#MFRWAuthor Week#5
Welcome to the latest week in the MFRW blog challenge where authors use weekly writing prompts to create a blog post. Please click here to check out the other authors in this hop.
There were a few books that influenced me but to name just one, it would be Mary Burchell’s A Song Begins, a Harlequin Romance in the Warrender Saga.
A story about an opera, Anthea Benton, an opera student, who enters a contest to win money to further her singing lessons and clashes with Oscar Warrender, a world-class opera conductor. She is crushed when she does not win or place in the contest and feels it is the conductor’s fault.
When he finds out she had said some pretty rough things about him, he’s intrigued and sends her a letter of invitation to come to London to audition to become his student. What I loved about the story is although he was a butt-hole, she persevered and learned to no longer let his ill temper intimidate her. She won the major female role in his new opera. In the process, the romance between the two took a long time to develop.
At the end of the opera, when Anthea sang her last aria, to this day, I can still imagine I hear her clear strong soprano voice and it totally blew me away. Her voice made a huge impact on me. Reading this book helped to seal my decision to write in the romance genre. I vowed that one day I hope to make a major emotional impact on the readers of my future books.
What book or books influenced you? Tell me in the comments.
But I think the work I’d most enjoy would be that of a researcher. ‘Cause is there really any such thing as too much research? Okay, maybe there is but only by a little bit, *pinching fingers together to show minuscule amount.* I’d love to work as a historical researcher delving into the what, when, where, why or how of past events. Or, since I’m always exploring all sides of my family’s past, I think being a genealogist researcher for FamilySearch.org or Ancestry.com would be cool.
How much of myself is in my writing and/or characters? That’s a good question. When I start to create my people, I already have a little kernel of knowledge of who they are in my mind. As the process of getting to know them takes shape, the character asserts himself/herself and I find that, like with a new friend, there are habits or hobbies, jobs or locations that we share. Is it intentional on my part that we have these things or places in common? Maybe. Although I have been writing since I was fairly young, I’ve only been writing for a few years ‘professionally’ to one day publish a novel. So, I’ll leave it at maybe. Maybe I possibly, almost certainly, intentionally put me in my stories.
Alicia Coleman 