Michele Ceron

I was born in Philadelphia but we moved to the Philly suburbs when I was 2 years old. I was a child of the 80’s and I was in high school in the 90’s. I’m the 3 rd oldest out of 4 girls. I had a pretty normal childhood. In my family my parents always introduced me to people as “the quiet one”. Being the only full-fledged introvert in my family meant that I kept to myself more and was shy and not good with meeting new people. It also meant that I was an avid reader and didn’t have a problem spending a lot of time by myself. But with 3 sisters, it wasn’t always easy to get alone time. My sisters and I fought a lot! LOL

I was always into reading for as long as I can remember. I even read a lot of books during the summer months when most kids didn’t want to read at all! LOL. I started doing some creative writing around age 10. My language arts teacher saw that I had some talent. Out of my entire elementary school when I was in 4 th grade I won first place for an assignment where we had to pick out a picture from National Geographic magazine and we had to write a (very) short descriptive story about the picture. I remember I picked a picture from Cambodia of a poverty stricken Cambodian family where the mother was standing in a doorway to a dilapidated building with her toddler. My teacher said my story made her cry. She did some kind of language arts tour later that year and took it with her as part of her display or something.

Well my genre is really daytime tv soap opera but that genre doesn’t really exist in book form? I’m kind of pioneering it (though I did find one other author who is also doing it but he is writing his soap in novel form whereas mine is in screen play form) so I chose to also call it Contemporary Romance because what is a soap without romance and the many possible dramatic entanglements involved in romantic relationships?

When I was a kid I grew up on soap operas. I was hooked even as young as 8 and I didn’t even really understand most of what was going on but yet I was still drawn in. My mom used to watch all the ABC soaps so those were the first ones I watched then when I got to middle school a friend of mine got me hooked also on the CBS soaps. By the time I was in high school I was actively watching like 7 different soaps! At that age I dreamed of not staring in a soap; but writing for one! Being a soap opera writer was always one of my dream jobs! And now I’m living my childhood dream! What I love most about writing a soap opera is that there is no ending to soaps. It keeps going and going. One story may end but it just evolves right into another one. It never gets boring because you have a huge cast of characters all with very diverse personalities and backgrounds and there’s multiple story arcs going on at one time and often the stories will intersect with each other or flow in and out of each other. Writing a soap opera seems to me to be a lot like conducting a symphony! My brain never stops with thinking up new scenes, new stories, new directions for existing stories, new couples and another problem is that I keep thinking up new characters but yet I don’t want to kill off or get rid of any of the previous characters because I’m so attached to all of them but it can get confusing for the reader the amount of characters that I have and the fact that the cast list keeps expanding! I have to carry a notebook around with me so I can jot down any random idea that pops into my head when I’m not at home so that I don’t forget it later!

Reading has always been my biggest hobby, I read A LOT and I’ve gotten into the bad habit in recent years of reading 3 or more books at once. I used to only read one book at a time, on occasion two. Now I’m always reading 3-6 books at any one time. This isn’t good because some books take me much longer to finish than I would normally. I don’t really have any other hobbies at the moment, I guess I’m pretty boring that way! I do have an inquisitive mind and I do love to dive deep into a wide variety of topics, especially topics that are taboo or considered out of the norm and I will just keep researching it until I’ve had my fill and move on to another topic. I’m what some people would consider a conspiracy theorist which has a bad connotation even though in reality; it isn’t a bad thing. I think everyone should always be digging deeper into everything and always have an open mind to any and all possibilities of the goings on of the world. I guess you could consider that a hobby.

So Cape Heights actually originated back in 2003. In 2001 I stumbled upon an online soap opera role play called Crystal Beach. It was an original soap opera but written on a message board format. There were 2 or 3 women who created it and there were a few more of us who came along later and assisted in writing it. We each wrote for several of the characters and together we came up with story ideas. I loved it so much that I wanted to create my very own original soap opera role play. Myself and two of the other writers from Crystal Beach came up with Cape Heights. I actually didn’t come up with the location myself. I honestly don’t remember if I came up with the name myself or one of the two other women did but my one co-creator her name is Tina, she came up with the idea to make it a coastal town somewhere in the pacific northwest so I have to give her that credit. In 2006 the soap kind of petered out on the message board when we started to lose interest in it because our lives got to busy to keep up with it.

So after Cape Heights died out in 2006 on the message board format, I went into a writers rut. I had no interest in writing at all for the next 12 years. In 2017 I began thinking back on Cape Heights and I kind of missed it. I wanted to go back and re-read all that we wrote. I tried to find it, but sadly, it was nowhere to be found in internet land. I was bummed. Then several months after that, just one night out of the blue I’m laying in bed and I start randomly thinking about Cape Heights again and ALL the characters and relationships and stories we had them in; all of it started flooding back into my brain as if a computer was downloading it into my mind. I kept remembering all of it and I couldn’t go to sleep. I knew that I just had to open my laptop and start writing it again. I started thinking “where would all the characters be right now if it was 5 years later from where we left off? Immediately all these ideas for new stories for them started coming to me a mile a minute. I got out of bed, went downstairs and just started writing and I haven’t been able to stop, since. I brought over into the newly revamped Cape Heights three characters from the other soap I helped to write that I mentioned earlier, Crystal Beach. Two of the characters in Cape Heights (Miranda and Theo) were characters from Crystal Beach that I actually created on my own. Miranda was the very first soap opera character I ever created, so she always held a special place in my heart so I had to bring her in to Cape Heights. A third character I brought over into Cape Heights was Mike who is Miranda’s cousin. I did not create his character, one of the original creators of Crystal Beach created him (Angela Clark) but I knew I couldn’t have Miranda without Mike, so I brought him in as well and he has turned out to be one of my most beloved characters. I can’t imagine Cape Heights at all now without those 3 characters from Crystal Beach.

Chris has a lot of my personality in him. He is mild mannered and easy going; an introvert like me. He doesn’t talk as much as most people. On the surface he seems like a vanilla character but his background is so rich, complicated, and dangerous. His father is the leader of a drug cartel in Columbia. Chris didn’t want to be forced into the cartel life so he fled the country, came to the US illegally, changed his name and hid from his father for several years. Back when we wrote Cape Heights in 2003, Chris’s story was he was an illegal alien. His girlfriend Anita was from Mexico and here on a green card. He was concerned about being deported back to Columbia, so to prevent that from happening, Anita recruited her best friend Lori, who is an American citizen, to marry Chris to keep him in the country. But they had to make the marriage look legit so Chris and Anita pretended to break up and Chris and Lori pretended to be a real couple but they were just friends. Secretly Chris and Anita were still dating each other. But over time, Chris and Lori fell in love with each other. Lori’s father Elliot was none too pleased that his 20 year old daughter jumped into a quickie marriage and so Elliot was trying to break them up. Chris is in love with both Anita and Lori but ultimately Anita finds out about Lori and Chris while Lori finds out she is pregnant…….fast forward 5 years to present. Chris and Lori are happily married with a 3 year old daughter while Anita temporarily went back to Mexico. But Chris’s father found out where he is and is forcing him to be a part of the cartel. His ruthless sister has come to town to make sure he falls in line but Lori has no idea about his cartel family and he is trying to keep her in the dark to protect her and their daughter who are in danger if he tries to turn the cartel in or not cooperate.

Well soap operas never end, they just keep going so its just a continuation of the stories and relationships from the previous volumes. I do have an ending to Cape Heights in mind but it is a WAYS away, many more volumes to write to get to the end!

I’m a colon hydrotherapist by trade and I want to be a business owner, own my own colon hydrotherapy business so that I no longer have to work for other people and do things the way that I want to do them. As soon as I get the capital for it, I will open my business!

The only thing I find challenging is in a soap, stories can easily get complicated and I try my best to keep them interesting and dramatic while at the same time realistic. Soaps are known for often going into the territory of stories that are so far fetched and outrageous and well, just stupid sometimes and not believable. I’m trying to not fall into that trap. I’m trying to stay away from typical soap opera troupes like people coming back from the dead who the whole entire town saw die in front of them or long lost evil twins or pregnancies by space aliens, lol, things like that. Another challenge is I have no co-writers to help me when I get stuck on the direction of a story. That was what was nice when previously I wrote Cape Heights with other writers. The downside to that, though, was sometimes we would disagree on a couple, a character, or a story direction and sometimes it was hard to resolve it and decide who gets their way and who doesn’t. I enjoy having complete control over all of it now but occasionally I do get a bit stuck and wish I had my old co-writers to help me with it.

Oh, that’s hard. Don’t try to force it. When you’re ready to write your masterpiece, it will just flow out of you.

Great question! Both! For Cape Heights most of the characters were created many years ago. The challenge was to try to remember as best I could who they were exactly back then and how much the same and how different would they be now 5 years later? A soap since it’s a continuous story that is constantly evolving and never ends, my characters have the things that always remain the same about them and then parts of them that grow and change. I’ve created around a dozen new characters since I started writing Cape Heights again and the same goes for those characters as well. They have their core characteristics but then they have the parts of them that grown and evolve through the trials and tribulations of love and everything else that life throws at them.

I’m currently writing Cape Heights Volume 6 which I expect to release in the fall, I’m hoping for an October release. Volume 6 is going to feature the very first Cape Heights wedding so I am VERY excited to write that! It will be a drama packed wedding, for sure! A lot is going to happen!

Good! I have no complaints! It’s a very easy to use forum and I love that I don’t have to make my own tweets! ��