Part #4 of our chat with author, Rochelle Alers @roclers LUV: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? How did you embark on the journey to publication? Rochelle: I always wanted to be a writer because I was and still am an avid reader. I was curious how those words got on a page, words that mesmerized me for hours at a time. My very active imagination was put to the test when I wrote a short story that was published in my college newspaper. At that time I still did not think of myself as a writer. That happened once I discovered Silhouette Romances and read more than two hundred titles and then I told myself I could write these – totally unaware they were written to a formula. Just because they were as easy to read did not translate into easy to write. My attempt to become a romance writer wasn’t based on my ability to tell a story but on race because my characters were of color. And at the time most publishers were not willing to publish novels with Black lead characters. Although I’d received a number of rejections I’d refused to stop writing stories for women who looked like me. I kept writing and filing the completed manuscripts in a file cabinet, because I believed that one day an editor would accept what I’d written. That came in 1986 when Veronica Mixon, an editor at Doubleday asked if I would submit something to her for her Starlight Romance line. I did and in December 1988 my first romance novel Careless Whispers was published. I had to wait another three years before my second novel My Love’s Keeper was published in 1991. Then in 1994 Kensington launched the Arabesque line and Happily Ever After was the third novel in a long list of my titles that continues to 2023 and beyond. When aspiring writers ask me about my writing journey I tell them to read, read, and read some more in the genre in which they want to write. I’ve read authors whose work I’ve come to love and even others who aren’t favorites, but I still enjoy.

Posted by LUV Team at 2023-01-26 20:00:30 UTC