Welcome to the 5 Minutes Series. Each week, I’ll ask five questions of some of my favorite authors, editors, publishers, and other industry professionals. This week I’m with my dear friend and regular co-conspirator, author Kimberly Cooper Griffin.
First, and most importantly, if you could only eat one kind of pizza for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
The short answer to this question is there is no better pizza than a BBQ chicken pizza from Woodie’s Wood Fired Pizza in Carlsbad, California. I will die on this hill to defend this assertion.
The long answer to this is that I might be one of the few people on this planet who isn’t a pizza fan. I blame this on the Little Caesar’s pizzeria just outside of the main gate of the base I was stationed at in Biloxi, Mississippi for tech school. They delivered for free and had a deal for two large pizzas for five dollars. Being a poor airman who had a hard time with the salty food they served in the chow hall, I basically lived on pizza and all these years later, I’m still not a big fan.
Tell me about your most recent release?
My most recent release is Sweet Spot which came out in August and is the second book in my Oceana Series. Each of the books in the series can be read as a standalone, but they all revolve around a tight-knit community of people living in Oceana Mobile Home Park in Oceanside, California. Oceana is a fantasy community that lives in my head, but Oceanside, California is a real place and also happens to be my place of birth. Oceana is a special place and slightly magical, where the residents are brought there to fulfil a need they don’t even know they have. Shia is a rising star on the professional surfing circuit, and Rose is the new property manager of Oceana. Each of them is focused on their career and neither have time for a relationship, but when they meet, sparks fly. Despite agreeing on keeping it casual, things between them develop pretty quickly, until Shia’s life is turned upside down when someone she never expected to see again shows up. This is a story about balance and how sometimes trusting yourself and others close to you can be exactly what you need to reach your dreams.
Oceana means a lot to me. As I mentioned, I grew up in Oceanside, California and spent a lot of time on the beach and out on the water. As a young woman, I always longed to live in an ideal community with a group of friends who all just vibe together.
Along those lines, what are you working on right now?
I just sent the first set of edits for the third book in the Oceana series, Lost Harbor, back to my editor. Lost Harbor features Shia’s next-door neighbor, Alice and Alice’s long-lost love, Bridge. Alice and Bridge met and fell in love as nuns in a convent and were expelled when they were caught in bed together. This book explores second chances and overcoming differences. Lost Harbor will come out in February 2024.
I also just pitched a new book I’d like to write with a co-author to my publisher, and have a few other projects in the works.
Can you talk a little about your path to publication?
My path to publication is a “it’s not what you know, but who you know” set of circumstances. I’ve always been fascinated with writing, but my educational path focused on engineering. I wrote a lot when I was younger, and then I stopped for a while as my career took up so much of my time. But then I picked it up again in my forties, never thinking that I’d become a published author. One day, I found myself writing a story, and before I knew it, I had an entire novel-length manuscript written and I realized I’d found a passion for it. Based on that passion, I began to surround myself with other writers through meet ups and classes, and one thing led to another, and a friend helped me publish my first book, Life in High Def, through their imprint. That book won a Foreword Indies Book of the Year award, and I was hooked. I continued to write and published two other books under that imprint.
I was at a conference for the Golden Crown Literary Society when I met a fabulous person named Finnian Burnett who you may know.(Ed. Note. We’ve heard of them. Very strange person.) They encouraged me to enroll in the organization’s writing academy. It was through my time in the academy that I was paired up with my mentor, Radclyffe, who not only taught me so much more about writing and publishing, but she also offered me a contract on the project that I’d started in the academy. And that’s how I began publishing with my current publisher, Bold Strokes Books. All in all, I have published thirteen books, so far.
What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Write now, edit later.
I don’t know who told that to me the first time and I’ve been told it several times since by many others.
It’s so easy for me to worry about finding perfect words and sentence composition, wanting everything I write to be deep and meaningful. Maybe that works well for others but doing that will always pull me into a suck hole, holding my work captive. So, I force myself to keep writing to get the idea down with the intention to edit it later. This saves me so much time.
Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?
Why is it that all I can hear in my head now is Austin Powers saying, “You’re a weird bird, baby?”
The unfortunate truth is that I have never taken a picture of a weird bird but now I want to.
Finnian Burnett 