I want to take a moment to welcome Bree back to this blog! Last time I wrote a review of her book Georgia: Restrained. Today, Bree is back from New Zealand with a guest post!:
Getting to know Bree Guildford
About me
Hello!
I am Bree and I love writing erotic romance. A lot of my stories have a strong
girl-on-girl component, and I also enjoy delving into the world of polyamory. I have always been drawn to stories that have
a focus on the emotional side of relationships, and this is an important aspect
of my own writing. I love writing about
sex, but I also love writing about the relationship between characters... in
fact, I find it almost impossible to write something that is purely sexual;
this is why I acknowledge myself as a writer of erotic romance, rather than
erotica.
While writing erotic romance is a big part
of who I am, there is a little more to me than my dirty mind! I am happily married and have four children,
aged between four and ten. I am halfway
through a communication degree and hope to work in media relations after I
graduate. I am a big sports nut, and in
my 'other' life, I write about rugby for various online publications. I enjoy escaping for a weekend here and there
with my wife, but with four kids that only happens once in a blue moon!
So how did I get into writing erotic
romance?
Ever since I was little I have enjoyed
writing. In my early teens I was all
about the teen angst driven poetry, in my mid teens I was more about romance,
and by the time I turned 18, I was taking a lot of pleasure (literally and
figuratively) out of writing secretive sex scenes.
I tried my hardest to want to write
something 'clean', to want to write something that I could share with my mum,
my nana, my grandma, my sister, my friends... but those stories were the ones
that fizzled out after a few pages.
Erotica, it seemed, was where my abilities lay, and I was embarrassed
about it! It got to the point that I
gave up writing at all, because surely it wasn't appropriate to be writing so
explicitly about sex!
Then I met the wonderful woman who is now
my wife. There was no such thing as
'TMI' in our friendship, and early on I confessed to her that I enjoyed writing
about sex, but had always felt a bit awkward about it. It didn't take a lot for her to convince me
that I should give it another go, so one day I began writing again.
It was a boy-meets-girl story, and rather
than trying to make the sex a not-so important part of the story, I made sex
one of the key components of the story.
Rather than feeling embarrassed about writing all things sex, I felt
somewhat empowered. I cannot even tell
you how nervous I was when I sent my friend-now-wife the document for the first
time. It was a couple of scenes long and
I was so incredibly scared she was going to laugh at me, or be horrified by
what I had written. Her reaction
though? “MORE – NOW!”
And so it began.
That was almost three years ago now, and
while I have a lot of unfinished stories on my computer, I don't let that get
me down. No one can become an expert
overnight, and I have learnt something from every single story that didn't make
it. I look back on my earlier stories
now and almost cringe, because the writing isn't very good. The ideas are certainly there, but my writing
back then was nothing like it is now.
I'm not saying I have mastered the art – I know I haven't – but it does
feel good to look at my old work, and compare it to my new work, and know
that I have improved.
Toward the end of 2013 I decided that my
writing shouldn't be something that I kept secret. Until that point it was only my wife and a
couple of online friends who had read my work, and I realised that if I wanted
to feel like a real writer, I had to put my work out there for everyone to
read. It was a scary prospect. What if no one wanted to read my work? What if the only feedback I received was
negative? It was daunting, but I knew it
was a risk I had to take.
I decided on my pen name, then created a
Facebook and a Twitter account, as well as a blog. That was the easy part though. The VERY first example of my work that I
posted was my story 'Georgia: Restrained'.
I was so nervous when I went to bed after posting it, and considered
deleting the post. What if no one read
it? What if people DID read it, but they
all hated it? The next morning I woke up
and found my story had been read! There
was even a tweet which was along the lines of 'loved your story, can't wait for
more', and in honesty, it brought tears to my eyes.
Eventually I self-published 'Georgia:
Restrained' on Smashwords, and have now added another four books to what has
become the 'Georgia & Zoe' series.
As with sharing my writing for the first time on my blog, I was
terrified about the response when I published Georgia: Restrained on
Smashwords, but when I got up the following morning it had been downloaded 50
times! Within a week it was up to 200
downloads, and that is what really gave me the confidence to embrace this side
of who I am.
I doubt I will ever become a famous author,
but knowing there are people out there who are looking forward to the next
story in the Georgia & Zoe series coming out, that is enough for me! The next big step for me is going to be
putting a book on Smashwords and actually charging for it... I think when
someone actually BUYS one of my books, that is going to be when I feel
like I really do belong in the amazing community of erotica writers!
Where you can find Bree
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