Firstly, congratulations to the winner of last weeks competition: Janie Stevenson. Yep, I'd love to have a hero with soft downy plumage in his nether regions and the strength of giant eagle wings in his arms. Nice. A copy of
A Talon at Her Throat is winging it's way to you as we speak.
Today we have prolific writer
Emma Shortt stopping by. And her book in a week release
Paying her Debt (yep, book in a week!) is only $0.99 for a tiny short while. Grab yours to see what this clever lady can whip out of thin air!
x Michele
A Book in a Week
I
wrote Paying
her Debt, my erotic, contemporary romance, in a week. Yep, a week.
It
came to me in a flash of inspiration and I knew I had to get the story down as
soon as possible. So I sat at my computer and I just did not stop writing.
Well, okay there were food and toilet breaks but other than that the family
were ignored, the house fell apart around my ears and even whilst I slept the
plot invaded my dreams.
Now
I’m quite a prolific writer, less than 25,000 words a week and I feel like I’ve
slacked off, but this was something else altogether. If I could bottle the
energy I felt in that week I’d be well...writing a book a week!
Paying
her Debt has been described as an old fashioned
romance with some pretty modern erotic elements and I hoped that it would be my
first bestseller for Evernight (one of my two publishers). Up until then I’d
had a few paranormal romances published but whilst they’d done okay they
weren’t setting anything on fire. Paying
her Debt did.
It
sold more books than anything I’d published before combined and as I watched
the sales figures tally up I couldn’t help but think that yes! I would write a
book a week. Goodbye evil day job, hello
full time writing.
Only
it doesn’t work like that.
I’ve
never again been able to create an entire, fully edited book in such a short
time. I’ve come close. On one very memorable day I wrote 15,763 words. Those
words were the ending for my post-apocalyptic romance, Waking up Dead (coming
late 2013 from Entangled Publishing), and I was ill for days afterwards. But a
book in a week – nope it has never happened. I’ve thought about this a lot and
tried to work out why I can’t recreate the energy I had in that week and I’ve
come to two conclusions. Firstly at that point in my career I was so desperate
for something to sell well that I was spurred on to the point of madness,
secondly I had a storyline come to me from nowhere - fully formed - and I sort
of wanted to write it so I could read it...does that make sense? Of course
these reasons don’t help me to do the whole thing over again, but it is fun to
wonder! I’d love to hear from anyone else who has managed to write a book in such
a short space of time. Where did you get your energy? Can you recreate the
process?
And
if you’d like to read the product of my week of madness it is on sale right now
for just 99 cents at Amazon.com. I’d be thrilled if you’d check it out. Just
imagine if I made the Amazon best seller lists with it! It might even spur me
on to try for a five day book...you never know!
Happy
reading,
Emma
x
