It’s clichéd to say it, but “Blakwidow” Amanda Storm used her sticky web site to initially snare interest in her burgeoning career. What she didn’t expect was to capture the interest of a book publisher as well.
“One of the associate editors [at ECW Press] saw my web site,” explained Storm to SLAM! Wrestling. “I used to write match narratives of all of my matches. She liked my writing style and suggested to me that I do a book. It took me about a month to realize she wasn’t somebody trying to pull my leg or somebody trying to scam me. Once I figured it out, they gave me an advance and I started working.”
Her web site has served her well over her career, and came in handy when she began to work on her book, entitled Blakwidow: My First Year as a Professional Wrestler.
“The web site was almost a working diary for the first year. When I first started, like most people, I wasn’t getting on shows every week like I am now. I was getting on two shows a month. So I had the freedom to literally write about every show I was in,” explained Storm, who now works one to four shows a week.
“With the web, you can get exposure that used to take 10 years to get.”
Storm, who is in reality Alexandra Whitney, had a notebook from her first year in wrestling, and relied on her memory to relive the rough first year as a pro wrestler.
She was given a certain amount of text to shoot for, and delivered pretty close to the required amount. The book weighs in at 240 pages.
“I kicked around how much I wanted to talk about my life, and, well, I really didn’t want to talk about it that much because it wasn’t really that kind of a biography,” she said. Instead, Storm keeps the book focused on her first year in wrestling, and doesn’t talk too much about her past growing up.
It was important to Storm to try to keep thing positive. “For the most part, I tried to keep it an upbeat, positive book and not really talk too much about the seemy side of professional wrestling, except in a couple of cases.”
She is not too worried about how some of her contemporaries reaction to what’s written about them in the book. “I think probably for the most part, I was complimentary. I didn’t make it a revenge book or anything like that. A couple of times that I said things that probably weren’t complimentary, I changed the name of the person.”
Now that she’s a published author (though when interviewed SLAM! had a copy of the book, and she had yet to see one), Storm plans to keep training with Wladek “Killer” Kowalski at his wrestling school and hitting the promotional trail. Storm has talk shows, book reviews, internet promotion and book signings in mind. She recently appeared on TVO, Ontario’s public broadcasting station. “I haven’t really been on TV that much, except to wrestle, and I was a little nervous, but I tried not to show it.”