Spotlight: The story behind the story of Keeping Secrets by Kiru Taye @KiruTaye #TheEssienTrilogy
In 2011, Harlequin Desire put out a submission call for new writers to pitch their story ideas to their editors. At the time I was a new writer and had only ever written two romance stories previously. But I was a huge fan of the Harlequin Desire line with some of my favourite authors being Day Leclaire and Brenda Jackson. So you can imagine how excited I was to pitch a story to them. The pitch event went well and I can still remember how excited I was when I messaged Empi to say they had requested the first 3 chapters of the story, which meant I had to actually write the full story. Yikes! Anyway, long and short of it, I wrote the draft while blogging it and a few of my online friends read the story as I went along and gave me helpful pointers. I submitted it to HD. Eventually they came back and said it wasn't for them. At the time, I had just signed a contract with Breathless Press, so I decided to park the story and concentrate on completing the Men of Valor series which I had