First of all – last night I watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse and the season opener of Nip/Tuck – Oded in spec ops gear and Julian, oh my Dr. Troy – so sullen, so selfish…

Okay, now to writing – I’m nearly 16K into Standoff and happy with where I’m heading. The heroine, Grace, is a doctor but she’s not mouthy and tough on the exterior like Nina or Tracy. So I have to rein in my dialog impulses and nix the snarky on the outside. She’s strong of course, she’s Cade’s mate and she’s taken a huge risk to come to him. He realizes that but she’s got some stuff to deal with. She’s a scientist so her happy place is in a lab or with data and not necessarily with a lot of other people. It’s always a challenge to write every character and make them unique, make them as real as you can without essentially copying your base character again and again.

Sometimes beginning a new book can be daunting, sometimes it’s the middle or the end that make me insane. The last two projects I worked on were hard to start but once I hit a certain point, once I know my characters and where they need to journey to, things begin to ease in my head.

I don’t necessarily mean it becomes easy to write that journey, but what I mean is I know the map and feel confident about the waypoints if not the scenic markers of the route.

I remember thinking that at some point, it would get easier after I did it a few times. In some ways, it does. I know more now about how to heighten tension with a few sentences here and there. I know how to edit better, I know things that make me a better writer in a technical sense. But at the same time, the knowing means I feel more pressure to use all those tools to the best of my ability to write a book.

Each day I learn and grow. Each day I fail and succeed. Hopefully, the success will outweigh the failure. But in the end, it’s what I do, how I do it and that I continue forward.