Hello hello!
So, I disappeared for a few months. I apologize for not sending anything, not wishing you a Happy New Year, and not releasing any new book in so long... But something happened, and I need to share something with you.
Rant incomming! There's a too long; didn't read section at the end in case you're in a rush.
A heart-to-heart.
Last December was the worst month creativity-wise for me. I struggled with every little task. I abhored the idea of spending hours doing a TikTok that would get blocked because I forgot to censor the word "finger" (true story) in a non-steamy scene. But most of all, I was so tired. I've been working crazy hours for several years now, rarely going on vacation (and only taking a few days off if I had to visit my mother, who thinks I never do anything right...). I lost my father, who I had a very troubling relationship with (he made it clear I was his retirement plan), and in my family we've never had the freedom of talking about feelings, so I never dealt with the grief properly.
I was going to therapy, but now I see my therapist and I were not a good fit and I should have changed therapists earlier. With my new therapist, I learned my mother is a narcissist who raised me as a scapegoat (super recommend Jerry Wise's videos on YouTube on the subject!). Because I was the family's scapegoat, I grew up with no self-esteem, no boundaries, and I'm just always desperate for external validation.
All of this I only learned after I had a panic attack, on Christmas day.
Imagine this: you're having Christmas dinner with your partner. The year was rough and you worked very hard, but you don't feel like you accomplished much. You spent the last month procrastinating on your tasks, detesting everything you do and everything you write.
Then you pass out.
Out of nowhere.
I was eating and watching TV and my blood pressure shot straight through the roof. I started having massive chest pain, especially on the left side. My uncle died young from a heart attack, so I rushed to the nearest emergency room.
Bless the doctor who was working there on Christmas evening. He was so patient with me. He never doubted my story (as often happens with women) and he took it seriously. We did a bunch of tests, found nothing, and after nine excruciating hours of pain and shortness of breath, they sent me home.
Three days later, I was back.
This time, I couldn't breathe. I could barely speak to the nurse. My blood pressure shot through the roof again, over and over. I was sure I was having a heart attack.
A new doctor saw me this time. He asked me if my year had been stressful. I mean, I guess? Everyone's 2024 was stressful, right? He told me he would give me something, just to test.
It was a potent anxiolytic and it actually did help. It was a panic attack, he believed. I was stressed, overworked. I needed time off.
In January, I found out you can have panic attacks days after being stressed. I found out I was so overworked and stressed out that my body literally thought it was better to die than to live another day in these conditions. π I also discovered there's such a thing as a panic attack hangover and I could barely get out of bed after the whole thing went down.
It was a nightmare and I hope you never go through it.
It was also a wake-up call. Things had to change. I had to upend my life and figure out what works and what doesn't work. What I can keep and what must go away. My health was suffering because of it. So, I took that chance to analyze everything.
Why did I start to write?
My first steamy romance author was Lauren Blakely, but there was one thing about her heroines that always annoyed me: they were always so fit!! I remember how the male POV would go on and on about how muscular and hard as steel the heroine's calves were. Like?? I could not relate at all. π Every heroine was super fit, had abs or a flat stomach, and huge perky breasts. And I could not see myself in any of them!
So, I decided to write my own stories, with heroines that looked more like me. Later, I diversified, and now I have bi-racial heroines, and black girls, and girls with colorful hair, but they're always curvy. That's the one thing I'll never let go. But that leads to a problem...
The state of publishing.
Publishing was never easy and it's getting harder. With AI everywhere and publishing houses focusing so hard on social media, it's getting more difficult to compete with big companies that have millions of dollars to invest in marketing. All my romance books have one thing in common: a plus-size heroine, and that's very, very hard to get published. Paranormal romance is also very hard to publish traditionally, unless you already have a huge following on social media. The publishing houses are simply not interested.
But I believe in my stories, and I want to read heroines that look like me, so I choose to persist. Even if that means dealing with Amazon's predatory policies. I only receive 30% royalties over books that cost 99c, for example, and though Amazon has never had so much profit, they only pay us 0.004c per page read on Kindle Unlimited. That's not a typo! They truly only pay us 0.004c per page read. So, if you read a 250-page book on KU, the author receives one dollar... before Amazon takes their share, of course. Plus, they have something we call the "cliff"; every thirty days after publishing, your books drop further in the algorithm, forcing the author to publish another work as fast as possible, preferentially every thirty days. An incredibly narrow timeframe to produce a book.
What are the plans?
This year, I'm forcing myself to slow down. I'm still struggling with it (I had an anxiety attack just last week), but I'm choosing to write fewer novel-length books instead of a huge number of novellas. And to think that, when I started, I used to publish a novella a week! No wonder I burned out so badly.
Curiously, the vast majority of my works were never published in bundles (a funny thing, because I love buying bundles), so that's what I'm doing this year. I'm re-editing and re-proofreading my stories, bundling them, putting nice covers in each of them, and publishing these box sets. This will help the algorithm stay afloat while I write longer books. Please, do grab these once they come out! It'll help me enormously to publish the next novels. The first bundle coming out is Forbidden Curves, books 1-13. A good chance to read through the whole thing in case you missed any story!
For this year, I have planned three new novels: Archer, the sequel to Dante; a holiday shifter romance for the end of the year; and a hockey romance!
What am I working on right now?
A few months ago, a scene popped into my head. I wrote it down, barely two thousand words. It was this banter-filled scene between a couple that had been seeing each other in secret... because he was her brother's best friend.
The scene ended with her brother walking in on them and reacting very badly.
I wanted to write this scene into a story, but it didn't fit with what I had in mind for Archer... It also didn't fit any series I had... So I needed to invent something new.
Pucking Perfect is going to be a standalone hockey romance. It won't be a series, at least not at first. Ever since I moved to Toronto, I've wanted to write something set here, so why not a hockey romance (I'll invent a hockey team that actually wins Stanley Cups since the Maple Leafs cannot π)? I'll give you more details as we get closer to the release date, but I'm so very excited to share more. I'll soon share the original scene I wrote, just a tease, and some curiosities about planning a story set in the city I live in...
TL;DR: After working nonstop for years, I burned out and, subsequently, had three panic attacks related to work. Knowing I have to slow down, this year will be focused on publishing bundles, though I have full-length novels coming up. The first one will be a standalone hockey romance called Pucking Perfect.
Things are going to change and I hope you stay with me through these changes. Please, take care of your mental health! The world keeps telling us to be more and more productive, but what's the point if we're too sick to enjoy life?
See you next!
xx
Erin
COVER REVEAL
ο»Ώ
A LITTLE TEASE...
0 comments