Whew! It’s been a while! I’ve been pretty busy the last few months – two more rounds of editing on Love, Undisclosed and NaNoWriMo completed. The good news is, all I need now is to get it proofread and then it is complete and ready for release. Here’s the blurb for Love, Undisclosed, hopefully coming out some time in the next few weeks!
Can you fall in love with someone who is falling apart?
Julienne has loved California since she lived there as a child and jumped at the opportunity to return for college at UCLA. Now a graduate, she’s desperate to stay in the city she loves, but her job applications are going nowhere. The only thing helping her cope with unemployment is her one luxury expense: her gym membership, and it’s there she gets a mysterious opportunity that just might change her life. She has to take it, or face leaving Los Angeles, and all of her friends, behind.
The new job thrusts her into the world of troubled young actress Cece Browne, whose off-screen antics are threatening her role on a prestigious TV show. Cece lurches from one crisis to the next, and Julienne can’t help but find her captivating as she struggles to keep her from becoming tabloid fodder.
Julienne must tame Cece’s most self-destructive impulses to keep both their jobs and stay in the city she loves, but will her feelings get in the way?
Love, Undisclosed is a sweet, clean, slow-burn romance set in Los Angeles. Content warning for a young star off the rails and all that that entails – alcohol and drug use, mostly!
Whew! It’s nice to finally be able to share that!
This month, I’m mostly focusing on marketing and planning what I’m writing next. There’s a lot of research and outlining happening, so it’s all pretty early stages. I’m pretty focused on what I actually want to be ready for publication this year, which is hopefully two novels (one of them being Love, Undisclosed, the other as yet untitled) and a novella.
NaNoWriMo got me to complete the first draft of a novel set on a fictional reality tv show, where Caden, a producer on The Great British Modelling Show finds themself catching feelings for Amber, who desperately needs the show for her career. This is the first novel I’ve ever written with two POVs, and it needs a lot of editing, so I’m hoping to get through a few rounds of editing and hopefully release it towards the end of this year.
The novella is also a romance, because a friend sent me that video of the dog dancing at Crufts and I thought ‘there’s a romance in this’. A disillusioned celebrity dog trainer and a woman whose dream it is to go to Crufts with her dog meet and fall in love, and it’s going to be wonderful. I’m hoping to get the first draft of that done in February, and then some edits and ready for release in the summer or early autumn.
I like to break up my editing with writing new stuff, because editing is hard and writing new stuff is fun, so I’m also tentatively planning to write the first draft of another reality TV themed novel later this year. I’m not sure when I’ll fit this in – it might end up being another NaNoWriMo novel. The basic concept is a chaotic bisexual who applies to go on a bachelor-like show to boost her social media ends up falling in love with a fellow contestant. I’m thinking if I do a whole series of reality TV novels I could call the series Love, Unscripted. (Thanks to Jason for suggesting this, along with Love, Unleashed for novels about pets).
On the whole, I’m feeling pretty excited about the projects I’m focusing on at the moment! I’ve shelved my dreams of being a game designer for now because I want to focus on writing romance novels while I’m on this weird pandemic gap year, but I do still have outlines for those stories saved in my google drive, ready to be picked up again.
This ended up being longer than I thought it would be! Thanks for reading, if you’ve made it this for, and hopefully my next post on here will be a cover reveal!
Max Louise Perry 