Monday, January 31, 2011

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?

3 comments:

PG Forte said...

Cool topic. I love pushing myself to try new things! I don't know that it's a conscious effort to develop as a writer, however. I think it's more likely that I would just get bored if I weren't always pushing myself and trying new things.

kelly said...

Well yes there is the boredome factor too! Another good reason to try new things!

hotcha12 said...

SURE WOULD LOVE TO BE A WINNER.