writer « Robin Writes

Naturally, the first thing I did after finishing REDUCED was to send it to a few beta readers. I also queried half a dozen agents. And heard zip.

So, after making a few tweaks as per my readers’ suggestions, I simply published the book.

I really had no plan. I wrote it, yay, I wrote A BOOK! And I was done. I used CreateSpace, picked a cover template (but used my own photo), and I was good to go!

And then someone said, well, great, but what happened next?

Next? How should *I* know??

So I sat down to write REUSED. But this time, I had a plan. Sort of.

A couple days in, I got stuck. And then more stuck (stucker?). So I gazed around my office, trying to find something to do to avoid writing this book.

And then it hit me—I’d publish OTHER people’s books! Really, how hard could it be? I’d fielded so many questions about my CS experience, so yeah, that’s it. Start a publishing house.

So I did. Rocking Horse Publishing.

I planned to release 6 books in 2013, including the one I was writing and was stuck on—I wasn’t even sure I’d get any submissions.

I got one. Then another. Then a virtual flood of manuscripts.

RHP published 12 books that year; we did 17 this year, and have 14 scheduled for 2015, so far.

REUSED? Oh, yeah—after I got done with the flurry of starting the publishing house, I sat down and wrote non-stop for four weeks. REUSED came out in December 2012.

And then someone said, well, great, but what happened next?

Crap.

So I scheduled RECYCLED to come out in March 2013. I had nothin’. Zip. Postponed the launch.

July arrived, suddenly and without warning somehow, and I had promised my fans, er, fan, or well, something like that, that the book would ABSOLUTELY be available in July.

Finally, I sat down to write. Three weeks later, RECYCLED saw the light of day.

Whew. A trilogy. I DID IT!

And then someone said, well, great, but what happened next?

Darn. Repeat. Oh, yeah—REPEAT! That’s it!

Coming in March 2015 . . .

When I was little, like three, four years old, I decided I wanted to write books. I took tiny pieces of paper, Scotch-taped them together, and “wrote stories.” My grandma thought it was cute. When I was about eight years old, I saw a TV commercial for Gone With the Wind—it was coming to theaters and the pageantry caught my imagination, so I asked Grandma if we could go.

She said of course, since that’s pretty much what she always said if I asked for something, although I didn’t do it often. The only caveat was that I first had to read the book. All 1000-plus pages of it.

So I did. I’m sure there were many things I didn’t understand, because, if you haven’t read the book but only seen the movie, you’re missing out Scarlett’s other two children and a host of interesting characters. But I read that book, and I got to see the movie afterwards.

Over the next decade, my scribblings evolved a bit and I submitted short stories to a few magazines—collecting rejection slips, naturally—and I worked on school newspapers and took a summer journalism class. I also kept a diary for some time; a very 1970s thing to do, it seems.

About seven years or so ago, I started writing professionally. Like, you know, for pay—pretty exciting, even though the topics were often boring and mundane. But at least I brought in a few dollars here and there.

And by the time that market dried up, so to speak, I had eaten that fateful salsa late one night and had a dream about a twenty-something young woman kicking butt and taking names . . .

That was Abby, of course, and so her story began: REDUCED was born.