DD Prince, romance author

I was chatting with some girls doing a group read and started thinking back so decided to share some fun facts. This is long. I’ll be cleaning it up and putting it on my blog later if you want to scroll on by for now but wanted to share.

Tia was originally Athena but I had an erotic dream one night about her and Tommy (I should say me and Tommy because I was the muse for Tia) and this amazing amazing sex dream he called me Tia instead of Athena as a nickname. The dream was so hot that I get wet just remembering it.
Tommy was very very real to me. He still is. I still dream about him. No matter how many book boyfriends I create, he is my soulmate.
Originally, Tommy was an only child. Dare came to me in the 2014 version of this book, the one that actually exists. There were several early partial versions but I never ever finished. I’d get so far, sometimes to about 200 pages or so, before Tommy started to show some redeeming qualities. In the early versions he never got to any semblance of redemption at all. My early versions were extremely dark and violent. In the first version he slapped her around. A lot. I was a teenager. An angsty teenager who was taking Accutane and I wrote very very dark shit that I now know might have had something to do with the drug I was taking for my acne.
Anyway…

I started again on computer when I was about 18. My fiancé at the time (my now husband) had a computer and it was cutting edge but had no hard drive so you saved everything on 3.5” diskette. I got farther than I’d ever gotten and the book became a real possibility. Athena was also an orphan but lived with a loving Scottish uncle but that uncle (who had a very thick accent the way I wrote him) got in trouble with Tommy and he took Tia as restitution. Tommy’s family didn’t come into play and he was an only child.
(I’m glad I later created a family for him. I think that helped with the redemption)
The uncle had major major devastation at putting his niece in that position and right after she left to go take her place with Tommy, her uncle died and I remember sitting there bawling my eyes out about it. I got so upset that I had to put the thing down. I couldn’t even write. I went to go back to it and the disk had a MOTHERFUCKING VIRUS. This was the early 90’s. People who got viruses often couldn’t do anything about it.

The book got put down.

I re-started it again when I was about 22 years old. I had two weeks of vacation off work and nothing to do and wrote on pen and paper for two weeks straight. I didn’t leave the house for days at a time until my arm felt like it was going to fall off from excruciating writer’s cramp.
I went back to work ( I was working as a buyer for a computer company). The book got forgotten.
I often stopped and started writing things but never finished. I told myself I had to finish The Dominator first. In my 20’s I tried to write a ghost story about a couple who bought an old house and she started acting all strange and she was possessed by the ghost. I read each chapter to my husband as I wrote it and he thought it was great. I stopped. I told my husband I had to finish The Dominator. It was just tugging at me. He told me it was a trap. I needed to move on. Every time I started and stopped that book I’d beat myself up. I believed him. I put it aside and figured someday maybe I’d try to write some other book. The Dominator wasn’t meant to be.
Fast forward to my late 30’s. I get an iPhone 3GS and discover iBooks as the first app I download. All sorts of free books. I become obsessed with reading. Most of the free books are indie authors. I start following them on social media and thinking more and more about writing again. I start buying books instead of just reading freebies and this gets me thinking more and more about writing.
Fast forward to 2014 and I’m in the bathtub and I’m on my period and I’ve read a bunch of vampire books in a row and it’s on my mind and I start thinking of the storyline for Nectar. A vamp who gets off on period blood. I’m writing full time as a freelance writer so I figure I might as well try to write the story and see if anything happens. I’ll dedicate some of my writing time to fiction instead of just all the non-fiction stuff I’m doing. I know about online marketing because I’m an online marketing writer and maybe just MAYBE I can do something with my dream of writing fiction.

I get 2/3 done book 1 of Nectar and I stall. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I start thinking about Tommy & Tia again.
I decide maybe while I’m stuck on Nectar, I’ll dabble with that old idea. I don’t tell my husband because he’ll tell me my mafia book is a trap, like it always was.

Before I finish Nectar I’ve written 550 pages for Tommy & Tia. It’s the same, sort of, but its different. There’s family, there’s backstory. There’s the idea of redemption for Tommy. He’s always gonna be a bad guy but he wants to be better for her. And she’s a good girl. But she loves him so fucking much that she can overlook some of the bad stuff. She gives him the unconditional love he needs. Love conquers all.
And here I am today.
I told myself that I had to finish The Dominator in order to move forward with my writing. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy because after I did finish it, I was able to move forward with Nectar. Other books were born. I still haven’t said goodbye to Tommy & Tia yet. I don’t know if I ever can; they’ve been with me most of my life.

So…

If you want to write — write. Keep writing. Keep rewriting. Don’t give up. Even if you scrap the story ten times.
We live in an amazing time when you don’t have to wait till a publisher thinks you’ve got what it takes. Maybe you’ll put out a book and it’ll suck. Maybe it’ll change your life. If you can’t let a story go, if you can’t let go of a dream of seeing your work in print. Keep writing. See what happens.
Much love.