This Tuesday At The Tiki Hut - Renee Reeves

Today's special guest at the Tiki Hut is Renee Reeves.

Renee Reeves was born in Stuttgart, Germany but raised in the US. On her mother's side, she is Irish and English and on her father's side, she is German and Irish. Ever since she was a little girl she has loved to read. Her mother, always supportive, made it a point to take her to the library as often as she wished and to get her to each and every school book fair. She would come home with bags of books and would gobble them up in only a few days. She would sit against her pony’s stomach when she was lying down in the pasture and read a book while her pony napped.

Reading, along with horses, was and still is one of the great loves in her life and that love turned into a desire to write. Renee is now married and her husband told her if she wanted to write a book then do it. So she did and is now a published author.

Her first book, NIGHT ANGEL, was just recently released. It is a contemporary about an ex-con, Nick Evanoff, who has turned his life around and now owns a horse sanctuary. He meets Morgan, an abused widow, who has moved to Montana for seclusion and things go from there....;) Renee is now working on 2 paranormals.

Be Renee's friend over on Myspace and check out the first three chapters of NIGHT ANGEL at Black Velvet Seductions.

Leave Renee a comment today and your name goes in the hat for a copy of NIGHT ANGEL!

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Motivation…Finding it and keeping it.

By Renee Reeves


I don’t know about anyone else but I can find story motivation just about anywhere. A walk out to the barn can spark scenes and images galore. A day trip can immerse me in my own imaginative world, or motivation can hit me when I’m doing nothing more than sitting in a chair gazing out of the window. Most of the time that motivation comes from me wondering, ‘what would I like to be doing now if I were someone else?’

A day trip to a SC church ruin (yes, I know Night Angel is set in Montana!) and staring at a boring hotel wall was how the characters in Night Angel came about. The scene in Night Angel when Nick first sees Morgan is very quiet and peaceful—straight from the SC church ruins. But after that scene I wondered, ‘what now? Now that he’s seen her and wants her, what should their story be?’ I decided both Nick and Morgan just had to have extremely traumatic and horrific previous lives in order to fit together and it took me a while to decide on what those lives should be.

So, finding motivation is simple for me, but keeping it is another matter entirely. I am one of those highly emotional people. My emotions dictate how I am going to feel every single day and right now my emotions are in an uproar because my mother is fighting advanced cervical cancer. Being her fulltime caregiver is physically and emotionally exhausting, not to mention extremely stressful, and really leaves no time for me to manage those characters and scenes bouncing around in my head. At times I am even too tired, or, if I really want to be honest, too depressed to get on the computer and type. During those times I find the storylines in my head to be an annoyance because I know I have to get them out and on paper, or the computer, before they disappear…and, at times, the motivation to do that is NOT there. But, if I ignore them and do nothing I give nasty ole guilt the ability to worm it’s way into me because I know I am wasting not only time, but also talent, scenes, imagery, and what may be a story and characters that some reader out there might really love.

So, how do I handle difficult writing/motivation times like those? I guess I can say at times I get mad and take it out on my characters, putting forth my own depth of emotions in their fictional lives. At times it works and at other times I read over what I wrote and think, ‘ugh…what in the world was I doing to them? They don’t deserve this!’ I also try to use writing as an escape and handle it little by little, maybe one word or one line at a time, and eventually, for a short period of time, I am able to lose myself in the lives of my characters, or at least use them for an emotional outlet.

So, my question to readers is, how do you handle stress or lack of motivation in your own life?