Thank you for inviting me to visit with you today and to talk about the first two published books in my royal siblings, The Gasquet Princes, four book series.
When I started writing From Now Until Forever, published by Astraea Press, all I knew about it was that it should have a royal hero. I couldn’t ‘see’ my heroine, nor for that matter my hero, so I went for broke and started freewriting.
Melanie, my heroine turned up right away, and indicated this would be a short story geared towards an online site I’d submitted to in the past. I was given a scene through her eyes – well I was given a tiny snippet of scene, let’s be honest about it. All I knew, some guy with blond hair was getting shot at.
Not a lot to go on, but hey, I thought my word target was a tad over a thousand words, surely I’d get something. I did, but according to the ‘crit’ group I belong to while it captured their attention it wasn’t enough, they wanted more!
So I tried again and took it up to five thousand words, submitted it to a publisher looking for content for their anthology. At the same time a friend read it for me and said ‘she wanted it’ if the story was rejected. It was. So I went back to my friend, Kate, who promptly told me, ‘Good, but you have to extend it to fifteen thousand words.’