Hello! Thanks for having me today. My name is Alanna Coca, and although I've only published one romantic suspense so far, it is certainly my favorite genre to read, and I'd love to write more. My idol is Sandra Brown, who started out writing genre romance, and now has these twisty and engrossing books that make me want to grovel at her feet and beg for paper scraps.
I won't do that though. I have some pride.
My stumbling block is the fact that I'm a pantser. Now, flying by the seat of my pants works fine when I write contemporary romance, and it's very easy when I write erotic romance under my alter ego Olivia Brynn. Those characters have no problem talking me through their plot as I'm typing away. I like to add a little bit of mystery and a few twists to those books as well, but a romantic suspense needs a little (okay, a lot) more thought beforehand.For example, I wrote PreView back in 2008. In my mind it was going to be a straight up mystery. I thought I'd write a series of books starring this heroine as she goes through her everyday life solving crimes that have yet to occur using her prophetic dreams.
This is the first book where I started with chapter one, because that's what woke me from a sound sleep one autumn morning.
Before the "new wip glow" wore off, I immediately wrote the last chapter, because I knew just how I wanted the whole conflict resolved. Back to chapter two, where the heroine informed me that she's got a love interest.
Oh, okay. So it's a romance. Got it.
*Tweak the final chapter*
This is when I see that Trevor, the love interest, is a difficult guy to like. (One reviewer describes him as dark chocolate, "a bitter treat") So I tried to talk Ryann, the heroine, out of a happily ever after with this guy, but she's got her sights set. So I bounced from beginning to end, and worked my way to the middle. This involved a lot of tweaking, a little hero-slapping, and several scene rewrites.
Sigh.
If only I could plot!
But finally, I finished the book, and ended up falling for the hero right along with Ryann. and couldn't have been happier when Carina Press took it. To have PreView sitting on the virtual shelves with the amazing authors and books you'll find at Carina was a thrill. I'll admit to a little bit of happy dancing, and maybe more than a little bit of liquid-spirit-lifting.
For more of a taste of PreView, you can visit my website where I have a trailer and excerpt set up.
To thank the lovely Not Your Usual Suspects authors for letting me crash their blog, I'd like to give a copy of PreView away to a NYUS reader. Just comment here with a snippet of the last dream you remember having. Now, if it's a sex dream, I probably don't want details, but the weirder the better. I'll choose one random commenter to win a digital copy of PreView.
I'll start: The last dream I remember involved my friend's tiny baby who for some reason was no bigger than a mouse. I had to change her poopy diaper.
Sometimes I wonder about me.
