Tracey Alvarez is a USA TODAY BEST-SELLING author living in the Coolest Little Capital in the World (a.k.a Wellington, New Zealand). She’s a successful Indie author who writes steamy, small town New Zealand, contemporary romance.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:                  Welcome to ‘Write With Love’ I’m Sarah Williams, best selling author, speaker and creative entrepreneur.

Sarah Williams:                  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 Tracey Alvarez, thanks for joining me Tracey.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:                  No worries, so tell us about yourself, and your writing journey so far.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Okay, well I write contemporary romances, so far set in New Zealand, and I’ve been writing them since about 2010 but only started publishing in 2013. I’ve always written so I’ve been writing as far back as I can remember, one really bad novel when I was in my early 20s but it wasn’t until my kids were older that I started writing novels. So that’s pretty much how I got started back in 2010.

Sarah Williams:                  Brilliant, so you’ve been writing for a long time, did you have a few ready to go when you started publishing?

Tracey Alvarez:                 No, because before that, when my kids were little, when they still had naps, I would write short stories. So I had quite a few short stories published in New Zealand Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day, New Idea, that sort of thing, when they still published short stories. And one or two competitions and then when the kids started getting older it wasn’t so easy to find time to write, and I actually home schooled them for quite a number of years so that kind of went on the byside and it wasn’t until they went to school that I actually had the time to write longer works and now I cannot write short.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, I completely understand, I have four kids, they’re all at primary school and there’s no way I would have been able to home school them at all, let alone try and write as well.

Tracey Alvarez:                 We haven’t got enough brain power for that.

Sarah Williams:                  So, pre-writing, did you ever do any courses or anything like that about writing or you had a different [crosstalk 00:02:55]

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’ve done lots of online courses, I’ve never done something like university level creative writing or anything like that, but I have done tons of online writing courses, everything from craft to marketing, to you name it, and I’ve still got all of the notes on my hard drive. So, I feel like I’ve done my dues learning my craft as best I can, yeah.