Welcome Guest Blogger Jeanette Grey

These Words Aren't Precious

Three separate times in my life, I decided I was going to be a WRITER. One of those serious ones that bleeds for her art. The first time, I was sixteen, and I immediately went out and bought a fancy leather-bound journal and a fountain pen.

I still have that journal. I even wrote in seven of its pages.

The second time, I was twenty. Cue another expensive journal, another pen. This time around, I also started a Word document and made a whole new folder on my computer for all my genius words. I filled ten pages that time and started three documents, each less than three pages long.

It's hard to quantify exactly why those efforts went so wrong, but I think the fancy journals had a lot to do with it, even if the end they were just symptomatic of a bigger problem. Every word I wrote was belabored because it had to be good. It had to be genius – worthy of my ambitions and of those elegant, hand-made paper pages.

At age thirty, I looked at my life and didn't like what I saw. All the little stories that had been running through my head for the past decade started whispering to me more loudly. And then, one day, I started scribbling them down. There were no pretty notebooks or cool pens. I wrote on the backs of crossword puzzles and the edges of receipts. On loose leaf paper and my husband's graph paper pads.
My words didn't matter. And because of that, my ideas became free. And suddenly, for the first time, my stories came to life.

Somehow, that new mentality carried over, even when I started writing on my computer. Once I decided my words weren't precious, it not only got easier to write them, it also got easier to rework them, rewrite them or just plain delete them.

So this post is in celebration of letting go, throwing carefulness to the wind, and seeing where just playing can get you. How many people find their soulmate after they stop looking? Or get a promotion after they decide to just be themselves at work?

Or write their first book, right after deciding their words weren't precious at all?

Plix spends her lonely, gritty life trying to solve the mysteries her father left behind. Armed with a variety of cybernetic enhancements and a talent for getting into places she shouldn’t be, she searches for clues to his murder—and who’s responsible for poisoning her city.

Waking up on a street corner with her brain wiring fried to a crisp, she figures she must have gotten close this time. There’s only one man she trusts to pull her back from the brink: a tuner who can retrieve the evidence hidden deep in the recesses of her mind. A man she dares not let too close to her heart.

When Edison downloads a secret SynDate schematic from Plix’s burnt-out circuitry, he knows with dreadful finality that nothing—not even the fiery kiss he’s been holding back for years—will stop her from pursuing her quest past the point of insanity.

All he can do, as he helps her plan her final mission, is ease her pain, watch her back…and hope one of them doesn’t pay with their lives.

Buy your copy today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Samhain Store.

After brief, unsatisfying careers in advertising, teaching, computers, and homemaking, Jeanette Grey has returned to her two first loves: romance and writing.

When she isn’t writing, Jeanette enjoys making pottery, playing board games, and spending time with her husband and her pet frog. She lives, loves, and writes in North Carolina.

She is a member of Romance Writers of America and Carolina Romance Writers.

Website: http://www.jeanettegrey.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/jeanettelgrey
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jeanettelgrey
GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4507045.Jeanette_Grey