Everything I Need to Write a RomCom

Hi, I’m Amber Eve — author of smalltown romantic comedies, and my long-running blog, Forever Amber. If you’d like to know more about me, start here. If you’d like to hear more from me, meanwhile, hit the button below (or ‘smash’ it, as my 7-year-old would say…) Please note: this newsletter contains affiliate links.

Some authors can write a book pretty much anywhere. On their phone. On the toilet. On the back of a cereal packet. While standing in line at the post office. I could go on.

These authors are straight-up unicorns, as far as I’m concerned. Their very existence is amazing to me, because I … am not like that. No, in order for me to write a book, a very specific set of circumstances has to exist. I need, in no particular order…

I know a lot of people who write in coffee shops, just to get a change of scenery. This is amazing to me, because I can literally only work in my office, surrounded by all of my things, and with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones at hand just in case there’s even the slightest noise outside that might disturb my v important work (I can’t listen to music while I’m writing because I’d probably just start typing the lyrics, but I occasionally play white noise if I have to...). On my desk, I also always have...

The coffee cup will get refilled multiple times throughout the day; the Stanley cup is basically just there so I can pretend to myself that I’m going to drink enough water, even though I know perfectly well I won’t. (Seriously, though, I’m an absolute sucker for a Stanley cup. I know it’s a total cliché at this point, but I am nothing if not basic, and I love them so much I have a second one that sits on my bedside table, just so I can pretend I’m going to drink water in the evening, too…)

Sort-of on the subject of hydration...

Is it just me, or do you also turn into a dried-up husk of a person every time you sit down in front of your computer? I know that actually drinking the water in that Stanley cup would probably help with this, but why would I do that when I could just buy lots of products to throw at the problem instead? I never go anywhere without my hand cream and lip balm, and I keep a set in my desk drawer at all times, too, so I can reapply them constantly during the day. I switch these up all the time, because I’ve yet to find my Holy Grail in either, but, for anyone who’s particularly interested, my current lip balm is this one by Essence (At night I use a generous slather of Laneige Lip Sleeping Mask), and my hand cream is a L’Occitane one which has the benefit of sinking in quickly, so I can get back to typing. Speaking of which…

Forget writing on my phone (I genuinely have no idea how people can write an entire book on a phone… I can barely get out a single sentence without multiple mistakes…) — I can’t even write on a keyboard unless it’s exactly the right type of keyboard. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the Princess in ‘Princess and the Pea’ fame when she grew up, well, now you know…

My preference is for a manual keyboard – or a ‘clicky’ keyboard as I call it – which makes a satisfyingly loud ‘clacky’ noise when you type on it. I suspect this is probably really annoying for my husband, who shares my office (I did ask when I got it, and he claimed it doesn’t bother him…) but I really enjoy typing on it, and anything that helps motivate me to type is worth it, as far as I’m concerned. I have this one, and I feel it’s very appropriate that I write romance books on a pink keyboard with a love heart on it, no?

(The cute puppy isn’t included, unfortunately; Nellie belongs to friends who live in our street, and we were just puppy-sitting her for a few hours. Isn’t she adorable, though? She’s basically a real-life Jellycat pup…)

I’m fairly old-school when it comes to note-taking and like to write everything by hand (Although not the actual BOOKS, obviously. I do know some authors who do this, and, again, I’m in awe of them because that would hurt my hand. No, seriously…), which is why my desk drawers are overflowing with notebooks. They’re not pretty or well-organised (I love looking at photos of people’s bullet journals, but I’m just not patient or creative enough to make my notebooks look aesthetically pleasing...), and my handwriting is barely legible at this point, but, I don’t know, there’s just something about the act of putting actual pen to paper that I love?

I’ve talked about this before, but I have a little ritual now whereby I treat myself to a new notebook for each new book I start writing (I normally buy personalised ones from Martha Brooke or Papier…), but I also have a few others which I use for various different things, and, like most of the writers I know, I just seem to keep buying more, even when I don’t actually need them. When you’re tired of notebooks, you’re tired of life, right?

Finally, I write all of my books using the Reedsy online editor1, which used to be free, but which is now £5.99 per month, and totally worth it, because while it might not be the most complicated or feature-rich writing program out there, the interface just really works for me: I love the goal-setting feature, and it allows you to back up your work to Word, or export it as an epub, so while I have tried other, more expensive programmes, this is the one I keep coming back to, and which every one of my books so far has been written on... including, I hope, book number 10. Which I am STILL currently busy plotting, and feel like I will be working on for the rest of my life at this point.

I should probably go and get on with that, shouldn’t I?

Until next week,