Lashell Collins's Blog, page 23

Just Pulled the Trigger

So … what I just discovered is, if you are a first-time author and self-publishing on the Internet, it is an extremely terrifying experience to hit the “publish” button. All manner of scary, horrifying thoughts run through your mind in that instant. Things like:  ‘Oh my God, what have I just done?’ and ‘What if everything I’ve just published is complete and total crap!’ and ‘Fat lot of nerve I have calling myself a writer! Who the heck am I kidding?’ 

But even with all those disturbing thoughts chasing me down like rabid dogs, I hit the button anyway. I pulled the trigger. Good or bad, for better or worse, in typos and run-on sentences … I hit the “publish” button. And now I wait for the next 12 hours until my precious baby will be finally be available for purchase on the Amazon website. The next agonizingly slow, torturously painful 12 hours.

Having never given birth myself, I can’t help but wonder which is worse….

Technical Difficulties

I’m not really great at blogging. Even though I have done it before. In all honesty, I do have another, pretty successful blog that I write with a friend, under a different name (Yes, Lashell Collins is a pen name). So I’m used to doing this sort of thing as a collaborative effort, even down to choosing our weekly blog topics. It feels really strange to me to be blogging by myself, and I find myself really stressing over what to blog about.

I started this blog in anticipation of the release of my first novel – book one in my new romantic trilogy. I am self-publishing on Amazon, and I had intended to push the publish button yesterday so that Pierced By Danger would have the very romantic publishing date of Valentine’s Day. However, as the title of this entry suggests, I ran into some technical difficulties during the publishing process.

I’ll spare you the gory details but, suffice it to say that there were several hours of angst, followed by great relief upon hearing back from the good people on the wonderful KDP-support team. But the end result is that Pieced By Danger will be delayed a couple of days. And that’s ok. With everything else going on in my life right now – all the little details surrounding the book release, and all the exciting (and stressful) things going on in my real life at the moment – I’ve decided that a small delay in publishing is really no big deal. And “technical difficulties” are sometimes a blessing in disguise.

How I Fell in Love with Romance

Okay. So, I’ve just spent the last four months or so writing a story that completely took over my life. It was just supposed to be a single, stand alone story but, it somehow became a trilogy. The Pierced Trilogy, and book one – Pierced By Danger – will be published in the next two weeks. Yikes!

Writing, for me, started out as something I just wanted to try. I’d spent years (my whole life it seems) reading some truly wonderful romance novels. An obsession that began when I picked up my mother’s copy of Danielle Steel’s Daddy. I was just about to start high school at the time and I was instantly hooked. I had always been an avid reader but, up until that point, I had never read a true romance novel before.

Over the next few years, my mom and my grandmother and I formed our own little book club of sorts. We would each buy a different Danielle Steel to read and then take great pleasure in trading them until we had each read all three books. Then we would go to the store and buy three more and do it all over again. We eventually moved on to other authors and genres but, my love of romance was firmly rooted.

When my grandma passed away shortly after I married my husband, and my family members were cleaning out her apartment, I remember being really sad and disappointed when I learned they had thrown out her huge collection of books. Had I been able to help that day instead of at school taking a final, I would have insisted on keeping many of those old paperback romances we traded around.

Today, my favorite romance authors have names like Norah Wilson and Janice Maynard (and yes, E L James is a guilty pleasure!), and my favorite stories are on the spicy side. But it all began with Daddy by Danielle Steel. Which makes me ask the question … how did you fall in love with romance? Please leave me a comment and answer the question. I really want to know.