I noticed this when I met Diamond during the holiday season at a poetry reading. Immediately curious about her, I introduced myself, feeling sure I'd be able to get a story or two out of her.
Did I ever. Mrs. Drake has recently released her first novel, Imagined Love. Imagined Love paints the portrait of a young woman's lonely desperation and the tribulations she undergoes after acting on that loneliness.
Readers have been raving about the book's thrilling plot, so I interviewed Diamond to share some of her process here on Paper Dollz to give readers a little insight into how she balances motherhood and writing.
Please tell us about how you became a writer~ what drew you to it? A need to communicate your feelings and experiences? When did you start?
I've been writing poetry and short stories since I was in the first grade. It started as a way to express my feelings but it quickly turned to loving the attention I got from my teacher, parents, and other kids. They always thought I was much older because of the types of things I wrote about and it made me feel like a grown up.
Then it became a part of my life. For years I would get ideas in the middle of the night and instead of getting up to turn on the light and find some paper, I wrote on my closet door! I thought my mom was going to kill me when she finally saw it but it was my "creative process." Ha,ha,ha.
Love that you wrote on your closet door! What an amazing story. In "Imagined Love" the heroine's journey is similar to your life journey. Most writers draw from their experiences. Can you tell us how you made the leap from your experiences to imagining a different life for your character?
In Imagined Love, Jade's journey IS similiar to mine in that she had to deal with some of the same issues. She differs in the way she chose to handle those situations. In some ways Jade dealt with them in the way I wished I had and in other instances she did things I would never have dreamed of doing! I have to admit that writing this book was like therapy for me. I learned so much about myself and was able to heal some of those old wounds I've carried for years. The challenge, in writing things based on truth, is keeping it fictionalized. There's enough truth to make it relatable but it's still a work of fiction.
As a mother, how do you balance the time demands of writing with taking care of your family?
Sometimes it is difficult to balance being a wife and mother with being a writer particularly because of the way I write. I don't have a designated time that I write everyday. When things hit me, I get up to write and that can be at ten o'clock at night or four o'clock in the morning. The characters' voices and images are so strong that they do wake me up from a sound sleep or make me stop what I'm doing to write down what they say! Thankfully I have a family that gets me and knows when I'm in "write" mode that I just need to be free to do it. Also, doing things ahead of time (like cooking a week's worth of meals) helps free me up to write fairly uninterrupted. However, my family knows that they are my priority. I don't miss school functions or things that are important to them in order to write.
What is the greatest joy you get as a writer? The biggest challenge?
The greatest joy I get from writing is making people feel. I loved the reviews I've received so far because the thing each reader had in common was that they felt every single emotion I wanted them to feel. They laughed out loud, cried, became angry, and felt sad at certain parts. That's music to my ears! Knowing the reader cared about what I wrote made all of those sleepless nights totally worth it.
The biggest challenge, I found, was knowing when enough was enough. I tend to be wordy (as you probably noticed) and sometimes I found myself going way too long on a particular scene or subject. It was at those times that I had to look at it from the perspective of a reader and ask myself if it was just too much. Thankfully, that worked for me and I was able to self-edit and know when it was time to move on.I noticed on your website you wrote 4 other novels.When do we get to see those? Can you give us a preview of one?
As far as the other four novels go, I think at some point I will go through and rewrite them. It's been almost twenty years since I wrote them and they served more as a tutorial of what I did wrong! I understand now what editors and other professionals were trying to tell me back then but I was too young and arrogant to really hear them. I'm currently working on the sequel to Imagined Love but perhaps after I'm done with that I'll pull out all four of them and see which one "speaks" to me!
Can't wait to see your other work. Until then, best of luck with your first novel, Diamond!
To Purchase Imagined Love, please go to www.diamonddrakebooks.com.
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