Sacrifice and Reward

Today, STALKING SAPPHIRE, my New Adult Thriller was finally released!
It is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks/iTunes, Kobo and more. I've put up the purchase links for Apple, Kindle, and Nook here, as well as on my website.

For every author, screenwriter, blogger, post-it poet, whatever it may be, who is not yet to the point where they'd like to be, I want like to say one thing: Do not give up!
I almost did, plenty of times...and now, obviously, I'm glad I didn't.

About 3 years ago, I was living an over-priced apartment in Burbank, CA, which had monthly ant infestations and rats in the walls, I was an unemployed waitress with writing aspirations and just one out of millions of other unemployed waitresses with writing/acting/directing aspirations living in Los Angeles.
At that time, I was still trying to be a screenwriter; convinced to my very core that I could never write anything as complicated as a book. (Ha!) I'd done decently at screenwriting competitions like Nicholls fellowship, but I wasn't exactly raking in the dough. I even spent a few horrible months trying to fix other peoples screenplays in exchange for something that was much below Writer's Guild minimums.

It was just a few months before I ended up losing my apartment that I started seeing/dreaming about a man, a killer, following a distressed young woman through a dark forest with every intention to kill her. Then suddenly, the tables turn. The young woman, previously in tears, turns out to be the hunter, and the killer, to his own surprise, turns out to be the victim.

I wasn't really sure what it was, or where it fit in, all I knew was that I couldn't get rid of it.
Deep down I'm pretty sure I knew the story was supposed to be a novel, but--again--I never imagined being able to write such a horribly complicated thing. So, I tried writing it as a webisode, short, feature, and TV series, to get it out of my head but none of it clicked and none of the constant images disappeared. Sapphire was pretty much torturing me. Pestering me daily. Haunting me nightly.

Finally, one day, I threw my hands up and said: "Fine, you bastard. I give up."
I sat down to write my first novel and the images that had been with me, for months at that point, became the opener to STALKING SAPPHIRE.

I'd love to say that the story was all roses and sunshine from there and ended in a very happily-ever-after way with today's release of STALKING SAPPHIRE, but I had about two more years of struggles in front of me before my absolutely wonderful agent would take me and Sapphire on and Diversion would pick up STALKING SAPPHIRE and its sequel.

Today, I feel like Sapphire is in my mind with a slightly superior smirk on her lips, saying: "Told you so."

Xoxo,
Mia