Today we’d like to introduce you to Irina Rachow.
Hi Irina, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My story? I love the possibilities of what could be. Fantasies, amazing characters, tragic and beautiful storylines. I was actually drawing stories before I could write a word of one. You could always find me sitting curled up somewhere with a pen or pencil in hand and any kind of paper that was available. I would spin stories out loud as I was sketching the characters, trying to draw things quickly enough to move along with my story. They were usually fantastical creatures and I had a particular fondness for dragons, elves and fairies. Maybe it helps that I was born in the year of the dragon…
In my teens, I would write stories and cast my friends as the main characters in them, giving them adventures with all the teen angst and the love that I knew that they wanted and felt they deserved. Always happy endings, of course!
Between school and random first jobs, I didn’t have as much time for stories and writing, but I would still channel my energy and creativity into whatever I could to keep it interesting. When I was 16 and was working as a hostess during the day shift at the popular Carlos and Pepe’s restaurant in Santa Monica, to pass the tine before the evening rush I would grab the seating list sheets, flip them over and write elaborate stories or poems or draw fantastical pictures while waiting for people to come in the door.
From my mid-20s to mid-50s, I was busy working towards a degree, starting a family (3 kiddoes by age 35), and creating a retail mini empire of fashion and travel boutiques. My creativity was channeled into wild themed birthday parties, beautiful visual stores, fun over-the-top fashion events, and themed windows and decorations, ever-changing, always different, definitely pushing the envelope.
Now my three children are young adults, the stores are sold or closed, and during the pandemic shutdown I discovered pickleball and started a jewelry company called Everwild Designs with five distinct collections of jewelry because I just had too many ideas to keep them all in one! In-between running the company and designing, I knuckled down and pushed through the last seven classes needed to complete my Associate’s degree in Business Entrepreneurship. (I actually walked across the stage at age 61 feeling giddy alongside my sister because we finally got a degree after a 35-year break in classes!).
Happily, with a wee bit of time to write and several stories bouncing around in my heart, I am back on my writing path. What started as a chain-story concept with my book club 16 years ago has become the foundation for my near-future sci-fi fantasy romance series under the Everwild universe – I have just completed my first full-length novel, Collarbound – book 1 in the Blendborn series. It addresses the bigger questions of survivability, bodily autonomy and the boundaries of love, all mixed in with an aggressive planet, corporate shenanigans, and DNA-altered people. I have fallen in love with the characters, laughed out loud, cried, and felt like I was enduring everything written along the way. It’s been an incredibly fun and challenging experience, however it turns out.
Another writing passion project of mine is under a new company that doesn’t even have its legs under it yet called Pathfinder Story Lab. Through this, I am planning to develop a series of interactive books for people on the autism spectrum or dealing with social anxiety or other challenges in a safe and dynamic space. This one I’ve had close to my heart for over 18 years, and I hope, through it, I’d be able to help a lot of individuals and their families navigating the challenging world of neurodiversity.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
There will always be challenges in anything, but with writing, oftentimes the largest challenge is time. To write well, you need to be able to be in a space where distractions are minimal and you can get into that flow to develop the storyline, the plots, the characters, the world, the arcs, and all the other details to get what is in your head out onto paper in a way that sounds and feels as you intended it to.
One challenge that I face is, depending on my mood, I might want to rewrite scenes and settings. But what can happen is that the book can seem a little choppy until I go back in and polish it back up and smooth it out so it flows better again.
With the rapid onset of AI, it is a double-edged sword. AI can help you format chapters in your story, but it can also steal your ideas and lurk like a temptress, offering to write the story for you, while praising you for your creativity.
My challenges will be deciding to continue with this trilogy before moving into the social stories, or to try to do them in tandem and move both projects along.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I decided to stay with the name Everwild for my new publishing endeavors as it resonates so much with my core environmental values. I also own Everwild Designs (2022), which is my jewelry company, founded primarily to create products with meaning and intention while funneling profits to wildlife preservation, a cause very close to my heart.
My Blend-born book series under The Everwild Chronicles follows the path of people in the near future faced with the advent of DNA layering to obliterate deadly diseases, including cancers, but with side effects that are either enhanced by design or difficult to suppress as well as live with. With an ever-changing planet and pressures starting to present in all aspects of weather and biomes, as well as incredible advancements in medicine and technology I was inspired to forecast 50 or 60 years in the future to what things might look like and what choices we might need to make as a species.
I hope to be known for more than my jewelry or the boutiques that I created and ran for 35 years. I would like to also be remembered, in this chapter of my life, for creating books filled with rich worlds and memorable characters that are relatable, ones to carry within them rich possibilities and hope, plus some relatable personalities along the way.
And, as with my jewelry sales for every book published, I will channel funds towards securing and permanently retiring acreage to be kept forever wild.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
In this chapter of my life, where I am working on novel writing and storytelling, the biggest lesson I have learned is that things take longer than you think they will. Even with the ability to speak words to written text, which shaves off some time, what I think will take me a month to do still takes three or more to do well. But I have also learned that anything worth doing, is worth taking the time to get it right.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.everwildchronicles.com
