EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING I LEARNED FROM SOAPS

How did you develop the idea for your most recent work?

My whole writing career has been a case of “You know, it’s not supposed to happen that way.” My first romance novel was picked and published out of the slush pile. I wrote a non-fiction book about figure skater Sarah Hughes in a year when she wasn’t expected to do much at the Olympics. She ended up winning the gold medal, and my book went into second and third printings. I pitched a novel based on the soap-opera, “As the World Turns,” and it ended up becoming a NYT best-seller. 

Then, a few years later, I took a cancelled soap-opera, “Another World,” and revived it on-line as a combination of text and video with readers directing the story. I took what I learned there, and turned my paperback figure-skating mystery novels into enhanced e-books, with professional performance footage alongside the original story. And then I combined everything I’d done up to the point, the interactive fiction, the multimedia enhancements, and decided that I would write my next book live online, and that I would take feedback from readers along the way about where I wanted to story to go next. 

At www.AlinaAdams.com/live, readers can literally watch my every key-stroke. They can see my typos, my mistakes, my clunky prose and my badly plotted dead-ends. It’s the exact opposite of what writers are told to do, which is to polish their work until it’s perfect before letting anyone see it. But, what can I say, it sounded like a fun idea, so I went with it. You know, it’s not supposed to happen that way….

Read my entire interview at Jim Jackson's blog: http://blog.jamesmjackson.com/2015/03/alina-adams-guest-author.html