First of all I want to thank Ashley O’Melia for letting me guest blog post and giving me the chance to meet you amazing people! Let’s start with who am I?
Hi, I’m Janette Gellar. I am the author of the Cause World Series. Cause for Ruin is currently available on Amazon’s Kindle Vella and soon on Patreon at my $5 tier. I host the Romance and Carrying On Podcast which is currently on hiatus until May. And lastly, I am always on the hunt for my next good romance read so I discuss romance in all spice levels and subgenres, except for YA because I’m too cool for high school and bully romance because, hey, everyone’s got to have a line and this one is mine.
Since you’re taking the time to read this I feel like I should let you in on a little secret. I wasn’t always a romance writer. In fact, growing up I hated writing for school assignments.
Not because of some mishap with a discouraging teacher like so many authors I have read about (I mean seriously, is there an elective in teacher school that’s called ‘How to Crush Student Dreams and Piss on Kittens’ or something because so many authors seem to have a story of that one teacher who told them they were never going to amount to anything and it’s frankly making me want to homeschool). No, I had wonderful teachers growing up who encouraged me to write and I wrote many short stories, one even won a competition. (I’m still proud of that.) The thing was I wrote stories that were filled with action and adventure. I messed up my characters in ways that would make Wednesday Addams proud.
So when I decided to take my first stab at writing romance I made the worst mistake I could have and killed off my male protagonist because, well, he had it coming. And with that fatal pen stroke my first adult work was kicked out of the romance genre. Instead it joined the bastard genre cousin of romance we call women’s fiction. Some would have tossed the story out and hoped no one saw it but I decided that I could fix it. I rolled up my sleeves, pulled out my editing pencil, read some craft books on what I did wrong, and the Cause world was created.
In addition to my website you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
Ashley O'Melia, Author 