A Word Please

I am excited to introduce a fellow BestsellerBound author today. Her name is Amy Saunders and she has written a great piece about her writing journey. I just love her story and I’m sure you will, as well. Before we get to that, let me introduce Amy:

Amy Saunders is a novelist and short story writer from Massachusetts. She loves blending mystery with action-adventure and romance and sometimes even sci-fi. When she’s not in a writing or promoting frenzy, you’ll find her relaxing with friends or baking.

You can learn more about Amy and her writing in the following places:

Website: www.amysnovels.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/amy_saunders
Facebook: http://profile.to/amydsaunders

Now on to Amy’s story:

Murder mystery. Pirate lore. Action-adventure. Complex characters. The stuff of my daydreams and scattered generously among the books, movies, and TV shows that I have memorized. But somehow none of those things had ever quite come together in my own writing. Who I really am was always seriously absent from my stories. That is until I cut loose my notions of how I was supposed to write and started writing what I wanted to write.

Enter May 2009 when my main character, Imogen Bell, first saw light. She had a name, a vibrant personality, and no story. I fiddled with some ideas but nothing clicked until Sebastian, Shazi, and C.J., underwater archaeologists, materialized. Underwater archaeology? Where had that come from? The idea scared me a little. OK, it scared me a lot. It’s a subject I actually like and I got more and more excited as the concept developed. Then I hit upon an idea that was so me I couldn’t stand it: exploring a sunken pirate ship!

Well, I hardly knew what to do with myself. I loved my characters, the plot centered around personal obsessions, and I had a familiar and beloved setting. But I was still mucking around in some very un-me territory. I had pirates, true, but the wrong ones (ancient Greek pirates specifically). And I had so much exciting stuff happening in the background story that there was nothing left for the present-day story. Oops!

After spinning my wheels for a while and nearly throwing it all out the window and starting over, I had two revelations that changed my writing forever. First, I don’t care for Greek history. Instead of researching ancient Greek pirates, I kept drifting off to read about the so-called Golden Age of piracy. So it hit me, why aren’t my pirates from that era? (Head smack.) Second, I realized that if the backstory was so juicy, why wasn’t it the main story? (Head smack.) Once I had these two puzzle pieces, everything else just made sense.

This was my first novel for publication and I put a lot of pressure on myself to get everything right. Did I? Hardly. But in the end, besides having a red forehead, I knew I had written the best story I could and it was time to take my lessons and move on to the next one. Most importantly, and most exciting, my book had me written all over it. Thanks to all of these hard-learned lessons, my next novel is going along much more swimmingly. I’m sticking with what I like from now on and no matter the future struggles that is the most liberating experience I could ask for.

Ready to run out and grab her book now? If I wasn’t buried beneath a to-read pile, I’d already have this one open in front of me! The title is Dead Locked. Let’s take a look:

Imogen Bell may publicize what Peter Bishop and his team of underwater archaeologists dig out of the silt, but she’s about to dive into her own treasure hunt – only this one will test more than her knowledge of shipwrecks. With only five clues and the legend of a pirate captain and his hidden jewel to lead the way, it’s up to Imogen to prove her murdered colleague did not die in vain, and crack open a centuries-old mystery.

Here’s a short trailer:

You can find Amy’s book in print and Kindle format on Amazon. Take a peek:

Thanks for reading.