Raine Balkera - Romance Author

Hello, everyone! Welcome to Week 20 of the MFRW Author Blog's 52-Week Blog Challenge . This week, our topic is: My Favorite Social Media Platforms, and Why . *sigh... The most fun I tend to derive from these posts is creating the Banners for them. LOL IF Social Media worked the way I think that it should, I would be enamored of them all. However, all social media networks cater to the wealthy, the affluent, the successful, and the almighty popular people. Just like it works with people in real life. If Social Media sites worked in an inclusive manner FOR ALL, I would choose them all, but they don't and do not work for me. Goal-setters probably love Social Media and strive to gain recognition there, so I commend those types, believe me. For me, it is like whipping a dead horse, but that is because I am (currently) a nobody without a following. My content is seen by no one and easily lost among the more prominent, popular, and successful among us, so ...

Hello! This is week 46 of the 52-Week MFRW Author Blog Challenge, and the topic today is: Let Me Brag for a Minute... Sorry to say this, but as a Catholic, this particular personality trait was beaten and shamed out of me from an extremely early age. I do remember one time during a job interview for a Bank, I had to drive downtown (Detroit) and had the sadly mistaken impression that it would be where I'd be working... in that building, in downtown Detroit -- two things that super-appealed to me at that time. I was upbeat, excited, and eager to impress (I think), and while I don't remember anything I said, I will always remember the interviewer smiling at me and saying, "Wonderful! I love the way you beat your own drum to such a down-to-earth rhythm!" Now, as mentioned above, my initial reaction was, "OMG, I just blew it! She thinks I'm bragging!" Because, as stated, bragging has always been a bad thing to my rigidly molded mind....

Hello minasan, and welcome back for another installment of the  MFRW 52-week Blog Challenge via #MFRWAuthor. It's Week 42 now, and the topic of discussion for today is MY FIRST LOVE Which I really don't want to discuss here, or ever again for that matter. Unrequited Love by KaidaYinThyme Along with a host of other issues dealing with my past, one of the HELP steps in recovering from said malady is to let it ALL go. Including any memories or mention of unrequited love. However, and to be fair to the rest of the participants in this week's Hop, I can touch on the fact that while it remains a painful and quite sad memory, it was also a bit of a catalyst for my writing career! Yes, I had a mad crush on a boy from the 7th grade straight through high school and almost a decade beyond that! Tall, dark, devastatingly handsome, thick, unruly black hair, tanned skin, dark eyes, sexy voice, and very impressively built due to his love of all things sports....

When life feels more like a sport in which you suck at, everything tends to get skewed (make biased or distorted in a way that is regarded as inaccurate, unfair, or misleading), as I'm sure most are already aware. As Moses once said, "I am but a voice crying out in the wilderness." For me, that wilderness is Social Media . Being my own worst enemy, there always comes a time in my writing endeavors when I stop typing, pull back from my efforts, and start to see things in that skewed vision. I feel like Moses in the desert. For several years now, I've made countless attempts at reaching out to people, making friends, and learning how best to 'market' myself in order to attract people to me and my novels. With zero in the way of progress. Facebook seems like a bowling alley now... abandoned, hollow, and aged. Tumblr fell in on itself once the SJW crowd took over and left zero in the way of space for any other type of 'socializing' or...

However illusory the ideal may be, it is the one that, more than any other, drives the psyche of the Romantic poet forward. Wordsworth's Ideal Man Welcome back, friends, to Week 19 of the MFRW Author 52-Week Blog Challenge. This week, we're asked to describe The Ideal Romance Hero . I write AND read romance, but that doesn't mean I feel confident or sure about my response, and I needed to give this one some serious thought prior to setting fingers to keyboard. Alpha or Otherwise, Dark or Fair, Young or Old, Rich or Not, a Hero in any Romance novel needs to be a few things, and for me that mainly consists of MY idea of the Perfect Man. But, not entirely. Alpha's can be thrilling in a novel but downright boorish in real life. Next! I've always tended toward dark-haired men but have been known to freak out when spotting someone with blond hair, so... Sad though this might sound (and be in reality), I'd rather my man made good money than none ...