On this memorable day, I'm going to make a confession. When I first started playing with writing romance, my major focus was to get published. I didn't spend time thinking about whether the story was good, just good enough to publish.  You would think this would be one and the same, but it isn't exactly. Commercial fiction can be "good" in different ways, and not necessarily in the actual writing. A story can have great suspense, great romance, great sex, great comedy and dialogue, great insight into a character, and any one of those aspects, done superbly, might make a book "good" in the reader's eyes. So I wrote short stories and sample chapters that I thought were really good at the time.  This would be the sale. The months went by with no sales, and I reread the writing I'd had sent out.  Thank heavens this stuff didn't sell. I wouldn't want any of it as my initial romance entry even if someone else thought is was good enough because, I realized in hindsight, it wasn't good.

Then I began to sell. Sometimes I was purchased and the story ran with minimal or no changes. Sometimes I had a more hands-on editor who helped me craft and improve the story even more. I liked having her there in spirit there with me when the piece came out. At least two of us liked this story!

Eight months ago I broke out into the hot venue of e-published stories, and tumbled into a whole new level of this endeavor. My stories were now getting reviewed, and not like the old days in a magazine or newspaper that gets tossed the next day.  On blogs and readers' sites all over the internet, missives that would stay posted and available for—who knows—months? Years? Infinity? I was lucky. My reviews were good, sometimes fantastic, and I was thrilled. Then I read one that was luke warm. Aggh. I think mostly my genre wasn't her cup of tea, but she did critique me on one technical aspect of the story which I found (through the haze of my anguish) worth considering.

I am now working on my third story for The Wild Rose Press, and I am working in layers. First, get the story down. Next, go back and make the story work technically—show, don't tell, describe, make dialogue realistic, etc., etc., Finally, I'm going back once more because I have evolved my goal again. I want my story to be good. What am I giving my readers? The opportunity to laugh? To cry? Characters to identify with? Situations and decisions that hit close to home? Emotions that ring true? And hope, always hope.

What can my readers take away from my stories? I hope you'll read Specs Appeal and find out!