Sleeping with the Lights On, a contemporary romance from Brenda Whiteside

Please help us welcome Brenda Whiteside to the blog this week. She is sharing some wonderful advice guest post with us and some great advice for those authors wanting to get their books published. She has her contemporary romance Sleeping with the Lights On is on sale until July 30th for $.99. Welcome, Brenda! Without further ado, we’ll hand it over to you!

MILLIONAIRE, STALKER, AND HOT COUNTRY SINGER

I’d like to take you back eleven years to when I published my first book.

There’s a fine line between confidence and abject insecurity. For an author, the abject insecurity can sneak up at any time and stall you, or at least convince you every word going from head to computer has bypassed the creative juice chamber coming out dry and tasteless. Such is the journey. And we all travel this road differently.

My tale is directed to all authors but in particular to the aspiring author. The path to getting my first book published could have been a dead end had the order of events happened differently.

I love to write about characters on a journey, traveling both the physical and the mental roads. My first novel length release, Sleeping with the Lights On, has such a journey for my heroine, Sandra Holiday. Along the fictional journey I create pitfalls and summits, conflicts and resolutions. The road to publication is no different, although as authors we’d like to skip the pitfalls and conflicts.

The abject insecurity I mentioned earlier usually hits me three times when I’m writing a book:  two chapters short of completion, while I’m writing the synopsis, and again right after I type “the end”.  I always manage to muddle through the last two chapters, a whip in one hand holding off my negative inner critic. I wring out those chapters, a word at a time. I won’t even go into the torture of writing a synopsis. But the final phase, the now-I’m-finished-and-who-will-publish-this-inadequate-book is the hardest to overcome.

When I finished Sleeping with the Lights On, I entered two contests to confirm or put to rest my insecurity. Let someone else judge the book’s worthiness. And then I waited.

I’m not a patient person. In a rash moment, I queried one publisher. The Wild Rose Press responded so quickly asking for a partial, I was left giddy. A few weeks later, they requested a full. Jump ahead three months to “the call” or really the email. Excited? Oh, yes. Insecurity? Gone in a flash.

But here’s the difference between fiction and reality; between the logical order of events an author writes and real-life experience. Two days after getting “the call”, I received notification from the two contests. The judges had a slightly different response to my book. In fact, one judge really slammed my baby.

Rejection is hard to take regardless of how thick your hide, but I have to say rejection is much easier to handle when you’ve already been accepted for publication. The journey to getting published is much better when the summit comes first and you can look down at the pitfall and scoff – with confidence. I’ll never know how I might have reacted to those less than winning critiques had I not published first. Would I have shoved the book into a drawer to collect dust? I hope not – must be a moral in this tale.

I haven’t found a cure for conquering the insecurities, but perseverance gets me over the crest. I won’t quit entering the occasional contest, but I’ll not take the results as the final word.

Is there a book you’ve read and raved about that a friend found dull or boring? If you’re a writer, have you let a contest result influence what you did with your manuscript? Have faith in yourself and keep on writing.

Sleeping with the Lights On is on sale until July 30th for $.99. And for those of you who listen to audio, I have free UK codes for the audio book. Comment here or send me an email.

About Sleeping with the Lights On: 

A secret admirer, a redheaded stalker, and an eccentric millionaire have thrown Sandra Holiday on a dangerous path.

After two failed marriages and countless relationships, Sandra thinks she’s met the man to end her years of less than perfect choices; choices that not only derailed her travel-related career plans, but also left her single and broke.

Carson Holiday, a Las Vegas country crooner with swoon-inducing good looks, spent his adult life pursuing a recording contract and love, never holding on to either. After eighteen years, he drops back into Sandra’s life, reigniting an attraction he can’t deny.

When Carson reappears, Sandra must choose again. As life confronts her with yet another turning point, will her decisions find her eternally sleeping with the lights on – or will she finally discover a way to turn them off?

Contemporary Romance, mildly sensual:

BUY LINKS for Sleeping with the Lights On:

About the Author:

Brenda Whiteside is the author of suspenseful, action-adventure romance. Mostly. After living in six states and two countries—so far—she and her husband have decided they are gypsies at heart, splitting their time between Northern Arizona and the RV life. They share their home with a rescue dog named Amigo. While FDW is fishing, Brenda writes stories of discovery and love entangled with suspense.

 

Tags

9 Comments

  2. In all these years, I’ve actually never entered a contest. But everyone certainly has different likes and dislikes. I’ve yawned through NYT bestsellers. You can’t please them all, and I, for one, am glad you kept writing wonderful stories!

  3. Your story is the story of every author I’ve read about or talked to. Some readers enjoy a narrow range…a genre, perhaps, even as narrow as a particular niche in that genre, like surprise baby stories or cowboy tomes. So they might be skeptical of our genre from the get-go. Contest readers are often forced to judge books OUTSIDE their most-loved genre, so they could begin reading our books less engaged. Truth is, we have to keep writing to improve our craft, even while the criticism comes…and that’s not easy. Mush on, my friend!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *