Dr. Tonya Nagle worked hard to get her PhD in Higher Education Administration, then decided it wasn’t for her. She preferred teaching, interacting with students and writing creatively. So, that’s what she did. Today, the Marine Corps veteran is a curriculum instructor for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and uses her weekends to write. She has a lengthy collection of books under the pen name Cara North and currently is part of a new anthology of stories for young adults called Written In The Stars. Tonya talks about her writing process, her roots as a writer, and juggling a full-time job with her passion for writing.
“I write for my own entertainment and then if it finds an audience, that’s awesome,” she says. “There are some box sets or collections that I sign on to do where they have parameters and they have, you know, either a shared world or a guideline if it has to be within this many words, it has to be within this trope that kind of stuff. And I sign on for those because that’s good for me as an author to have, you know, to have those deadlines to have those parameters to stretch my chops if I’m gonna write something new that I don’t normally write. So like, you know, I do try to do some of those. And then most of the time, though, it’s just whatever I want to write”.
Hear more about Dr. Tonya Nagle’s writing process in our conversation on The Independent Author podcast. Here it is: