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Welcome to Up Around the Corner, Emma. Please, please
us a little about yourself and your writing.
First of all, thank
you for giving me this opportunity! To tell you a little about myself, I’m 27, born
and raised in Stockholm, Sweden, where I live with my boyfriend. I work part
time as an administrator and am currently studying towards a BA in Arabic with
Middle Eastern Studies, with a focus on Arabic Linguistics. I love languages
and learning in general, and I consider myself a bit of a geek. Outside of
work, school and my writing, I enjoy hanging out with my friends and talking
for hours on end, binging on TV shows, taking walks, drinking tea, playing The
Sims 2, doing my nails and organizing things! Seriously, give me a bag of mixed
beads and some containers and I’ll be happy as Larry.
I’ve liked writing
for as long as I’ve known how to hold a pen, and I was 11 when I first decided
I wanted to be an author “when I grew up”. During my adolescence I spent
countless hours doing text based role playing, primarily in a Harry Potter
fan-RP setting, and wrote dozens of first chapters that never got a second
chapter. Eventually I started doing NaNoWriMo regularly, which led to finally
learning how to write more than a chapter of the same story, but even so it
wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I really started taking myself
seriously as a writer. Teaching myself that writing is something I’m allowed to
put a lot of time and effort into, even when I have assignments to work on,
rather than just a hobby was what led me to finally publishing my first book, a
novella called Going Home in the winter of 2014. I am currently in the
later stages of editing its sequel, which is called Dress Rehearsal Rag
and will be available in digital formats in early-mid June. I write in a range
of genres but, with some exceptions, my stories tend to fall somewhere under
the “speculative fiction” umbrella.
You appear to be a quite busy person, Emma. How do you
prioritize so that you manage to find time for writing?
I do tend to be happiest when I have a lot of projects
going, though it does get a bit much at times. The two keys to finding time for
writing, for me, are permission and planning. The first is mental and
emotional. I’ve come to a point where I’ve realized that I’m permitted to
prioritize my writing, as long as my bills are paid and nothing in the kitchen
is sprouting legs. I’m allowed to put writing before schoolwork, social
activities and other projects, when I feel that’s something I need to do. That
perspective is becoming easier and easier to maintain, but I still need to
remind myself at times.
The planning part is more practical. I use various apps and
systems to keep track of my plans on a long term basis (months and years) and a
short term basis (weeks and days), and I use to-do lists religiously to
schedule all my projects, including writing, into my daily life. On Mondays I
post an update on my blog about what I’ve been up to in the week before and
what my goals for the coming week are, and usually once I’m done I’ll assign
the goals on that list to different days of the week. Planning helps me keep
focused and keeps me from losing track of my writing amid everyday activities.
In what languages do
you write, and work to have your works published?
Although Swedish is
my native language, I mostly write in English. I’ve always been very fond of
the language and enjoyed expressing myself in it, so I started writing poetry
and some fiction in English when I was about 13. Around that age I started
spending time online, making friends in other countries and of course the
lingua franca then was English. The people on online messaging boards or
websites like deviantArt were my first audience, so it felt natural to produce
things in English. I was also very into text-based roleplaying, and through
that I was writing interactive (fan)fiction in English, sometimes for hours
every day, for several years. I think that’s why at this point writing fiction
in English comes more easily to me than writing it in Swedish; those muscles
are just more toned.
And then there’s the
question of the market and who to sell books to. There’s no escaping that you
reach a larger audience with English. That’s not to say I never write in
Swedish, but since it’s more practical from a market perspective to write in
English and I find it as easy, or perhaps even easier than to write in
Swedish, I have decided that I will only write longer works in Swedish if I
have a concrete reason (such as a story being set in present-day Sweden). I
plan to write a YA fantasy series in Swedish at some point, set in a small
Swedish town, but that’s still in the “simmering” stage where the idea isn’t
ready to be worked with yet.
Once in a very blue
moon, I write something in Arabic, which is a different experience altogether
because my level is obviously not as high in that language and my vocabulary is
very small. It’s challenging, but a lot of fun.
What is one place in the world that you would like to
visit and why?
Oh gosh, that’s a hard question! There are a lot of places
I’d like to visit, but I think right now New Zealand is on top of my list. The
main reason for that is that most of my closest writing friends happen to be
there, the people I consider to be part of my writing “tribe”. These are people
who have been very supportive of my writing, and great sources of inspiration
and friendship and it would just be so lovely to be able to go on a writing
retreat or something with them. I met most of them during Camp NaNo a couple of
years ago, when I somehow became the one Sweden in a cabin full of people from
NZ and Australia.
Second on my list are the mountains in Lebanon.
That sounds like a great choice, Emma. What works have
you had published to date and what are you working on now?
I published my debut novella, Going Home, in December
2014 and my second one, Dress Rehearsal Rag, which is a sequel to the
first, was released just a few days. They detail the lives of a group of
people, particularly my main character Orryn, who live in a dystopian society
where sameness is valued and originality is frowned upon. The books are very
relationship-focused, however. So as you can see, I’m quite new at this! I did
publish a poetry book in my teens, too, but that’s not currently for sale
anywhere.
Everyone has to start
somewhere and it appears that you’re on your way.
Final Question: If
you could have one individual (famous, infamous, or otherwise) read one of your
works who would that be and why?
That’s a tough one!
I’d probably wait a few years until I’ve got more works to choose from. But if
that’s not an option, I’d send a copy of Going Home to Leonard Cohen.
Both books in this series are named after songs by him, after all.
Makes sense, Emma. Thanks for taking the time to answer
my questions and share your thoughts.
If you’d like to learn more about Emma Lindhagen and her
works, check out these links:
Twitter: @EmmaLindhagen
Books on Smashwords:
Books on Amazon:
