Interview with JF Kristin

Q: Have you always known you wanted to write?
Luckily, yes. I’ve been writing since I could pick up a crayon. Before I learned how to spell, I’d tell my stories to my parents. In first grade, writing stories in my class journal was my favorite part of school. In second grade, my teachers started sending me to young authors’ conferences, which had been geared toward fourth-graders and upward. In third grade, I decided I was going to journalism school and that’s exactly what I did after graduating from high school. After finishing my journalism degree, I decided to do an M.A. in English part-time, outside of work, purely out of love for language and writing.
Q: What inspired your first novel, Rock Star’s Girl?
I started freelancing as a promotional writer and web designer for musicians when I was a senior in high school. That led to making friends and acquaintances who are musicians, and then meeting their friends who are musicians, and so on. Some of them are in independent bands, and others are or have been in more popular bands signed to major labels. Several are guys I’ve gone on dates with, or have been in relationships with.
When you meet someone who is known in the music or entertainment world, in a context that’s entirely separate from their career—usually it’s been through mutual friends, or friends of mutual friends, or at a friend’s show or something—you just don’t really think about what they do for a living. You forget that there are people out there who follow their lives, or who would recognize them in a crowd, or discuss and dissect things they’ve said or done, or even what clothes they’ve worn somewhere.
I was reminded of this one weekend afternoon while hanging out with someone I knew who is in a fairly well-known band. We’d met through mutual friends, and to this day I’ve never seen one of his band’s shows, so the career/public-self wasn’t the context I knew him in. We were at his place, and he was looking at something on his computer. When he explained that he was reading a message board about his band, to check on what people were saying about him or all of the band members that day, it made me stop for a second. It was a really strange moment, and it made me think about what it would be like to read what people are saying about you when they know your face and name, but don’t know YOU. The idea for Rock Star’s Girl initially came out of that moment. I wanted to explore that idea from the side of someone who didn’t have a career in the entertainment industry, and who would never expect to be in that situation at all.
I should also mention that I have nothing but good things to say about any of my friends who are musicians. Cory and Jesse (characters in Rock Star’s Girl) are very much fictional.
Q: What was the most difficult process in writing for you?
The first big revision of Rock Star’s Girl was definitely the most difficult part of the process. Anyone who remembers writing their first novel can probably relate to this. Here you have this manuscript, finally complete at between 80,000 and 90,000 words. You’ve been working on it for ages. You want to query agents, or send it out into the world. Then you start getting feedback and suggestions and realize that something could be much more effective if you changed this, or changed that, or added this subplot. Before you know it, you’re deleting 20,000 or 30,000 words from your manuscript, and that’s only the first revision. They become much easier to do after that, I think.
Q: Can you tell us about your second novel?
My second novel is about as different from Rock Star’s Girl as you can get. It’s not chick lit. Think more along the lines of something you’d study in a contemporary literature class. It experiments a bit with form and with concepts of time. Plot-wise, I’m keeping that under wraps for a while. I know that’s really vague!
Q: Do you have a certain writing schedule you try to stick to?
Writing something every day is the schedule I most try to stick to. It isn’t always fiction-writing, although working on a novel-in-progress is something I aim to do the majority of the days each week. For me, the most important part of getting a manuscript finished is to work on it consistently most of the week, every week. It doesn’t matter if it’s writing only a sentence or two, or if it’s writing 9,000 words over a weekend, as long as I’m writing something every day. It’s when I leave something sitting for a week or two that I slow down a lot.
Q: I noticed from your website and blog that you are really into fitness. What are some of your go-to workouts?
I’m a cardio nut right now. You can usually find me on the elliptical three times a week, doing about 6 or 7 miles each time. About once a week after the cardio, I’ll do the lighter hand weights for more arm toning, or use some of the weight machines. I also walk my dog three or more times a day, so that gets added into the mix.
When I have days with a little bit more free time, I like to hike. One of my favorite places to hike, Runyon Canyon, is mentioned in Rock Star’s Girl. Kundalini yoga is also one of my favorite things to do. I find that it really strengthens my abdominal area, and also puts me into a great headspace.
Q: Your philosophy is “dream big.” How do you put this philosophy into your life, and how do you think you can influence others to do the same?
The biggest part of “dream big” for me is getting to the true, most ultimate dream or goal, and not selling myself short. It’s about asking yourself what you would do, where you would live, and what your life would be like ideally, and not taking into consideration anything perceived as a limitation or restriction. That’s important. If something is a dream, and you’re restricting or limiting yourself in that dream, then where else in your present-day life are you constructing restrictions or limitations that don’t have to be there?
If there is something you want to do in your life, just do it. Don’t talk about wanting to do it, or write it off as, “One day I’ll do this,” or “I want to do this, but�” Writing a book is a good example of this. A lot of people never get to that point. It’s abandoned a few pages in, or several chapters in, or even after a first draft. Or they think, “Wow, I could never do that,” or are daunted by the concept of a word count and don’t begin at all.
Something I’ve enjoyed a lot lately is discovering aspiring writer’s right around me, whom I never knew had the ambition to write. Since finishing Rock Star’s Girl, I’ve found myself in conversation with people I’ve known for years, hearing about how they want to write a screenplay but don’t know where to start or if they’re doing it right, or how they want to write a book but don’t know if they can. It’s great to be able to talk about the perceived limitations that keep people from writing, and to help them shift their focus from hypothetical roadblocks to achieving their dream.
I strongly encourage everyone out there to think about what they truly want to do and the places in this world they want to explore, and to go after their dreams. You may come across people who question what you want to do, but the important part is to listen to what you know about yourself, and not what others think they know about you or see as limitations.
Q: What are some of your favorite Sephora products?
My number one, can’t-live-without product that I purchased from Sephora is the Jonathan Beauty Water Shower Purification System, but I don’t think they sell it anymore. I wish they did! When I first moved to California, the building I lived in had ridiculously hard water with a lot of copper in it. I have blond hair, so it started looking not-so-blond until I got the filter. I’ve also noticed that if I wash my face using only the filtered water, instead of tap water from the sink, I don’t get skin blemishes. Results may vary by person, but what this filter removes from water is amazing.
Second is Bare Escentuals mineral veil, although you can get that from several places. I usually get it from Sephora, though. I love this stuff, and have been using it for about four years.
For the summer months, I also really like the self-tanning gel made by Clarins. My skin is very fair, and although it doesn’t burn easily, it also just doesn’t tan. I was always afraid of self-tanner turning my skin orange, but when I read the first 50 great reviews of this product on Sephora, I decided to try it. It gives your skin a really natural-looking, “just-got-back-from-the-beach” type of glow.
Q: What are you currently reading?
Right now I’m reading White Noise by Don DeLillo and The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. Next up is The Tenth Insight, also by James Redfield.
Q: What are some top places on your travel wish list?
The top places right now are London, Paris, Brisbane, and Sydney. I’ll hopefully visit all of these places soon!
Q: What would be your advice to aspiring writers?
My advice to aspiring writers is the advice I discovered in a post on Write It Sideways that helped me forge ahead with Rock Star’s Girl. The advice was simple: don’t edit as you write. When I began writing Rock Star’s Girl, I was in the habit of going back over every sentence I’d written and editing it, then editing it again. When I stopped doing that and left it for the many revisions to come, it was amazing how quickly the rest of the novel came to life.
The second piece of advice I have is to write something every day. It doesn’t have to be something for your current writing project, but the very act of just sitting down and writing for even five or ten minutes every day can move mountains. Once you get your mind used to switching over to writing mode by writing every day, writer’s block really does become a thing of the past.