I’m hard at work listening to Starship, eating my kids Halloween candy, and working on finishing the first long draft of romantic suspense, Too Hard to Leave. Firefighter Matt is determined to find out who’s responsible for the death of his best friend. When Emma decides to leave her worries behind and hit the beach for a couple weeks, she wasn’t expecting to meet someone like Matt, much less fall for him. Matt’s got trust issues and he knows there are no guarantees in life for a happy ending. Emma is convinced she only wants a vacation fling.  Will fear and doubt keep them apart?

I’m having fun creating Matt and Emma’s struggles. Originally, Too Hard to Leave was written as a shorter story, maybe about 80 pages, but I decided it needed to be much longer. And then writer’s block visited me last month. Not just the being stuck on a scene kind of block but the kind of block where I questioned the story, my talent as a writer, my existence, humanity, and also the need for strangers passing one another to throw out the obligatory “hi, how are ya?”. And then, as it always does, the fog lifted and I had an idea, which led to another idea, which led to me deciding to take the month of November to finish the first draft and turn Too Hard to Leave into a suspenseful, steamy, twisting tale.

Over the past couple of days I’ve gotten about 15 thousand words on the pages. I had forgotten how happy the hectic, frenetic pace of a deadline makes me. I’m weird like that but I guess we’re all weird in our own ways- whether we fly a flag and tell the world or not. Me? I stay up too late writing and then I’m hateful in the morning. I have zero ability to learn from this mistake and not enough desire to change. I love the concept of love yet my thoughts are never flowery or sweet, just bent towards sarcastic and laced in profanity. Maybe this is the perfect mix to make a modern day romance novelist or maybe I’m a romance novelist because that’s the best way for me to channel my um… unique qualities.

Either way, I’m spending my afternoon listening to 80s music and writing scenes, all while trying to keep my short attention span from leading me to google unnecessary info or to clean things that can probably wait (but maybe shouldn’t). Sooo, wish me luck and patience as I try to figure out the rest of Matt and Emma’s story in the next 21 and a half days.