Welcome to my page, and if you’ve already read my books, thank you for taking the time. If you’ve just stumbled upon my page and have yet to read my books, that’s okay too. This blog post is for you as well. If you’ve read my About Me page, you probably already know a few things about me, and why I write. But let me get a little deeper. These blog posts will be where I share the inspiration for the stories I write. You will get to know the backstories of how the tiniest kernel of an idea in my mind becomes a book. My goal is to do this for every book I write, so you get a behind the scenes look at my creative process, because I don’t know about you, but every time I read a book, I find myself wondering where the idea came from. Well, with these blogs I plan to answer that question for you all. So…here goes!
My first books, Crash and Lifeline feature an interracial romance, and recently I was asked why I chose to write an interracial romance. Well, for me it was a simple decision. Growing up I never saw myself represented in the books I read, and I was always attracted to guys of all races, not just my own. I grew up in an area that was predominately white, black, and Asian people so that’s what I was exposed to, and through that I began to find myself attracted to more and more Caucasian males. As I got older and began to read more, I looked for books that featured interracial couples, but I could never find any. Especially books featuring black women and white males. They were nonexistent. Crash and Lifeline are actually not my first interracial romances I’ve ever written, but they are my first published ones.
I wrote my first interracial romance when I was in high school, and it featured a young adult black female in love with a vampire who is a white male. But it’s for my eyes only. That story needs a lot of reworking if I ever plan to publish it. That story was written because I was a fan of vampire romance but had not seen any with a black female protagonist. So, I just wrote a relationship that I wanted to see. Plain and simple. Fast forward many years later, and Crash came to my mind. The spark of this story came to me when I was in school to become a registered nurse. I had a moment of locking eyes with a doctor, and it felt strangely intimate because we were both wearing masks, and he couldn’t see anything but my eyes, and vice versa. But something about that moment stuck out for me, and it never left. That was eight years ago. I built the entire story of Crash from that one moment (and yes, it appears in the book). That’s it.
The smallest idea became two books. Writing the story wasn’t as easy as the idea coming to me, but when I tell you this, it’s to let you know that a story doesn’t have to come fully formed and with some grand idea or epiphany. You can start small and build something bigger. All you have to do is start the thing. Take a deep breath, sit down, pull your pen and paper, or laptop out, and just write. And if you don’t think people are waiting for your story, you’re wrong. There are people who desperately want to read the book you want to read as well, but they can’t read it if you don’t write it.
That’s why I wrote Crash and Lifeline. My mission is to write stories that feature relationships that are underrepresented and not lovingly looked upon when they should be. My goal is to write stories for every heart.
