Growing as a writer

Today’s the last day of the contest Erin Nicholas and I are having to celebrate the release of our print books earlier this month – Just Right and Love 2 Love U. Head on over to The Romance Studio to find out more!

Love 2 Love U has been out for a few weeks now but I never really did blog about it here. It’s a print anthology of my three novellas, Love Me, Love Me More and 2 Hot 2 Handle. All three stories got good reviews, especially 2 Hot 2 Handle, which also was the #1 seller at the Samhain bookstore for quite a while after release. That story really felt like a turning point in my writing where it was getting stronger and better, although I think my writing has grown a lot more even since then.

Pushing myself as a writer to try different things helps me to keep learning and growing and improving. 2 Hot 2 Handle was my first ever M/M/F story so I did struggle a bit writing it. Sometimes stories just flow out of me and sometimes I have to really work to get them out. Other stories that have been a struggle for me were Rigger, because it was my first BDSM story, and Power Struggle, because of Dev. In Rigger I had to get inside Shayla’s head and really understand how she would feel in that situation which, being completely honest here, I have never been in. It was even more difficult to get inside Dev’s head in Power Struggle – a guy who deep down inside wants to dominate a woman, but secretly feels it is wrong and bordering on abuse. That’s a powerful internal conflict, especially when he’s confronted by a strong woman who knows what she wants him to do to her.

But I think the struggles we have with our writing are what help  us learn and grow and improve.

I’ve been pushing myself to learn and grow more as a writer lately. I’ve done workshops and I’ve read and re-read some craft books. I’ve worked harder at planning my stories out - I've even started using an Excel spreadsheet for my plotting and it worked great! I’ve tried wrting about some different things – a Beta hero (who knows if I was successful, we’ll see!); another BDSM story with the most mature hero I’ve written yet (Gabe is 40), a strong, masterful dominant who walks away from the life; and I’m trying to write a historical romance set in a unique time and place – now this one’s definitely a struggle! Though I’m kind of looking forward to the first scene where the hero has to get the heroine out of her clothes…it’s going to be quite a feat!


Other writers – how do you keep developing yourself as a writer? Or do you even think about that?