GOING BEYOND THE COMFORT ZONE

Please help me welcome multi-published romantic suspense and mystery author Chelle Cordero to the blog.

Here's Chelle: I am really a very private person. I normally choose not to discuss many of the ups and downs of life outside of my immediate circle of friends (and even then there is a lot I won’t share). Yet I allow my characters to feel the full range of emotions. Sometimes I have to lend a character some of my emotions… and I kind of feel exposed.

The stories I write have characters who have experienced tragic losses, trauma, crushed dreams, betrayal, abandonment and fear. Deanna is kidnapped, Tom mourns a lost love, Caitlyn lost both parents at a young age, Jake is desperate when a maniac threatens to kill the woman he loves, Layne hides from an abusive husband, Lon is accused of a heinous crime – and each character cries, feels fear, anger, despair and all of those “rip your heart out feelings”.

Although I may add a random memory to one of my character’s lives I often share very little with them, but oh how I share when it comes to tears. In one scene I wrote my character went to speak to his dead fiancé about falling in love again and he cried, and I cried alongside him (sigh, that was hard for me to admit). In another book where one of my characters sacrificed her life for the man she loved and then was accused by the same man for betraying him, she felt despair – and I forced myself to remember all of the frustrations I ever felt for having my well intentioned actions misunderstood. I was the one who lost sleep after researching serial killers and horror for a murder mystery.

I love it when I hear a reader say how they “laughed and cried” or sat “on the edge of their seat” – yet I feel exposed knowing how many of the private motions revealed in my books are actually MY private emotions. When I write I must force myself to go beyond my comfort zone and share these feelings.

Funny thing is, no one is making me share these things – but writing is a need that is tantamount to breathing, and breathing is actually quite comfortable.

Chelle Cordero is a multi-published romantic-suspense and mystery author with Vanilla Heart Publishing and short stories in five different anthologies through VHP and Mandimam Press. She also freelances as a journalist for several local and national newspapers and magazines. Chelle also pens the weekly Amazon Kindle blog ‘Living, Breathing, Writing” available by subscription. Ms. Cordero lives in New York’s lower Hudson Valley and serves her community by volunteering as an EMT with her local ambulance corps. Chelle’s web-site can be found at http://chellecordero.com/