The fabulous website smashwords.com offers independent authors the opportunity to participate in an online interview so readers can get to know authors better. One of the questions in my interview was “What is the greatest joy of writing for you?” I mentioned that I was working on a blog post about the writer’s high. To fully understand my take on the writer’s high, I’ll need to get on a tangent (stick with me, I promise I’ll bring it all back around in the end!). See, when my husband and I first met, he was a runner. He had recently found out he had plantar fasciitis, his doctor prescribed very expensive and fancy shoe inserts, but still my husband found he couldn’t run without his feet killing him. I asked, “Why do you care so much about running? You go to the gym all the time, and there are other ways to get your cardio done.” My hubby’s response was that he ran not because he liked it, but because he was after the “runner’s high.” I laughed out loud and said, “That’s a myth! No way there’s any such thing as a ‘runner’s high.’” A lengthy discussion ensued about whether I’d ever run more than a mile, and if not then I couldn’t know for certain that the high did not exist.
Getting back to the joy of writing, I find that I keep at it specifically to hit a high. It’s not always a euphoric high, but it is always a feeling very close to transcendence. I’m outside my body or so totally in my fictional world that my mind is set free. Like surfers, or maybe even runners, I have to keep chasing the high. I don’t always get it every time I write, but just the promise of it keeps me coming back to my computer or even my spiral notebook. Not every writer’s high has the same results either. Razor came to me full of behavior that I did not expect, and subsequently I learned a lot about my characters from just a single scene. I’m terribly grateful for that particular writing session because if I would have written the scene as I originally intended, the book would have far less character – and clearly one less character in the form of Razor himself. I mention Razor doing unexpected things in my interview, and in fact, his very presence caused me problems. I seriously thought about making it an MC series about Razor’s club instead of the Riot MC. I’m grateful that I tabled that notion because seriously, there’s no way I could do a book for Bush’s character. I mean there’s nothing appealing about halitosis in a romance novel.
Having said that though, do not fret. Razor actually will get his own book, Into the Riot, coming December 2018. A number of odd tidbits regarding Razor came to me during the writing process of Unforeseen Riot and also Inciting a Riot. I’d share some of those with you, but I’d rather hold on to them so you discover them in his story. Bottom line, I’ll keep coming back to the keyboard in hopes of getting that elusive writer’s high.
###