I was at ShiMMer last weekend, an awesome MM romance event in Birmingham, UK. I hung out with tons of readers and fellow authors, and I had a fab time. Here’s a pic of my set up before readers arrived and cleared out my swag…as I had hoped, haha.

One of my readers asked me about my writing experience of my last book, Beta’s Strength, book five in my mpreg Irresistible Omegas series. The reason she asked is that the first few chapters are pretty emotional, as the pack deals with a loss of a pack member (not a main character, no worries…). She was curious if I cried as much while writing as she did while reading.

The short answer: hell, yeah.

In fact, I cried buckets. First when I wrote it, then when I reread it, and then both times during editing.

I don’t know if this is true for all authors, so I won’t speak for them, but I usually feel as deeply when writing as the readers do while reading. The passages they report back to me as exciting, romantic, sexy, or emotional, have already triggered those same feelings in me while I wrote them. And Beta’s Strength has a prologue I added when I’d already written about half the book, and that one gave me legit goosebumps while writing…and I’ve heard the exact same from readers when they read it.

It’s one of the reasons why I have to be in the right headspace to write a certain scene. If I’m already having a rough day, having to write really heavy scene is usually not a good idea. Unless I want to have a crying fit, in which case it would work out perfectly, as wring the scene will trigger me to bawl my eyes out.

The plus side is that writing is super cathartic in that sense, as I can also process a lot of emotions. Because I feel so deeply what I write, having my characters work though emotional stuff can help me process my emotional stuff. You’d think that would make authors healthy emotionally speaking, but sadly, we seem to carry a lot of baggage, haha. I know I haven’t gotten nowhere near to processing all my baggage…but that’s fine. I’m happy to unload it one thing at a time onto my unsuspecting readers…although they should know better by now, haha.