Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Have you ever met someone who said they were an "aspiring author"? Well, duh, who hasn't? It's a pretty common dream to have, after all. Books are awesome, and everyone thinks it would be incredibly cool to write one of their own. But not many people actually achieve that dream, do they? Before I was published, when all I did was glom every available book all day long, writing a book seemed like an impossible task. It was Mount Everest, and I was a pudgy teenager with acne and zero clue how to strap on a pair of hiking boots. I appreciated the effort of every person who scaled that peak, after all, they brought stories back with them. It was something I didn't think would ever be possible, so I didn't even aspire to do it then.  By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons I skipped the aspiring part and just started writing for fun. For my own entertainment. It turned into a novel. So I started mentally calling myself an...

Today I'm going to talk a little bit about my process of writing. I've been writing fiction seriously since 2009, and the way I go about things now is totally different than how I got started. In the beginning, I didn't plot SQUAT. I sat down in front of the computer and the muse breath took me away. It was fun, letting my creativity loose and seeing where the story took me. When I sat down to write, I had no idea what kind of story would fly out of my fingers. It was an adventure. But then I finished something and decided I wanted to publish it. And therein lay the problem. My muse breath didn't care about structure. The story I'd made wasn't satisfying because I didn't understand the way the story was put together. Some people instinctively structure their stories well. They can pants their way through any book, no matter the length, and be totally fine with it. Those people are so not me. Back in 2011, I attended my very first writer's conference...