It Started With…

Writer’s block.

Way back in 2020, Lexxie Couper (also me), got slammed with a brutal case of writer’s block. Not just a few days, or weeks, but months and months. Two years worth of writer’s block. And when the words finally started to come back for Lexxie they…well, they didn’t come back hard. In fact, they’re still being a temperamental pain in Lexxie’s side. But what did happen was short little romances started popping into her/my head. Little 10,000 words completely over-the-top instalove romances.

The thing was, I didn’t know what to do with these short romances. I didn’t know there was a category on Amazon called One Hour Reads Romance, or Ninety Minute Reads Romance. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was a category for short romances. And then the most amazing Heidi Shoham (who has been Lexxie’s editor since 2007) pointed me in the direction of these categories and…something happened in my writer’s brain. Something I haven’t felt for a long while: excitement.

Now, I thought about releasing short instalove romances as Lexxie, but these aren’t Lexxie books. Yes, they are romances, but they are full-on OTT romances. They are the fantasy of love at first sight dialed up to a million. And that is how Elle Couper came about. (Hands up if you’ve seen just how clever/lame I’ve been with my pen name?)

Elle Couper only writes short instalove romances. And the first series is all about the alpa heroes of the Formula One racing world.

Why that world? Why F1 drivers? Because my husband and my eldest daughter are massive F1 fans. Every race weekend, in the wee hours of the morning when the sun is still asleep (because most of the F1 races happen in the Northern Hemisphere), the husband and the daughter are in the living room, watching and shouting at the TV, and generally having an absolute ball. And every so often, my daughter will say things like “If I dated Lando Norris I’d…” or “What would it be like to be married to Carlos Sainz?” and those throw away comments got into my head, nested there. And that is how Hot Grid: The F1 Players series came about.

So I guess…thank you, writer’s block.

And thank you, awesome readers, for joining me on this wild ride. Buckle up, it’s going to be a blast.

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