Ever since burnout, I’ve noticed a sense of loss.

A sense of “I don’t write the way I used to”.

And I didn’t think I did.

I’ve spoken of burnout many times. Starting in 2019, I didn’t realise I had it until 2021 and then spent the next two years trying to get out of it.

During 2019/20, I wrapped up the Porn Star Brothers series. A massive seven novel epic of family saga across multiple generations. But by the time I was finishing the last two novels I was done with it. I was done with the family; I was done writing the same thing. My mind wanted to be free to write other stories. So, I pushed on and finished the last novel, and left 40 short character stories from the series unwritten, but I couldn’t write any T.K. Wrathbone stories, either.

In 2021, I pushed out the Wrathbone stories but no adult.

In 2022, I pushed out Anything for You, and in 2023 I pushed out Burning Desires while I changed my business life dramatically by closing down two sets of socials and websites for two author names, and another set for my jewellery label as I closed that business as well.

But during those novels, things felt weird. Wrong. Different.

I wasn’t writing the way I used to in the descriptive tone for Porn Stars. This time it felt awkward, harder than it had been. I knew something was wrong and I couldn’t write properly.

That’s when I came up with the analogy of a dot-to-dot puzzle to try and explain my then version of writing. I used to be able hit every dot in order and make it around to complete the picture, finishing a novel in three weeks, but with Anything for You and Burning Desires it felt as though I fell onto dot three or four and then jerked back and forth as I stumbled my way around the puzzle, with a few spins, kicks, and tumbles along the way. Once completed, I knew there was so much missing. No heart, no emotion, just an exhausted hate of writing.

Clearly I still had lingering burnout.

Since Anything for You, I’ve been thinking I’d lost my mojo for descriptions. I felt my prose slipping into the beige zone. It had never been purple, but had always hovered nicely in the middle between the two and I certainly didn’t want to go full beige.

During Burning Desires, I considered that maybe it was my writing style that had changed, slipping even more into the quick and easy to read zone in simple, easy to read English.

At the end of 2023, I followed BD with book one of a duology. I didn’t write book two until April 2024.

By then, it felt like things had started coming back. Just a little, nothing to write home about, but it was there, the mojo had dipped its toe into the doorway of my brain and gone, “here’s some descriptions and witty prose for you.”

And then I wrote a cop show trilogy, and it was pretty good with minimal problems. Being the first, and very rough, draft, I still need to add in more description of places and people, get a few geographical points right, and need to stop having my characters sigh and put their hands on their hips, but in reality, people do these things. They’re called habits.

I don’t have a degree in writing or English, didn’t get to finish high school, but I have read enough books and watched enough courses to improve my skills over the last nineteen years.

But I was still missing something. The something I couldn’t put my finger on.

So I asked my editor.

I asked her about my descriptions and whether I gave enough to fill out sentences and paragraphs the way I used to. Whether my writing was as full and could readers still imagine the scenery in their head. And she gave me quite the insight in a four page word doc.

I’ve quoted some of it below, and as a reference, PSB stands for Porn Star Brothers, and my shorts are my young adult short stories. Remy is from Burning Desires, Sydney and Sean from the duology, Jenny from PSB.

Perhaps what you perceive as a change in the descriptive detail of your stories is, in fact, a shift in tone.

The tone of the shorts is different from the PSB tone, and different again from Her, Him, Burning Desires and Anything for You. The tone in the shorts is quite cold—it probably has to be because you’re writing about kids and you do horrible things to them—these are horror stories, so they follow horror story givens. You can’t have warm characters because that would upset the genre givens. Your characters may not deserve to be monstered quite so imaginatively, but most of them behave in ways they know to be stupid, wrong or unlawful.

The tone of the PSB books, right from the get-go, is infused with the love of family. The brothers stand by one another, and look to their parents for moral compass, even if they don’t always follow the rules. Some of the titles – De Luca, for example—have a harsher edge because of the central character(s), but even when the MCs are in the depths of despair (when Roger and Tomas were so ill, for example) there’s a warmth of family that comes through. Remember when everyone took Roger and Tomas into the sea? That’s pure love magic.

Now, look at Remy, Sydney and your other more recent characters. Sydney loves her friends—sort of—but she has no other emotional ties. She’s really quite unpleasant to most people which makes me wonder why her women friends are so devoted to her…but then, they all benefit from her success, so they’re symbiotic. This symbiosis is rather different from the symbiosis of the Stephanopoulos clan. All this snarkiness is very much the face Sydney shows the world, too. She doesn’t suffer fools, and she’s always, always on the offensive. What’s underneath is even colder. Remy is also somewhat of a loner although a bit less cold than Sydney.

I think it might be this shift in emotional tone that you’re perceiving rather than a change in the descriptive style.

Flexible writers can produce a huge variation in tone as well as situation and plot and character. Sydney and Sean both admit to using a formula, but I don’t believe you do, except insofar as it’s necessary for genre givens. You have at least three markedly different tones, and I’m sure you could do others.

You might be missing writing characters you like. I always find writing about people I like, even if they’re snarky grumps, gets the story flowing better than writing about people I don’t feel any kinship with. I bet you liked Jenny and Spiros and Pedro and Roger and Diana and co…and even the terrible twins, right? Some of them did the most ridiculously stupid things, but you probably felt more like giving them a swift kick in the pants rather than strangling them to slow music.

After reading her entire word doc several times, I went, “ah…okay” as it had made complete sense to me. The female characters in my stand-alone novels are different to those in the Porn Star Brothers epic mega saga. My novels are about single women who want fame, money, and love, and find it, the usual happy ever after ending with a lot of weird stuff thrown in. These characters will always have a different feel over a family. They will always grow with me as I do, and as I write older characters.

In my thirties I wrote thirty-something characters. In my forties they aged up a few years, and now that I’ve surpassed fifty, they’re around their mid-forties, give or take. So, as I get older, will they, or will they stay forty-somethings forever? This is something I’ve already thought about and believe they might.

So, it all made sense.

I write sassy women who kick ass and don’t get their asses kicked, just like my author mentor and inspiration, Jackie Collins, said of her characters. I want to read about strong women getting ahead and getting their way in a man run world. Not read about piss weak women letting men walk all over them.

I’ve read Nancy Drew books since I was ten. Forty-one years of a strong, feisty, independent woman who didn’t take no for an answer and could do everything better than any male her age and older.

So, after the last three plus years of trying to figure out what had changed about my writing, whether it was style, description, or something other, the change of emotional tone made complete sense to me. Because I had aged. Bypassed another decade. Another year of writing books, stories, poems, songs, essays and opinion pieces.

And the three female characters in the last four novels (three and four are a duology) are all the same. Ari, Remy, and Sydney are all the same female even though Remy is a singer/club owner while Ari and Sydney are authors. All forties, single, hardened against the world and the people in it and their circumstances. But all find their version of a twisted happy ever after.

Over the years many years I’ve been writing stand-alones, my characters have changed, just like me. We’ve grown older, jaded, exhausted by the world and the people in it. The way women are treated, and the way we’re fighting back. My characters are me; I am them. I come out in them when I write, they become me in words. We are symbiotic. We are the symbiote.

As for liking my characters…well…I don’t hate them. They’re strong, feisty, single, independent women who love men and enjoy having sex with them, but, in thinking things through, they are hardened by the world and their age, and I have no emotion for them. They’re just story ideas Muse gave me to write. Maybe I need to get back to characters I do like, characters that are hilarious and funny, or, at least, give more warmth to them.

Although, is there irony in saying that in many of the books I’ve read I’ve had no feelings for the characters? Felt no warmth for them, felt no emotion for them. There have been characters in books I just wanted to kill before I was halfway through. Usually women, usually drunks, druggies, and cowards. I blame the authors, usually male, who make female characters like that. Although I have read many female author written books and don’t care for many of their characters either.

So maybe I’m a product of my reading environment of weak and unemotional characters, and need to start reading my Jackie Collins books from start to finish to get some sexy sassy women vibes going back on.

All of this will percolate in my brain until April when I try to start writing novels again. Writing is physically hard, given my arthritis is worse than when writing Porn Stars, and I currently have a screaming pinched nerve in my right shoulder blade, but I finally have hope after years of struggling to find the right words to describe the issue. I felt the mental atmosphere around me changing as I read my editor’s words, and along with the thoughts I’d already been having, I can’t wait to see what happens next.

I can only hope everything gets back to the excitement of the Porn Stars days and that magic comes back. While I don’t want to write another family epic, I need to get in touch with the warmth of my characters, and get some excitement back for writing them. Add in some humour, and wicked, wicked, antagonists.

Maybe a Jackie-style Hollywood novel is next. Hot men, hot women, sex galore, and maybe a few characters from Porn Star Brothers thrown in.

Yep…the ideas are percolating…