The first million words are the hardest

In my transition from academic writer to romance writer, I read several times that I needed to write at least one million words in the romance genre before my writing would ring true. That's on top of reading one hundred romance novels to get a feel for the genre.

Considering I hadn't read many capital "R" romances, and written none at all, I had a lot of work ahead of me. However, I realized I'd read an awful lot of literary novels that were, in essence, romances. Isn't Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera one of the most romantic stories ever written?

What about Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy? And most of Jane Austen?

Now the trick was to find my own voice as I spun my stories. And that, apparently, is where the "writing one million words" comes in. I redrafted my first two novels--Cult of the Black Virgin and Just Desserts--many dozens of times. And considering each book was over 80,000 words, that added up to over one million words pretty quickly.

And you know what? By the time these two books were released last spring, I felt my writing had changed, somehow.

I was working on the first draft of a sequel to Cult, when I noticed that I didn't have to rewrite every scene a dozen times. I didn't  have to redraft every single sentence to make it fit with the sentences that came before and after. Now my sentences seemed to take an organic flow, each one born out of the one preceding, and leading effortlessly to the next,

 Hey! I was becoming a writer!

Now I'm not saying that my latest book, Revenge of the Black Virgin is any sort of magnificent piece of literature. But it was easier to write, and it is better written, than my previous books.

And it hasn't stopped there. The third instalment of the Black Virgin Trilogy--Gift of the Black Virgin--was even easier to write. I'd found my voice, I knew my characters, and I just let them tell their stories. This book is being edited right now, and should be released in the fall.

Meanwhile, I'm half-way through another novel--the first book in a trilogy set in the Middle East. In Tracking Tor: Mirage,  I have to start all over with my characters and setting, of course. But I'm enjoying that. This time my alpha hero, Torval, is Danish--and although I've just met him, I think I'm in love already.

The rest should just come naturally....