Today my guest is Amy Anguish.

Amy R Anguish grew up a preacher’s kid, and in spite of having lived in seven different states that are all south of the Mason Dixon line, she is not a football fan. Currently, she resides in Tennessee with her husband, daughter, and son, and usually a bossy cat or two. Amy has an English degree from Freed-Hardeman University.

Follow her at http://abitofanguish.weebly.com or http://www.facebook.com/amyanguishauthor

Here’s what Amy has to say about what goes on in the head of an author.

When Gail first mentioned the topic to me, I thought about writing it like a conversation between myself and my brain. Then, I decided that might scare off any potential readers, so we’re going to go a different direction today. Through the years, I have had quite a few jobs, from taking in sewing to teaching preschool to being a legal assistant. Unfortunately, after a while, an author runs out of jobs to give her characters that she actually has experience with unless she makes them all basically the same. I suppose I could do that, but wouldn’t it get boring to always read about teachers or authors or legal assistants? So, what’s a girl to do?

Google is a huge help. But so are friends. I love sending emails to friends or family members who actually work in the jobs I have my characters working so I can pick their brain. It also keeps me from wasting too much time online. I find that if I get online to do a “quick search” for something, say the technical term for that tool a doctor uses to look in people’s ears (it’s an otoscope, by the way), that leads me to remembering that I was going to do [insert mundane thing here] or trolling Facebook or letting myself be lost in the abyss that is called Pinterest. It’s much easier to stay offline as much as possible when I’m supposed to be actually putting words to paper.

Now, if you’ve followed the whole train of this post, you can see a little into the way my brain works. Ha! I started out with my original idea, went from there to how I have to do research every now and then since I can’t make my characters all have the same job, and from there to the random train of thought of how easily distracted I get if I let myself. My brain really is like that meme that says a woman’s brain is like a browser with 2,857 tabs open all the time. And to think, I really meant to write about how I’m a “plantser”—a combination of a planner and pantser when I write. Maybe next time?