Hey, y’all. I’m Amorina Leigh Carlton. I write Southern Fiction with a Twist. I was born and raised in the rural Deep South, until I moved to NOLA with my husband a few years back, where we live with our toddler and our two pups.

I’m a lifetime reader and writer, deep in the editing stages of my first novel, Waiting for True Love (working title). I’ve been working on it for longer than I’d like to admit, but I expect to be finished sometime in the next year. It’s a social commentary about abuses of power filtered through a romance set in the South. And, that sounds like some real marketing B.S., huh? What it really boils down to is it’s about a girl who gets involved in an affair with a youth pastor and the aftermath.

If you had to pigeonhole me into a genre, I guess it’s women’s fiction. I write some stories that seem like romance, some that seem like mysteries, and some that seem like fantasy or sci/fi. But, they always feature “women behaving badly,” as I like to joke. By which I mean, they’re strong women who don’t do what they’re “supposed to do.”

I’ve loved writing since I could hold a pencil (or a crayon or whatever it was). I remember trying to tell my Momma about my imaginary friend (I was an only child, a decision I decided to pass on to my own poor toddler – but hey, maybe she’ll be a writer, too!) and her about ready to call a priest. Imaginary friends were too much for her, but she did later understand my passion for both reading and writing. Momma didn’t live to see me published, but that’s just one more fire under my butt to pursue my dreams.

I’m not wholly decided whether I’ll pursue traditional or self-publishing. It’s a hot topic in the writing community, and one I’m still doing some soul searching on. I’m leaning toward self-publishing. Does that mean I think I’m not good enough? No. It means every day on Twitter I see good writers talk about their hundredth rejection letter.

One of the things that led me down this road to actually pursuing my dream of becoming a full-time (well, mostly, when my two-year-old boss lets me) writer was the reality that so many of us spend the majority of our lives doing things we hate. And, life is TOO short for that.

We’ve all heard that quote about finding a job we love and then we’ll never work a day in our lives. I don’t think that’s true. I lose hours at a time writing (something not true of anything else), but it still feels like work. It’s still hard. And, it’s still worth it.

My goal here is to share some of my writing, my thoughts on writing, some book reviews, and maybe introduce you to some writer friends I’ve made along the way. And, hopefully, we’ll all have a good time and maybe learn something new.