Realms of the Raven - Erotic Romance Author Maura Anderson

I’m within a scene of finishing Giving Thanks, one of the two m/m stories I have appearing as individual e-books from Aspen Mountain Press and as part of the Hot Comforts anthology from ManLoveRomance Press.

This story has an interesting history to it. I had been in a chat with Jet Mykles and Anne Cain where our discussion turned to the lack of Thanksgiving themed stories, especially Thanksgiving themed male/male stories. At some point the conversation devolved to specifics and one of them threw out the idea of a food-based story where the guys use gravy as lube. Of course my know-it-all self had to interject that gravy would be too grainy and butter would be better.

Next thing I knew they’d challenged me to write that scene.

I have a horrible personality flaw that makes it nearly impossible for me to resist a challenge. Especially from people I respect. ‘Nuff said.

So I cooked up a scene with Derek and Troy and had a nice little story idea around it. It was maybe 2K words. As you may know if you read my blog, I write a weekly flash fiction free read and those are usually 750 words or so. So a 2K scene is not so out of character. But I did have enough done that I liked it and knew I wanted to finish the story. The question was who to sell it to - I knew it wouldn’t be very long, maybe 8k, and there aren’t many houses that take that might take a contemporary male/male story that short.

At this point I decided to get a few people to look at what I had and give me a sanity check on whether it was worth finishing. It was the first male/male story I’d written and I do have these issue with “suckitis”. So I sent it to a couple of friends who I trust to tell me the truth. They liked it and encouraged me on.

Okay, so it was worth finishing, but I still didn’t know who to sell it to. I was chatting with Laura Baumbach a few days later and mentioned my quandry then asked if she had advice on who to send it to when it was done. To my surprise, she asked to see it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have sent it to her, honestly. I don’t like to presume on friendships and I’m hugely mindful of not calling in favors. I play by strict rules, maybe to an idiotic level in some people’s eyes.

I sent it and spent a little while biting my nails off. I honestly expected a lovely critique that pointed out all the things I’d done wrong. Maybe even telling me to not give up my day job and stick to het stories.

Instead she asked if she could buy it. I had to pick myself up off the floor. Really.

So I signed a contract, then one for another idea I had (Bittersweet, though I didn’t name it for quite a while). Then I started trying to work on it … and trying…. and trying.

This story kicked my ASS.

I have spent more time writing, deleting 99% of it, writing some more and repeating that cycle than anything else. I’ve probably written 25K to get 9K of usable wordcount.

Today I realized what at least one of my problems is. I tried to pants this story and it’s too long for ME to be able to write by the seat of my pants. Most deletions have been because a scene wasn’t moving the story along. It wasn’t serving a purpose. This happens when I don’t know my plan of getting to the end.

No more writing stories without a storyboard for me. As soon as I’ve turned this in, I’m putting together the storyboard for Bittersweet. I refuse to go through this again.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know, but there it is :)