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As she sat down to eat, her cell phone chimed with a new email. Picking it up, she saw the message from Heartbeat Books with the subject line:The third installment of the Sealena series.
Her fork suspended in midair, Carly’s heart raced as she opened the message from her editor.
Dear Carly,
I hope the flurry of activity in Port Serenity this month is providing ample inspiration for your WIP.
More like a plausible excuse for procrastination.
I’m writing to check in on your progress as our deadline for the third book is approaching fast. Sales and marketing have already launched their extensive promotional campaigns and early sales reports are promising, but we want to make sure we maintain momentum. Therefore, I’m writing to ask if you could submit the book chapters to me as you’ve written them.
The fork clattered to her plate.What?
Unprecedented, yes, I know, but we want to release excerpts to exclusive promoters leading up to release date. If you could just forward anything you’ve written so far beyond the sample excerpt we’ve included inLove at Sea, that would be a great start.
Thanks, Carly! Waiting with bated breath for the conclusion of Sealena’s love story!
XX
Paige
Senior Acquisitions Editor–Heartland Publishing
Her editor wanted new chapters. The problem was, Carly didn’t have new chapters.
This entire series had begun on a whim, as a simple fanfic short story she’d submitted to DigitalPress, an online reader app, the year before. She’d never expected the story would hit a million readers and gain the attention of Paige Heartland, the editor at the small Alaska-based publishing house—or that it would have resulted in a three-book, six-figure deal that had basically changed Carly’s life overnight a year ago.
She hadn’t thought she was capable of the three-thousand-word short story, let alone a series trilogy, but the first book had flown onto the pages. Evidently, forbidden love was not much of a foreign concept to her. The first book in the series was essentially a thinly veiled fictionalized account of her own love life—her hidden desires, her longing for a love that could never be.
The editor had loved it. Readers had loved it even more.
It had given her the confidence and inspiration to write the next book,Love at Sea. It continued the heartfelt struggles of love from afar. Sealena and her fisherman were navigating an impossible connection that neither of them truly understood or knew how to resolve.
Readers were hooked but, unfortunately, also growing impatient. They were calling for the love story to come full circle. After hundreds of pages of sensual experiences and interactions that were soul connections, readers were demanding the real thing. No more fantasies. No more lusting from afar.
Which meant she needed to make good on the mythical themes she’d introduced and give Sealena her thirty days on land “hall pass” of sorts that had been the dangling carrot in the first two books. It was time to take the Serpent Queen out of her element and explore the connection on land.
She’d introduced it in the excerpted chapter...but then she’d stalled.
Now that Sealena was on land—what next?
As she set her phone aside, it chimed again.
Another new message from Paige.
Oh, and I’ll need those chapters you mentioned you’d written already by tomorrow, the one-line message read.
Those chapters were still rough. Ideas, really. It was going to be a long night.
Eating quickly, not really tasting the food, Carly cleared away her dishes and put the leftover food into her fridge. Then, grabbing her new laptop, she sat at her desk and flipped to the second chapter, where the blinking cursor sat waiting for inspiration.
How was she supposed to write this final story when she really had no idea what would happen between Sealena and her fisherman? Longing, unreciprocated feelings and dancing around a real connection were things she knew—write what you knowhad definitely been working for her—but how did she write a story about the two lovers actually coming together in a meaningful, impactful way that would meet reader expectations when she herself hadn’t experienced that pleasure?
Fiction is not real. Come on, Carly. Stop trying to write a fictionalized diary entry and just tell a good story.
Sighing, she started to type:
The fisherman stares at me for a long time, as though he’s not sure he can trust what he’s seeing. Maybe I’m just a hallucination, a figment of the overactive minds of men who spend so many lonely days at sea. He recognizes me, but he’s unsure.
