Love Stories

I've been writing novels for about five years now. When I first started, I had the seed of one idea in my head: the story of a little girl named Laney and her friend, Harvey the Hippo. These characters had sprung from some things I'd written in high school, and my first attempt at a book resulted in a novel called Drops of Jupiter.

I like the story, but I've done nothing with it since I finished it so long ago. Instead, I moved onto writing (in order) Hunting for Lilacs, Beyond the Trees, After We've Fallen, The Chocolate Garden, and Just Be.

The last of those was the novel that poured forth this past November, when I participated in NaNoWriMo 2016. It is a love story at heart and something I struggled with for a long time. Should I write a sappy love story? Does this love story have to have a happy ending? It this story really categorized as a romance? And how do I feel about that?

I didn't have the answers to those questions, and part of me wondered why I was so against writing a love story. What's wrong with them? If written well, the story can put smiles on people's faces. Isn't that what I want to do?

Well last week, I gave the first 20 pages of Just Be to The Plot Sisters to read and it was as if I'd purged myself of any bad feelings about love stories. They enjoyed reading the pages, and after our discussion, I realized that every other book I've written, with the exception of Drops of Jupiter, has a love story either at the center of the book or on the periphery of it.

I think I'd better come to terms with the fact that I just might be a love story writer. Plenty of worse things exists out there, don't you think?

Happy Writing!
~Christina