As creative professionals living in a chaotic world, we can feel a lot of pressure to complete every project, accept every opportunity, and allow our personal and professional lives to cross over more than they should. Today, I’m telling you that I can’t do it all.
What draws us time and again to this trope? Hate-to-love is surprisingly tricky to write, and you have to be carefully toeing the line, but we keep coming back? Why?
The tension. Ooh baby, we love that tension.
Contemporary stories wiggled around in my head until I gave them life, and soon I found that I was writing in several genres, erotic and more traditional romance in both the historical and modern age. I wrote BDSM novellas and menage novels and pirates stories and everything in between. And along the way, I’ve come to favor certain elements of writing both then and now.
Be a writer, they said. It will be easy, they said.
As an author, I think it’s important to read books that aren’t perfect so we can perform more effectively in our own stories. That said, there are a few things that will make me put a book down.
As wonderful as my character’s tragic backstory or hushed conversation might be, none of that matters an iota if I don’t get the beginning right.
There is productivity belief that if you set the bar too high on a day’s project and don’t meet it, you will feel like a failure, thus making you less productive the following day. But if you set a small goal and reach it, you’ll feel like a success, which will then inspire you to complete the next goal and the next.
Food is an intrinsic part of human life and it feeds – in more ways than one – into who we are as people, physically and emotionally. It dictates our social lives, the way we feel about ourselves and so much more.
Will they or won’t they – it’s the most important, infuriating question of every romance novel. Will they give into their desire now, in the dark corners of the library? How about now, in the hidden coves of the rose gardens? When will they finally succumb to what they both desire most?
Whether there are only seven stories to honestly be told or a vast amount more, the reality is that when you—or any other author—puts those stories to the page, it is the very first time they have been done that way.
Holland Rae, Writer 