Writer Emma Scott (Check out her action-packed romantic thrillers here on Goodreads) has challenged me to post seven things about my writing that other people don't know and to help (EIGHT) other authors procrastinate by tagging them to do the same. Here are my seven:

1. I usually don't tell people what I'm working on until I've done about five drafts and I'm ready for Beta readers. I sometimes wonder if that's why people think books simply appear from writers' fingers?

2. I used to take acting classes; that experience is absolutely invaluable to me in the writing process.

3. There's a three-hankie yet hilarious scene in "Something's Gotta Give" in which Diane Keaton's playwright character, Erica Barry, is spending traumatic days simultaneously (yes, she's Keaton, so she pulls it off brilliantly!) laughing and sobbing at the keyboard. I have many days like that but I don't pull it off nearly as well or as elegantly.

4. I once made an agent cry when she had to reject my (truly awful) manuscript. It was my first attempt at a romance writing and she felt terrible at having to tell me.

5. Micro-flash fiction was something I used to exercise my writing skills. I called it "verbal photography" and tried it out on listeners at a writers' conference. The group leader said he liked it but had no idea how to critique it. Now, of course, flash is a Thing.

6. The best compliment I've ever received was from a filmmaker who'd just read excerpts from "Tales From the Streetlamp" and told me he "would never look out the window the same way again."

7. I'm an accidental horror fiction writer. I entered a flash fiction contest, to see if flash was the style I ought to be doing, and was assigned "Horror" as my first genre. The piece did well, and evolved into the manuscript "The Last Hunter," my first completed novel.

I'm not going to assign this to anyone, because I am sure you would rather be writing; but if you want to have a go and maybe inspire yourself in the process, have at it!

Cheers,

Anne