Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing

EP 248 - Personal and Professional Challenges with Carina Alyce

May 5, 2022

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Mark interviews Carina Alyce, a best-selling author and full-time triple board-certified physician who started writing dramatic medical romances after twenty years in the trenches of health care.

Prior to the main content, Mark shares a personal update as well as a word about this episode's sponsor.

You can learn more about how you can get your work distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.

During their chat, Mark and Carina talk about:

Carina's love of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Grey's Anatomy, and how this evolved, along with her passion for storytelling, to start writing her current series
Her medical and clinical background that helped inspire some of her stories
A typical work and family day, and where and how Carina gets her writing in
The "dead drop" method of communicating with herself using Gmail drafts while working on a manuscript
Scheduling TikTok content in advance during one-hour of work to use for the remainder of the week
How a TikTok "page flip" video works
Managing projects via a visible wall whiteboard/calendar
Writing Firefighter/Doctor/Police romances
The HEROES WITH HEAT AND HEART 9/11 charity anthology Carina edits and heads up
Using a combination of personal experience and interacting with firefighters and law enforcement to help make the content in her novels legitimate
How sometimes "crossover" can be an understatement in Carina's MetroGen novels that include the hospital, the firestation, and the police station
The number of books Carina already has out and the batch of forthcoming releases coming out in the next several months
Setting up the stories in a way that the readers can help determine what happens in the ongoing stories, with plot twists such as who the father of a pregnant woman's child will be
How a single event can include numerous people who all have their own unique story that can covered within this series
The dramatic storytelling principal of "Chekov's gun" ("If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act".)
And more...

After the interview, Mark reflects on a couple of things from the conversation.

Links of Interest:

Carina Alyce is the pen name of the Amazon best-selling author and full-time triple board-certified physician who started writing dramatic medical romances after twenty years in the trenches of health care. She promises she never had sex in a call room - the mattresses are not comfortable - or had a fistfight with a patient - though she did work as a fight doc at the Octagon. Her stories are sexy, snarky, and real with all the romance and drama of the lives of our first responders.

She writes the MetroGeneral Downtown series that tackles the personal and professional challenges facing our front-line providers. You’ll find her stories have the drama of Grey's Anatomy, the comedy of Scrubs, the sexiness of Outlander, and the medical details of Forensic Files. They feature fast, witty dialogue, strong women with goals, and quirky ensemble casts.

When not working or writing, she is a brown belt in judo, an avid reader, and an attending surgeon in stuffed animal veterinary medicine for her six kids. (No one trusts her husband's medical skills because he's just a lawyer.) You can follow her at carinaalyce.com/newsletter or see her dance and make Grey's Anatomy jokes on TikTok at https://www.tiktok.com/@carinaalyce

The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0