Have you ever had writer’s block? I can answer honestly, “Nope!”

Now I’ve had issues climbing my way out of plot holes. (They’ve basically required an imaginary hard hat and steam shovel to get out of them.) I’ve had a hard time wrapping my mind around a character. (“You keep talking in my head, annoying person, but I have no idea who the hell you are!”) But I’ve never had a problem coming up with a story idea. Why? Because I mine novel ideas from everywhere and I mean EVERYWHERE: conversations, TV shows, other books, news articles, or this one song I heard on the radio while I was driving to work. And I don’t give up on ideas, even if they aren’t viable for that particular setting, character, or novel, itself. I simply… reshape them.

Imagine Stephanie Gibbons in an empire-waist gown and ringlets. That’s how I originally envisioned the Gibbons sisters!

For example, can you guess what was the inspiration for the Gibbons Gold Digger series? Probably not. It was regency romance. Whaaaaaaat, girl? Yes, a regency romance novel! That was the original incarnation of the Gibbons family that I had in mind years ago.

The Gibbons Sisters (though they went by another name) were a group of lower tier aristocrats who were dead set on moving upward in society and had a list of family rules on how to go about doing it. If it meant marrying an earl or being the mistress of an earl, they didn’t care. Their reputations made them less than popular among the women in the Ton and very popular with the rogues. I wanted the women in the family to be cheeky, funny, and a blast to write. Now the problem with this: first, writing a book about a social climber that’s set in Regency England isn’t very original. There are hundreds of books like it. Secondly, I didn’t see historical romance being the trajectory of what I wanted to follow for my writing career. So then became the quandary of how to take this cool idea (or at least I thought it was a cool idea) and make it into something I still wanted to write but a novel that was also marketable.

I saw among African American lit that the soap opera-y (Is that a word?), gold digger books were growing in popularity. Based on the sales lists I could see that black readers love their drama and their hustlers. Instead of making the Gibbons sisters social climbers in Regency England, why not adapt them to more modern times? Rather than looking to raise their status through marrying an earl or a duke, how about having them just wanting to marry a really, really rich guy? The same rules would apply on how to do so. They would operate under many of the same codes of ethics. But I could set it in a black community in America.

I still wanted the story to be a romance though. In order for the reader to root for a family of gold digging women and hope each would eventually find true love, each sister also had to have redeeming qualities. Bingo! Bango! Presto! I had my new story idea!

So what’s the moral of THIS story? There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Those ideas that you deserted long ago as not viable or just plain stupid, pull them out again. Dust them off and look them over. You have no idea what treasures may lurk in that writer’s memory box.

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Stephanie Gibbons has finally hit the jackpot. Her new sugar daddy, Isaac, is loaded and treating her in high style. When he proposes, Stephanie is sure she’s set for life —- until she finds her bank account empty, Isaac gone, and a strange —- but very attractive—man following her.

Sexy P.I. Keith Hendricks has been tracking Isaac all along the eastern seaboard —- where the con man has left behind a trail of heartbroken, swindled women. But when Keith confronts Stephanie, he’s not sure if she’s Isaac’s accomplice —- or his next victim. The only thing that’s certain is his overwhelming attraction to her. And when Stephanie joins him on the hunt for Isaac, neither can ignore the sparks. Soon Stephanie is wondering whether true love is worth its weight in gold…