Up Close and Personal with Reece Barden

Reece Barden has always dreamed of being a writer. As she says, “I always loved writing. When I was a child, I always had a copybook, and I’d be making up stories. As an adult, I always said I would write a book someday. During COVID, I finally had some time on my hands, and I decided I was just going to do it!”

On writing

Her husband says he knows when she’s writing the steamy scenes because she’ll have a glass of wine as she writes.

Reece shares, “I love writing paranormal romance because I love the fierceness of their love. All of my characters are a little older, late twenties and thirties, so they’re not naive, but yet when they meet the one, they are totally blown away. They fall hard and for keeps. There’s something really comforting about that. No matter what other drama I put them through, their mate is always there for them.”

The most challenging part for her is trying to write something a little bit different while still sticking to what readers love and expect. She doesn’t write “alphahole” characters or weak female characters, bullying, or cheating.

The Chase

The Chase is the first book in her spin-off shifter series, the Steel Pack Alphas.

After publishing The Alpha’s Saviour, her first wolf-shifter romance, she got so many messages from people saying how much they loved the suave, mysterious Alpha Steel, so she just had to give him his own book.

Blake needed someone to keep him on his toes and a little different from the usual well-trained future Lunas he would have met before.

The question it answers: Would you take another mate to stave off moon madness?

Criticism and Feedback

She says she’s been fortunate so far not to have any scathing criticism yet.

She’s had some comments about leaving GoodNovel, which was a tough decision to make, but she purposefully left her stories on Radish for people from countries that don’t have access to Kindle Unlimited or Amazon, and she thinks people have really appreciated that.

One subscriber on Ream, where she serializes her stories as she writes them, commented on a particularly tense part of the story that “she loved the chapter and breathing was overrated anyway.”

She says, “I loved that because I really want readers to be drawn into the stories so much that they cannot wait to get the next installment.”

Advice

You would you give to your younger self

Just have fun. This isn’t a dress rehearsal. You only get one shot at life; make the most of it.

For aspiring authors

Just write. Get it onto a free platform like Wattpad to get some feedback, and join writing groups on Facebook to find out as much as you can about how to publish your book.

Don’t sign contracts without checking them out thoroughly and speaking to other, more established authors.