CHAPTER 1 - SOLE
The last few years have brought a lot of firsts for me. First time looking into a camera and saying a line. First time kissing a man I hated. First time falling in love with a man I hated. First time leaving my hometown. First time at Cannes. First time house-hunting. First time . . . well. If I list them all here you’ll fall asleep from the boredom. I’ll skip to today. First time I kill my husband.
I'm at that place in writing that I always forget about. The day I finish. It's always easy to remember the struggles. The frustration. The days where I look at my husband and can't remember his name because I'm on my third day of no sleep. But today is my finish line. The easy, write three chapters and be done with this baby, final steps. I want to remember this, to cherish it. A reminder that things might seem bleak at times, but they are always balanced out by good days. In life as much as in writing. Don't forget to celebrate those good days.
Yesterday marked the end of a one-year journey: my time at Cosmopolitan.com. I had been given a fun task, to write, one episode at a time, three episodes per week, the story of a NYC girl and her hunt for love.
I often forget, when a book is written and sitting on my shelf, all of the heartache and frustration that went into writing it. Take Sex Love Repeat. I was a writer possessed, churning out a stack of pages each day until BAM. I had backed myself into a corner, hopelessly in love with two different heroes with no idea what to do. I struggled for three weeks, writing, then deleting scenes.
This morning I'm writing the last three episodes of the Bedroom Blog. It's been a long and fun journey, I have really enjoyed this process and connecting with new readers through Cosmopolitan. It's been odd, writing a story over the course of a year, three chapters at a time. I've never written a story in that fashion, especially one where I couldn't change scenes once they had been written (and published). It's been a really interesting and creative experience.
I read recently that self-published books can't get onto the New York Times Bestseller List. That they weren't allowed.. or that the New York Times doesn't recognize self-published sales. I knew, when I read it, that it was false. Black Lies, my erotic romance, hit it three times last year. But it was still a welcome sight to see Hollywood Dirt, my newest baby, hit the list. Twice. Technically, three times, because it hit the eBook list AND the Combined Print/Ebook list.
What does that mean?
10 Writing Tips from NYT Bestseller Alessandra Torre Don't drown your readers in descriptions. Sure, give them a few sentences to set scenes, or to make them feel like they're there. But no one cares what every person in the book is wearing every day. Or what every room of the heroine's home looks like.
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