SPEAKER_00 0:00

I literally could not write a single word because my brain was just stuck in the expectations of people and whether the characters that I were writing were gonna be offensive, if they were gonna be difficult to manage, if they were gonna be inside of the metrics of what a romance is supposed to be. And having to shake off all of that noise has been incredibly difficult.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Welcome to the Write It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacey Fraser, a formally repressed creative soul, turned fiction writer, story editor, and author accelerator certified fiction book coach. At Write It Scared, we tell the truth about why writing a novel is so hard by acknowledging that most writers grapple with two stories: the one they want to put on the page to the best of their ability, and the often subconscious internal story that prevents them from doing it. This show is designed to help you identify and rewrite the internal narrative holding you back while you discover and write the story you want to tell and learn all the tools to help you do that successfully. Join me each week for a new episode where we'll talk about writing to deepen our understanding of the craft and of ourselves as writers. Writing a novel is an inside job that we do not do alone. Welcome to Red It's Scared. I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hey writer, welcome back to the Ride It's Scared Podcast. I'm your host, Stacey, and this is where we talk about the brave and the vulnerable act of writing our novels so that we can do it with more clarity, more confidence, and a whole lot less isolation. Today I'm talking with indie male-mail romance author Alex Cross for a really honest conversation about writing emotionally intense stories, navigating publishing pressures, and learning how to protect your creativity after becoming a published author. We talk about her Fire Between Us series and its highly anticipated second installment, From Our Ashes, which released on May 4th of 2026. So just a few weeks ago, I've read it. And we also discuss her Us duology, Echoes of Us and Becoming Us. We dive into writing dual timelines and how to structure that, creating messy and deep human relationships on the page, and why character psychology drives everything she writes. But we also talk about the harder side of authorship, the comparison, the reviews, the social media overwhelm, writer's block, and what happens when readers' expectations start getting louder than your own creative instincts. This episode is a reminder that writing is deeply personal work and that staying connected to why you started matters more than chasing performance, perfection, or trying to please everyone. But before we dive in, I want to take a quick moment to remind you that the Courage Files are still open for submission. The Courage Files is a new segment that I'm introducing on the podcast next fall for season four. And this is all about showcasing and celebrating listener wins. Not just the big flashy ones, but the small, messy, hard one, quietly brave moments that nobody sees but you. Because one of the most powerful ways that we can help ourselves move through doubt is by hearing that other writers are showing up right alongside of us. And we realize that our situation is not so different from someone else's. And if they can do that, then maybe we can too. So if you've taken a courageous step in your writing life, I'd love for you to share it. And with your permission, I'll be featuring some of these on the show. And starting in season four, once a quarter, I will be randomly selecting one submission to receive a free editorial assessment plus a book coaching session with me. So for details, you can go to writeitscare.co forward slash courage hyphen files, or just go to the link in the show notes to send in your submission. Okay, here is Alex's bio, and then we'll jump into the interview. Alex Cross is a Colombian nail-mel romance author who writes emotional, character-driven stories about messy people finding their way back to love. Her books lean into angst, flawed characters, and relationships that aren't always easy but feel worth it in the end. She is the author of the Us duet, Echoes of Us and Becoming Us, and the Fire Between Us series, When We Ignite and From Our Ashes, where things tend to get a little more chaotic before they get better. When she's not writing, she's juggling life as a mom of two, running on caffeine, overthinking her character's emotional decisions a little too much. She's also a former chef, which explains the slight obsession with details and feelings in everything she writes. Hi, Alex. Welcome to the Write It Scared Podcast. I'm so happy to have you and talk about all of your books. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_00 4:56

I'm doing great, Stacey. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

We are going to talk about your several of your romance books, your series. But before we do that, would you please share a bit about how you got into writing, into your journey, into becoming a fiction writer and then a published author?

SPEAKER_00 5:14

I feel like that's a long story, but I'm going to try to make it as short as possible.

unknown 5:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

I feel like I've always been a bit of a romantic. I was the youngest kid in my family. I always got the controller that wasn't plugged into the Nintendo. Nobody wanted to play with me. I was like, everybody was playing the big kid games, and I was always kind of left behind. And I feel like that gave me daydreaming superpowers. And ever since I was a kid, I'd always have these stories in my head, and they always centered around people meeting for the first time and the sparks flying and just the whole romantic vibe of two people matching up and their lives being intertwined. And I always, every time I was bored or every time I have some time off or anything, I'd always replay these scenes in my head and start to organize them. And eventually, when computers were more accessible to us and I could start writing out the stories, which I think was around when I was like around 14 or 15 years old, I actually started writing. And then that eventually evolved into having my phone and writing stuff in my phone while I was at work or when I was in university. And it was always my escape. It was this fun stuff, this movie that I had going through my head. And I would always come back to it and write these stories. And then I am a chef by profession, career, whatever you call that. And I have two little kids. My youngest is two and a half years old. And restaurant work and having a family is a little bit conflicting because you don't have weekends, you don't have special occasions. And the work was really starting to weigh on me. And when I had my second maternity leave, I decided that I wasn't going to go back to work. And I had a really rough time with my second kid. She wouldn't sleep ever. And if she slept all the time on top of me, so I was permanently nap-trapped at all times. And when I was trying to stay awake and I was trying to keep my sanity and not go crazy, what I would do was just take my phone and start writing. And I'm not going to disclose too much information about that, but I used to write fan fiction. And then when I had my kid, I started writing my first original stories. And somewhere, I think when she was like around five or six months old, I finished my first book and I told a friend about it. And she told me, you know, you can publish your own books through Amazon, right? And that comment turned into everything, basically. So I just thought, okay, I'm in maternity leave. I technically don't have a job anymore. I need to figure out what I want to do with my time. And I decided that I was going to do this the right way. So I don't do anything half-assed. I'm not good at just doing things for funsies, or I'm just not that kind of person. I'm a perfectionist in an at an annoying level. So I thought, okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do the whole thing. So I had courses and how to develop mental edit by myself, courses and how to edit. I found resources of where to find editors. And I dived in completely into this world and ended up publishing my first book. And it's just snowballed from there. And that first book was that Echoes of Us? The first book that I finished writing wasn't actually Echoes of Us. It was another book that I am uh that I want to rewrite because I feel like I've learned so much during this whole journey. But while I was like around the 80% mark of finishing that first book, I started thinking of Echoes of Us and I started writing teeny tiny scenes. And when I finished writing Echoes of Us, I said, this is the book that I want to publish first. This is the book that I feel that resonates more with me. And it's a book that I want to push out in the world first without knowing anything about publishing or romance or anything like that, which was a bit of a shock. In what way? In what way? I think Echoes was the least safe option that I could have chosen to be my debut. More, I think that, and I have several people who've explained this to me because I probably didn't get it unless somebody pointed it out, but Echoes touches the barrier between it being a romance and going into literary fiction. And I say that in the sense that Echoes is technically contemporary, so it's not touching on dark romance, which usually deals with more toxic or more out of the box kind of relationships. And then what happens with dark romance is the fact that the relationships are toxic, but somehow the relationship works while it's toxic. And what happened with Echoes was that it was exploring a toxic relationship, but knowing that it was toxic and that it was bad. And that kind of opposes the concept of romance because it's not a very comfortable experience if a person just wants to get in, see the relationship, and have the happy ever after. This is going very real into people having fights and hurting each other. And I think I had no idea that people in romance weren't that into that. Or I guess people who read certain kinds of contemporary romances weren't into that. Because I definitely do have an audience, and I do have an audience. So there is space for it. But it was a bit of a shock to learn that the story that I needed to learn how to market the story and get it to the right readers. Because if I just threw it out there in the world, a lot of people who read romance and who saw the cover and who thought it was cute, they were gonna have a bit of a shock when they got into the book.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I can hear where you're coming from. So let's back up just a little bit. Because it'll make more sense once you tell us what the story is about. So Echoes of Us was the first book in the duology, the Us Duology, which is an absolutely beautiful duology. I've read it several times. And it's one of the most beautiful healing journeys I've ever seen, and also one of the most I don't want to give too much away. So I don't want to give any spoilers away. But it's really, really, really beautiful and really well done. And um, so let's talk about that one first. And the characters in this are Atticus and Noah. So please tell us what this particular book's about and what drew you to write it, uh, and and we'll go from there.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Okay, so Echoes of Us is a second chance romance that goes from past to present, and the past timeline takes you from where the couple meets and how their relationship developed, and then you have this spin on the story on the fact that it takes you two years after to where they're broken up, and then the person shows up out of nowhere. So what's happening in the story is you're trying to piece together what happened, if everything was so perfect, how did they go from point A to point B? And if there is a way to actually fix this relationship, and as you figure out what happened, the toxic and the addiction aspect of the story, you are put in a position in which you're not sure if this couple is supposed to end up or not end up together. Right? That was the exploration and the concept of what was supposed to happen in this book. And what was the second part of the question? Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

I don't remember. Just keep talking. No, it was what was inspired. What inspired second part of the question is what drew you to write to write about this, to write about a toxic relationship, to focus in on themes. There's heavy themes in this book, right? There's addiction and mental health representation. So what draws you there?

SPEAKER_00 13:04

So I think Echoes, Echoes of Us was a story that was developed in a very specific time in my life. As I told you, I was just in this postpartum stage of my life. And I was kind of lost in knowing who I was and what I wanted out of life. I had a terrible friend breakup. If you've ever had that, you know that friends break friend breakups kind of, I don't know, they destroy you emotionally compared to what relationship breakup I think can do to you because it makes you question everything about yourself. And I started this whole therapeutic process. It was based about finding myself, but also it was about accepting the person that I used to be and forgiving myself for past mistakes, right? And that intertwined with the idea that I had that I wanted to write about a toxic, I knew that I wanted to write about a toxic relationship, and I knew that I wanted to write about a breakup. I draw a lot of my inspiration out of songs. So I was listening to music and I had a couple of songs and I started envisioning all of these scenes and I said, okay, I want to write this book. But it wasn't until I think there's a chapter in which Atticus's friends drop by his room and they tell him the situation. They open up this there's a problem with addiction. Yeah. When I wrote that, I had no idea where I was going with that book. I had no idea. I knew it was gonna be toxic, I knew it was gonna be a relationship, but when I wrote that sentence about this is a problem about addiction, I just stopped, stared at the screen, and said, Oh my god, okay, this is where we're going. That's fine. Let's just deal with this then. And then it just kind of all went from there. So Echoes of Us is a very personal story to me, not as much as becoming us. Becoming us is incredibly personal to me, but Echoes of Us also kind of echoes back on my own life. And because it happened during this whole therapy process, it helped me put all of these emotions into a book and be able to control the narrative and give it a different spin on it. I sometimes I talk to people and I try to explain this, and it's kind of weird because I know this is about true romantic interests, but I feel like for me, it was a little bit like Noah was me when I was 20 years old, and Atticus was me at this point of my life. So it was always about trying to forgive my past, but in a setting in which it was a romantic relationship. So that's what it ended up being. And then it eventually led into the second part of the story and whatnot. But I think I've always I've always been very inclined to talk about stuff or bring to the forefront stuff that people might be a little bit uncomfortable about. I feel like those things need to be talked about. And I didn't shy away from the story with that. So I just wanted to lay it all out.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like writing naked.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I can't remember who said it, but you have to oh wait, Stephen King's tell the that's the only we our profession is called we're called professional liars, right? The writers. And yet, like this amazing quote by Stephen King is the number one thing you have to do is tell the truth. Yeah, exactly. You have to tell the truth and whatever that is. And so I think it's really brave and fucking vulnerable as hell and beautiful. And look what turned out. It was like this is such a beautiful story. So I gotta know. Did you write the whole both books one after the other? Did you know what was gonna happen in the second book? No. How did it all come about?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

No, I write I started to write Echoes of Us thinking that it was gonna be a standalone. But when I reached the end of Echoes of Us, and I'm not allowed to say any spoilers. When I reached the ending of Echoes of Us, I felt like it's finished. No, no, we can talk about this. We can talk about this. When something traumatic happens with a couple and they're trying to rebuild the relationship again, it's not easy. It's not like they decide that they're gonna forgive each other and everything is just gonna be easy from there. So when I got to the end of the book, I was I just saw it and I thought there is so much more story still left to be told because there is a whole journey behind that it's not just the moment in which a person decides that they're they are eventually gonna forgive the other person, but all the work that it takes them to be able to obviously to forgive, but also to build a new relationship, right? I just thought, yeah, I need to write the second part. And then I also thought I need to write the second part, and I need to write, I need to write it from Noah's perspective perspective this time because he's the person who has to do most of the work to be able to build this relationship, right? And then I thought, okay, I'm gonna do it still in the double timeline. And then I thought, but wait, what am I gonna go back to? And then it was just like a light bulb going out in my head, going up in my head, and just going, okay, I have to go back to his past so that we can go through this whole process. And I was like, okay, this is gonna be painful as hell, but we're just gonna dive into this and we're gonna write it and it's gonna be okay. And I think I literally just cried for six months straight writing the book.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

I know I'm incredibly healing time. I almost never cry when I read books, and I cried in Becoming Us. I cry.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

It's a tough book. It's a tough book.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

But in a good way, but in a really good way, yeah. It's definitely a book that you put down and you go, holy shit. So it is interesting from a craft perspective. This was not an easy narrative structure at all. No, no, it's both of them juggle the past and the present in a dual timeline. The first book is all with one POV character in dual time, right? The second book is the other love interest, the other becomes the other POV character. And what I loved about that is that we got to learn his origin story, Noah's origin story, and how he healed from that. And that was very beautiful. So, how did you land on that narrative device? And and how did you handle keeping track of when I was first starting to write echoes?

SPEAKER_00 19:22

I thought, you know what really I think it came from. Have you ever seen 500 Days of Summer? Look it up. Not right now, but look it up.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Now I gotta write it down though, or I'll forget it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

So that movie made an impression on me, a very big impression on me. And in this movie, it it goes from present to past, and it's about a couple meeting, and then afterwards when the couple is broken up. And the story in that book is the shift in perspective from the main character of how he remembers his relationship to what it really was for him to understand why they had to break up, right? So I think that's something that always got stuck in my head that I thought it was a beautiful narrative. And when I wanted to write this story, I kept having these flashes and the scenes in my head, and they didn't match in the timeline. So I started thinking it's not gonna make sense if I just write the whole block of before and then the whole block of after. So I just thought, okay, I'm just gonna do this. I'm just gonna wing it, and I'm just gonna start writing one chapter of one and one chapter to the other. And it was very inspired in 500 Days of Summer. Obviously, not the same story or the same structure or the same ending, but it was you discovering the characters and you being able to read the red flags when the other character isn't actually seeing them. But then you as a reader can start to piece together the red flags from the first part of their relationship, right? And the echo storyline was never supposed to be, there was never supposed to be supposed to be shock value. It was never supposed to be a mystery, which you get to the point and you go, Oh my god, I can't believe this was the twist. You were always supposed to know what was gonna happen, but the curiosity comes into play of how it happened, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:14

And then indicative of romance, honestly. We all for the most part, we know what's going on here, what for the most part, right? Yeah, but what we're interested in is how.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Exactly. Exactly. And then when I started writing the book, it was easy, but when it started passing the halfway point, it started to get very hard to keep them aligned, and it was really difficult, and I still didn't have a system in place at that time. So I started doing it in a document, and I started to write all these scenes and trying to get it together, and it was a mess because my brain didn't connect with that very well. But that eventually, I saw this TikTok at some point about V Schwabs, and they have this thing that's the story corpse method, I think that's what it's. Called. And what that was that you had to write out all of your scenes, and those were the bones of your story. And that's the way that you started to organize them. And that's when I met my very best friend in the author world, which is post-its. What I do now. And it's crazy. People, everybody who comes to my house, it's like it's an attraction to come to my office into the writing space because it's completely covered in post-its. And I have them, each book has its own line and there's different colors. And while I'm working, I'm moving the post-its around. And when I started to write Becoming Us, I already had the system in place. I started to work it. And it was so helpful to manage that double timeline because I could move the post-its around and see where the story was going and what was the rhythm that I had to keep, because that's also very important. And there's this thing that I saw at some point with developmental editing that each scene needs to be able to drive to the next one. That's the momentum we all have to keep going. And what I wanted to do was be able to give clues in whichever timeline that I was that was going to drive to what was going to happen next in the next timeline. I'm terrible at writing, like at different points of the book. I need to write everything in order. It's something that I just, my brain cannot process if I don't write in order. So it wasn't necessarily that the present timeline was always leading to the scene that happened next in the present. It was always connecting it with what was going to be told next in the past. And then what was told in the past is going to have to connect directly to what happened to the present. So I kept that in mind the whole time that I was writing. And that helped me organize it. But literally, I just I owe all of my organization skills to post-its. It's my thing.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

Absolutely. You are not, you're in good company. I know a lot of writers that like post-its. Myself include.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

They're wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Yeah. And there's also just something about being physical with it, like moving it around.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Connects better. It's I don't know what it does, but it's it lets you see the big picture. If you write it down in a document and it's in your computer, you can't see it. You can't, you can't see the golden thread that's connecting the story. You can't. Yeah. Or at least I can't. It's not possible for me.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

I I try I've tried both. I think it also depends on the type of the story for me. Um, like right now, I'm working on a mystery thriller suspense thingy, and I need my spreadsheet for that one. I really do to keep all the twists and the reveals and all that stuff. But anyway, I I digress. I saw your author's note in Echoes that said that the you changed a version of the book. Something had changed in it, like you'd updated it. Can you share what that was? Is so long as it doesn't give any spoilers.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

Okay, so no, there's no spoilers involved in that. As I told you before, I am annoyingly perfectionist. I didn't actually change anything with the storyline. It's exactly the same storyline. But you know that every time that we write a book, we learn things. Even while we're editing, you're not the same writer that you were at the beginning of whatever pass you do with a manuscript, that you are at the end of that same pass. You're always gonna learn something from that. And you're always gonna learn what words you're repeating, what phrases you're repeating. Maybe you're not varying your sensitive structure enough. Maybe you're not letting the dialogue flow the right way, right? And in my writing process, because I just started out and because I didn't know anybody in this community, I didn't have the proper editor, I think. I started with just having someone from Readsy, and I had no idea how editors worked, right? I naively thought that an editor would give you your work back and stuff would be like fixed. I had no idea that editors gave you suggestions so that you got your stuff fixed. So you also need to learn how to fix those things that you're doing wrong, right? Yeah. So every time I did a path with an editor, obviously I learned things, but then, but then, when I wrote When We Ignite, which was my second book, I had a different editor proofread my book. And this was a completely different experience while editing. Because one, I my editor's one of my closest friends right now, and I'm just met her last year, and she's very aligned with what I like in writing. So she's very character-driven. She's very the psychology behind the characters. And because we have such a great relationship, and she's also starting out with her editing career, we don't edit, I don't edit the things by myself. We have one Google Doc and she's editing, and while she's editing, I'm editing over that same document. And we have conversations about it. So it's like there are a lot of things that are straightforward to me, but then there are things that I stop and ask her about it while we're in the process. And then she takes her time to explain to me why that needs to change. So, for example, in the first version of Echoes of Us, I had an insane amount of dialogue tags. I thought dialogue tags were where things were at. Everything needed to be spelled out. And one of my biggest learning curves, or the biggest thing that I tried to learn, was getting rid of the dialogue tags, replacing them with action tags, replacing them with inner monologue, replacing it with environmental tags. But this whole thing has been a learning process for me. So when I wrote Becoming Us, I knew that a lot of people were gonna go back and read Echoes of Us. And I learned so much. And the book was so different in the way that I was writing right now that I thought I can't just, I can't leave it as is. I need to get my hands on this and I need to fake a decision. And then the audiobook for Echoes of Us was also coming out, and I was like, oh my God, I re-edited that book, and I am not kidding you. I re-edited that book in less than a month because I had to give it to the audiobook people, and it was the most insane thing that I've ever done in my life. I do not recommend you doing that ever. And like my editor and I were just working around the clock. It was the most insane thing that I've ever done. And after I did that, I realized that I also need to learn how to let things go and just understand that my past work is always gonna be a less developed version of what my books will eventually grow into. And I think it's a very important thing for authors not to get stuck in every single book, it has to have the same alignment of what you know right now. So, for example, with When We Ignite, I told myself after I finished re-editing Echoes, I said, you're not gonna re-edit that book. You're not gonna touch it, you're not gonna read it again. You're gonna leave that book as is. It's okay if it has more dialogue tags than your next book, you're learning, and you just have to let that go. Because it really just turns into a rabbit hole. I'm never gonna keep things out if I just keep going back and re-editing each book as I learn something new.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

So funny. Welcome, well, welcome to authorship. Your cortisol level just shot up 50 points. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Yeah, exactly. I'm not like it's exactly right.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Damn it. So but I get what you're saying. You grew as a writer, you grew as a writer, and another book was coming out that would link you back into would expose you to new readers and have you would have readbacks on echoes. It was a smart decision to go back and do what you did. Yeah. And change it for the narrator. By the way, the narrator is really good for I loved Patrick. I loved his he's got wow, his voice is just hot.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Yes, I completely agree. I loved him. I loved him from that.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Okay, so tell us what you're what's coming out now and a bit about the From Our Ashes series. Which is that right? Is it From Our Ashes?

SPEAKER_00 29:59

Is it Fire Between Us?

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Thank you. I couldn't keep the names of the book. So tell us the name of the series and tell us the books that are in that now.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

And what's the Fire Between Us series and it's also supposed to be a duology. Yeah, that's all that's what I'm gonna say for now. It's supposed to be a duology. And then the first book is When We Ignite, and the second book, From Our Ashes, is gonna come out in May 4th. So it's just right around the corner now. And this was a completely different concept from Echoes of Us. I was, I think we're always nervous when we release a new book, but I was very nervous with When We Ignite because it's different from the subject subject matter of what happened with Echoes. And I know now that it still has my same style, and I know that those kind of things are always going to be present in our writing. But I guess it just felt a little bit difficult for me to think of publishing that book when I had already gone through the experience of publishing, and then you know what life as a published author is. So you start to be a little bit more cautious, right? I wrote When We Ignite before I started being cautious. So there was no going back. It was just you have to push forward and you have to get this book out. And When We Ignite, what I wanted to do with that book, or the premise of that book for me as an author, was to push myself into writing spicier books. So I didn't want to shy away from it. I wanted to be able to write it. And then I also had this idea that I wanted to do a scandalous age gap, but I wanted to make it work for me. So it had to be something that was realistic, right? And I think it was a right bet. I think it worked out, but that book does end in a cliffhanger, which I announce all over the place because romance writers do not like cliffhangers. Oh, it didn't as long as the next book's ready. It is already out. Yeah, I know. Trust me, I've been hearing that for over a year. That was also a very interesting learning experience because a lot of people who read When We Ignite liked When We Ignite, but then it wasn't as big as Echoes was. And every time I try to market the book, everybody was like, Oh, this sounds amazing, but I'm not gonna read it until you publish the next book. And I was like, Oh, that's fantastic for me and my sales. Thank you so much. I love your intentions. Uh, I absolutely love those two. I love that relationship. It's flawed, it's messy. The second book is a hundred times more messy than the first one, if you can even think that's true. As I said, it's a very different vibe from Echoes, but I think that what that book centers on is more of a drama, like a family drama, a workspace drama. And everything that happens is a little bit more fast-paced. There's always something going on, there's always something that's gonna put pressure or pull the characters away. And that's why I think it was such a fun experience for me. And also, it's a dual POV. So in this one, I didn't have to focus on just one person, but they had the two people and you really stone the story and still make it work.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Yeah, you stretched using uh dual POV in just wow. Uh it's just you just you just didn't do anything simple. No, you didn't know I didn't I have I have also read the first book, The Fire Between Us, the f the first book of Ash and Bennett. And you're right, it's a completely different type of experience, but there I it's still incredibly character-driven. And that's what I love about these types of books, is I love that emotional experience, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:30

Yeah, I think I figured that out about myself during this journey. Again, there's so much that we figure out after we publish and while we're in this process. And I had no idea that I was a high angst rat writer until I started getting the reviews for Echoes of Us. I had no idea. I was like, I thought my book was light, and people were like, This is not light. I don't even know what you're thinking.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

Oh my gosh. No, both of them, really, they're very high angst, fairly spicy male-male romance, and they are both beautiful. So, no, you don't write light.

SPEAKER_00 34:03

I had no idea. I was completely sure that my books were just like fun, happy books, and people told me, like, no, ma'am, that is not what you're writing. And I also had no idea that I was so character driven versus being plot-driven. And now that I know that and acknowledge that about me, it's ridiculous to me that I didn't know this before. Because it's like I have this, and we can talk about this too, because this is gonna be announced on April the 13th, which is very close. I'm gonna be participating in an anthology. Love it for a shot. The concept of this is obviously short stories, right? But as I have issues with being completely character driven, it's very difficult for me to feel that I can develop characters writing a piece that's just between 5 to 10k, right? Because he can't have much character development trying to write a short story. And I know that you can, but I wasn't sure if I could. And when I started writing that, I had to go back and I talked to my editor and I had to have the whole picture. I had to have their co-lives so that it matched with the decisions and what they were doing. Even if I wasn't writing it down in the book, I needed all of that information. It was crucial for me. I even had to know what was going to happen eventually in this book, what was gonna happen after, and just take this one piece of the story so that I could actually write it out. And it was a very fun experience. I absolutely loved it. I am obsessed with those characters too. But it made me realize that I need a lot of information from my characters and I need a lot of stuff that I don't think a lot of people necessarily do when they write this sort of books. I don't think people need that amount of information that I usually need with my characters. And it's just part of my process. I can't move forward if something doesn't feel like it aligns. And then that goes back to Fromer Ashes, right? Because Fromer Ashes has been an incredibly difficult book for me to write. Incredibly difficult. I started writing this book, I think at the end of 2024, which was right when I published Echoes of Us. And it was a completely different premise. The POVs were different, and everything started to shift when I published, and I had a major author's block after I published. Then every time I tried to go back and write the books, stuff wasn't aligning with me, with the characters, so I had to keep deleting stuff and then putting it and making it work again until I eventually found the rhythm and I could make it work. But every time I found a roadblock, it was always because I didn't feel like the characters were aligned and the decisions weren't aligned. And that just it completely blocks me. My mind doesn't work if the characters don't have clear motivations and if it doesn't make sense for them. This whole process has made me realized how incredibly character-driven I am. And I hope that I could eventually be a little bit more plot-driven, but it's always gonna have to be hand in hand with the characters and the psychology and their backstories and everything.

SPEAKER_01 37:03

No, it makes complete sense. It also makes it hard hard to do, and probably you find yourself going back a lot, rereading to anchor back into what they're going through in order to read forward, I would imagine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Yeah, a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

So big part of this podcast is talking about when the writing gets really hard, when we struggle, because that normalizes the roller coaster for all of us. We tend to it's really easy to think that, oh, they're just spitting out these books, especially when you're a romance writer, because readership is hungry, right? They want your books. And so as an indie romance author, you're just expected to it's like stamping a mint. It doesn't work like that. Yes. But anyway, so I'm just curious, has there ever been a time when you really struggled with doubt? And what kind of maybe what turned it around for you?

SPEAKER_00 37:56

I can think of two things specifically. And it's the first one was after I published uh my debut, I was all over the place emotionally. I had no idea you weren't supposed to look at reviews. Nobody ever warned me or held my hand and told me just don't go into good reads, right? So I had no idea that you had to stay away from those spaces. And reading reviews is something very emotionally difficult to do. And I'm not talking just about bad reviews, I'm talking about good reviews too, because it's a high that they take you on, and the crash is it's hard to manage because your emotions are never at a level place. They're always very high or very low. And I had no idea that when I was writing romance and I was gonna get my book reviewed, the reviews weren't gonna be like the writing is good or the writing is bad, or the pace was okay or the pace wasn't okay. It was gonna be a critique to the morality of my characters and the worth of my characters and the worth of their relationship. And that was something that was shocking to me. It was very shocking to me. Because it's something that touches you in such a personal level. And if you have no idea about this, and I try to warn as many baby writers as I can and try to hold their hand and tell them you're not supposed to go on good reads, but when you go on good reads, please come and talk to me so we can digest those feelings that you're feeling right now. Because it's a very difficult thing to go through alone and face by yourself. And building a community is a very important part of being an author, basically because other authors are gonna be the ones that are gonna help you and hold your hand because they know what it feels like, and they're the ones that are gonna have your back and are gonna be like, they don't care about the morality of the characters, they just care about your well-being. And I think that's a very important thing. When all that happened and it was such a big shock to my system, I got completely blocked. I literally couldn't write. I had a block that went from the moment that I published Echoes, which was December 14th, I think, until around May or June of the next year. I literally could not write a single word because my brain was just stuck in the expectations of people and whether the characters that I were writing were gonna be offensive, if they were gonna be difficult to manage, if they were gonna be inside of the metrics of what a romance is supposed to be. And having to shake off all of that noise has been incredibly difficult. And I think the biggest advice that I could give to somebody is to limit the time in social media, limit the time that you set up for reviews and have moments in which you can touch grass and just step outside of the author world and remember what real life looks like because it's very easy to get consumed by all of this and people's opinions and the drama that goes on in the book of talk community. It's very easy to wrap yourself around this whole thing and just it just takes you all over the place. It literally, it's like a rag that just drags your emotions everywhere. And that was something that was very difficult for me, and it took me quite a long time to be able to stabilize. And then that bled into the issue that I had with Frommer Ashes, which was I hadn't finished a sequel and there were all these expectations of what the book was going to be, and it kept blinding me to write the story that I wanted to write because I kept thinking about people's expectations. And the only thing that helped me was get I have another phone for my social media, and I have it on from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon. I turn it off, I don't have it on weekends, I turn off all of that noise. And every time that I feel like I want to go on Goodreads or that I want to see reviews or when I get the urge, what I do is just disconnect everything and just sit down and write. Sometimes it's something completely different to what I'm being expected to write, but I just sit down and write. And forcing myself to do that, I've learned how to do writing sprints. I've learned how to do these little exercises in which you kind of force yourself to get the words out and push yourself out of the block and just let the writing flow. I think that's been incredibly helpful in being able to turn it around. But I do think you need support. It's so important. You really do need the support because it gets to you in such a personal way, which you don't expect. And there's nothing like nothing in my life has prepared me to deal with the feedback that you have to go through with an author and to understand that you need a controlled environment, that you need the betas, that you need the sensitivity readers, that you need the alpha readers. Have people that you trust and who you can talk to and be able to sound out your book and write the story that you really want to write and not the story that people are expecting you to write, right? I think that's been the most difficult learning curve for me. It's I can't please people. I need to stop trying to please people, basically.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

Yeah, this is why that's why the one of the keystones of Write It Scared of the podcast is just this idea that writing a book, it's an inside job. We gotta it comes from us, right? We don't do it alone. We and when we try it's it's it's painful and it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have it's gonna be. There's gonna be pain. But it does but the way we get through it is with each other. And that's what the podcast is angled on is this idea of hearing other people's experiences gives us hope. The the greatest source of hope we have is each other. Yeah, I agree and sharing one to one and reaching a hand. Back to help another author who didn't know not to look on fucking goodreads or whatever, or somebody or mentioning that someone should buy stock and post it. We just we're here to help each other, yeah. And that's what I love about it. So thank you so much for being willing to be so vulnerable in sharing the truth about it, right? And um, I think it's beautiful. So I just honor your willingness. We're gonna wrap up. Um so what would you say that your wish is for your fellow writers out there? Either the baby authors, the baby writers who are just starting out, just coming up, or the people who are about to publish uh the second book in a duology that's highly anticipated.

SPEAKER_00 44:47

Yeah. I would say that my wish for authors is that they don't lose sight of the reason why they write, that they don't lose the fun in it, that they don't lose the magic and that feeling of satisfaction that you get when you manage to tie a plot point or that you manage to write a character is happy ever after and everything connects. It's not to lose sight of why you're doing this and why you enjoy doing this. Try to quiet down that noise of how many page reads you have or how many books you've sold, or much worse, to be looking at other authors and comparing yourself because comparison, especially in this, is the absolute thief of joy. And if you start to look at other authors and just see the success of other people, because you're not seeing what's happening behind the scenes and the mental breakdowns and the flops and the downwrite, the peaks of sales and stuff, you're not seeing any of that, right? You're just seeing a curated version of people's success. And it's very easy for those things to steal away from this experience and to make you put pressure on yourself and make you want to push out books faster, to publish faster, to write stories based on tropes that you think are going to be more popular, and stop thinking about why you really want to write these stories. I know that the reason why I want to write these stories is because I want to see how they get that happy ever after, right? I want to see how they do that. I want to be able to see it through and see all the mess and see all the growth so they eventually get to that. And that is always going to be the most rewarding thing for me. It's always being able to get over there and to be able to match the puzzle pieces of the story to make it work. It's very easy to let yourself be caught up with the community and caught up with people's sales, I think. And we just need to ignore all that noise. Well said.

SPEAKER_01 46:59

Oh my gosh, Alex from post-its and revision to 500 days of summer to just wow. It's just been such a pleasure to talk to you. So can you please tell us what we can expect? Uh, I know what we can expect next, and then where listeners can find you and your books.

SPEAKER_00 47:26

Next on May 4th, we can expect the conclusion to the Fire Between Us series with From our Ashes. Uh, after that, I am gonna take all of the pressure off of myself, and I am not gonna disclose absolutely anything of what I'm working on next. I'm keeping everything a secret because I want to find the joy in writing myself. And my books are all in KU. You can find them on Amazon, and you can also find them in the Barnes and Nobles website and in some stores.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

And obviously, the audiobook of Echoes of Us is available anywhere where you can find audiobooks and very soon becoming us.

SPEAKER_01 48:02

I can't wait for that one. Yeah, well, thank you so much for your time. And listeners, if you are into character-driven stories with a ton of hearts, angsty with healing journeys, definitely go pick up all of Alex's books because they are just it's all well done. Oh well done. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Ride It Scared podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please make sure to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. And please leave a review. Reviews help other writers like you find the voices and messages they need to hear to continue to write their stories. Let's lift each other up. Remember, you can be scared and still be unstoppable. I'll see you next week.