LITERARY EXHIBITIONISM

From the blog of best-selling erotica writer Kyra Davis:

Okay, I know I haven't been very chatty lately. I've been busy doing things like writing, house-hunting and...oh yeah, getting married!!! I promise I'll write more about that in the near future. But what brought me back today is friend and fellow New York Times bestselling author (still love saying that) Alina Adams. She's launched a really interesting writing project that seems to be part exhibitionism, part performance art and part lunacy.  You see she's writing a romance novel filled with drama, secrets, double-crosses, revenge, scheming, schemers and sex. So far this is my kind of book. Note I did not say it sounds like it's going to be my kind of book. I said so far it is my kind of book. I can say that definitively because I've read part of it. And no, she didn't send me the first few chapters. She didn't have to because she's writing it online, as in anyone who clicks this link can actually see her while she's typing this thing. We can see her typos, we can see her delete, we can see her going back and rewriting sections or taking out entire passages all together. We can even give her advice in regards to what we think she should be writing and what's good and bad about the sentence she's writing as she's writing it.

Personally I'd rather play Twister with Attila the Hun on a bed of hot coals than invite the world to judge me as I struggle through sentence after sentence.  Therefore when I found out Alina was doing this I had to know what on earth was going through her head.  That burning question lead to this interview. Hope you find it as interesting as I do!:

So I've written my fair share of exhibitionist scenes before but never anything as daring as this.  What gave you the idea to write a novel live, online, for all to see?

Well, as with all traumas, this one began back in my childhood. When I was in high-school, I was a voracious fan of what some might call "trashy novels." Sidney Sheldon was my all-time favorite, but I also read Judith Krantz, Belva Plain, Michael Korda, Jeffrey Archer, etc.... Basically, if they made a rich, splashy, 1980s mini-series of it, I was there.

I wanted to grow up to write trashy novels that got rich, splashy, 1980s mini-series made out of them. To English teachers, this was not a worthwhile goal. Frankly, it wasn't a worthwhile goal to anyone. So I had to make it up as I went along. I wrote many, many books, and received many, many rejections letters, before I somehow stumbled into selling my first romance novel, a Regency, in 1994 to AVON (a year later, my second book shut down their line - make of that what you will). I can't help thinking, though, that the process would have been made a whole lot easier if, as an aspiring writer, I'd been allowed to hang out and watch over a professional writer's shoulder as they went about their business, seeing how they did things, learning all that stuff high-school English teachers wouldn't - let's be honest, couldn't - teach me. (That shouldn't be too annoying to said professional writer, right?) That opportunity didn't exist for me as a teen. So I decided to create it as an adult.

Want to watch a book as it's being written live, all the typos, the mistakes, the deletions, the moving words around, the changing the same word ten times in the hopes that, this time, it'll magically work, not to mention the cutting of two entire chapters because you've come to the depressing realization that if a character is boring for you to write, he'll be even more boring to read?

Well, then, www.AlinaAdams.com/live is the place for you! You can learn from your own mistakes, or you can learn from mine. Because, God knows, even twenty years and over a dozen published novels later, I still make tons of them!

Read the entire interview at: http://www.kyradavis.com/2014/09/literary-exhibitionism.html