A Cup of Coffee & A Romance Novel With R L Tynes

  Happy New Years Eve everyone! The past couple of weeks I have spent my time reflecting on 2023. Thinking on setbacks and achievements, and what I've learned. I swear each year I get older, the wiser I get. Youth really is wasted on the young. I'm 27 now, and each year of my 20s I feel like I improve and get clearer on what I really want. I am nowhere near the same person I was just a few years ago and thank God for that! Your 20s are for figuring yourself out and finding what you like to do. Finding your purpose and passion, and I fully stand by that. Not excluding that of course you can find passion and purpose at any age, but my 20s seem to have been very chaotic for me so far and now that I'm on the other side of my 20s things are slowing down.  It's so hard to know what you want to do, who you want to be, and it should be constantly evolving.  A few weeks ago, my mentor gave us some good homework to complete for going into 2024 and one of those things is to make a...

As I’m planning my year for 2024, listing my goals and making my vision board, I have reflected and know that in 2023 one of the main culprits of my stagnancy has been worrying about the outcome. Looking so far ahead that I would stress out and shut down, and get overwhelmed. So this years goal is to ignore the outcome. It will do what it’s meant to do. I am focused on the process. Enjoying the journey of writing and creating because that is the most important part—the process. So I’ll leave you from a quote from my mentor as she inspired this post and always helps me to get clear and focused. Maybe this will help you too!  ✨💖

 As this year comes to a close, I wanted to share about the battle of writing what you think you should be writing vs. what you love. When I first started writing, I thought I should write a YA fantasy very much along the lines of Twilight. Now, I still love Twilight to this day as much as my 13 year old heart did, and I will forever be in the fandom and my heart in Forks, WA, but as I was writing my Twilight-esque book, I noticed it got harder and harder as I went on. I wasn't loving the book anymore. It's because I was reading and loving all of these steamy contemporary billionaire romance novels and that is where my heart was, and what I was supposed to be writing. Not forcing out a book that teenage me would like. Or I found "more respectable or credible" somehow. But the truth was I wasn’t reading YA anymore and  I shouldn’t have been writing in a genre I wasn’t passionate about anymore.   So, I quickly wrapped up that book to give myself some closure and then s...