Author Q&A with Natalie Debrabandere

Natalie Debrabandere is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. We first worked with her on a cover for her book ‘Switch On!’, a non-fiction book about NLP. Then we were thrilled to help her update her covers for two of her novels, ‘Strong’ and ‘Unbroken’.

We talked to Natalie about her writing career, and found out about her preference for background noise when she works, that she likes to acts out the scenes from her book when editing, and how one day, she might just travel into space.

Here’s how it all started for Natalie at 11 years old with her sister, her dad and a hand-made newspaper…

Q. Natalie, tell us about how you got into writing.

I always wanted to be a writer, I think it’s in my bones!

When I was 11 I started a little newspaper with my sister; we would write poems and articles, my dad would type it up, and we would sell the finished product to friends and family. Not long after that I started to re-write the ending of books I’d read according to what I wanted to happen, or write little scenes based on existing characters I liked. And eventually I started to get frustrated sometimes when I could not find books that told exactly the story I wanted to read, with exactly the sort of characters I wanted to read about… This is really what led me to start writing my own stories. For the longest time though it was only very short, concentrated stuff I did just for me, until one day I reviewed something I’d written and realised it was 25,000 words. So I decided I could do something with that.

Eventually I discovered Createspace, and the world of self-publishing, and this is how Unbroken was born.

Q. Where do you write?

Mostly at home, sometimes in the library if I feel I need to get out of my ho