Why Stubborn Matters—Kate Douglas

Kelly, thank you so much for the invite to blog with such an amazing group of authors. You know that I’m doing this mainly to see what they have to say (well, and because I really like you) —but there has to be a secret password somewhere that helps us get the contract of our dreams, right?

Uh, no? Well…damn. Of course, I actually figured that out a long time ago. I started submitting stories back in the mid 1980s, and when I won my first contest I thought I’d be published within the year. Little did I know…

Things obviously have changed. I started in the days when you printed out a manuscript and mailed it to an editor (since finding an agent when you were unpublished was just about impossible) and then waited up to a year for a rejection. Now a writer can go ahead and write a story, put it up on Amazon and call themselves an author. A lot of those writers are serious about their craft—they find skilled editors to help them make their work as perfect as it can be, they learn the important aspects of business that can help them find success in this crazy world of writing, and they never rest on their laurels. They don’t have time, because they’re busy writing the next book. They’re too stubborn, too driven, to quit.

And those are the ones I’m talking to—the writers who take their craft seriously, who understand that there’s not a writer alive who doesn’t benefit from good editing.

First of all, I really believe that there are those among us who can’t exist without writing. I come from a long line of writers, though the writers in my family weren’t published authors. No, they kept diaries that were handed down, diaries I’ve read and marveled at, reading those penciled entries until I feel as if I know their authors intimately.

My favorite is an entry my grandmother wrote back in late 1905 when she was a nursing student in San Francisco. “He walked with me along the beach until almost 11:00, and then I bade him take me home.” Transfixed by the poetry in her prose, I read this to my dearly beloved, hopelessly pragmatic husband, whereupon he said, “And if she’d stayed until midnight, you might have been somebody else.”

The power of words…

But I have those diaries, and on occasion I will pull them out—not because the stories are so amazing, but because the stories are…well, yes, they’re amazing, but they’re also descriptive of the everyday lives of people trying to be good parents, trying to make it, trying to survive.

People who found the time to write even when times were tough–in fact, more often when times were tough. But they knew those stories were important, and so they wrote.

And, as usual, I’m getting off track. Sorry—I’ve had a rough few weeks, learning to write on a MacBook Pro when I’ve always been a Microsoft girl. Which leads me back to the place where I digressed—something I do way too often—but that’s also something I want to talk about, and that is, how being stubborn often leads to the most wonderful surprises.

I wanted to write romances. I love the happy endings, the strong-willed women and the tough-as-nails men who can still be vulnerable enough to open their hearts to love. I wanted to write them, and I did, but I also wanted to be published, which wasn’t as easy as it looked. Remember, this was the early 1980s, but I didn’t quit. I must have inherited some of that stubbornness from my predecessors, because I kept at it until I finally sold to one of the very first epublishers, but it wasn’t until 2005 that I signed my first NY contract. Twenty years after my first submission–I was 55 years old, which, to be honest, from my current age, looks pretty darned young!

But I didn’t sell one of those traditional romances I wanted to write. No, I sold Wolf Tales, which, for its time, was a rule-breaker. You name a “romance rule,” I broke it. Now my Chanku tales are pretty tame by comparison, but not in 2005. They released in January 2006, and since that time you’re seeing more and more truly amazing, unique, and totally original books. I’m not taking credit for that, because it was an evolution in publishing forced on the traditional publishers by the demands of readers. Readers who didn’t quit asking for sexy, off-the-wall stories, and writers willing to take that leap from what was, in the beginning, a very high wall.

So first tip—break the rules. Write stories that aren’t like anything else you’ve seen. I remember when we were told that first person storytelling was a deal breaker, and yet those have become some of the most popular books out there. Same sex relationships in books were taboo, and yet I fully believe that those stories of romance outside of the traditional male/female dynamic have helped break down barriers and that they’ve had a role in changing minds over the ongoing fight for marriage equality.

Second tip–you can’t break the rules until you know the rules, and this is where I get back to what I said earlier about editing. The rules I’m talking about here are the basic rules of writing–you know, the ones your teachers should have taught you when you were probably dreaming over that hot guy or gal in the next row of seats?

Yep. Those rules.

I receive emails from people all the time asking me to help them get published, and yet those emails are written without thought to punctuation, spelling, or even the most basic language skills. Know the language, know what makes a sentence, a paragraph, even a phrase, work. Once you know what good writing sounds like, you can get more creative with the rules, breaking them in a way that moves your story forward.

And I guess my third tip would be more a gentle slice of reality: if you have to force yourself to sit at the computer and write, maybe you aren’t cut out to be a writer. Your stories have to come from the heart, not because your buddy is making money self-publishing and you want to make money, too. For many of us, writing is a career, and if we’re lucky, it pays the bills. (Or at least pays enough to help us buy the tools of the trade. You know what I’m talking about: coffee, alcohol, and the occasional computer upgrade.)

But it’s our love of the written word, of the characters we create and the stories we tell that keeps us coming back to our projects day after day. We write whether we sell or not. We do it because we can’t NOT do it. We do it because it’s the only way to silence the voices in our heads, the anxiety that hits when we’re out walking and an idea pops into that convoluted brain and says WRITE ME NOW! (and yes, my characters do tend to speak in all caps…)

I hope you have that love, that desire to write the kinds of stories that you love, but if you’re not a writer, I also hope you can get just as lost in a good book as many of us do in our writing. I’m a voracious reader–that was my first love, what drove me to want to write my own stories. If you think that’s a path you want to take, don’t let anything or anyone stop you. Back to my topic–stubbornness is as important to a writer’s as any other tool of the trade.

Which reminds me–I have a new operating system to figure out. And a book to give away–Dark Wolf, the first in my Spirit Wild series. I’ll leave the details up to Kelly. Enjoy!

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Let’s take a look at Dark Wolf

Dark Wolf

Spirit Wild #1

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A little about Kate:

Kate Douglas was first published in contemporary romance and then successfully moved to erotic paranormal romance with her long-running Wolf Tales series at Kensington Publishing. In 2010 she was awarded RT Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her outstanding body of work in erotic romance. Kate continues to write within the world of her sexy shapeshifters with her new Spirit Wild series which follows the second generation of Chanku shapeshifters from Wolf Tales, now published independently. She has her first romantic suspense novella with St. Martin’s Press coming out in May 2015 in the Hot Alphas anthology with Lora Leigh. Kate’s first novel in the series–Intimate–which is set in California’s wine country, is due to release in November 2015.

Learn more about Kate and her books here: Website | Facebook | Twitter @wolftales | Goodreads | Email  kate@katedouglas.com

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Make sure to check out all of the other stops on this month long tour HERE and enter the grand prize giveaway.