How Dale Mayer Shuts Down Intrusive Thoughts and Releases the Words

Jenn Lessmann

A hostage situation wouldn’t be out of place in any of Dale Mayer’s Military Romance series. It might not even be completely unexpected in one of her Thriller Suspense series, or in a novel from her Paranormal catalog. So when she talks about some of the unusual steps she takes to release her creative mind, somehow, they all make sense. After all, any successful rescue mission is going to require a detailed plan of attack and maybe a good distraction.

USA TODAY bestselling author Dale Mayer promises “a great read each and every time,” whether that read follows the adventures of a team of military veterans and their highly trained war dogs or an amateur sleuth in small-town Canada. Best known for her Psychic Visions series, Dale “honors the stories that come to her,” she says, writing so many books across multiple genres that her website now includes three separate flowcharts to help readers find their way. There are over two hundred fifty books listed, not including box sets or the nineteen books she has on preorder.

Awareness

Dale began her writing career writing five thousand words of fiction a day while doing technical writing to pay the bills, but somehow, the breakneck speed she’s maintained from the start hasn’t slowed. In the fall of 2000, Dale won fourth place in a writing contest that came with the opportunity to work with an agent. She was excited at first, but she ultimately decided to self-publish after the agent encouraged her to cut a character she loved from her debut. She released the first three books in her Psychic Visions series in rapid succession.

Then she switched, temporarily, to the Young Adult genre. Dale’s teenage daughter was craving vampire fiction at the time and couldn’t find what she wanted on the shelves. Her obliging mother composed a ten-book series, which will soon be re-released for a New Adult audience with aged-up characters. Although her daughter outgrew vampires somewhere around book seven, she remains involved in Dale’s business, handling some of the marketing and social media to give her mother more time to focus on the creative side.

Assessment

In 2015, after she noticed a drop in sales, Dale started researching successful authors. She interviewed several of her friends to see what they were doing. What she found surprised her. “Everybody was doing something different. Everybody was doing what worked for them,” she says. Based on this knowledge, she decided the best way forward was to “stop looking outside. Just write what you want to write. Promote it as much as you can, and if it doesn’t sell, either move on or keep writing because it brings you joy.” 

She started writing Military Romance around 2016, enjoying the fast-paced action that provided a break from her more complicated Mysteries. Now she has one hundred fifty of them published alongside her Thrillers and a newer series of Cozy Mysteries. She says they’re fun and easy to write and grins talking about some of the ideas she has for new stories. “What you want to do is unlock your storyteller. I would consider myself a storyteller versus a writer,” she says.

Action

Of course, how authors get the words on the page is just as important as the craft that goes into their stories. For Dale, the answer has always been quickly—even if the actual method has varied over time.

A few years ago, Dale gave an interview describing how she had written nine thousand words before breakfast. Although she was happy with her writing speed, regularly typing twelve thousand to thirteen thousand words per day, Dale’s knuckles eventually started to complain. It took three tries for her to switch to dictating, but by 2016, she made it stick. Now she dictates ten thousand words in an hour, finishing one-hundred-thousand-word Thrillers in two weeks. Dale does most of her dictation in the morning, but she keeps an 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. work schedule. After she gets her words in, she switches to the business side: advertising, direct sales, and community building. The books are page-turners, no matter which genre, and her readers are always asking for more.

Dale’s storyteller, the creative side of her mind, comes out when she manages to distract the rest of her brain. “There’s all those other things—intrusive thoughts that come in all the time to everybody’s brain—and so trying to stay focused for me means shutting that part off, and the way to shut that off for me means [I need to] give it a task. So you’re occupying it with something else. I am giving it something to do. And while it’s doing that, this half is free,” she says.

For a while, it was enough for Dale to go for a walk, dictating her story as she moved down a path or circled her property. But the weather doesn’t always permit an unfocused ramble, and occasionally she’d get too wrapped up in the story to pay attention to where she was going. For her own safety, she needed an alternative.

Though many authors listen to music while they write, that technique doesn’t work as well when you’re dictating a story. So Dale started watching movies with the sound off. After trying a few different films, she found that some—Disney’s Moana in particular—worked better for her than others. She had to know the movie well enough not to get sucked into the plot. It had to be predictable enough to let her creative mind wander but challenging enough to engage her analytical side. 

Eventually, however, she still needed more. Dale switched to playing solitaire on her phone, and when that became too easy, she upgraded to spider solitaire, then jigsaw puzzles. When the puzzles stop engaging her executive functioning, she moves up to more difficult ones, thousands of pieces spread out in front of her while she dictates.

After two weeks of dictation, the recordings of her finished draft, complete with the occasional author note, doorbell, or curse of frustration when she forgets a character’s name, go on to a transcriptionist. Dale says she tried voice-to-text apps like Dragon for transcribing her work, but the AI had trouble with her Canadian accent and made too many mistakes in the manuscripts. She works with two transcribers who type out her words faithfully and send the file back to her. Meanwhile, she’s already recording the next book.

The manuscript Dale receives from her transcribers is still almost four months from being ready for publication, though she says she could streamline that process to one month if needed. But she probably won’t ever need to. Although Dale publishes an average of two books per month, she’s already completed enough books to get her most of the way through the next year. Remember all those preorders? Those books are finished and ready for readers before they go up on her website. 

“I decided a few years back I was tired of living on the cliff edge of deadlines, and I really put my nose to the grindstone, and I just got a year in advance,” she says. Dale took advantage of COVID lockdowns to concentrate on finishing as many books as she could, as quickly as possible. Now her preorders go up, as completed projects, a year ahead of their release. Most series are on a schedule, releasing at the same time each year, but she has some room to squeeze in new projects if they arise. She skips most of the usual social media pre-launch campaigns, like excerpts and cover reveals, except for what is needed for her newsletter. 

Her system is pretty seamless, despite the number of steps involved. She’s found ways to get help with “the tedious kind of jobs that I don’t have time for,” which leaves her free for creative work, she says. Once she gets the manuscript back from the transcribers, she prints it and edits it by hand. Then she sends it to someone who enters all the edits for her. The edited manuscript goes to a developmental editor, who usually reads it and returns it in a day, mostly checking for consistency. Dale revises any of the continuity errors, again by hand, before sending it to a line editor. Then she revises again and sends it to proofreaders, beta readers, and another round of proofreaders. When she’s happy with the manuscript, it goes to a formatter, who sends it back to her for one last check before it gets uploaded. She has two full-time employees, who usually do the final upload and manage her store.

Aftercare

Dale’s first books were Thrillers, and she has continued writing in dark genres, hoping “to bring some of those [real-life dark experiences] to light in the world out there,” she says. But years of writing in darkness took its toll on her mental health. She started writing Cozy Mysteries, set in her own hometown, as an escape. The Lovely Lethal Gardens series provides her an opportunity to share her sense of humor while challenging herself to develop the clues. Dale says changing genres keeps her from burning out because it’s “fun and always different.” Many of her readers agree, following her author brand across genres. She says she sees crossover from Thrillers to Cozies, and from Cozies to Military Romance. Only the Paranormal readers seem to stay in their silo, but that may change when her YA vampire series gets reintroduced to a New Adult audience.

She titles her Cozy Mysteries alphabetically, and after seeing the disappointment from Sue Grafton’s readers when the author passed away without finishing Z is for Zero in her Mystery series, Dale prioritized completing hers. “You know, I don’t have any health concerns or anything like that,” she assures me. But “it’s nice to know that you have twenty or thirty books in the wing. For a lot of authors, that’s a lifetime.” Having so many books prepared lets her consider other ways of spending her time, like taking a cruise with writer friends, volunteering with animal rescues and women’s shelters, or advising new authors. She was able to take a few months off last year because of the backlog of preorders she’d set up.

As she looks to the future, Dale says she’d eventually like to shorten her work week, maybe take Fridays off for some of those activities. She’s confident that she’ll be able to maintain her business because of the people who help get her books out. She says having a good team to make the books the best they can be also helps her to “find a schedule that makes everybody happy.”

This sense of the value of teamwork and lessons learned from experience permeates her books, whether it’s the SEAL teams in her Military Romances or the animal friends in her Cozy Mysteries. But ultimately, Dale’s brand is built on herself. Even her merchandise bears her monogram. So when asked how she would advise others trying to rescue their creative minds, Dale says, “There’s a story inside you. It’s your story. Make it yours. Don’t be swayed by anybody else. Keep it yours, and trust that other people will enjoy that bit of you.” 

Jenn Lessmann