Shelley Lee Riley is the International award-winning author of Casual Lies—A Triple Crown Adventure. The memoir tells her story about Casual Lies, the horse she trained through all three American Triple Crown Races—the first woman to do so. After five years spent in the United Kingdom, she returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and, in her spare time, worked as a freelance writer for various publications.

Now retired in Oregon, she enjoys living in a forest, watching the deer clearcut the garden, the sounds of the Canadian geese roosting on the chimney, and the squirrels chewing the siding, the decking, and the sprinkler heads. While not engaged in repairs and replacement gardening, she enjoys writing fiction. https://shelleyleeriley.com

What is the most challenging part of your writing process? Finishing!

Everything is covered in dust. No, seriously, I’m a died-in-the-wool procrastinator. I have any number of ways to distract myself from the hard work that goes into finishing a novel. My most frequently employed method is writing the first sentence for a new story idea. Sometimes, I make it as long as an entire paragraph. On occasion, I’ll get as far as a few thousand words.

Therein lies the problem: some of those first lines are fleshed out enough to make the beginning of an intriguing story that needs to be written. So, what happens to them? They get stored away on my laptop in a file named Novel Ideas. There are currently twenty-one ideas wasting away in the wilderness of the Novel Idea folder, each collecting its layer of metaphorical dust. And who knows what tomorrow will bring? Ideas tend to strike at the most improbable times. I’ve been chewing on a new one since yesterday.

Examples abound: First example – TWELVE BODIES AND NO ACCOUNTABILITY! How could the justice system have gotten it so wrong? Detective Gideon Key, grizzled on a good day, sat at the back of the courtroom looking more like a vagrant than a decorated homicide detective.

Second example: – UNHEEDED, A SHADOW SEARCHES THE NIGHT, darting through the crowds. The street lights fade, only to brighten upon its passing. However, the shadow doesn’t go unnoticed, for there is one who knows what to look for and hunts the hunter.

My newest ploy to distract? A soirée into the highly competitive Children’s Picture Book arena. The following story exemplifies how a distraction can get expensive and far faster than you might think.

First, I needed to write a story; fortunately, one already existed in the Novel Ideas folder. Next, I needed to envision the characters, their appearance, and how each page would be laid out, i.e., cartoon, anime, or realistic. Next, the vision is ready to be rendered. Finding an illustrator should be easy. Right? Nope. I started with Fivver, where I’d found the artist I used for my middle-grade book, Labyrinth of Ruin. A Romanian student who was putting himself through college. It was a bit of a process, but it worked out in the end.

It soon became apparent that this Forty-page book with illustrations would cost between $850 and $2,500. Other sources quoted an illustration package costing between $4,000 and $60,000.

Well . . . that was an eye-opener. Undaunted and armed with a modicum of artistic talent and a closet full of art supplies collecting dust, I gathered what I thought I would need and sat down to create some of the most beautiful and colorful cartoons that could catch the eye of any three-year-old. Almost immediately, as I sat staring at a blank white page, I found myself looking for a distraction. . . I found one: Procreate Illustrator, and it was only $12.99.

Great idea, right? Even though I’m a point-and-click girl, I would do it all digitally. Resolutely, I picked up my sixteen-year-old, first-generation iPad, which still occasionally works, and prepared to buy and download Procreate for iPad. However, it can’t be done; my iPad is so old that it’s only suitable for collecting dust.

I would have to purchase a new iPad Air and all the accessories, including the Apple PencilPro, OtterBox iPad cover, and Procreate Illustrator for iPad. Let’s not forget the extended warranty and twenty-four-hour Apple support.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Spending money is the best distraction of all.

A week passed, and I rediscovered that my point-and-click aptitude needed vast improvement to conquer this challenging program. And two weeks later, I published my first children’s picture book, Leopold. So, not all distractions end up covered in dust.

Flushed with success and strutting around with my chest puffed out, I adapted a short story I wrote years ago as a children’s chapter book. I’ve just finished the cover, and as you might have guessed, when it began to get complicated, I found myself looking for a distraction.

“George,” I said. “Could I be featured on your blog?”

I hope this current set of distractions has made you smile.

Shelley is the author of Casual Lies – A Triple Crown Adventure, Into Madness,  Labyrinth of Ruin, and Leopold. These can be found on Amazon or ordered anywhere books are sold.

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