Crystal Perkins, up and coming New Adult author of Gaming for Love (and my friend), tagged me for this blog hop. See the author I tagged below (another talented friend, Heather Lire), who will post her answers on her blog next week.
1. What am I working on right now?
At the moment I’m working on final edits to my upcoming release, Breaking His Rules. The fifth book in my Feeling the Heat series, Breaking the Rules will be published on September 8, 2014 by Carina Press. If you read Catching Heat, then you probably remember J.T. Sawyer’s brother Jake, the owner of a gym called Jake’s Joint, and Melissa Atherton, whose quest to change her life led her to join Jake’s gym and sign up for his personal training sessions. Jake has an ironclad rule against getting involved with his clients, but his attraction to Melissa just might have him rethinking that particular rule.
Breaking His Rules started out as a novella, but I’m happy to report that a novella wasn’t long enough to tell Jake and Melissa’s story. It now comes in at over 70,000 words!
2. How does my work differ from others in the genre?
This is a tough question to answer. I believe every single author is unique. What I mean by that is each author has a different voice, or their way of telling a story. I’d like to think one of my strengths is to inject my stories with humor, as well as emotion. I love writing a series because it gives me (and the readers) a chance to revisit the characters they fell in love with in previous books.
3. Why do I write what I do?
This one’s simple. I write what I love to read. Contemporary romance has always been my go-to genre, so it just made sense that when I decided to start writing, I’d write contemporary. My first book in the series, Love in the Afternoon, is an homage to soap operas (which I grew up watching), and my second book, The Winning Season, is a sports romance. Soap operas and sports wouldn’t seem to go together in a series, but somehow it worked, and I couldn’t be happier to combine two things I love in one series.
4. How does my writing process work?
I have a pretty simple process. Once I decide on the characters, I write a loose outline of the story and then just start writing. For me, planning out every single scene or detail is too restrictive. I love it when I’m writing and something that never occurred to me pops into my head and takes the story in a direction I never thought it would go.
Because I also have a full-time day job, my writing time is limited to after work and weekends. Like a few of my author friends (Tera Lynn Childs, I’m looking at you), I can’t write in Starbucks or other public places. I need complete silence to concentrate. And I’m not sure if this is odd, but I actually like working on revisions because it’s a second chance to make the story and the characters shine.
Next week, the lovely Heather Lire will be answering these same questions on her blog. Heather’s first book Second Chance at Forever is a wonderful story of lovers reunited. Read about it, and her writing process on her website.
Alison Packard 