Renee Conoulty is an Australian Air Force wife and mother of two. She writes stories of dance, romance, and military life. She also narrated her own audio book, then wrote a book about it!

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:                  Welcome to Write with Love. I’m your host, Sarah Williams, bestselling author, speaker and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published. Some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do.

Sarah Williams:                  Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now, here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:                  G’day. I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today, I’m chatting to Renee Conoulty. Thanks for joining me, Renee.

Renee Conoulty:              Hi. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:                  No worries. Can you tell us about yourself and your journey to publication?

Renee Conoulty:              Okay. I never had a plan for publication. I never had a plan to write. It’s something that kind of snuck up on me by surprise. It probably started … I’ve always been an avid reader. So I’ve always loved reading. Big bookworm, and then when my hubby joined the military and we posted up to Darwin, I was looking for something to do because I was at home. I could only pick up a bit of part time work. Had the kids at home. I was like, “Well, I like reading. I’d love to join a book club.” But I found it really hard to actually get out of the house and go to a book club.

Renee Conoulty:              So I got online. I discovered this place called Goodreads and got lost in the abyss of Goodreads. I found a great group of people there to join and started reading almost competitively. I got up to about 275 books a year which is kind of a lot, but I saw myself as a reader, not a writer. I’d never been just into writing. I just didn’t think I could. I felt like writing corny poetry and dumb things that rhyme just to amuse myself, but a novel just was way too daunting. And all these books that I was reading were written by these authors that are these God-like creatures that sit over here and have creativity and can write. I’m not like that.

Renee Conoulty:              So after doing that for a little while, I started up a book review blog. Honestly, it was so I could get on to NetGalley and request free books.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah.

Renee Conoulty:              That’s why it started, which was great for me, and it was great for meeting authors. After I’d requested a few books and actually connected online with a few authors, and I discovered that authors are people. They’re like normal people like me. So that sort of made me think twice about things. Then I had a few people say, “Oh, you should write a book,” and encouraged me. Because writing this blog, I’d been writing silly little stories about things and writing book reviews. I had probably three different people say, “Oh, you should write a book.” I’m like, “I can’t write a book.