I’ve been a writer since a very young age, but when I started writing with the goal of publication, the first full length book I produced was a fantasy romance featuring a half-elf merc and a fire-wielding mage. I loved that book. It poured out of me in a way writing never had before, but that was long before I’d been weighted down by the rules of writing. No matter what genre you’re in, there are rules and people who will eagerly tell you about them and when you’re breaking them.

After years of trying to write within the confines of those rules and construct a book that fit the wants and desires of the romance publishing industry, I burned out. The broken promises and the inability to write without those rules in my head pushed me to a breaking point. I started to question why I was even writing if I no longer enjoyed it.

I reverted to my angsty high school self. The me that used to get lost in comic books and fantasy novels and autobiographies of Isaac Asimov. I got mad. Anger is an emotion I don’t do often but my Sicilian bloodlines allow me to tap into it pretty well.

All of that pushed me to write something new. Something that wasn’t for anyone else but me. This story, this book, this character sketch (I really didn’t know what I was writing, just that I was writing) became the vehicle for all my dark and twisty emotions. I poured everything I felt into those pages. I affectionately termed whatever it was that I was writing my Screw You book. Screw the rules, screw what anyone said I could or couldn’t write, I just wrote to make myself happy. (more…)