Full disclosure: I am not a big romance reader.  I picked this book up based on the recommendations of many friends on social media who promised I would enjoy it.  They were not wrong.  Everlong is not the book I thought it would be.  Do not judge this book by it's cover.  Yes, it is a “slow- burn” romance, but it is so much more!  My experience with this book started off a misled state of mind of what I assumed this book would be like.  So, as I began reading it, I would have told you that it was nicely written, but off to a slow start.  I got a little lost in the first couple of chapters as I tired to figure out who Lily really was.  When I finally caught up, I couldn’t stop reading this book.  Lily’s story is exceptionally well written, with wonderful descriptive texts.  The dialogue is believable and easy to read—I could easily hear the characters speaking the words in my mind.  The chemistry between Sam and Lily was fun, a...

I’ve been working on my next book for several months now.  I’ll be honest, it’s been a daunting task and for one reason alone:  My characters—though I know what I want them to look like, and how I want them to act—they haven’t really come all the way to life yet.  My mind knows who they are, but the page has yet to really recognize their greatness.  To be clear, I don’t usually just throw a character together and make them up as I go.  Okay, maybe I do for some characters that have a minimal part in to play in the story, but I put a lot of thought into my main characters.  They have extensive back stories, even if their entire story doesn’t get told in my book, (or at least in the book I’m working on) they come from somewhere and had a life before I began writing them.  There is a point in my writing process—and it is usually about the half-way to two-thirds point into the book—when the character begins to take on, not just the life that I had envision...