Where do you hail from and what do you love most about your hometown?
I’m from a little area off the east coast called the Eastern Shore. The whole peninsula sticks out of the side of Virginia like an arm. So I grew up on the water with sand between my toes. It’s a great place to live… I just wish we had a Starbucks!
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I never could make up my mind. One day I wanted to be an Olympic Equestrian with a million dollar horse, and the next I wanted to be a female Ansel Adams, traveling the country with my camera. I never wanted “to be” a writer though. I think even back then I knew I was a writer already.
Tell us about your latest book.
Kill Me is a quirky paranormal novel full of magic and mystique. It’s set at a music industry convention, so there are plenty of guitar bits and even an enchanted violin. There’s also a non-traditional love triangle and some serious Vamp mojo going on. At the center of all of that is Claire, a somewhat naïve mother just trying to hold together her crumbling life. Boy was she in for a rude awakening!
Do you have anything new in the works and can you tell us a bit about it?
Sure! I’m working on the second book in the Blood Chord series now, called Kiss Me. It’s a follow up to Kill Me and it builds on some of the things I stared in the first book. I’m also working on another novel now about a girl who begins dreaming of her past lives while ravens follow her everywhere.
What advice would you give to writers just starting out?
Read a lot of books. I’m always flabbergasted when I meet a writer that claims they don’t read very often. How can they expect to learn the craft if they don’t study it? Other than that, I’d tell someone just starting out to write every day without fail. Nothing can improve their writing but doing a lot of it.
Do you ever suffer from writer’s block? If so, what do you do about it?
I suffer from procrastination, which is a distant cousin of writer’s block. I can come up with five-hundred reasons to avoid writing, but once I sit down and make myself start things usually kick into place. It’s a constant battle, one that I don’t always win. But I fight the good fight every day regardless.
Who is your favorite author and why?
I adore Jodie Picoult. The way she cuts right to the meat of human fallibility is pure genius. She’s not afraid to tackle the tough subjects with unbiased finesse. She’s who I’d like to be when I grow up. That or Anne Rice.
Where do you as an author draw the line on gory descriptions and/or erotic content?
I’m fairly open-minded when it comes to explicit content or violence, but it has to serve a purpose. For example, Kill Me has a few adult moments, but only one scene is actually on-camera because it furthered plot and development of several characters in the novel. That’s also why I contained most of the violence in Kill Me to the last few chapters—I wanted it to stand out more because those scenes are important.
Don’t forget to give us links to your website etc.
QuirkyGurl Media- http://www.quirkygurl.com
The Blood Chord Series site: http://bloodchordseries.wordpress.com
Kill Me on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007UPOLR6
Author Bio:
Alex Owens is a woman with little free time, which means she stays up all hours of the night putting pen to paper. By day she’s June Cleaver in jeans, and by night she writes. Somewhere in the middle of all that she finds time to tend ‘dem babies, fry up the bacon and curl up with a good book (or ten), much to the chagrin of her family.
