Keary Taylor Writes Local Novel What I Didn’t Say

Keary Taylor. Photo courtesy of Jenni Merritt.

what I didn't say

Keary Taylor was kind of lonely when she left her large extended family in Utah in 2008 to move to Orcas with her husband, Justin Taylor, and two-month old baby.

So at first, she read a lot. Then she started writing — and there’s no stopping her!

Keary will launch her latest book, a Young Adult novel set on Orcas Island, called What I Didn’t Say,  this Friday at 6 p.m. at the Orcas High School Commons. The public is welcome to attend the reading and a talk with Keary afterwards.

Keary, now just 24-years-old, has always been a writer. Her first publication was 200 pages of “fan fiction” for a Harry Potter book. Keary describes fan fiction as “writing your own story from someone else’s writing.” She explains that fan fiction is not meant for publication as anything other than fan appreciation. But 11 years ago she planned to be a nurse, and thought of writing as a hobby.

After moving to Orcas, however, writing made her feel better and she starting a historical fantasy set in the 1600s, with the working title Ever Burning. Then she started the hunt for a literary agent and after sending out submissions to some 40 agents, she decided, “It didn’t have much of a plot and was not that great a book.”

So in 2009 she set it aside, and while awaiting the birth of her son, she wrote Branded  in nine months. Branded  is the first volume in her trilogy Fall of Angels; it is followed by Forsaken and Vindicated, which grew out of demand from her internet readers for more.

While “taking a break” from writing the second title in the series, Forsaken, Keary branched out into science fiction by writing Eden. That book was published in December 2010, and within a year, its Facebook site had caught the eye of film producers. In December 2011, Keary and her husband signed a deal with Black Forest Film Group to produce Eden  as a movie.

All the while she’s been shopping for agents, but her books’ popularity have grown with internet marketing and social networking.   Now, 95 percent of her book sales are ebooks, with the lion’s share placed through Amazon.

Keary used Amazon’s “Create Space” program to publish her first books. As a print-on-demand service, it also provides the ISBN and I-span codes required by retailers, and issues royalties.

Her routine is to write in the mornings, while her children are at preschool, and then again after they go to bed at night. Her desk is the dining room table; she creates her books in Word.

“Music plays a heavy influence in my writing,” Keary says. Before writing her first drafts, seh develops a playlist to evoke the mood she’s seeking. What I Didn’t Say needed a thoughtful, romantic feeling, and so her musical soundtrack included “Somebody Wishes They Were You” by Adelitas Way, “Sympathy” by the Goo Goo Dolls, “White Balloons” by Sick Puppies, “Earth Stood Still” by Ledewyze and “Silence Remains” by Three Doors Down.

After the first draft, the music stops and she shares subsequent drafts with her beta reading group, her family and friends. She confers with her writing partner, Jenni Merritt, author of Prison Nation,  daily.

Although she hates Twitter, she spends at least an hour a day on it and other social networking sites.”I love to connect with readers; it’s an advantage to self-publishing, and it’s helped me become a better writer.”

If she faces a writing problem that threatens to block her, she shifts to something different, and will go to great lengths to work through a problem. For her new book, she started writing in the first person, then shifted to third person because she wanted a contrast between the book’s events and the main character’s thoughts and diary entries. But after polling her Facebook readers, she decided to rewrite the story all from the first person perspective.

Her advice to aspiring writers is “Believe in yourself and never give up. I took myself seriously when other people wouldn’t.”

Treating her writing “hobby” as a job has payed off for Keary Taylor. Her success is “extremely satisfying, having worked so hard. Everything’s difficult, there’s nothing easy about writing — for a time.” She has learned editing, plotting and advertising through her mistakes, she says. Now the challenge is time management.

And she’s going to tackle that problem by taking a vacation from writing — for a month. Starting June 1, she’ll be back at her dining room table, writing more stories.

Keary Taylor will launch What I Didn’t Say at Orcas High School Commons on Friday, May 11 at 6 p.m. The book will be available at Darvill’s Bookstore.