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One of Hollywood’s hardest working women is about to discover there's a lot more drama behind the camera than in front of it...
Faith “Freakin’” Sinclair probably shouldn’t have called her boss a perv…or grabbed his “privates.” But as creator of the hit dramedy Modern Women she’d had enough of his sexist insults. Now she’s untouchable in the industry—not in a good way. The only way to redeem herself is to convince Alex the wildly popular wildly demanding former star of her show to come back. But there’s one obstacle in her way—one very handsome broad-shouldered obstacle…
Professor Mason Mitchell is head of the theater department where Alex is studying “real” acting. The only way he’ll let Faith anywhere near Alex is if she agrees to co-teach a class. It’s an offer she can’t refuse—and as it turns out the professor just might end up teaching Faith that there’s more to life than work—and that real-life love scenes are way more fun than fake ones….
Guest Post: One Drop
Jayne Denker
And then there was the time I nearly gave up writing fiction altogether.
It was a moment that would turn your hair gray in an instant, I swear. I mean, I could feel my favorite not-found-in-nature purplish auburn leaching out of every strand while I did one of those slo-mo reaches, crying in a voice altered to an octave and a half lower than normal by the drawn-out special effect, “Nooooo...”
Well, wait—let me set the scene first. Picture a happy fledgling author, halfway through the first draft of her first novel. That would be me. With hair color intact. I had powered through my first NaNoWriMo, conquered the quest for 50,000 words in thirty days. If I could get that far, I reasoned, I could make it all the way to the end of a book. What an exciting thought! So now, with the diligent writing during the month of November, and the distracting holidays, behind me, I was charging ahead under my own steam, gleefully continuing with my First Ever Chick Lit/Contemporary Romance.
I was even more excited to get to a chapter I’d been looking forward to writing for ages. In it, my hapless heroine throws a Christmas party, where everything—and I mean everything—goes wrong. And then culminates with her house catching on fire. (Don’t worry—like all my novels, it’s a comedy. It all comes out fine in the end.)
I started writing the chapter eagerly, enjoying knowing exactly what was going to happen every step of the way for once (hey, I’m a pantser—I only keep a vague plan of action on my best days, so this much knowledge was a blessing) but being pleasantly surprised by little details and clever twists that came out of nowhere. I was halfway through the scene and loving it.
And then...
It was just one errant drop. My son bumped into me as I was taking a drink from a bottle of water. The drop went flying...straight under the keys of my laptop. Before I could turn the machine off, that evil droplet snaked its way to the battery.
“Nooooo...”
Yes. Dead. I’d lost my MacBook. It was confirmed the next day by one of the dudes at the Genius Bar. Nothing was salvageable—nothing. I’d lost the Christmas party scene. (The rest of the MS was safely ensconced in Google Docs, thank goodness.) Yes, I cried. I really did. Even though I was grateful that I hadn’t lost the entire half a novel, I still wept for what I did lose. I stopped writing for several weeks.
It sounds silly, I know. It was only one scene. But I struggled to recreate it, all the while suspecting I never matched what I had written originally. To this day I’ll never know. Was the original version the better one? I realized eventually that it didn’t matter. What did matter was that I started writing again (on a new MacBook Pro).
What mattered was that I finished the novel, found an agent, and the agent found a publisher. (It wasn’t that easy, but it happened.) And then I finished another novel, and another one, and now I’m almost finished with a fourth. That whole “never give up” thing? I think there’s something to that. It’s right up there with my other favorite bit of advice: Back up your computer. Frequently.
Jayne Denker is the author of three contemporary romantic comedies, By Design, Unscripted, and Down on Love, and is hard at work on a fourth. She lives in a small town in western New York, USA, with her husband, son, and one very sweet senior-citizen basement kitteh who loves nothing more than going outside, where she sits on the front walk and wonders why she begged to go outside. When Jayne’s not hard at work on another novel (or, rather, when she should be hard at work on another novel), she can usually be found frittering away stupid amounts of time online.
Connect with Jayne!
Blog: http://jaynedenker.com
Twitter: @JDenkerAuthor
Buy the Book!
Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/unscripted-jayne-denker/1114865242?ean=9781601831316
(Also available on iTunes)
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