Caitlyn Nicholas: Drive Me To Distraction

Today I'm delighted to pop my Guest Post cherry.

Delighful blogger and author Caitlyn Nicholas has dropped by talk about writing, and her latest novel, Drive Me To Distraction.

I'll hand you over to her:

 

Caitlyn Nicholas

My publishing tale…

 

Everyone’s path to publication is different.  Like birth stories. No tale is the same as another, but at the end of it all you usually end up with a baby, or a book.

 

I am not one of those authors who’ve been writing fiction since six years old. I was, however, a prolific letter writer from my teenage years. This morphed into prolific emailing (when :cough: they invented emails), and when I couldn’t keep up with demand, the emails morphed into blogging.

 

I am not a good pregnant person. I throw up. The whole time. All day. Every day.  I do not glow with maternal contentment. Oh no siree.  I am a very sad panda. There came a point when I was about six months along with my second daughter when my husband looked at me, white faced, foul tempered and retching and said something like, “Just go and sit down would you.”

(I’m not very good at sitting down).

And I said (whined), “But what I am going to do sitting down? So boring.”

And he said, “Write a book or something…”

 

So I did.

 

I rewarded myself for getting to Chapter 3 by joining the Romance Writers of Australia.

I then discovered they ran competitions, and set myself the goal of finishing the book and entering a competition.

I entered several competitions, got loads of feedback (which was hard to take because they tore my beloved story to bits). Read Valerie Parv’s The Art of Romance Writing. Read Romance Writing for Dummies. Rewrote the book and submitted it to Mills and Boon/Harlequin.

You could nearly hear the laughter from their London office, and within days I had my very first rejection letter.

So I sulked about that for a while, dusted myself off, found out about guidelines and what different publishers expect, and rewrote the story.

Again.

I knew it was a good story.

Then I submitted it to a start up publishing company in the US called Samhain Publishing.  It was high risk, doomed to failure, and anyway, said pretty much everyone, e-books are just a blip, no one will take them seriously.

But I had a good feeling. E-books made sense to me. So I persisted.

Two weeks later I had a publishing contract.

 

And so the rollercoaster of being a published author began.

 

Drive Me To Distraction is my third full- length novel (I had a bit of a gap between novels 2 and 3 due to being knocked sideways by Post Natal Depression) and it will be published on 1 November.

 

You can find it here: http://momentumbooks.com.au/books/drive-me-to-distraction/

 

I also have a novella, Dark Moon Rising, being published in late December (check my website / blog for the details about that one – I don’t have them yet!)

 

You can find me online at: http://www.caitlynnicholas.com

My blog: http://www.caitlynnicholas.blogspot.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/CaitlynNicholas

Fb: https://www.facebook.com/CaitlynNicholasAuthor

 

About the Book:

Drive Me To Distraction is fast, fun and full-on. It’s about Alex, a female Formula One racing driver, who’s determined to make it in a man’s world - no matter what the cost to herself or anyone around her. After she makes a deal with the evil Hamish MacCameron she is propelled to stardom, but it quickly becomes clear she is nothing but a pawn in a more sinister high stakes game. Rob Dryden, owner of the Prometheus race team that Alex drives for, isn’t shy about his feelings for Alex. But she has a nasty secret, one that prevents her from having a relationship with Rob, one that no one must ever know about. Which is a pity, especially when it’s leaked to the tabloids and she winds up being the star of an extremely popular YouTube video. Of course Hamish MacCameron is responsible, and she vows to strangle him with her bare hands. Unfortunately for Hamish, someone has already taken care of it, and now she’s the prime suspect with Rob Dryden close behind.

 

Caitlyn is very generously allowing MIA followers a peek at a sample of Drive Me To Distraction here. (Just scroll down to sample and click to read).

 

Enjoy.