by Laura Lee Guhrke

When Avon asked me to do a blog about my new book, WITH SEDUCTION IN MIND, my first reaction was to groan. Not because I hate to blog. Ok, I do, but that’s not why. It’s because I’m the writer and, by the time one of my books comes out in stores, I’ve moved on.

I’m in the middle of a whole new story, and I don’t even really remember what the previous book was about. All I know is, it’s not the book that’s under deadline now. But when I flipped back through the pages of WITH SEDUCTION IN MIND, when I re-read about Sebastian, the famous but cynical novelist with writer’s block, and Daisy, the fresh-faced wannabe, and how they fall in love despite the fact that they are forced to write together, I realized I had a great blog topic: Biting Off More Than You Can Chew (also known as: Oh, Crap, I’ll Never Make This Work).

You see, when I started WITH SEDUCTION IN MIND, I did it with the absolute certainty that writing about writers would be easy. I thought sure I’d make my deadline because I know this topic cold. “Write what you know,” people say, and I figured that made sense. Until I tried it. And that’s when I realized that writing about writers is really, really hard. The reason, of course, is because writers are crazy.

Seriously, though, it was a lot harder to show two writers falling in love than I thought it would be. Sebastian and Daisy collaborate, they fight, they seduce each other. They also finish their books, fall in love, and live happily ever after, but how I got them to that happy ending still baffles me, because they also procrastinate, hate writing as much as they love it, welcome any possible distraction, and fear the whole time they’re doing it wrong and their writing is crap.

In other words, they’re sort of like...me. Because of that, telling their story was a lot harder than I thought and I learned to never assume something’s gonna be easy, because the minute you do, you find yourself in deep trouble. As for making my deadline...well, maybe we’d better not talk about that. My editor reads this blog, you know.

What about you? Is there any project you’ve taken on that you thought would be a piece of cake, only to find out it was harder than you thought? What did you do about it? What did it teach you?