My name is Ashlee Wynters and I would firstly like to say thank you for visiting my blog. I am the author of Moore, Than a Pretty Face. I would like to start from the beginning on how I became a published author and my journey. The truth is I didn’t dream from the time I was a small child of one day becoming an author nor did I even know I could write. I am a high school dropout and I always struggled with school. I was that flower child with my head in the clouds, I had trouble with almost all of my classes and I struggled to try to stay focused and concentrate.

Since leaving school I started working in accounts, I know right how does that work? It can be repetitive, so I seemed to be able to get my head around it and I seemed to really like it. My partner and I then brought our first home which was a knockdown re-build which we decided to renovate as we had no money. Then I started distance learning studying accounting to further my career with the company I worked for. So here I am, 27 years old, working full time, we had now been renovating our first home for two years and I was trying to study accounting in the limited spare time I had. My brain felt like it was going to explode from the pressure, I had done it too myself but I just couldn’t cope, something had to give. One day I was driving to work, my normal morning routine is to call my mum and I would speak on the phone the entire commute to work, and this one day she had asked me how I was, a very simple question, when answering I began to cry, not a tear, I mean a complete meltdown! I told her I couldn’t cope, I hated accounting it made me miserable and I felt completely depleted. She tried to calm me down as I was driving a vehicle and told me, that if I didn’t want to do accounting, “Don’t do it!” She also told me that we needed to slow down and I needed to start doing something for myself, whether it was creative writing or colouring in, I had to find that one thing that had nothing to do with anyone else! That day I wrote my first 1000 words, by the end of the week I had reached 11,000 words and it just went on from there.

I just started writing about a character that came to life in my mind and it was the first time in my life I had done something that felt almost effortless, it felt so natural to me. So I kept going, I started rushing my morning workouts just so I could fit in at least 20 minutes every morning to write. The rush of adrenaline I would feel in that 20 minutes was incredible and extremely addictive. I started planning my day and events around my writing and the feeling I had felt of being lost was gone, I had finally found myself and I was a new woman!

After 5 months, I had completed the first initial draft. After a year of working full time, renovating our home and sneaking in time to write every chance I could I had finally finished the draft and was ready for someone to read.

My mum from day dot had begged me to let her read it so it made sense as she had given me the idea originally, so I gave it to her to read. As soon as I handed over the A4 binded book my heart sank and all I could think was “Oh my God! My mum is going to read all the sex scenes I wrote!” It’s not like I could have asked her to skip them, so I waited patiently for her to read it, a week went by, a month and I asked her “Mum have you read my book yet” she replied “I have to keep putting it down, I am trying but I keep seeing you as I read and it’s making it difficult for me!” My poor mum, I knew that was going to happen so I sat her down and reminded her that it is a fictional story and Ella is not me. She laughed and told me she knew it wasn’t me that she found it hard as sometimes she could hear my voice as she is read so it was difficult for her to separate the two. So she continued to read, I got a phone call at around 9.30pm on a weeknight and she’s shouting at me through the phone, “You are insane! You made me burn my dinner!! I couldn’t stop reading the last four chapters, you have a wicked little mind my beautiful daughter” I just laughed, she had finally made it to the end.

Since then I have been to writing conferences and workshops, I have watched countless videos online about how to become an author but everyone I had read or watched had dreamed for a lifetime of wanting to be an author and had gone to university to further their dreams, I was the new kid on the block who was a high school dropout and I needed to find a way to get my words heard. So I sent my book off to a few publishers in Australia and heard nothing. Feeling very disappointed but still believing that this really could be something special and always believing everything happens for a reason, I felt I was on the right track and I just had to stay positive. I looked into self-publishing companies but they seemed untrustworthy, then I stumbled upon Balboa and my dream of becoming a published author has now become a reality. I have learned many lessons over the past year, good and bad but mostly I have come to realize that if you work hard, anything really is possible! You just have to give it all you have and more and you will achieve it.

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