Revisiting Old Muses

Before I learned all about the alleged importance of writing to market, I wrote from the heart.  I still do although it usually starts as a tug of war inside my head that goes like this:

Business me: Write to market.

Creative me: NO!

Business me: It’s what people want. More sex. More sizzle. More… whatever the market wants.  Maybe whips and chains.

Creative me: No, I want to write about love and pain and trust.

Business me: Write to the darn market anyway.

Creative me: Whatever.

Luckily, the creative part of me wins during the writing phase, leaving the business me to scramble on how to market the finished book to the public.  But this isn’t the point of this post.

I found a few of my older trailer videos back when I was posting most of my stories on Wattpad (and then unpublished when I started self-publishing for real) and one of them is finally coming out of the shadows in a contemporary romance box set that launches in May.

In His Heart first started out as a 50K word romantic suspense novel but I saw major problems with it when I wrote it – like how on earth did I make Hermosa Beach PD look so bad? I lived one block away from the station and they were good people – the ones I knew.

So I knew I had to change a few things like focus mainly on the romance and cut back on the suspense part but I wasn’t ready to read the whole piece all over again when I had another novel to get ready at the same time this novella was due for the box set.

Thank goodness for book trailers because it turns out I made one for In His Heart.  And the inspiration for my two characters, Josh and Livvie, are there along with the original blurb and the mood I wanted to convey. Rose Leslie and Nicolai Coster-Waldau are perfect, and even though I no longer use actors to imagine characters, Rose and Nicolai are the only ones I see in my head for California surfer-detective Josh and feisty Cali girl, Livvy.

Disclaimer: All images of the actors belong to their respective owners.