I’ve been thrilled with great reviews for Love Me More in the last few weeks and 2 Hot 2 Handle being #1 on the My Bookstore and More top ten list for days! Here’s how one quick fantasy story turned into three popular stories.

Love Me was my very first published story. It was an exciting debut for me and I was so thrilled to get fan mail and some nice reviews for this story, not to mention awesome sales! Then I had another idea involving the same characters, so I wrote Love Me More. It still amazes me how easy those stories were to write. They are quite short, but they just seemed to flow out of me. I’m probably not remembering correctly, but I swear I wrote them each in about an hour. Okay, maybe not, but it was fast!

I wanted to make it a series of three stories because three‘s a nice number, don’t you think?    But then I got stuck. I really wanted to try my hand at a m/m/f or m/f/m ménage story but I had a hard time imagining Gavin in bed with another dude. Eventually I gave up on that idea and decided Abby deserved her own love story. If anyone could handle two men, it was Abby! And there was 2 Hot 2 Handle.

An aside: Some of you may know that I recently did in fact come up with a way to get Gavin in bed with another guy, if you’ve read my Samhellion freebie Love Me Tonight 

I have to say 2 Hot 2 Handle didn’t quite flow out of me as easily as the first two stories. In my first attempt at writing m/m, I stumbled and hesitated and questioned myself. It was hard. But I like getting inside the male mind and people seem to like my male characters, so I just wrote about two guys who love each other, and imagined what might make them want more. I know this is a fantasy for a lot of women – two hot guys who want to be with you but also with each other.

Not only was this my first m/m/f story but it was the first ménage story I’ve written with a HEA for all three characters. My other ménage stories involve a one night fantasy (including my next Ellora’s Cave release CONFERENCE CALL) but this is the first where all three commit to each other.

I’ve become quite fond of all these characters after three books together! They become so real to me.

In the end I hope I wrote a satisfying story about an unconventional love and I learned while writing this that love is the same whether it’s for another man, another woman, or both.

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One thing I’ve learned from all my writer friends is that many of us angst over the same things in our writing.

It seems many of us start writing a book thinking it is the most brilliant idea ever, full of energy and excitement and some time (often around page 100, for some reason) we become convinced the work is total crap and we should just give up.

Other common sources of discouragement are rejections, reviews and sales. You’ve persevered through that “this is dreck” stage and finished your manuscript, polished it all shiny and bright and sent it off to editor or agent and then you get that big R. Or, you get a review that isn’t everything you’d hoped for. I’ve never had a bad review, but I’ve had a “meh” one and even that got me down for a while. You watch that “bestseller list” and don’t see your name there. You get the royalty statement and are disappointed at how few people have bought your book.

Writing is an emotional roller coaster for sure. I love the adrenaline rush I get when I figure out a plot problem or when I get an idea I know is going to be fantastic! I also love the thrill of getting a great review from someone who really got my book, or getting an email from a reader who loved it, or hitting that bestseller list.

But I’ve been in those dark craters of depression, too, sometimes for the smallest of reasons, like nobody commented on my blog post, even though I can see many people visited my blog that day, or like not being on that bestseller list, even though I know in my head that doesn’t really mean much. It shouldn’t be that big a deal but it gets to me and I know it gets to other writers, too.

Even the editing process can be discouraging – because let’s face it, editing is inherently negative. Even though it’s been deemed good enough for publication, the editor is pointing out everything that is wrong with that manuscript we bled, sweated and cried over.

And many of us angst about our own abilities, our confidence fragile. After my first sale, I dreamed that it was a mistake and in the morning I had to rush to my computer to check my emails to make sure they hadn’t rescinded that contract offer! After the first sale, we fear never making another sale. We fear we won’t make enough sales to get another contract offer. Or we fear we’ll never even be able to write another book. Recently, I had the experience of my editor leaving the publisher we worked with. She and I had connected so well. She seemed to genuinely love my stories and my writing, and had so much positive feedback along with the negative. My reaction to her leaving: I will never get another contract with this publisher again. And you know what? I wasn’t the only one of her authors who felt that way!

Sometimes that black cloud of depression settles over us for nothing, really – that feeling when you’re in the middle of writing that all you’ve sweated over so far is no good. Why do we feel like that? Do we need the constant reinforcement that we get from critique partners, reader fan mail, reviews, acceptance by our editor or agent? When we’re in the middle of that lonely journey from Chapter One to The End, it’s hard to be objective and it’s hard not to wonder, why I am doing this again?

For me, that feeling usually goes away pretty quickly, and I can keep going because deep down, the reason I’m doing this is simply because I love writing. I love telling stories, I love living in my characters’ worlds, learning new things, being someone else for a while, and falling in love with a hot hero (even though I have my own real life hot hero). Also, knowing we’re not alone in these experiences is a huge help, which is why I so much value the relationships I’ve developed with other writers.

As writers, I think we are people who feel things a lot – the highs and lows and everything in between. To be a really good writer, we want to make our readers feel those things too. How can we make them experience those emotions if we don’t feel them ourselves?

Do writers more experienced than I ever get to the point where they believe everything they write is brilliant, they don’t care about sales or lists or reviews because they’re so successful, and they never angst about their ability to write or sell another book? Or are we all neurotic and obsessed  with no confidence in our own abilities?