Stained Glass Shards

1.

He flew for me. Miles of land and ocean had separated us for weeks. When he had left me, cold and nude on the bed, he whispered in my ear that he'd be back to lie with me. And he did, knocking on my door in the early hours of the morning after his transcontinental flight. Swiftly removing his clothes and stripping me of mine, he didn't utter a word. He didn't make love to me. I lay beside him, curled into him until the heat of our bodies melded together like molten glass.

--Iliana Gardner, Stained Glass Shards

ELYCE

Like gestation, it had been nine months since I decided to become a whole new person. A new Elyce Fielding emerged from her shell the morning Griffin Belanger stepped out the door. When I waited for a knock at the door or the chime of a text sent to change my mind, and that attempt to reach me never came, I promptly called into work. I requested a personal day to take care of a problem.

The problem to be fixed was me.

From my desk drawer, I removed a package of paper, unsealing the fresh loose leaf. On the faint blue lines, I wrote a list of my goals and everything I'd experienced since meeting Griffin, in squiggly curves until I filled all the pages with dialogue and scenes of our encounters. The prose was reality mixed with the wishes I had always desired from our coupling. Mostly, I wrote about my need to be completely his for the rest of our lives.

It was truly more fantasy than reality.

When I finished the book two months later, I sent out one-hundred-twenty-seven query letters to agents and publishers. I received nine requests for the full manuscript. Three agents competed with each other for my commitment to their agency. I selected Bruna Maximo as my agent. She maintained my vision for my novel, Stained Glass Shards.

Primarily, she guided me through the process like a guardian. She allayed my fears and assured me of my talent.

Regardless of changing the locations from Boston to a sleepy college town in Ohio, using different names, and embellishing events in the book, I held a strong belief that I'd be identified as the heroine in our story.

The novel was a supercharged version of our unconventional love. When I selected the name Tucker Frost for the male protagonist, I ensured it wouldn't resemble Griffin's name, eliminating the close connection to him. Additional dissimilarities were peppered in to protect the not-so-innocent characters. However, Tucker—the handsome television actor who carries on a secret sexual relationship with his college friend, Iliana Gardner—had been inspired by Griffin Belanger. Iliana remained spellbound and easily manipulated into a sordid affair, which caused her to lose her sense of self-worth. The only means of breaking the spell was to break away from Tucker, which she did successfully by focusing on creating her own commercial production company, something she'd never thought she would achieve without his support.

I felt some shame creating a sexually explicit tale of unrequited love, but Bruna assured me that the story would be devoured by millions of romance fans. I stayed true to the narrative and didn't give Tucker and Iliana a happily-ever-after. Early reviews indicated that one wasn't expected or necessary because the story was more about Iliana's awakening.

My refusal to attend the book tour circuit arranged by the publisher became a sticking point. I feared public recognition as the inspiration for my heroine, but it seemed inevitable that my family and friends would eventually figure out I had written about myself and Griffin—no matter how long we'd kept our sexual trysts a secret.

After much convincing, Bruna helped me change my appearance and self-confidence. In an act of true-life metamorphosis, I acquired a personal trainer to help me lose the thirty-five pounds of excess weight that had clung to my curvy body for the majority of my life. The months of exercise and deprivation whittled off the weight gained from my sedentary writer lifestyle.