katefierro:

The last seven days were intense, with a lot happening around my debut novel, Love Starved: I have just finished my third – penultimate – round of revisions. The beautiful cover designed for my book by the ever so talented Valerie was revealed. Soon, Advance Readers’ Copies will be ready to fly into the world, which means my story will actually become a book.

It’s surreal, looking back at the whole process and seeing how something as abstract as a simple idea evolves – through countless hours of planning and writing and editing – into something as real and magical as a book.

I’ve never been a one-story kind of girl; I always have at least three projects going on, and dozens of other ideas buzzing around at all times. On the magnetic board above my desk there is a sheet of paper with twenty-two story seeds noted down: those are the ones I was/am/will be working on in foreseeable future; those that are defined and more or less planned. Eight of those stories have been crossed out as completed since I put that paper up there. Eight are circled as those I’ve started and are in different stages of completion. The other six are planned, but untouched yet. Once upon a time, that ever-growing list contained only fanfiction ideas, but at some point, some of them started to have lives of their own.

The ideas come from everywhere:  a shred of conversation heard in passing; song lyrics; a picture; a sentence read in a book or on the internet; a dream. There are themes that intrigue me and demand to be explored in writing: Magic. Mystery. Angels. Friendship. Dreams, and consequences of giving them up.

And, apparently, fantasies.

And I don’t just mean erotic fantasies, as the choice of an escort as one of the main characters in Love Starved may suggest – I mean anything we believe we can’t have; any desires and dreams we put aside as unrealistic, impossible, or too fantastic. Love Starved is not a story about sex (although, yes, there is some sex in there eventually). I took the well-known “high-class escort and a rich client” theme and played with it in my own way, spinning and twisting it into a tale about hope and dreams, hard choices and growing up.

I’m excited to share it with you, and to talk about the story I’ve had to keep quiet about for so long! Expect more news from the book front soon! 🙂