I was asked to guest blog for the Harlequin Paranormal Romance blog because Shadow's Caress was released from Bites on Feb 1st. (It's a fun story with fun characters and suspense! Check it out.) Of course I said yes! I love talking about my characters and their stories, but guest blogging is hard for me.
Theoretically, you wouldn't think guest blogging would be any harder than blogging here, right? It's not the case, at least not for me. Here, I just riff about whatever I feel like talking about, but when I guest blog, I need a topic and need to stay on topic. I tend to digress. Often.
Plus, on a guest blog, I'm trying extra hard to be interesting, and yet because I have to stay on topic, I often sound as if I were writing an academic paper rather than blogging. That's how stilted and formal my language ends up being. I ran into this same problem with this guest blog.
I had a topic--How to make a ghost sexy--and that's normally really hard to come up with, so I figured I was one ahead. I started making notes because let's face it, y'all know I was just writing down what the characters were saying, internal monologue as well as external dialogue. It's not a question I actually asked myself at any point while I was in Pre-Book or writing the story.
As I notebooked, though, I realized that I had put some thought into a few areas and I'd made decisions on how I was going to handle things. I decided to focus on that for the blog. Knowing I have a problem with formality in guest blogs, I decided to try writing it in ink on paper rather than using Word. Maybe that would avoid it.
Nope. I ended up with a boring academic treatise. I had another thought: What if I wrote it in an email? I tend to be really chatty in email unless I'm sending a note to my agent or an editor. Then my mind goes blank on chatty stuff and I'm overly businesslike. Anyway, it was worth a try, right? It worked! I got my chatty tone back and that's how I like to blog because I am chatting with y'all.
One small problem. I got a little too chatty and I hit 200+ words before reaching my topic. Um, yeah. Editing, cutting, and revising were necessary.
I'll post the link to the guest blog tomorrow--stop by then to check it out!
