About Hannah Lynn
Hannah Lynn was born in 1984 and grew up in the Cotswolds, UK. After graduating from university, she spent ten years as a teacher of physics, first in the UK and then around Asia. It was during this time, inspired by the imaginations of the young people she taught, she began writing short stories for children, and later adult fiction. Her first novel, Amendments, was published in 2015, her latest novel, The Afterlife of Walter Augustus, is out July 2018. Now as a teacher, writer, wife and mother, she is currently living in the Austrian Alps.
Twitter – https://twitter.com/HMLynnauthor
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/HannahLynnAuthor
Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13830772.Hannah_M_Lynn
Works of Hannah Lynn
Amendments
The Afterlife of Walter Augustus
I won’t just stick to one genre, so stop asking me
When I announced that I was releasing my second novel I got a lot of exciting messages. Friends, twitter followers, my mother-in-law, all wanting to know the same things. What happened to Gabe and Em? Was Fi really dead? Could there really be such a thing as a third amendment? Well, I had to explain, this isn’t the follow up to Amendments. Faces fell. But was it the same type of thing? they asked. No, not really. This one’s contemporary fiction. Cue more confused faces. But you write speculative fiction? New Adult Fiction? Yes and some day I will write a follow up to Amendments, in fact it will almost certainly end up as a trilogy. It’s just not the book I’m writing right now.
I can’t speak for other authors, just for myself, but when I have a good idea for a story hit me, I know about it. (You can even find an article about it somewhere in Enthralled magazine.) The things is, that idea doesn’t feel the need to conform to one particular form of genre. Amendments was NA. Unfortunately, when I released it NA wasn’t exactly a big thing, it was either YA or Adult. However, when I was writing it I didn’t give a monkeys what genre it was. I didn’t even think about how I would market it. These were the characters I wanted to build my world around, this was was the story I wanted to tell.
I hindsight, that was extremely naive of me. Perhaps I could be infinitely more successful if I did stick to one genre and write exactly for that audience so people know what their getting when it comes to one of my books. In fact, I am almost positive I would be. Perhaps I will reach a point in my writing career where I settle down and decide that yes, humorous fiction, or contemporary fiction, or speculative fiction is the genre for me, but right now my brain doesn’t work like that. I write for me and I write the stories that ask me to write them.
Please don’t take this to mean I will cut off my nose to spite my face. I realise in the world of commercialism an artists’ work often undergoes adjustments in order to make it more appealing to a wider audience and I appreciate that. Of course I will make changes to my story based on the feedback and advice from critiques and editors and beta readers, but generally speaking, the theme and the characters of my book are what dictates my writing.
It’s also part of a learning curve. Writers must foremost be readers first, (although I’ll be honest, sometimes it’s difficult to remember that with so many ideas begging to written) and how many readers confine themselves to one genre? I know I don’t. I may lean towards Science fiction or contemporary, but I’m quite happy to lose myself in a thriller too. While I have been writing for many years I am most definitely a new writer. I need practice. I need to be sure of my voice. Experimenting with different genres helps me do that.
So, I apologise if people were hoping for an Amendments sequel, or if people who read The Afterlife of Walter Augustus then head to Amendments and are surprised to find it just a little bit darker than expected. I’m not playing games or switching genres to confuse people. I’m just developing as a writer, that’s all. I plan on doing this for a long time and while I can’t guarantee what I’ll create along the way, you can be sure I will give it my all.
The author’s upcoming book The Afterlife of Walter Augustus will be available on Amazon from July 12, 2018.
