Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Shawn and Terry are BFD’s too. They write science fiction while I write erotic romance. So it’s a really fun (and sometimes crazy) dynamic.
I’ll never forget the time Terry was gone doing something and it was just Shawn and me doing sprints. So we did one and gave our word count. And then I asked him what he was writing and he told me his scene. And then he asked what I was writing and I told him I was writing a really hot sex scene between McKay and Adam. The look on his face was priceless.
But truthfully, all the thanks for meeting these two guys goes to our audiobook publisher, Podium Audio. Because I met Terry Schott at a Podium Meet and Greet at the 20 Books convention several years back. And he and Shawn had seen me give a talk about marketing at the Smarter Artist the year before. Terry was like the long-lost best friend I didn’t know I was missing. We just clicked and our friendship has been the best and it was just a whole lot of kismet that we ended up being author friends.
Romance authors probably know Terry as a Strengths consultant for Becca Syme’s Better-Faster Academy. He’s a master, world-class author coach. And trust me, when I have a plot issue or a motivation issue, I go to Terry first. He always has ten or twenty possible ways to solve my problem.
Many thanks to Podium for giving Johnathan and I this book deal too. They wanted a rom com and they wanted Johnathan and me to write it. So that’s how the whole Ro Bro thing happened. One of the stand out moments was when Johnathan called me up for our weekly chat about the book and I said I had a title. But I wasn’t sure, because on the one hand, it’s really stupid. But on the other hand, I can’t stop laughing about it because it’s so stupid. And I needed his opinion on it.
So he said, All right, let me hear it. And I told him The Ro Bro. And he got dead silent for like ten seconds and then he said… I don’t know if I love it, or it’s the worst title ever. (Or something to that effect.) So we just laughed and couldn’t stop laughing about how stupid it was. But then we decided it was perfect.
So The Ro Bro was born.
Steve Smith jumped the line as one of my most favorite characters ever. He’s so… everything. And there have been times in my career—typically when everything is going great—when I have looked back and thought… is this really what I set out to do?
I started my writing career as a non-fiction author writing science textbooks for homeschool families because I am scientist. I have two stupid degrees in science. It was the focus of my life for about 10 years. And then one day… it wasn’t. I walked away from it. PhD program, Master’s degree. All of it. I didn’t like the people, I didn’t like the dogma, I pretty much hated everything about “corporate science”. And I wasn’t even in “corporate science” I was an academic. But it’s all very same-same.
It felt like a big waste of time to walk away from that. I mean, I worked so hard to get there. And that’s why I did the science books for homeschool families. I’m fairly anti-social, but I’m actually a really good teacher and a really good speaker. So this was a really cool way to use my education and scratch that writing itch.
I wrote about two-hundred of those textbooks (they were mostly workbooks, but I did write full-on text books too.) And then I kinda ran out of steam. I would not say that my little science workbook business was a raging success, but for a single mom who had lived below the poverty line her entire life (and by this time I’m in my late 30’s) an extra three grand a month was life changing.
But then I started wondering if I could be a fiction writer. A creator of worlds, and characters, and meaning. And so I did that. Well, first I thought about it for all of 2011. Trying to wrap my head around what it actually takes to write a book and all the technical stuff. And then on January 3, 2012 I started writing my first fiction book. And it wasn’t romance.
I have always been a reader. And my first love is science fiction. Just like Steve. So I wrote science fiction. Just like Steve. It did OK. It didn’t get terrible reviews or anything, it just wasn’t… the ‘it’ thing at the time. This was 2012 and Hunger Games was all the rage. I didn’t write another Hunger Games. I wrote I Am Just Junco and it’s a very long, very dense, very character-driven six-book series about an insane girl trying to navigate a near-future world as violent aliens return to Earth to claim it back. In a nutshell, at least.