Christina Alexandra

This week my Tuesday post is something a little different–my first blog hop, at the invitation of author Christina Alexandra.

Christina is a freelance writer from Southern California who writes historical romance set in England during the Georgian, Regency and Victorian time periods.  She works the midnight shift as an emergency services operator for a large Southern California police department.

Follow her on her Website, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

So…moving on to My Writing Process: I have four questions to answer before I pass the baton.

What am I currently working on?

I just finished a very, very fast draft of a contemporary romance that is a prequel to the secret baby story I wrote last year. (I’m a big fan of secret baby stories.) The story I just finished is a variation on the secret baby trope, in that the hero finds out he is a secret baby–oops! Spoiler alert! One of my writing friends speculated that two secret babies in a series is one too many. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on that!

I’ve had a couple of weeks of not writing (fiction that is) while I try to develop the next story in my Regency Ring series. I say “try” because, really, I’m not much of a plotter. For the last couple of weeks I’ve written blog posts, put in quite a few hours of volunteer work for my local RWA chapters, shopped for a new car, and spread fifteen bags of mulch, but that’s probably too much information! I plan to put fingers to the keyboard on this new story this week. All I can tell you is that it will be Regency set, with a character from my upcoming release Bella’s Band as the hero, and there’ll be a ring in the story.

How does my work differ from others of it genre?

I don’t know. (Big laugh here!) It’s funny to think about how my writing is different when so often we’re told to market our work as “just like so-and-so famous brand”, something I find really hard to do. I like my heroines to have children or dogs to care for, even when they’re contemporary, self-supporting, career women. Also, come to think of it, since I very much admire people who have the courage to start businesses and put other people to work, many of my contemporary heroines are small-business owners.

Why do I write what I do?

In a class I took a couple of years ago, we developed a “Why I Write What I Do” statement, kind of a mission statement for writers. The details would bore you, but I can summarize by saying that I write what I like to read: stories that reaffirm hope. Romance genre fiction, when done right, is not just about love, but about faith and hope also. Let the story be silly, let it be inconsequential, let it be fantastical, but let it never, never leave the reader depressed.

How does your writing process work?

I like to figure out my characters’ goals, their main external conflict, and think about their wounds and why they’re right for each other. If there’s a villain, I try to think about his goals and wounds also. From this I conjure up an inciting incident and turning points, kind of the “tent poles” for the story. Sometimes I have scenes in mind. Then I push through a fast draft. For a full length, this has been taking me about two months. I could probably do it in one month, but that whole “butt in the chair” for eight hours a day thing doesn’t work for me–it kills my back, and I feel mentally dried up after a few hours. After the fast draft, I put the manuscript aside for a time, a month or more, then go back to it and revise as many times as I need to.

Readers, please weigh in on my secret baby question. I’d love to hear from you!