Episode 176 – Ashley Earley – Heart of Skulls

Overview Ashley Earley grew up in Georgia, where she spent most of her time running wild in the woods of her backyard, building forts to create her own fantasy worlds, obsessing over books, and experimenting with her writing. Today, she lives in Colorado with her dog and still spends her time devouring any book she can get her hands on, writing, and editing for her clients at Earley Editing, LLC. In May of 2021, she graduated with distinction from University of Colorado Boulder, receiving a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She also enjoys snowboarding, exploring, annoying her dog, constantly eating chocolate, and sharing her writing adventures on Instagram. Her Thriller/Suspense short story, Chasing Hair of Gold, won first place in the 2016 Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards. As a writer, she leans into fantasy or horror due to her love of all things creepy. As an editor, she loves a little bit of everything when it comes to fiction. Give her that steamy, forbidden romance, give her vampires, or even that young lovey-dovey stuff with all the twists and turns! Book Website https://www.ashleyearley.com/ Favorites https://www.tatteredcover.com/ YouTube Transcript Stephen: Today on Discovered Wordsmiths, I have Ashley to welcome. Ashley, how are you doing? I'm good, how are you? I'm doing good. Before we get started, we're going to talk about your book, Heart of Skulls. Before we do that tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you like to do and some things, hobbies and stuff outside of writing. Ashley: Okay. So I originally grew up in Georgia, but I live in Colorado now. I ended up moving out here for college and never went back or leave the mountains. So Stephen: do you ski now? Ashley: I snowboard, so I'm like, Stephen: the cooler person. Okay, cool. Got it. Ashley: Yeah, so I do snowboard when I'm not writing. I love reading. I have little coffee reading dates with my friends. I have a dog that I go hiking with quite often. Yeah, and then I run my own business, so I do that a lot of the time as well. So Stephen: pretty busy. Your own business related to writing or something separate? Kind Ashley: of related to writing. I write, I book edit. So I run my own book editing business with a couple other editors on Stephen: my team. You ever argue and yell at yourself about what should or shouldn't be in a book? Ashley: I do when it comes to my own books where I'm like, yeah, this works. This doesn't work. Oh my gosh, I'm a terrible writer. Like the typical stuff. Stephen: All right. What'd you go to school for when you went to Colorado, if I may ask? Oh, Ashley: I majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Stephen: So do you feel that has helped you with your writing career now? Or is it like it was nice, but not so much. Ashley: It was nice, but not so much. It did help with my editing career because I got to critique people in person and kind of fall in love with critiquing content. So that's. That's what I do now. So I'm a developmental editor who focuses on the content of someone's book and how it flows and all that good stuff. So it helped me with that and got me passionate about critiquing people. But otherwise for writing definitely not. I would say that they don't really teach you like the writing techniques people should be aware of. Stephen: Interesting. See, okay. And I ask that my own personal passions I feel we focus with younger kids in school way too much on spelling and grammar when they have no reference to what that is used for and where I feel we should work on just having kids tell stories and learn about how to tell a story and what makes a good story because once you write a bunch more, the spelling and grammar makes sense and falls into place. And I'm sorry, but The kids that are going to struggle and not get the w...