When you decide to write a book

-


Sitting in quarantine, watching some throw back 90s movies with my 10 year old daughter. Trying my best to make sure she has exposure to some of the greatest rom-coms that era has to offer. 'She's All That', 'Win A Date With Tad Hamilton', 'Never Been Kissed'. Only to be left in the middle of the movie for time with friends on Minecraft. 

My mind started to wonder how great it would be to write a romance that would be worthy of a generation. Keep in mind I am not Danielle Steel - I start to think about what that romance would be like. What would my lead character's names be? What is their occupation? Is it a torrid love affair or a wholesome Hallmark? 

I start tracking some of my ideas and pretty soon I come up with something to send to my friend Rachael. 

Rachael and I have known each other for the better part of 12 years. We have experienced a lot together - from raising children, to aging parents. We have exchanged many ideas over the years, from short story thoughts to horror movie plots. Often followed up with a "I would watch that movie" or "I would read that book".

I sent her an idea one afternoon and we started throwing ideas back and forth. Eventually saying, "I would read that book", and her following up with, "Let's write that book". 

So we started to get together on Friday or Saturday nights, often in her garage with a cozy lamp, and a folding table enjoying the warm summer nights or adding a floor heater to be able to work outside on cooler fall evenings. 

Enjoying a beverage or a coffee, we would laugh and write. Thinking is this really funny or just funny to us? Deciding that we didn't care. We were creating something fun, and spending time together. 

Here we are two and half years later, a complete novel. Now what? 

Do we try and get this thing published? Sell movie rights to Hallmark? 


Well that is the journey. 

Here in this space I am going to share with you our journey, where we are so far, and some excerpts of our completed work that we are trying now to publish. 

We hope that you enjoy getting to know us and our work as much as we are excited to share it with you. 

Yours, always
Rach and Kim

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Content Edits

-
Image
Reader, let me tell you, I don’t think I’ve been more aware of my personal writing style than I was when Kim and I got our first round of content edits back on book 1 of the Amber Falls Series: Yours, Always. Little quirks, odd phrasing, repeating words and a myriad of other strange things present themselves when a real editor reviews your manuscript for the first time. Listen. We’re not professionals. We started this as a lark—to spend time together. That being said, both Kim and I are well educated and well read. We know the difference between their, they’re and there. We know where to put dialogue tags and punctuation. But I don’t know what a subjunctive clause is. I’ve looked it up, been told what it is by our editor and I still don’t know what a subjunctive clause is (sorry, Nicki!). We read through our manuscript so many times, edited chapters—we even read the whole thing out loud! We thought we knew what editing was. I believe at one point we may have confidently declared “If we
Read more

Real Life Inspiration While Writing

-
I posted a super funny, to me, meme on our author Facebook page earlier this week about pulling real life inspirations into our novel. It makes me giggle because my brother’s name is Isaac. #sorryyouhadtodie  But it got me thinking about how often I use real life scenarios in my work. Do I do it a lot? Is it conscious on my end?  The answer is, as so many are in life, yes and no.  When coming up with names of characters, possibly one of the most stressful parts to me personally, I shied away from names of people I knew. It’s inevitable, especially with a writing partner, that a name you would not have chosen is in the mix, however. If there’s no reasonable objection (and believe me, some names were rejected with prejudice), there’s no harm/no foul with naming characters. I have found with scenes, or conversations within scenes, that I like to pull what’s happened or happening in my real life as inspiration. Writer's block is real, and I like to run through my day or what is going
Read more

Our Writing Process

-
We have learned a lot about ourselves and the writing process on this journey. To be able to say, "We wrote a book", really took the cake. To know that there are people, other authors and writers out there that have stories living in their heads that may never see pen to paper. To have completed a story start to finish and see the story out there now in the world for others to see is a huge accomplishment in itself.  I cannot tell you how differently our final first chapter looks compared to our initial first chapter. There have been many changes and revisions, and we could not be happier with our final completed product. But there will always be something that could be updated or changed. But being able to stop and be happy enough to share with others is very exciting.  At first we were rouge, we wrote our first chapter together and had a small idea of how our outline would look, but we pieced together chapters each picking what we were excited to write about in the story. I
Read more