Unfortunate Son; by Shae Connor – Blog Tour and Giveaway
Please welcome Shae Connor to the site today. She has a new Unfortunate Son out and she’s here to talk a bit about how it came to be and what it’s like to write on a deadline. Be sure to read through to the end for a chance to enter the giveaway for a gift card and an eBook from Shae’s backlist.
Writing to a Deadline
Unfortunate Son marks the first time that I’ve actually proposed a book to a publisher before I was finished writing it. Now, that’s not entirely true; the book was mostly complete when I first spoke to Elizabeth North of Dreamspinner about my plans for a series, and even closer to finished when I sent her a formal proposal via email. But when you throw in the fact that I’d only ever written one novel before, agreeing to write three, complete with deadlines, was a huge leap into the unknown for me.
Since I started writing professionally, I’ve tried several different methods to encourage myself to sit down and write. I’ve worked on multiple stories at once, tracked word counts (my host, Andrew, and I even did a word count race for a while), done National Novel Writing Month, and written on both short and long deadlines.
What I’m learning—and I’m definitely still learning!—is that I tend to do best when I’m writing one story at a time, and when I have a deadline to shoot for. I absolutely hate missing a deadline. When I was working on my story for the next “butt-thology” (Butt Riders on the Range), we had a deadline of November 30, but after some discussion with the publisher, we agreed to push that back by two weeks. Even that made me uncomfortable!
Writing to a deadline, I think, is a concept that’s been ingrained in me since my earliest work days. I started out in daily newspaper, which meant we had daily deadlines to meet. No matter what else happened, we had to get pages filled and on the press by the same time every single day. Over time, as I moved into working on monthly publications instead, the frequency of the deadlines changed, but the regularity never did. My current day job has about one deadline a week, which still feels like a vacation after the daily grind.
When I first started writing fiction, I had no clue about how long it would take for me to write a story. I’d written fanfiction for years, but there was no consistency at all in how long it would take for me to write a story. I once wrote a 10,000-word story in one day. If I could do that every day—heck, even every week—I’d be golden.
But that’s not how things work. In fanfic, I could write whenever I had time and inspiration. I rarely wrote anything as a “work in progress”—posting as I completed a section or chapter—so there was very little expectation from readers, other than that I’d eventually post something else.
Professional fiction is different. There are expectations, on the part of publishers and readers. To build a successful, long-term career, an author needs to publish regularly. The intervals may vary, depending on the author’s style and genre, but with the exception of a handful of big names, the only way to keep moving forward is to keep producing new work.
Every author is different. Some authors can sit down and write a thousand words or three thousand words a day, every single day. Some can write only when they’re inspired. Some can write a novel in a month, while others take years. None of those things are right, and none of those things are wrong. The only thing that matters is what works for the individual author.
For me, having a specified date by when I’ve promised to have a story to a publisher is what works. During 2014, I met deadlines for two novels and three short stories. I have one more novel deadline coming up, and as that approaches, I’ll be working on finalizing others for later in the year. I don’t know that this approach will work forever, but I’ll keep going as long as it does. I certainly have enough story ideas banked to feed the stream!
Unfortunate Son
Blurb:
Five years ago, Evan Day lost his lover in the Afghan sand, and in the fallout, he lost his military career and his family. With help from friends, he reinvented himself as porn star Trevor Hardball, but his scars are hidden, not healed. When Riley Yeats falls into Evan’s lap in a bar, he awakens a part of Evan he’d thought was dead and gone. Evan’s fascinated by the blond and twinky Riley, even though he’s the opposite of Evan’s usual type.
Then Evan’s family reappears his life, and Evan soon learns Riley has his own family-inflicted wounds—ones that make it hard for him to be there for Evan. A disastrous confrontation between Evan and his parents leaves Evan’s mother injured and Evan overcome by anger and fear. Losing his tenuous hold on his emotional control, Evan makes one bad decision after another, but maybe his final fall will be the wake-up call Evan needs to set things right—with his parents, and with Riley.
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About the Author:
Shae Connor lives in Atlanta, where she’s a lackadaisical government worker for a living and writes sweet-hot romance under the cover of night. She’s been making things up for as long as she can remember, but it took her a long time to figure out that maybe she should try writing them down. She’s conned several companies into publishing her work and adds a new notch on her bedpost each time another story is unleashed onto an unsuspecting universe.
A member of the Romance Writers of America and the Rainbow Writers chapter, Shae was first published in 2010 and has a lineup of short stories, novellas, and novels available from Dreamspinner Press, Wilde City Press, MLR Press, and Amber Allure.
Shae is part Jersey, part Irish, and all Southern, which explains why she never shuts up. When she’s not chained to her laptop, she enjoys cooking, traveling, watching baseball, and reading voraciously, and she’s an annual volunteer for the Dragon Con on-site publication, the Daily Dragon.
Social Media:
Twitter: @shaeconnor
email: shaeconnorwrites@gmail.com
Website: shaeconnorwrites.com.
Blog Stops:
Check out the other stops on the Unfortunate Son blog tour:
12 – Jan – The Novel Approach
14 – Jan – Joyfully Jay
16 – Jan – Love Bytes
18 – Jan – Andrew Q. Gordon
20 – Jan – Kimi-Chan
22 – Jan – Grace Duncan
24 – Jan – The Blogger Girls
26 – Jan – Prism Book Alliance
28 – Jan – Vicktor Alexander
30 – Jan – JP Barnaby
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