Category: Random

Who am I?

RH TuckerLeave a comment

It’s 2020 so I thought it was time to update my “About” page. I figured I’d update the blog feed with the same post, only better. How can it be better? GIFS!!!!!!!!

Anyways, this is who I am. If you already know me, King of Nice is available for preorder right now 🙂

I was born in the pacific northwest, but call the Southern California desert my home. I grew on a steady diet of Nintendo, Thundercats, and Transformers. When I was little I wanted to be a cartoonist, and though that never happened, I’ve always considered myself a storyteller.

 

I love to create worlds and characters. Sometimes my mind is overflowing with different ideas that I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to telling.

By this point in time, I guess I should tell you, I’m a guy. RH are my initials. Since I write YA romance, many people assume RH Tucker is female, but nope! I’m a dude 😛

 

Which makes it awkward at times in this western society. Men are not generally thought of as romantic or in touch with their softer side.

 

Maybe it was my upbringing. I’m half Mexican and have one brother, but we were raised by a single mother. Who herself was raised by a single mother. And I have five aunts and two uncles from that grandmother. Let me tell you, those aunts were around constantly. Not only did they help my mom raise me and my brother, I probably have more than enough ideas from listening and watching them for future stories LOL!

 

Whatever the reason, I’ve loved the romance side of a story just as much as any action part of the story. Watching and reading about Spider-Man, I wanted to know will he or won’t he end up with Mary Jane. Superman is amazing, but being Clark Kent and that push-and-pull he had with Lois Lane was great. I love the romantic sides of stories.

 

So it’s no surprise that I loved the teen romcoms growing up. She’s All That is my personal fave, but other sare just as great. Pretty in Pink, Can’t Hardly Wait, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, the list can go on and on.

I love the young adult category and writing YA romance. I used to say, “I write books that could be on the CW. Or a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie”. And while I still think that’s true, a reviewer once described one of my books as “cute and edgy” and I think that describes my works best.

 

I don’t write outlandish scenes, but I keep it real. My characters aren’t super clean, who suddenly stop themselves from uttering a four-letter-word, but my pages aren’t curse word after curse word, just because. It’s real. It’s what I remember about high school, and it’s what I loved about those teen movies. If one of my books was turned into a film it’d be rated PG-13.

 

Anyway, that’s what I write. Who I am? I’m just a guy who likes a good story and probably drinks too much caffeine. Some people might say I eat too much pizza, but that’s nonsense. You can never eat too much pizza. And I will go to my grave debating anyone who thinks Rocky Road isn’t the best flavor of ice cream. Because it is.

Bestseller Lists…

RH Tucker2 Comments

Let me make this clear at the outset; To date, I’ve made no bestseller list. But this blog post isn’t really about that.

Well, it is and it isn’t.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about bestseller lists. Mostly because there seems to be drama in the author world. People doing or not doing things, and one of the reasons is because people want to make a splash. I’m being very vague because this post isn’t about what is or isn’t happening in the author world at this time, or what has happened, or what possibly may happen in the future. This post is about me.

So, I have this vision board, right? And I have a logo I printed out and posted to the board of a New York Times Bestseller sticker.

Becoming a bestseller is a huge goal people have. And yes, I haven’t taken it off my vision board because I still think it would be incredibly cool one day to be able to call myself a New York Times bestselling author. But you know what? If I really think about it (and I have) that’s the ego talking.

Yes, being on the New York Times bestseller list, or the USA Today bestseller list, or even ranking number one in my category on Amazon would be amazing. But I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’m realizing something; I don’t need it.

For the past couple of months, I’ve really been getting into Gary Vaynerchuk. If you haven’t heard of him, he’s become I guess this new, social media Tony Robbins and is putting out tons of content about getting to work. Hustling and working hard, blocking out all the negativity and only focusing on the positive and just doing what you need to do to achieve what you want out of life.

Why do I bring this up?

Because in a recent video I saw of his, he talked about not worrying about the number of followers you have or the number of likes you get on a post. Instead, you should simply worry about your craft and block out everything else.

There are so many people that don’t hit a bestseller list and that’s okay. It’s not the end-all-be-all to achieving a long career as an author. I recognize this.

So I’m trying to just focus on my craft. I’m trying to write the best possible story I can write and hopefully, I can make you, the reader, feel something. Whether it’s connecting with a character and sympathizing with them, or being absolutely disgusted with a character and you want nothing more than to reach into the page of the book you’re reading and strangle that character, I want you to feel something. And I can’t do that, I can’t write to that level if I’m over here worried about how many followers I have on Twitter. Or if I’m concerned about the number of likes I have on Facebook or how many people like the latest picture I posted on Instagram. Yes, I would love hundreds of thousands of followers on my social media platforms, but I don’t need it.

You know what I need? I need to write.

I need to get these stories out that have been inside, some of them for a long time. And what I’d like to happen, once those stories are out, is that readers find them and enjoy them. But that’s out of my control. All I can do, as I’ve said, is write the best story I can.

Today, Rumor Has It, True To You, and Heart Shaped Lock have been out for four months. 120 days plus some change. These are just the first of many stories I have inside. The first of many that I want to tell. And in these four months, I have kept an eye on where they are ranking on the Amazon charts. Rumor Has It has broken into the Top 20 in the Coming Of Age category a couple of times. That’s incredible and a little surreal. And there’s been moments where my mind drifts off and I wonder how I can get it to number one. But I don’t want to do that. Not because I don’t want it to be number one, but I don’t want to think that I need books to be a bestseller for me, as a storyteller (which is what I like to think of myself as), to deem myself worthy. I don’t want to start wondering what I have to do to become a NY Times bestselling author and then doubt whether I’m really a writer if I can’t call myself a bestselling author.

I just want to tell a good story.

 

MAY i see you in June…

RH TuckerLeave a comment

Haha! Get it? Because it’s the end of May. And next month is June. So hopefully *ahem* May I see you in June? No?

I’ll see myself out.

 

Just posting a little update on the website. If you scroll down to my last post from the beginning of the month, you’ll see I still have my FREE short story available. This will not be available on retail sites, only to newsletter subscribers. So feel free to join. In the newsletter I’ll just post periodic updates about upcoming books, excerpts and any future short stories I might have coming up *cough*I’ll be releasing one soon and newsletter subscribers get first dibs and first looks at the covers*cough*.

So anyways, yeah. I’m just over here, trying to write my little fingers off. Actually, I don’t know if my fingers are little. Average size maybe? Above average, yeah, I’ll go with that. No. I guess average…

 

 

So, anyways, yeah, lots of stuff going down in June. I’ll be sure to share more when it happens. Plus, still writing book 4, which I’m 99% sure of the title, but still holding off. When I know for sure, I’ll let everyone know, newsletter subscribers first.

 

Okay, that’s all for now.