Mr. Hot Stuff Next Door

1. Piper

CHAPTER 1

Piper

T he little pink cat-shaped timer on the desk goes off, and I slow down the clickety-clack of my fingers on the mechanical keyboard when I feel the feeble ring of its alarm. I scan the last sentence I wrote and add a few more words to it so I don’t forget what I was trying to convey by the time I come back to this after my break.

I've been at my writing for forty minutes straight, and the once glaringly blank page of the new chapter that, as always, put a little bit of fear and nervousness in me is now thousands of words beyond the portion of the screen where I can see the current section of my work. Four thousand words beyond it, to be precise. It's not my usual, but it's not too shabby, considering how tired I am.

I am by no means what could be called an active, sporty person, and I've spent the last five days touring Phoenix with my best friend, Sylvianne. I don't think I've done these many things in a single day or walked this much in my entire life.

Not that I don’t like a rambling, aimless walk outside, especially if there’s nature around me and any type of music in my ears, but walking with actual purpose is not really my thing.

Syl is my opposite in most things, so while I’m a going-nowhere-fast kind of girl, she’s more of the must-fill-every-spare-moment-with-some-kind-of-activity-or-die-trying type.

She’s a veritable tornado of energy that can never sit still for too long, which presents her with the biggest challenge of all since we’re in the same line of work. Any type of writer, especially a novelist like us, knows the craft requires endless hours of doing what amounts to a nightmare to her. Just. Sitting. Still.

She’s found workarounds, though. Dictating while running on a treadmill is one of them, or recording herself as she speaks while driving or using that scary-looking –at least to my lazy ass– standing desk in the corner of this very office.

Sitting might not be her thing, but writing definitely is, and Sylvianne is a fantastic storyteller with hundreds of thousands of readers all over the world. And I'm confident that someday, her fans will become double that number and will still be growing.

Me, I’m all for sitting still and thinking.

I'm the classic, eyeglasses-wearing bookworm writer through and through. There's nothing I love more than sitting in a room, lost in the world of my MacBook screen, my fingers flying on the keyboard, my mind miles away from reality, immersed in the joy of writing.

Well, except for stargazing, that is, but since when I look at stars through my telescope, I also sit or stand still and, more often than not, wind up thinking up stories or listening to my characters as they argue in my head, that activity is another part of the very same creative process in the end.

I guess I’m every kind of stereotype of the reclusive author one can come up with, and the fact that I write romance comes as a surprise to most of the people who know me.

I’m a bit of a loner, a lot of a weirdo, and the proverbial shyness suffered by many in our ranks is just as much my comfort blanket as it’s my high-tower prison.

So, I’m most definitely not one for talking my stories out loud or walking in place while I write on a standing desk.

What I am is a lover of all things couch-related and/or couch-adjacent. Give me a never-ending supply of books on my Kindle, a big fat library full of moldy, dusty tomes, good Wi-Fi, a couple of good music playlists, any type of screen with Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney on it, and a mini fridge full of Pellegrino water, ice-cream and doughnuts and put a remote controller in my hand and you'll make me a very happy girl. Set up a computer in that room, and once I'm done binging, I'll take that quiet seat in front of my desk or on that very couch and write to my heart's content.

Get me on a schedule to visit a city as huge as Phoenix and pack my days with activities that must be completed between Monday afternoon and Friday morning because that’s when you’ve got to catch your flight to London, and you’ll have a zombie girl on your hands like it happened to Sylvianne who, this morning, had to shake me awake about five times in the taxi on our way to the airport.

Not that I didn’t love spending time with my bestie, which, since I live back in Seattle, I don’t get to see that often in person, but heck, if I’m not knackered right now!

I'm usually so much of a couch potato that there's not a single muscle in my body that's not aching tonight.

I'd be almost tempted to take a couple of Aspirins if I didn't know that doing it would make me super-drowsy, which, even if it's nearly midnight, I can't afford right now.

I’ve got at least two more chapters to write unless I want to miss my deadline, piss off my editor, and disappoint my readers. My bed is not going to see me any time soon.

I huff out a breath, sliding my glasses back onto the bridge of my nose as I hit save on my document, even if the auto-save every thirty secs feature in my writing program is on. I’ve lost words before, and now this is an automatic action on my part before I leave my workstation. I mean, fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, and who’s to blame, right?

Now, deadlines, what a pain they can be! Those little bitches are the one thing about my job that I really don’t like, but they are par for the course. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

I smile, leaning back against the swiveling chair, curling my toes inside my fluffy home sleepers, but my small, pleased grin turns into a little frown when I realize there's no music in my ears.

Maybe my headphones ran out of batteries while I was writing, and I was so taken with my story that I didn’t even perceive that there was only muffled silence in my ears.

It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

I pull my headband off and plug the headphones into one of the side ports of my laptop to charge.

Hmm. My forehead wrinkles when I don’t see the little orange light coming on.

I stand up and un-dim the lights. Maybe I plugged it wrong. I fidget with the cable a little, and nothing.

Damn, they broke!

Ugh, not now!

I have to write tonight, and while it can happen –as it did right now– that I don’t even realize when there’s no music in my ears anymore because I’m in the zone, so to speak, I know for a fact that it would be next to impossible for me to get immersed in my book when I first go back to write a new scene in total silence.

I’ve been an independently published author since I was nineteen and a full-time writer for the past two years, and this is my writing ritual. I’ve got to have music!

A lot of authors I know can write in absolute silence. In fact, they prefer it. Many more go in the opposite direction and put a TV show that they're familiar with on; they stream entire seasons with the volume turned low, so the voices are kind of in the background and just keep them company while they do their thing. Syl does it, or she turns on a white noise machine.

As for me, like many others, I'm a pro-noise kind of girl when it comes to writing. I need sounds or music in my ears. Any type will do. Rain, thunder, nature sounds, binaural waves, classic instrumental pieces, and, of course, modern music. I love everything from electronic rock to rap and anything in between. I can listen to Daft Punk or Eminem just as soon as I’ll listen to Bach. But if I had to pick a genre and stick to it, that would be classic rock.

I’m the only child of two very loving parents who were already getting up in years when they had me as an unexpected –and, by then, no longer even dared to hope for– surprise, and they got me into it.

Queen, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Nirvana, Kansas, Supertramp, Guns ’N Roses, and, above all others, my favorite band in the whole world, Aerosmith.

My musical tastes generally vary depending on the book I’m writing, and oftentimes, I tend to have a song on a loop in my ears while I work, but there is no rhyme nor reason to it, and the track I’m hooked to can have very little to do with the story I’m putting together or go perfectly with the themes and book vibes.

For the full-length steamy romantic suspense novel that I'm writing right now that’s called Trouble by Name , my brain has settled on an oldie but goodie that goes with the plot like lasagna goes with gummy bears, and yet it works. That song is Pink by Aerosmith, and I already know I won't be able to write a single new word if I don't listen to it.

I’ve been obsessively playing it non-stop for the past five days since I went past plotting and straight into full-writing mode, and I need Tyler’s voice in my ears to get those creative juices flowing.

I can practically see my creativity crossing its invisible arms and going on strike as clear as day. I can picture her. She’s a mini version of me with her bitch-face on and a snarky look in her eyes. She’s not gonna give an inch unless I get music in my office by the time I go back to my keyboard.

Crap.

I’m going to have to order a new pair of headphones ASAP.

I go retrieve my iPhone from where it's lying on the wireless charger in the living room. Can't have it in the same room as me while I'm writing, or I risk being distracted by notifications and stuff instead of working.

I go straight into my folder of favorite shopping apps and dive right in. I might as well get a pair with a bigger battery life while I’m at it since I could definitely use it.

Books have been my life since my parents taught me how to read in my last year of kindergarten. I was fascinated by them, and the whole letters make words, words make sentences, sentences make paragraphs, paragraphs make chapters and chapters… chapters make wonderful books process.

To me, books have always been like windows into other worlds, other people's lives. The only real magic in an otherwise dull reality.

Before I even knew what being a writer meant, I wanted to be one, and my parents, who are absolutely great and love me dearly, always supported my dream career.

They got me my first typewriter at ten because I got enamored with the things, having caught sight of one of them in an old rerun of Murder She Wrote . When I turned twelve, it was time for my first actual computer, a trusty little Mac that was my faithful companion until the end of high school. And finally, they got me one with all the bells and whistles as a graduation present after I promised them I would pick a college degree that would fall in the Plan B category just to be safe. It was more my mom that pushed for it, to be honest. Dad's a retired librarian, and he's always been over the moon at my love for books. Being a great reader himself, he always understood that writing is to me what water is to a dolphin. He was sure from day one that if I applied myself, dedicated time to the craft, and worked diligently while also reading a lot of books in every genre out there, I would one day become a successful author.

Mom, even being supportive of me and trusting my abilities, is more of a practical sort with her ironed-white-shirt-and-suit-jacket banker self, so she wanted me to have options, hence the whole just in case Plan B thing.

So, after I got accepted into Cornell, I settled on getting a bachelor's degree in marketing and advertising. Which, back then, I thought could open up doors to a career that would have some writing in it anyway, even if it was only copy-writing rather than actual books.

Ultimately, it was the best choice I could make because my marketing know-how sure came in handy when I started publishing, especially since I decided to go the indie way.

When I finished my first book, I did try the traditional route of shopping around for agents and sending out letters and manuscripts to publishing firms, but the whole process made me sweat bullets.

I'm shy, and I totally suck at talking myself up, and I don't do well under pressure, so I spent months being stressed out of my mind and anxious until, after some research online, I stumbled into this whole other way of doing things on my own and even if I realized it would be daunting doing everything by myself, it still felt less heavy than having to deal with publishers and agents. So, with a bit of encouragement from my parents, I decided to give it a try. I had just turned nineteen then and was pretty busy studying for my degree and I didn't think much of it. I thought it would be a little side-project, at least until I finished university, but I had a good book on my hands, promoted it well, and I also got incredibly lucky, and stuff just picked up from the start for me.

I publish under several pen names because I write in different genres; therefore, my readers come from various pools. My most popular brand is the steamy romantic suspense I write as Nika Drefan, the very first pen name I came up with under which I published my first book.

By the time I graduated from college two years ago, I was making enough that considering writing as a full-time career was no longer a silly little what-if dream but a reality. I went all in and never looked back.

Best choice of my life.

Not only do I get to tell stories for a living, but I've met so many wonderful, like-minded people in the book industry. I cannot always overcome my shyness, but I guess everything is more manageable through a screen, so I've made more friends in the last couple of years than I managed in over two decades during school. Not simply other authors but also bloggers, cover artists, editors, podcasters, craft teachers, and, of course, readers.