even I, I, when I do my initial rights, I always do them with a pen and paper because while it's great to put stuff in discriminator and you can start seeing your chapters come together, the whole visceral nature of putting pen to paper and getting those heart pains out on the page, put some aside and you can go, I can deal with that now. Rather than it fogging up on the computer screen and going, I can't get anywhere with it.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. There's some sort of block as well. I don't know if it's because there's more things tied to your computer that might take your. Your attention.
[00:31:36] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: The pen and pad, I've never sat and just stared at it. It's always. I think you can free flow a bit better with the writing as well.
[00:31:44] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: So what's the next book you're working on? Is it in similar st or.
[00:31:49] Speaker C: Well, it's just that whole. Yeah. This is going to probably be my last memoir. So once that one gets done, I actually want to go back to my novel. This is another beauty of being indie published. I can set my own deadlines as to when I want to get this book out there. So I'm tentatively calling it Fractured Motherhood to go out middle of next year. Knock wood. I've got my developmental editor lined up now, hoping to get first draft to them by the end of the year. And then Once that's done, I love poetry and I will probably really dive back into doing poetry again. But this novel that I'd started to write, I really want to go back to it. First of all, it's set in the Philippines, which is where my kids are from, and it deals with a lot of social justice issues. I want to do a novel. I actually think being a fiction writer is a lot harder than being a memoir writer because I've got a story that I'm trying to build around actual facts, whereas the creativity required to actually do a fiction story and think about some of the sci fi that's out there, it's like, oh my goodness, how did they write all that stuff?
[00:32:55] Speaker B: It's sort of like spinning from thin air, isn't it? Spinning gold from thin air.
[00:32:59] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So those are my next few books. There is another one or two that they're kind of sitting on the edges of my reality right now. I don't know if they'll ever happen.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: Amazing. Well, honestly, you're very inspiring, Maggie. And I'm sure all our listeners want to find out where they can buy, split and follow you online. So can you please share where they can do that?
[00:33:21] Speaker C: Absolutely. You can follow me on maggie-walters.com. you can also buy my book there if you're in Australia. Otherwise internationally, you can get me at all the major online retailers.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: Thank you so much Maggie. That was amazing.
[00:33:35] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: There you have it folks, the truly awe inspiring Maggie Walters. Maggie's books are fantastic, so I highly recommend you go out and read it. Buy it. She is an amazing writer. Next time on the Hybrid Author podcast we have a.m. jackson on balancing romance and suspense. A.m. jackson is a romantic suspense writer who grew from tropical Queensland, small time wild child to become a pharmacist in Brisbane before attaining a PhD in business from the University of Western Australia.
Her passion for women's hockey led her to coaching internationally in Barcelona, Rotterdam and the UK and also on Australia's Gold coast and Perth. In 2014, Alison, which is AM Jackson, decided to leave her pharmacy career and has written six novels since. She lives with her husband and Wiley Westy Terrier in Perth, Western Australia. So that's what you've got to look forward to on Tuesday for the new timetable of Tuesday and Thursday episode drops. I wish you well on your author adventure this next week. That's it from me. Bye for now.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: That's the end for now.
[00:34:40] Speaker D: Authors, I hope you are further forward.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: In your author adventure after listening and I hope you'll listen next time. Remember to head on over to the.
[00:34:47] Speaker D: Hybrid Author website at www.hybridauthor.com au to get your free author pass.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: It's bye for now.
