Links Mentioned in This Episode:

Nightmares of My Own: Short Stories

How to reach Terra Luft:

• Website
• Facebook

The Resilient Writers Radio Show: Interview with Terra Luft – Full Episode Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state.

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.

Rhonda:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. Today, I'm here with Utah writer, Terra Luft. She is a speculative fiction author whose imagination mostly conjures dark tales, which is incredible. Terra holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and English with a minor in communications from Southern New Hampshire University. And she's also got a Master's of Science in Management and Leadership. And she is the, membership chair of The League of Utah Writers. Her latest book is Nightmares of My Own, collection of short stories. Welcome Terra. So glad you're here.

Terra:

Thanks Rhonda. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Rhonda:

Tell me a little bit about your writing journey. Like when did you start writing and when did you start taking it, you know, seriously quote unquote?

Terra:

Yes. Seriously quote. Yes, for sure. I really started writing back in 2008. And at the time I was writing novel links and trying to figure it out on my own. I had a writing group and then I kind of branched out to try and find community. And in community is where I really found what I was missing alone in my kitchen, so to speak.

And so through that community, I've had a decade of published short stories. And most of the time when I tell people I have a new book coming out, they think novel. And really it's I have a story in a collection with a bunch of other people, which is harder for people to understand. And so, about probably three or four years ago, I started thinking I have published enough of my own short stories in various collections that I probably have enough to make a substantial collection of my own and maybe get something out there of my own. So I started working on that about probably three years ago and it just came out in December of 2024.

Rhonda:

Congratulations, that's so great.

Terra:

Thank you.

Rhonda:

What is it about the short story that you love? Why have you concentrated your attention there?

Terra:

Two words, instant gratification. It is so much easier to craft a short story, edit a short story and then sell a short story. The noveling game is not for the faint of heart. It is a long game. It's a tougher game. And so while I was doing all the other things in my life, like getting my education, I work full time in the healthcare IT.

There's a lot going on and there's not a lot of time to focus solely on writing novels. And so it kept my skills sharp. It helped me grow my skillset in shorter chunks. And then I had publishing credentials that I could use to, when it's time, hopefully get an agent and get traditionally published. So that's the, that's the why, I guess.

Rhonda:

Okay, great. Wow. And so speculative fiction, mostly dark. So talk a little bit about the inspiration for the stories in the current collection.

Terra:

Yeah, even when I am writing to theme. So most of the collections that I've been in, there is a theme that you're submitting for so that that's how they tie the stories together. And even if the theme is something that you're smelling, everything goes to paranormal or fantastical. I don't say that I'm a horror writer straight because I just have elements of horror in most of my stories. It's more like, you know, paranormal and all those things. And I think it's because that's what I love to read. That's what I love to watch. That's my, that's where I live.

Rhonda:

So, okay. So you'd like the thrills and chills.

Terra:

Yes. Psychological is the best place to mess with people.

Rhonda:

Okay. Great. Yeah.

Terra:

So, yeah.

Rhonda:

I think it's important to write what you like to read. You know, I think so many people think, Oh, I should write some, you know, great American novel but actually they love reading romances. It's important because it's gonna take you a while. How long were you working on the collection?

Terra:

So writing it took about 10 years because they were just the ones that came out. One of them I completely rewrote. So this does have a brand new short story in the collection. And that part of it and figuring out how to do all the things that you don't know when you're self publishing. There's also a steep learning curve to that. So putting it all together, figuring out the story themes and knowing that there was a theme that was really hard. It probably took a good year probably to do the really solid work.

I started thinking about this and declared it to the universe that it was something I was going to do in early 2023. And then the middle of the summer in 2023, my work, my day job exploded and there's this giant project that took all my time and really I'm exhausted. So it took me a lot longer. And I kind of at first I said to myself, you know, I could wait two more years. What's two more years?

And then I had a friend who recommended me your Book Finishers Bootcamp. And I went to that bootcamp last summer and it really was like, Hey, you know what? It's never going to be the perfect time. You shouldn't wait.

Rhonda:

Never.

Terra:

No, never, perfect time. And so I didn't wait.

Rhonda:

So you did last summer's bootcamp?

Terra:

I did. Yeah. It was great because it really was what I needed to like pushed me over that  you don't have to write every day. You don't have to be this, you know, whatever it is that you've pictured in your mind. You can just write when you have time and as long as it's consistent. So I buckled down and I said, okay, I'm going to do this.

And you know, I camp a lot in the summer. And so every weekend that was my writing time. And, whatever I could get done on the weekends, that's what I did. And that was enough. And it took me a year, but it was a year less than it would have taken me to even get started if I had had that previous mindset of I won't even try until the timing is perfect.

Rhonda:

Yeah. I think you have that in common with so many writers, I mean most of us have, if we don't have a full-time job, we have a part-time job, kids, elder care, you know, like there's a lot just man keeping groceries in the house and getting some clean laundry, you know, like it's a lot.

Terra:

Exactly.

Rhonda:

We're not full time writers you know. None of us are when we're starting out where, you know, we're doing that first book. We're not Nora Roberts. You know, she can spend four hours a day writing. Most of us can’t.

Terra:

Yup.

Rhonda:

So, what's your writing life like now as you kind of post-bootcamp as your, you know, fitting it into the rest of your life. What does that look like for you?

Terra:

I know that I will write at least once a week minimum. And my goal, so now I'm writing, I'm revisioning my best novel that I've done. I've written like four of them, but never revised any to get them published.

 Rhonda:

Okay.

Terra:

So I picked the one that's my favorite and I'm revising it now. And my goal is two writing sessions a week because I feel like, even if it's just two days on the weekend, I can manage that. And 3000 words a week. And at that rate, I have eight months before I propose that I should be done with the new revisions.

Rhonda:

Wow. That's great. What's your, what's this novel about? 

Terra:

It is a urban fantasy where a woman who has been raised by a mother who she always thought was a little on the mentally challenged spectrum and because she thinks that she's being chased by another kind of person who's out to get her, she finds out that her mom was not making it all up in her head and it really was happening.

Rhonda:

Oh, someone was out to get her. 

Terra:

Yes. Yes. And the stakes are that the entire human race might be at risk if she doesn't get involved.

Rhonda:

Oh, fun. Okay. Yeah. Um, so you do go speculative all the time. You're like.

Terra:

Yeah, all the time.

Rhonda:

That's where you go. I love that. It's, I think it's really important to kind of follow that instinct  of, no, this is where, this is what I naturally gravitate towards. You know, I think that's how you find your material and your voice as a writer. So when you were writing camping, like, like you're at a campsite writing at a, like picnic table. How were you doing that?

Terra:

Uh, my husband and I have a cabin lot that is like our own camp spot, but our trailer, our camping trailer stays there all summer. So it's sort of like a home away from home, but it's in the camp chair around the fire. It's at the table inside the trailer if it's windy, but there's really no one else around and no distractions.

Rhonda:

Oh, that's so great. And you've got a little bit of nature. love that. So what did you take away from the book finisher's bootcamp that was so know, instrumental in helping you decide, I am going to finish this book and get it out into the world. 

Terra:

If I had to sum it up in one topic, it was that perfectionism is the killer of your dreams. And my tendency is to do everything as a perfectionist. And I felt like if I didn't have a hundred percent of the perfect setup to be able to, you know, write every day or every, at least some time of day, that I wasn't gonna be enough invested to make enough progress to say that I was writing a novel.

Rhonda:

That’s a sad part.

Terra:

I know, right?

Rhonda:

Yeah, yeah.

Terra:

Yeah, so, and in the bootcamp, was like, you break it down into such a great, easy to think about, and you dispel the myths of perfectionism that there are not a very many of us that can actually write every single day. And if you can, that's a gift. But if you're at the dance studio waiting for your little one to get done with dance, that's an hour or a half hour that you could just be writing. And that's enough.

Rhonda:

Yeah, it's interesting. I for years had this idea of, you know, I'm waiting until I've got like two, three, four full hours. And I was a single parent going to graduate school at night. Like, I never had that kind of time. And I don't know anyone really who does. And sometimes folks will retire and they'll say to me, oh, I thought I would have so much more time. And in theory, they do. But because it's not structured, it tends to evaporate, know? So yeah, time is our biggest struggle as writers, I think, yeah.

Terra:

And I feel like if you can make time, whatever that time is, and then make it a consistent carve out of your time, that's when you become a habitual writer. Whether that habit is a three hour writing session at a coffee shop on Saturday mornings before your family gets up. Or it's from nine to 10 after everyone goes to bed, you're still building that habit. And that consistency is what will make the difference between finishing and not finishing whatever you're starting.

Rhonda:

So how do you feel now that you've kind of, you've got a book of your own out into the world? Like how, what's, what's changed for you?

Terra:

Oh, it is. It's always been my dream. Cause when people say, why do you write? And I think, you know, at some point I just want to see my book somewhere with just my name on the cover. And I never thought that the first one would just be short stories, but it also represents a ton of time and effort that I've put in. So it, for me, is sort of like, oh, you've done that now, what's next?

Rhonda:

Oh, great. So it gave you this push.

Terra:

Yes.

Rhonda:

Nice. So, tell me, I love the cover, by the way. Did you do that? Tell me a little bit about your self-publishing journey. How did it go?

Terra:

So I have said for many years that I always want to do traditional because I don't have time to figure out or the skills to do all of the work that you have to do  because the  publishing journey is the same depending on who does it, right? Either you figure it out or you hire it out or you have an agent who hires it out for you. And I have a very, you know, I have a full-time job and two kids and a household and I don't have the skills, I'm not a graphic artist, all that.

So I have a friend who is a very successful independent author and she sat me down and said, okay, here's what you need to do. Here's the order you need to do it in. And then I have another friend who runs a developmental editing company who was like, here's the best website that we go to for, that we send our clients to for cover design. And I went to that recommendation and I found a design that was amazing and it called to my heart and I knew that that was mine. I just thought about it.

Rhonda:

It's perfect. Yeah, it's great. So good. So how long did it take you kind of from, know, okay, I'm going to, so you've got the stories written. How long did the publishing process take you? And you were figuring it out on your own.

Terra:

Longer than I thought that it was going to, right? And I think that was my takeaway is that everything took probably twice as long as I had anticipated. So I hired out my formatting for the inside. I didn't wanna have to learn another product. I didn't have time. So I hired that out. Yes. So I hired that out and then.

There was, I did it out of order. So proofreading should have happened before we did layout and I didn't catch a bunch of stuff. Um, so I think that I,  I sent it to my, I started compiling the order it would be in and trying to figure out a title probably in May or June. So it took most of the summer to really like figure out the interior and get the order right before I could send it to the formatter.

Rhonda:

And I'm curious, how do you make those decisions? Because a collection is, like, I think of putting a collection together where it's, whether it's poetry, essays, stories, the pieces have to speak to each other in a certain way. Like, how did you make that decision to curate the collection, to pull it together?

Terra:

So my, my genres are not one, they're all tied together with psychological speculative stuff. So I really, I went through and I read all of them and I labelled them as this is the genre that they are. And then I kind of grouped them together by genre. I started the reader on a journey from sci-fi through contemporary horror to the paranormal at the end. And then I had to figure out what the theme was that tied them all together. And the only thing that there was, it was either a nightmare that someone was living in the story, or they had come from a what if idea that was sort of nightmarish. And so that became the title.

Rhonda:

Okay. And then you had your title then as well. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you pulled it together, you send it to your layout artist, and then they did the layout, but you hadn't proofed it yet. but it normally needs to be laid out before you proof it right like in traditional public you get the proofs when it's laid out. So are you expecting that to be different?

Terra:

No, I didn't realize how much there was in the proofing. I thought that was just a read through but it's really like, do the quotations all thematically remain consistent through the book?  If I'm quoting a song lyric here and poetry here, do they physically look the same in the book? Those were types of things I hadn't considered that I would have to know.  I also found that my, because it was short stories, that other people had published originally, their style guides were different. And so then when they're all together, some of the styles were different between interior. So then I had to go back and sort of change some of those.

So that took a while.  I think we did three different proofs with significant changes in them.  And I think I got my first proof, I would say late September, early October. And then it also took much longer than I thought to get the, I thought that it was you pushed a button and you say publish, and then all of sudden, magically it's on Amazon, right? And all the other places. It takes weeks for them to get it ready and to be ready for them to print on demand and all the things. So that took a lot longer than I thought as well. And I would say I was ready to probably push the button in early December and then it didn't actually come out until middle of December. So, All right. And so the time.

Rhonda:

What do you feel like you've learned from doing the short story collection that you're bringing to the novel? 

Terra:

I don't know actually, that's a great question.

Rhonda:

You must have learned a lot about craft if you're writing. How many stories are in the collection? A dozen?

Terra:

12 or 13, I think. Yeah, there's some poetry. So there's probably 11 stories and a couple of poems. So I would say that the your craft, my craft has completely and continuously evolved. The more I write, the better my craft is. Yeah. And so I could see my early stories that they were done well, but they were not as strong as the craft and the story I rewrote that was specifically for this collection is much stronger. And so  I believe that now also going through the whole collection and making sure that everything matches stylistically will also translate into further future projects as well.

Rhonda:

Yeah, for sure. I think there's nothing like that first learning experience, right? Where you do your first self-publishing experiment, really, and you learn everything. And now it won't take you three proofs the next time.

Terra:

Right. Exactly. So good.

Rhonda:

All right. Well, you'll have to come back and talk to me again when the novel is out. This is so great.

Terra:

I'd love to.

Rhonda:

Yeah. I'm so glad you did the boot camp. This is awesome. Yeah.

Terra:

Me too.

Rhonda:

Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for being with me, Terra. Terra's book, Nightmares of My Own, is available wherever you get your books, so grab a copy. Thank you, Tara.

Terra:

Thank you, Rhonda.

Outro:

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.

Your ratings and reviews tell the podcast algorithm gods that yes, this is a great show, definitely recommend it to other writers. And that will help us reach new listeners who might need a boost in their writing lives today as well. So please take a moment and leave a review. I'd really appreciate it. And I promise to read every single one. Thank you so much.