14 1/2 Years of Penning Multicultural Love

So by now,

You know who I am, what I do, and where I am as an author today.

Still, I want to give you just a little bit of back info on me, and why I started my journey.

I have always been a huge paranormal and fantasy reader. I read my first paranormal Vampire book Interview with the Vampire at 11, but I will deadass not say what year that was LOL.

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Needless to say, I had no business reading that book at 11-years old.

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At any rate, it created my love for the supernatural, and I was on a voracious journey to read everything supernatural that I could after that. And in this journey, the one thing I found to be synonymous in every genre that I read, was the fact that there either wasn’t, or there were few people who looked like me in the pages that I read. I was bombarded with petite white female characters on the regular, and if a minority showed up, (never any multiracial ones like me) they were most often killed off, or made out to be the villain.

As a teen, it was read it or don’t, as the 80s was riff with it, and finding a minority character was next to impossible! Unless I wanted to read my mom’s Harlequin romances. I think it’s the reason I can’t stand Fabio to this day! LOL!

So I began to pen my own, with characters who looked like me.

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And boy oh boy was that fun!

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I wrote a Shakespearean tragedy, that I thought was quite good, but my friends couldn’t stop laughing. They laughed so hard, that it was then I realized at 14, that I might actually be funny. From there I got serious, because although the tragedy didn’t have the desired effect I wished it to have, it did keep them engaged, and attuned to the characters. I kept writing little tidbits, but I never took it serious enough to attempt a career at it. I married in 1993, had a family, so writing became this little past time that I could do on the side as a hobby, for at that time I was a chef. By 2005, when my oldest graduated, I became an executive chef, had more free time from the daily riggers of running a kitchen, all my children were school aged now, so I picked it up once more.

 

And that is where A Lad’s Trousers’ comes in. Most people assume that Arieanná’s Legend is the first book I ever wrote, but it isn’t, A Lad’s Trousers’ is. And at the time of it’s release, there were absolutely few and far (Besides the Goddess of IR Romance Beverly Jenkins of course) so that book took me to Amazon’s top Five, and because it was a cross genre Historical and Interracial at the time, it took me to Amazon’s top 25 in interracial romance as well.

Due to that, I decided to do a career change in 2009. I went back to school to become a teacher, which would also give me the actual skills to write professionally.

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And that was the birth of Arieanna’s Legend.

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As I was student teaching and tutoring now, waiting for a student I was tutoring in the library, (Saaid, I hope you let go of your misogynistic views of women, listened to what the fuck I said about them, and became something amazing!) there was a stack of Egyptian mythology books on the table in front of me. As I leisurely began to leaf through them waiting for Saaid’s constantly late ass, I got this image in my head of this young woman walking through this underground Egyptian Pyramid, and as she brushed her fingers along the hieroglyphs, they began to light up under her fingertips, and that was the beginning of my career.

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I shopped the manuscript around, and I can tell you it was pretty depressing. From editors telling me that I needed to take some English as a second language classes, because they looked at my last name, then assumed the Scottish accent in the books was me writing broken English, to being told that my 18-year old character who walks in on a shower scene (where she couldn’t see or hear anything) needed to be taken out of the book, or the girl aged up to 21 (right, that would never happen today. How far publishing has fallen,) to the straight out, we don’t carry those kinds of books (basically stating they don’t work with minorities who don’t write one race). It was rejection, after rejection, which although normal, hurt regardless. It was so bad, that my middle child at that time, 16, brought me this little book called “Dirty Rotten Rejections,” we had a laugh, and I still have that book to this day.

However through the publishing Gods, I was picked up by Eternal Press in 2011, after all those years, and I tell you, I couldn’t have been happier; never realizing that was actually the beginnings of my publishing nightmares.

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My book did amazing in that first year, despite the shortcomings around it.

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Eternal Press was a whole ass nightmare, from not editing author’s books professionally, to skimming off their royalties, to not marketing authors of color, to outright deflecting author concerned. But despite this, I stayed with them until 2015, since I had no clue about independent publishing. In 2015, they were finally sued by a gang of authors, they sold the company outright, and it was brought by Caliburn Press.

By 2016 I was totally done with them all, so when they asked if I would be renewing my rights, I said no, and they were reverted back to me. I technically only stayed with them, because it gave me the accolade of traditionally published author. In 2016 after the issues with the company, and having 10 books in the TBMD series, and another six in the Midna’s, I decided to go back to my roots, and churn out some Romantic Comedies (a genre I don’t write anymore) and that was great fun. I also figured that A Lad’s Trousers needed some sisters, and so I stepped into another genre as well. But mind you, they were all independent.

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If you think Independent authors get shit on today, you wouldn’t even believe what it was like in 2015. If you said you were an independent author, people would deadass say, shit like; “oh, so you’re working on being an author?” or “oh, so the traditional route didn’t work out?,”

And with a straight face too.

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Nonetheless, that began my journey as an independent author.

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I sent T.B.M.D to an independent editor, and they were horrified.

She couldn’t believe that the book was supposedly edited by a professional. She literally wrote in read pen, “was this edited by an eighth grader?”, in her email response, and I laughed hysterically. Needless to say, she did her thing, and no lie, my book hit amazon’s top five that same year!

I was riding on a high, and that began the TBMD series, 20 books deep now.

Since then, I have written 126-books in 9-genres.

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I decided that I would focus my art on Urban Fantasy, with women over 30, Arieanná and Midna Marie being the only characters I would write in their late twenties in fantasy, and Jobella in her teens; my attempt at YA, which I decided I sooo didn’t want to write due to the parameters (which on God do not exist today, and that is fucking crazy!). I picked this genre, for to me, there were a ton of other authors out there writing young adult and college aged fantasy. It was hard to find Urban Fantasy featuring older characters, unless you were reading Kim Harrison, or Laurel K, and to be totally honest with you, no offense, but I was sick of reading about white women.

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I love fantasy, but people seem to imagine that no one wants to read about an older character. I always find this funny, especially since the teen and young adult fantasy characters they read, had to come from somewhere.

They deadass weren’t hatched, unless they were dragons, and even then a mother dragon had to lay them????

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In any case, from that came the spin-offs Midna’s Farie Tale, Bayou Blues, the Death Merchants, & paranormal Matrimony. I love being an author, and for 14-years I have been making sure that no other person of color feels like they aren’t represented, especially multicultural women like me, as well as my sons and daughters.

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Email me and tell me about your story, how you found my site, and what you’d like to see in publishing moving forward! 😉