Writers in the Storm

by Ellen Buikema

By 2018, I’d organized myself into a fairly neat routine. Worked a bit on the house in the morning after a meal, reviewed email, went over the previous day’s writing, fixed what needed fixing, and compose new material until I needed a break or went blank.

The remains of the days varied, but I worked at our family dining room table in the same spot each day with a worry stone given to me by the mother of a past student and a stuffed dragon that guarded my writing area.

Occasionally, Bailey, our lovable black lab, would lay down on the floor with me and help me think when I was stuck for what to write next. That’s part of my process, either lay down to think or play solitaire using physical cards. Solitaire on the screen doesn’t work for me. I need to remove myself completely from electronics when temporarily stuck. I have no idea why that is, but it is.

The Big Move

Bailey, our wonderful, unofficial therapy dog and writing partner passed over the Rainbow bridge that year.

Since we’d both retired, we decided to move to Mexico and use living there as a base for travel. Eventually we found a place that felt right for us, Mazatlán, off the sea of Cortez.

Now, settled in a condo off the beach, I could get back to the business of writing. Except there were differences:

• Worry stone, hiding somewhere.
• Dragon Guardian, in a box with a friend in Phoenix.
• Dining room table, left behind for the new owners of our house.
• Writing Partner Pup, in heaven where he belonged—angel on four paws.
• Daily schedule, drastically changed due to neighborhood noise.

Living in a port city can be fantastic. Busy. Lots to do of cultural interest in El Centro Historico. Opportunities to meet people from all over the world.

Mazatlán is home to Banda music. If you’re not familiar with this musical genre, imagine a marriage of Mexican Norteño and German Oompah music. It’s not on my favorites list, but is very popular there.

When the Germans came though Mazatlán in the mid-to-late 19^th century they left beer (Pacifico) and Oompah. Sometimes, very late at night, musicians would play their tubas along the beach. That being a horrific way to be roused from sleep.

Basically, the beauty of the area aside, my writing process and writing comforts were caput.

Do we need the perfect writing conditions?

Some days when you open up the laptop the writing flows. Other times you stare at the screen and nothing comes to mind. Author Kris Maze, in a blog post for WITS, has helpful suggestions for getting the writing flow back after falling into a slump—never a fun place to be.

Having the perfect writing condition for one’s self is wonderful but life happens and you must either change your methods or be distraught at not being able to write.

Instead of perfect, try aiming for what works.

Dealing With Your Inner Perfectionist

You sit in front of your notebook, laptop, or for me recently, a blank canvas. You think, well isn’t it lovely, all that blankness—perfect just as it is.

My canvas depicting a polar bear in a blizzard of blinding white needed to become a jungle scene with parrots for the grandbaby’s nursery.

• What if I get the perspective wrong?
• How on earth can I possibly mix that unusual shade of blue?
• I’ve never painted anything misty before. What if it ends up looking blotchy?

This need for everything to go right can cause a whopping case of paralysis. Instead, take a deep breath, pick up the brush, pen, pencil, keyboard, and get something down.

Perfection is not real; it is an illusion. There is beauty in imperfection.

Walk into a library and look around at the many books, all works of art in their own right. Not one of them was flawless in the beginning. Even the best writers have published works that still have the occasional error.

Keep These Points in Mind

Your first draft will be a hot mess. No worries! First drafts are supposed to be messy. It takes a village to put together a great book. Lots of eyes-on help.

Remember that the goal is to tell a good story, which will take many drafts. But you have to start with the first one.

Focus on attainable goals. The over-arching goal is to complete your story, but there are the day-to-day benchmarks along the way:

• Mastering your writing routine
• Getting in your daily word count goals
• Improving your writing skills

Final Thoughts

Try what my best friend does, write as if no one is ever going to read your work. Write for yourself. Get it out of your head. In this way, there is no fear of composing words on a page.

Learn to embrace imperfection.

There will be disappointing days when the Muse refuses to show up to work. On those days step away from the computer, notebook, canvas, and do something that gives you joy. Short breaks can do wonders. A bit later, with a fresh outlook, read over what you’ve started, ask yourself “What happens next?” and move forward.

* * * * * *

About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written Parenting ... A Work in Progress, non-fiction for parents, and The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon chapter book series with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works in Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and The Crystal Key, MG Magical Realism/ Sci-Fi, a glaze of time travel.

Find her at https://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Top Image of Mazatlán at sunset taken by Ellen L. Buikema

How Your Inbox is Holding Your Masterpiece Hostage

by Lisa Norman

We talk a lot about protecting our writing time. We close the office door, put on noise-canceling headphones, and warn our families that if the house isn't actively on fire, we are invisible.

But there’s a quiet, heavy burden sitting right on your desk, masked as a tool of the trade.

Your inbox.

Once upon a time, email was a digital mailbox—a nice place where readers sent fan mail, agents sent contracts, and colleagues sent ideas. Today, it feels more like a slow-moving swamp of quicksand. Every single day, a fresh layer of digital noise pours over us: sophisticated phishing scams, AI-generated pitches, and endless newsletters we signed up for years ago and never read.

Before you know it, you aren't managing your correspondence anymore. You’re just trying to keep your head above the sand.

The Quicksand Real-World Horror

Years ago, I had a client whose email address was harvested by a particularly nasty scam group. Within days, his inbox was flooded faster than he could physically hit the delete key. Fake invoices, urgent security alerts, and desperate pleas cascaded in by the thousands.

He tried to keep up. He spent hours every day frantically scanning the noise, terrified he’d miss a real customer contact, a valid invoice, or an important career link.

You know what happened? He lost the real contacts anyway. The digital quicksand completely swallowed them. The overwhelming noise paralyzed his business, drained his mental energy, and eventually forced him to do the unthinkable: delete the address entirely, abandon his established contacts, and start over from scratch, new business cards and all.

That was a decade ago. Today, the swamp is wider, and the quicksand pulls harder.

I recently talked to a brilliant author and editor who confessed she was staring at nearly 7,000 unread emails in her business account alone. She spends valuable time every single day just shoo-ing the digital vermin away, watching the junk pour in faster than she can clear it, while warnings pop up that her storage capacity is hitting the danger zone.

If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. When I’m working with authors and entrepreneurs, I often see accounts with 20 thousand or more unread emails.

This is not your fault.

But we have to talk about what that struggle is actually costing your creativity.

The Mental Weight of the Unread

When your unread count climbs into the hundreds—or the thousands—you aren't just letting data pile up. You’re carrying a massive cognitive load. Your brain is trying to survive the quicksand pull of those unmade decisions.

Our brains aren't built to process a chaotic crowd of strangers screaming for our attention all at once. Yet every time you open your email to look for a specific note from your editor, your brain has to process through that quicksand. You glance past a discount code for shoes, a pitch from a publicist you don't know, a fake notification claiming your streaming account is suspended, and three urgent-sounding requests for your time.

You might think you’re just ignoring them, but your brain is actively working to filter them out. It’s making micro-decisions with every scroll: Is this a scam? Is this real? Do I owe this person money? By the time you finally find the email you needed, your creative energy for the day is cut in half. Your focus has been pulled into a dozen different directions. The scammers and marketers didn't have to steal your identity to win. They just had to steal the best part of your attention.

As writers, our brains are our creative sanctuaries. We need deep, uninterrupted focus to build worlds, untangle plots, and understand our characters. When we leave our digital front door wide open to every salesman and random notification, we are telling our creative souls that their peace doesn't matter. We’re letting the sands of wasted time swirl around us, pulling us down.

Finding Solid Ground

You don't have to live in a state of constant digital overwhelm.

Getting your digital house in order isn't about being a corporate efficiency expert. It’s about building a safe harbor around your creativity. It’s about ensuring that when you sit down to write, your brain isn't secretly chewing on an unread message hyping an artificial crisis.

If you feel yourself sinking, here are three ways to stop struggling and find solid ground:

• Separate the Rooms: Your fan mail, your industry newsletters, and your critical business or bank alerts don’t want to sit in the same inbox. When they all crowd into one space, the noise chokes out the important messages. Build digital walls so the vermin can't find your sacred creative space.
• Declare Email Bankruptcy: If you are sitting on thousands of unread emails, accept the truth: you are never going to read them. Select them all and hit Archive—not delete. They are still searchable if an emergency arises, but they are out of your sight. Clear a path so you have a safe place to stand. By hitting Archive we leave behind the fear that we’ve missed out on something critical. It will be there if we need it.
• Guard Your Access: Stop giving your email address away for free downloads you don't care about. And don't just substitute a throw-away address that piles up digital clutter elsewhere. Every time you fill out a form, you are giving a stranger explicit permission to interrupt your writing day. Be stingy with your access.

Your inbox can become a tool that serves your career, not a quicksand pit that swallows your time. Don't let digital quicksand stand between you and your next book.

How many unread emails are currently pulling at your attention? What is one small boundary you can set today to keep the digital noise out of your creative space?

About Lisa

Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not hanging out with her family, writing, or teaching, she can be found wandering the local beaches.

Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of No Stress Writing Academy. She also runs Heart Ally Books, LLC, an indie publishing firm.

Interested in learning more from Lisa? Sign up for her newsletter or check out her school, No Stress Writing Academy, where she teaches social media, organization, technical skills, and marketing for authors! This post is based upon a lesson from her class, Digital Organization Skills for Authors.

Her most recent book, The Work of Joy is now available here.

Top image from depositphotos.

By Jenn Windrow

Recently I was working with an editing client on their third fantasy romance novel. We had worked together on the first two, so I was well invested in the love story between the hero and heroine. But this story, well it was, breaking almost every rule that traditional romances follow.

And yes, rules are meant to be broken, but when it comes to writing romance, there are a few that are non-negotiable.

You see, romance readers are some of the most loyal readers in publishing. They'll follow favorite authors across series, buy books on release day, and recommend stories they love to friends. But that loyalty comes with expectations.

Unlike many genres, romance has a clearly defined contract between author and reader. When someone picks up a romance novel, they're not just hoping for a love story. They're expecting specific emotional promises to be fulfilled. Break those promises, and readers won't simply dislike the book. They'll often feel betrayed by it.

So, I thought today would be a good day to go over the three rules that simply cannot be broken when writing romance.

Promise #1: The Story Ends with a Happily Ever After (HEA) or Happy For Now (HFN)

This is the big one.

That future can be forever, which gives readers a Happily Ever After. Or it can be a Happy For Now, where the couple has chosen each other and the relationship is moving forward, even if every challenge hasn't been solved.

A romance novel must end with the central couple together and committed to a future relationship.

What romance cannot do is separate the couple at the end, kill one of the love interests, or leave readers wondering if the relationship will survive.

Can those endings work in fiction? Absolutely. They just aren't romance endings.

Readers pick up a romance because they want emotional satisfaction. They want to believe that love wins. If the story doesn't deliver that payoff, it risks feeling like a broken promise regardless of how beautifully written it may be.

You can put your characters through the deeper depths of hell and back, but in the end, we need to see them together. Happy, or at least as happy as they can be. And love blossoming.

This is how you make your readers swoon and want more.

Promise #2: The Reader Must Never Doubt Who the Love Interest Is

One of the fastest ways to frustrate romance readers is to create uncertainty about the romantic pairing. This doesn't mean characters can't have past relationships. They can. It doesn't mean exes can't appear. They can. It doesn’t even mean another love interest can appear on the page. They can.

But it does mean that readers shouldn't spend the story wondering whether the hero or heroine is genuinely interested in someone else.

When readers see one of the main characters behaving romantically, sexually, or emotionally intimate with another potential partner, it creates doubt about the central relationship. It weakens the bond that the hero and heroine have for one another.

Of course, there are exceptions. Reverse harem, why choose, ménage, and other relationship structures establish different expectations from the beginning. Readers understand the romantic destination and buy the book accordingly. And this is fine, as long as it is clear from the start that the hero/heroine is going to be collecting partners like Pokémon.

For traditional romance, however, readers want to invest fully in the central couple. Every scene that suggests a competing romance weakens that investment.

The reader's heart should never be divided.

Promise #3: Put Your Couple on the Page Together

This sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly common.

Writers often become fascinated by worldbuilding, side characters, mysteries, political intrigue, magical systems, family drama, or external conflict. Before they know it, the hero and heroine are spending entire chapters apart.

Romance doesn't happen off page. Chemistry doesn't happen off page. Emotional connection doesn't happen off page. Readers fall in love with the relationship by watching the characters interact. By reading longing touches and lingering looks and sexy moments.

Every shared scene gives the couple opportunities to build attraction, reveal vulnerabilities, create tension, deepen trust, and strengthen emotional bonds.

If you're revising a romance manuscript, look closely at how much page time your couple actually spends together. Not thinking about each other. Not talking about each other. Actually together. Many romance novels become stronger simply by increasing those interactions and reducing scenes where the protagonists are separated.

One of the first things I do when editing a romance novel is track how many scenes the couple actually shares. Writers are often surprised to discover their love interests spend far less time together than they remembered.

The Question That Causes Endless Confusion

This is where many writers stumble. A book can contain a romance and still not be a romance novel.

The difference comes down to what story is driving the book.

If the primary plot is solving a murder, stopping a war, saving the kingdom, surviving a disaster, or finding a lost artifact, you're likely writing another genre with a romantic subplot. The romance may be important. Readers may adore it. It may even be the emotional heart of the story. But if the relationship isn't the central plot, it isn't a romance novel.

In a romance novel, the relationship is the story. The external plot exists to challenge, strengthen, or threaten that relationship. Take away the romance, and the entire story falls apart.

Take away the romance from a fantasy with a romantic subplot, however, and the main story can often continue. The kingdom can still be saved. The murderer can still be caught. The dragon can still be defeated.

Understanding this distinction matters because reader expectations change depending on the genre. Fantasy readers may accept a bittersweet ending. Mystery readers may be satisfied when the killer is caught. Women's fiction readers may embrace a journey of personal growth.

Romance readers expect the relationship to be the primary story, and they expect that relationship to end happily.

The problem usually isn't the quality of the writing. It's unmet expectations. Readers bought one type of emotional experience and received another. That's why reviews often mention feeling "tricked" or "misled" even when the book is objectively good. Here's the test. If you remove the romance and the story still functions, you're probably writing another genre with a romantic subplot. If removing the romance causes the entire story to collapse, you're writing a romance.

The Romance Reader's Contract

At its core, romance isn't defined by kisses, spice levels, tropes, or even genre setting.

You can write contemporary romance, historical romance, paranormal romance, fantasy romance, science fiction romance, sweet romance, or steamy romance.

What unites them all is the promise. The reader expects a central love story. The reader expects to know who the romantic partners are. The reader expects to spend time watching that relationship develop. And the reader expects that relationship to end happily.

Deliver on those promises, and readers will happily follow you anywhere. Because while every romance is different, the contract remains the same.

Readers want to live happily ever after through your characters.

What romance “rule” do you think writers break most often, and have you ever stopped reading a book because it violated your expectations as a romance reader?

About Jenn Windrow

Jenn Windrow once attempted to write a “normal” book—and promptly bored herself into a coma. So now she sticks to what she does best: writing snarky, kick-butt heroines, broody supernatural men, and more sexual tension than a vampire in a blood bank.

She’s the award-winning author of the Alexis Black novels and the Redeeming Cupid series, where the undead never sparkle and the drama is always delicious. Jenn moonlights as a developmental editor, helping other writers wrangle their wild plots and tangle-free prose.

When not arguing with her characters or muttering about Oxford commas, she can be found binge-watching trash TV, wrangling the slew of animals that live in her house (husband and teenagers included), or telling herself she’ll only have one more cookie.

You can find her at jennwindrow.com or lurking on social media where she pretends to be an extrovert.

Photo by m carty on Unsplash