Author Seána Kee lives in southeast Wisconsin. She used to work as a copy editor but had to give up the job because of repetitive motion injuries. Now, she works for a fair-trade distributor. Seána has always been an oral storyteller and started writing in high school. As support was lacking, she hid her work from everyone for the next 30 years; only her husband knew. She wrote over 20 novels, “some of them well over 500,000 words, almost none worth cleaning up to publish now“. In 2017 or 2018, Seána met someone online who inspired her to give her an entire story to sit and read at once. That was the Kindle story “Haru”, published in 2019. She chose a pen name to keep “Haru” a secret from her family – although in the past year or two she has started letting some close people in on her secret. Meanwhile, she has discovered the necessity of brevity, beta readers, and editors – “although I think brevity may be a nemesis for the rest of my life!” When Seána isn’t writing, she enjoys nature photography, traveling, and listening to people’s life stories. Also, she just learned to loom knit and is “kind of obsessed right now”.
Which genres do you cover?
Seána Kee: The Pacifica trilogy is light sci-fi. I call the Made Things series “1974 East Coast America with magic,” which I suppose is urban fantasy. However, all my stories focus heavily on characters and the themes of family, overcoming, and achieving, which far outweighs the setting of, say, a futuristic colony world, or the occurrence of magic.
Which is the latest book you had published, and what is it about?
Seána Kee: “Robert’s Pen,” book 2 in the Made Things series. In book 1 Robert discovered he had certain abilities, which he shares with a very large family he didn’t know he had until now. In book 2 he’s trying to find the balance between keeping away from his unethical cousins yet learning from them how his abilities work, and exploring what he can do while still maintaining his moral compass.
At which book events can readers find you?
Seána Kee: None so far.
Which book event connecting you with readers is your favorite and why?
Seána Kee: I haven’t done any live events, but I do post a daily thought on my Facebook page, and I love interacting with people through the comments.
Do you have any specific messages to your readers and, if so, which are they?
Seána Kee: I think my stories all carry a message of what family is, regardless of shared DNA. They’re about the bonds between people and what holds us together, even if our biological family has, for any reason, been torn apart. There is also the message of being an ordinary person who can overcome life’s obstacles. They’re not stories of sudden superheroes or “that’s well and good for HIM, but it doesn’t apply to ME”. Even Robert doesn’t achieve because he has magic – he achieves because of who he is and who he has around him, because he listens and learns and CARES. In fact, the magic doesn’t even work UNLESS he cares. I think that’s a magic inside all of us.
Which writer(s) keep(s) inspiring you and why?
Seána Kee: Patricia McKillip has a beautiful way with words. Every time I read one of her books, I think, “I could never come up with a phrase like that. I love these word pictures.”
Do you have specific writing habits?
Seána Kee: This is hard to answer because I’m currently in a state of transition. I used to sit at my computer and let words flow out of my hands. I dream up narration or dialogue, and words form on the page with punctuation in all the right places, without me having to think about it. Having a recurring and debilitating injury means I can no longer type for more than a few minutes at a time. I have a voice to text program, but my brain hasn’t caught up to it. I don’t think out loud, in speech, and having to speak all the punctuation makes it choppy and stilted. It completely changes the way the story gets from my head to the page, and it’s not smooth going yet.
What are you currently working on?
Seána Kee: “Skrift’s Penance,” book 3 in the Made Things series. At the end of book 2 Robert accidentally does something terrible, and through all of book 3 he’s trying to put things to rights again. Of course, absolutely nothing goes as planned.
Which book are you currently reading simply for entertainment?
Seána Kee: I recently finished listening to Robin McKinley’s “The Blue Sword” on audiobook. (I’ve read the print version at least half a dozen times.) I think my next for-fun read is going to be a reread of Diana Wynne Jones’ book “House of Many Ways” (book three in the Howl’s Moving Castle series) – unless the library comes through for me with “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” which I’ve watched many times but never read.
What advice would you give any aspiring author?
Seána Kee: First, don’t decide you’re going to make money writing books, then force yourself to write one. Write because the story is in you and wants out. Write because you enjoy writing. Write even if you never sell anything, because the end goal is the writing itself, not the recognition for it. Love the process of storytelling, then let it out into the world. Second, hone your craft. If you’ve never written anything in your life, don’t expect the first thing you put on paper to be a best-selling novel. You need to work at it – at developing plotlines, at writing coherent sentences, at weeding out the unnecessary. This goes back to enjoying your craft before you try to make money at it. If you don’t enjoy the learning process, you won’t be able to stick with it long enough to achieve anything.
You can find Seána Kee’s books at Amazon.
