I was so thrilled - surprised and delighted - to see It's Love, Dude in the Weekly Interesting Reads newsletter from BookLikes. Now, that's the way to start Sunday! Happy weekend, all.

Just gone 7am in my corner of the world and I am TIRED. All caps sadly necessary. It's not that anything dramatic has happened in my life, just one of those days where life has caught up with me. Definitely a two-cup coffee morning :)

But being so tired got me thinking, and then I read Ilona Andrews' post (she writes a great blog as well as wonderful books) and when you scroll to the end and hear her say that if she writes her book tired, that's the emotion that her character-on-the-page fixates on, well, that resonated with me.

I'm at the final crisis moment of my WIP. "Kiss It Better" has been an emotional journey for my two characters and for me. There's a lot of honesty in writing a romance that engages genuinely with the reality of a quarter life crisis.

I remember outlining the story to a friend's husband (such a patient man, listening) and he nearly leapt out of his seat when I described the quarter life crisis. He so recalled that time in the late twenties when everything seems to fly up in the air and you're not sure if it's crash time or awesome.

Unlike Ilona Andrews, my characters don't become tiredness-fixated when I'm tired, but as excited as I am to be nearing the end of "Kiss It Better" I'm also a bit daunted by knowing I have to ride the wave of intense emotion with my characters through these final scenes.

So when I'm not writing, I'm reaching for comfort reads. For me, that means re-reading. Currently, I'm reading for the fourth or maybe fifth time Shelley Laurenston's Big Bad Beast.

Do you have any comfort reads for the tired times?

Coastal Romance: The Discussion

Lovely lunch with my crit partner where we sorted out the publishing world ;) The view definitely helped!