On April 21, 2015, I will launch my first book, Circle of Dreams! I giddily alternate between thrill and being a little nervous. Will readers love this story and these characters as much as I do?
Circle of Dreams started my journey as a writer. I reflect on the early days of sitting down to a blank page. It amuses me to remember my naïveté and over-confidence. If there is anything I’ve learned in this process—and there were a lot of hard lessons—one of them is how humbling it is to write.
One of my early challenges was grappling with the paranormal. Before I started writing, I read widely in this genre and was thrilled at the imagination and creativity of my fellow authors. The worlds they created were so seamlessly presented that it was effortless for me as a reader to dip into those realities, and understand the rules of the game. I’m thinking of some of my favorites: Marjorie M. Liu, Thea Harrison, Nalini Singh, and Christine Feehan (I reviewed her book, Wild Rain here). So, of course, my thought was: how hard could it be to sit down and write like this? Create a world? I assumed the world that would ground my stories would come to me as I wrote and would be just as seamless.
I now stand corrected.
As Circle of Dreams took shape, my second hurdle, writing my first sex scene, caught me by surprise. I thought it would be easy to write about sex. My mantra early on was “How hard could it be?” It’s not as easy as it looks, I’ll tell you, to describe a tender, intimate, exciting, amusing and arousing interaction with metaphor, description, and dialogue as your primary tools. This warrants a blog post of its own, so stay tuned…
One of my biggest hurdles was knowing there was a good possibility my mother would read this story. For two days, I couldn’t write. I found a great book, which I highly recommend: The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict. At the time I found this book, I was going through my first bout of writer’s block. I overcame this hurdle with a fair compromise, which was to create a PG-13 version of my books for my family. All these years later, I hope they are prepared for the full R-rated version because there will be nowhere to hide, for them or for me, from here on out.
This first book, in particular, has been a labor of love. Through Bri and Cole’s developing romance I’ve learned so much about writing intimacy, sex, and emotional connection. As they come into contact with the Quytel and discover a world where phenomenal psychic power exists in parallel with our reality, I found a platform to let me creativity play and a world that I’ll want to play in for a while.
Tune in for my Goodreads Circle of Dreams book give away on Valentine’s Day, Saturday, February 14, 2015!
The post My Book Launch appeared first on Jane Morrissey.