Please Welcome Guest Blogger Daryl Devore

A Newbie’s View on Writing, Being Published and Social Media

The title I wanted for this blog was - A Brave New World - but it seems Aldous Huxley used it already.  (No, I didn’t know that I googled it.) How did I become a published writer?  The short version.  Having penned an erotic romance manuscript (sounds more snootty than wrote a manuscript), I stumbled into being asked for a manuscript and it was accepted.  And that was the easy part.  Then came the editing which was a shock that I don’t think I’ve recovered from.  How many mistakes can one person make in 54,000 words? (968 insertions - mostly commas!, 616 deletions, 166 formatting changes and 712 comments from my wonderful, hard-working editor about what, and why, things need to be reworked.) All those blogs and webpages about “How To Tighten Your Writing” or “Common Mistakes Writers Make”  - read them and then read them again.   I passed Creative Writing both in high school and university, but I am stunned at what I’ve had to learn in the past few months. It seems I like !!!!s - had to edit those out.  Seems I dislike contractions - had to edit those in.  And I am not even going to mention commas!

All of the edits dealt with, the magical day happened, I am now a published author.  Newbie moment - my publisher sent me several ecopies of my book, A Kept Woman, and says I can use them for promotion or for book reviews.  I had to email back and ask - how do I do that?  Working on it - may be a future blog topic.

Then there is the terror known as social media.  Believe it or not, I’ve never sent a tweet and up until a month ago didn’t know what a FaceBook page even looked like and had only read a blog or 2.  But I have surged onward and now my pen name persona has a FB account - Daryl Devore and a Twitter account - DarylDevore. And here I sit writing my first blog.  Newbie alert - I had no idea how long it should be, so I fired off an email to my critique group, Rom-Critters.  Now you may think that was a frivolous question, but I have an unpublished novel at 120,000 words.  I can put words to  page, but I need limits.  The answer - 500 words.

So now I am out there in that brave, new world and what I’d really like to be doing is crawl back into my dark little cave and write - but my muse has gone on vacation and didn’t take me with her. (But that’s a whole other blog.)

A Kept Woman, published by New Dawning International Bookfair.  Arianne, an unemployed New Yorker with a dwindling bank account spots an ad reading Woman Wanted. Derek, rich and handsome, hires her to be his highly paid kept woman.  The sex turns to love as the strong-willed Arianne takes on the challenge of her life.

http://www.bookstrand.com/a-kept-woman
http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-akeptwoman-518576-144.html
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/43872