We were lucky to catch up with Christie Stratos recently and have shared our conversation below.

Christie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Was there an experience or lesson you learned at a previous job that’s benefited your career afterwards?

In my “past life” in the corporate world, I was a project manager, and as you can imagine, I learned plenty of valuable lessons and skills in that job. One of the most useful things I learned was the delicate art of creating a schedule for any project. That sounds very simple, and depending on the project, it can be. But as an independent author, it can be complex and hectic, with quite a lot being scheduled during the same time frame. It’s easy to get very stressed as well as to lose track of various tasks and at what stage in the process you are regarding them. Detailed task and priority lists, Gantt charts, and everything in between can make the difference for me between floundering in my publishing timeline and keeping right on track or even ahead of the game. One of the big lessons I learned as a project manager is to always assume things will go wrong, and as a result, it’s always a good idea to build excess time into your schedule. You think it’ll take six months to write your book? Add a couple extra weeks—life happens, and you can’t predict it. Assume freelancers like the editor and the cover designer will get sick or too busy and ask for more time on their deadlines; add extra days into those portions of the schedule. If you add in a small but reasonable amount of extra time for all of these tasks, it’s harder to miss your deadline, especially if your book is up for preorder and you have to have the final version ready by a certain date; I’ve seen that go horribly wrong when authors schedule their timeline exactly instead of adding some extra time for potential delays. It’s much easier on your stress level to schedule with the assumption of delays because you know they won’t end up pushing back your publication date.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve always loved writing, ever since I could write as a kid. Being an author has been the dream for all my life. But I never guessed I’d be writing historical fiction! My expertise is the Northeastern United States in the 19th century, specifically the 1840s-1890s. Within that time period, my favorite is 1840s-1850s. And believe it or not, historical fiction is a genre I swore I’d never write.

Although I’ve written ever since I learned how as a child, I didn’t start submitting my work anywhere until college, and then, only poetry. To my surprise I won an award right off the bat from the Poetry Society of Virginia! As encouraging as that was, I didn’t submit anything again until a contest in my college cropped up two years later. Again, I was shocked to win in the social sciences category. Could my writing actually be good? For some reason, it surprised me that anyone aside from my family would appreciate it. I didn’t submit anything until another couple years later, to a literary journal, and somehow I was still very surprised when my short piece was accepted. At this point I was finally gaining confidence and decided to try my hand at long fiction, something I hadn’t done since high school.

I started with historical suspense in the Victorian era and never looked back. Here and there I dabble in contemporary horror and other genres, but historical suspense and, more recently, historical fantasy have my heart. Anything historical for me!

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

When readers tell me they saw their own experience in a story or I hit the nail right on the head with some aspect of the story or characters, it’s the greatest compliment I can receive. Over the years, a number of readers have opened up to me and told me they related strongly to Abigail Whitestone in my debut novel, Anatomy of a Darkened Heart. I’ve been thanked for writing such realistic psychology into my books too. Those moments are ones I never forget. They mean everything to me.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I think the simplest way to support artists and create an even better creative ecosystem is to be open-minded and read outside of the most popular books of the day. I can’t tell you how many book review accounts I see across social media that only read the most popular novels recently published by the Big 5 publishers. They’re missing out on so many great reads!

Between traditionally published books and self-published books, over 4 million books per year are published, and yet the same handful are what everyone’s reading and reviewing. Society could read well outside these few popular books and discover incredible authors who will be not only be forever grateful you’ve taken a chance on them, but it will encourage them to keep writing. With so many options out there to read, why not experience something new and broaden your horizons?

Contact Info:

• Website: http://christiestratos.com
• Instagram: http://instagram.com/christie_stratos/
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/christiestratosauthor/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/christiestratos
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FunClassicReads/streams
• Other: Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/christiestratos.bsky.social