If you haven’t noticed by now reading this blog, my writing interests go a little beyond the love story. Don’t get me wrong: I love writing about love. That’s why I’m working on three upcoming romance novels for 2019 and why I find myself planning my “ships” for the fiction I write in other genres almost before I outline those stories. I love romance.
Also, my heroines are far from perfect, even in the “perfectly flawed” kind of way. Sometimes they’re too vulnerable, needy, whiny, difficult, stubborn, etc. Also, for better or worse, I adore romance tropes. I do. I enjoy reclaimed love, friends-to-lovers, hurt/comfort, opposites attract, enemies-to-lovers, and I can even sometimes tolerate a “love at first sight” story. However, since I have ideals, I want as much as possible to make sure that the lovers in my tropes bring more to the table than just, well, love. I want them to be more interesting people. What I’m always targeting in a love story is both a hero and a heroine who are strong enough independently to be part of a couple that you want to root for.
And I, like any good writer, feel that research is an important aspect of creating great, believable stories. So what I’m researching right now is, well, bad ass women. Basically, I want insight into what a real-life bad ass heroine is like so that I can do a better job writing about bad ass fictional women in my books. Otherwise, I think I risk troping-out kind of fast, know what I mean?
Can’t write it accurately if I don’t know what it looks like, right?
Therefore, starting this month, I’ll be interviewing some real badass women, and then sharing those interviews with you. I’m really excited about this because I think badass = power = sexy as hell, and I want to give you sexy as hell romance novels. And perhaps slightly more importantly, I feel that women face challenges to acquiring power and badassery (is that a word? it is today!). But in today’s world, more and more, women need to be able to survive as leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals, business women, etc. Furthermore, since I consider myself an entrepreneur and a professional, I have a special interest in learning about how other women have achieved power and success, how they feel about it, and what advice they have for women following in their footsteps. I think we all succeed more when we share with each other how it gets done, and that’s a lot of what this blog series will be about.
Basically, when I meet a woman who can do this…
I want to know how she does it!
Luckily, I happen to know a few amazing badass women, and I’ve already done my first interview with a woman who had a lot of awesome stuff to say that I’m very excited to share with you. You can look forward to my first badass woman blog post, hopefully later this week! And in the meanwhile, I’m also recruiting! Know someone who you think would like to share their story? E-introduce us! You can reach me at writer@weslieashe.com. Simple as that.
Cheers until that first badass post!
Weslie