Ten Years and Four Books Later, I'm still in awe

It's hard to believe that ten years ago this year I completed my first and second novels. When I was writing them, I had no idea they'd ever get published....I'd hoped they would, but it wasn't really a big goal. I was just thrilled to have written, and finished, them.

This week marks the five year anniversary of publishing my first book....although not the first book I wrote...that took another three years to happen.

Since that first day I put the kids to bed and sat at the computer, I've published four books (total), and although I'm not at the level of success I had begun to hope I'd be, I'm very happy with how my work is received. Reviews are wonderful and I rarely get something snarky from a reviewer who just wants to rain on my parade. My work has even won a few awards, given by readers, which is much better than being judged by other writers. haha

Anyway, writing four books over the last ten years doesn't seem like a lot, but it really is. Believe it or not, writing is hard work...especially for me because I don't plot my work. I come up with a title, the characters and a basic..."what if" sentence, then I start writing. For the most part I'm just "throwing up words on the page", which wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to go back to previous pages and fix a plot point because it changed when I threw my smorgasbord together.  But....annoying as it is sometimes, that works for me. It doesn't get the work written any faster but it makes for a fairly clean first draft (story-wise, not punctuation-wise. Haha)  Of course if I were a more prolific writer, I'd be Allison Brennan.  Yeah....not a bad dream to have.

Eventually I'll get faster at writing. I almost have to or I'll lose the ideas for the other stories in my head. And, knowing that there are people out there, waiting for new work from me and enjoying what I've written so far is very humbling. I wouldn't be celebrating anything if it weren't for my readers, so Thank You!!

Oh, and in case you hadn't heard, I made a change to my novel House of Cards. It's a new cover, to better reflect the romantic suspense element. This novel also won the Reader's Crown for Best Romantic Suspense at RomCom.