Sunday, August 25, 2013

Té Russ - When life gets in the way...




Can I tell you guys a secret?


I am eager for school to start!

I see back to school commercials and get giddy!

It can get difficult for me to write with the kiddos running around during the summer months. There’s the oldest, my fifteen year old soon-to-be-in-driver’s-ed daughter, who just loves to flop down on the couch and lay sprawled on top of me in some awkward position. Never mind the fact that she’s actually taller than I am. And then there are the two younger ones, six and three, I call them ‘The Littles’. With them racing through the house, playing tag or jumping from couch to couch, it’s hard to form a solid thought, let alone trying to write some romantic and intimate scene.

Just the other day I told them, “I’m going to dad’s office to work, because I need complete concentration. Unless something has fallen off and needs to be packed down in ice and I need to rush someone to the hospital, do NOT knock on that door.”

It’s not as bad as it sounds, trust me!

Also, I’ve made the demand to my husband that I need my own office in our next house!  It’s non-negotiable.  I’ve been very tempted, recently, to sneak off to some local coffee shop, and write to my heart’s content.

Besides dealing with a full house, there are my own personal issues of procrastination. Yes, I confess! When I should be writing, I find myself doing other things: finally getting around to cleaning, doing the laundry that’s been sitting in my washing machine for three days, refreshing Facebook every thirty seconds, pinning a million and one things on Pinterest or my mind just drifting off into nothingness.

Then one of my characters screams at me, saying, “Hey, we’re waiting on you to write!” I remember this is what I do. This is what I love. It is my passion.

So I sit down, log out of every social media outlet and after wasting all of my skips on iheart radio until I find the absolute perfect song, I write. And once I really get started, the words flow effortlessly and I am lost to everything around me.

It’s almost like an out of body experience. On good days, when all the stars seem to align and the stories all but flow from my fingertips I feel like a complete rock star (Hey, we all give ourselves a little self-gratification occasionally). It gives me goose bumps. And then there are the bad days... I cringe as I type and those days, well those are the days confidence can become harder to find (the self-deprecating days). It’s all part of the process. At the end of it all after going back and reading through my work, I realize some of the “good stuff” actually can use some revisions andtweaking and the “bad stuff” is actually better than I gave myself credit for.

For me, the beauty of writing is being able to create entire worlds in which I fill with people that my readers may eventually become invested in. It’s one of the reasons I have kept all of the characters connected to one another. Readers often wonder what may have happened to particular characters after a story is seemingly over. But that’s the thing! That's the beauty of it all. In my mind, in the world I've created for them, their lives aren't over! And so I give them recurring roles so that my readers may visit with them in another story. I’m committed to these characters. I’m committed to sharing their love and their lives with the outside world.

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Author Bio:

Growing up an introvert, Té Russ found solace in literary arts at an early age. She found reading to be a vehicle to broader horizons and writing a form of self-expression. She began writing love stories in her adolescent years as a way to expel her youthful thoughts of love into words.  Since then she has gone from writing stories and thoughts of love in journals to attending college for journalism and falling in love, which has allowed those youthful words of love to blossom into a series of stories in her romance novels. Though she has an immense appreciation for the sheer smell that books collectively exert, she also has found balance to her introverted nature with adrenaline inducing activities.  So if she does not have her nose pressed deeply into a book or her pin ticking through a pad, you may also find this mother of three jumping out of airplanes, cheering her husband on at the top of her lungs at MMA fights, buzzing down the interstate on the back of motorcycles, or kayaking.

Author links:


http://www.amazon.com/T%C3%A9-Russ/e/B008HSBE34/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_3?qid=1374711576&sr=1-3

Thanks, Té, for sharing with us.  Readers, please feel free to leave comments for Té on the site.  




2 comments:

  1. Thanks, Te! Nice post. This reaffirms our own occasional insecurities with writing and the obstacles that life throws us. I like your idea of keeping your characters interconnected in your stories as well. I wish I could twine all of mine together somehow. LOL. ;)

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  2. What a lovely post. I'm lucky enough to be over the kids running around stage but still life seems to interrupt! Finding time is always an issue. I have, mostly, kept my characters interconnected through the setting for both my contemporary and historical romances - just very gently. Now I have a few books out it is interesting to hear when readers pick it up.
    Good luck with your writing.

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