Actually, I really did ask two of my writing friends to suggest questions so this blog is real, it’s actual, it’s gritty! It’s more factual than the nightly news!
1. Where do you get your ideas?
Ah, the old chestnut! Hmm, why are chestnuts old? Anyway, I wish I had something exciting to say about this but it’s all pretty basic. I watch TV and listen to music. I think about things going on in my own life or people I know and extrapolate from there. I never use actual situations or characters but I’ve certainly used a germ of an idea from something that’s happened to me. I’ve always been a booky kinda gal and it’s amazing how something from one story will make friends with something from another story and wham, a new idea is born. I read a lot of nonfiction, especially history, biography, travel, popular science, then ask myself what if those particular events had happened in the Regency.
2. Are there issues (social/moral) that you’ve included in your work which readers might find a bit twisted or off-putting?
What an interesting question! Thanks, Jen! When I started writing about a courtesan and her lover, it was a couple of years ago and what was acceptable in a romance was completely different to what’s acceptable now. I have a theory that with the rise of erotica, an erotic edge has seeped into mainstream romance. I certainly know I’m reading things in romances now that were unthinkable a short time ago. And I delight in the energy this new element has lent the romance genre. Oh, dear, getting on my soapbox here. Back to my story. When I started writing Claiming the Courtesan, I assumed no publisher would touch it with a barge pole because of the heroine’s profession. Timing is everything – the courtesan element worked as a real hook for an agent (the first agent who read the whole thing signed me), editors (it went to auction where three houses fought over it for FOUR days) and potential readers. Who would have thought, huh?
Oh, dear, this is turning into a tome. I’ll pick easy questions for the next three:
3.Where is the most romantic place you’ve ever been?
Venice or the west coast of Scotland, where a lot of Claiming the Courtesan is set.
4.What keeps you writing?
These days? A deadline and the prospect of a check! For all twenty-seven years it took me between finishing my first book and selling Claiming the Courtesan, sheer bloody-mindedness which is a quality that I think is often maligned unjustly!
5.What is the best advice on writing you’ve been given?
Robyn Donald, who writes for Harlequin, once said at a workshop that the people who don’t make it are the people who give up. Sounds really obvious but it’s made a lot of sense to me recently. So if you’re trying to write, hang in there!
I got the impression from another review that there may be forced sex in this book. I am not terribly fond of forced sex but at least one other reviewer of another book (alison kent) had mistakenly identified a forced sex scene when there was none. Maybe you could comment on that without being too spoilerish.
I am really looking forward to your book being released!! I just wanted to start with that straight off.
As to the questions:
How fast do you write?
When will your next book (after CTC) be released?
What are you working on now?
Hi Jane! Thanks for asking this question. I think it’s a personal issue. There’s a lot of strong emotion in this book and a couple of fairly strong sex scenes. I know the review you’re talking about – personally, it’s not how I see my book at all or my hero. But it’s a free country and once you put stuff out in the public arena, you have to accept that people will place different interpretations on what you’ve written. I was talking to the fabulous Anne Gracie about this very subject yesterday (hey, name dropping or what?). She’s read the book and her interpretation was that the scene described was a desperate act by a desperate man, a man on the verge of shattering. I’d personally describe it as a forced seduction and I think you’re close enough in the minds and hearts of both characters to read more into it than just what happens on a physical level. But hey, that’s just my take on the subject! Does that answer your question? All the other reviews seem to have come along with my interpretation. But that doesn’t mean all readers will and as I said with total originality, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth.
Hi ladydawgfan! Great to see you here!!! Unfortunately, I must count as the world’s slowest writer, made even slower by the fact that I do the worst first drafts in the history of writing! Yes, even worse than Bill Socrates, Socrates’ younger brother, who until now held that particular record. It’s like chipping away at marble. I seem to throw away an awful lot before I get David (or a garden gnome – the jury’s out on that one!).
My next book after CTC is called UNTOUCHED and it’s coming out in December, hopefully to warm up a cold Northern Hemisphere Christmas or two. It’s another Regency noir but with quite a fairytale atmosphere, although definitely a dark fairytale. Elements of Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast. I’m putting an excerpt and the back cover blurb up on my website at the start of May. I’d love to know what you think!
At the moment I’m struggling with the first draft of another courtesan book that I’m describing as a Regency noir Affair to Remember.
How do you handle bad reviews? Do you ever Google yourself to see what people are saying about you?
Karen, in spite of all the advice I’ve been given (which is ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!), I have been googling myself. It’s a first book – of course I’m dying to know what people say about it.
I’m human, of course I don’t like bad reviews! But I think you’ve got to say they come with the territory and be a man (hmm, have I shaved this morning?). A lot of writers don’t like the idea of writing competitions for various reasons. I however entered an awful lot of contests before I sold CLAIMING THE COURTESAN to Avon. And I’m so glad now because they get you very used to a variety (and sometimes a lunatic variety) of responses to your book. I remember one poor judge hated the first few pages of CTC so much, she actually sat down and rewrote them in words of one syllable. Did it help me? No. Did I appreciate her effort? Yes, of course I did, even though I thought she was woefully misguided. As you can see from the excerpt, I have a slightly baroque style which I think is part of my voice. She didn’t get it. Other people did. Differences of opinion make the world go round.
Thanking you in advance for taking the risk and coloring outside of the lines! Really looking forward to reading CTC.
Thanks, Jen. May you love my blue monster as much as I do! And I always colored outside the lines! I was the difficult kid who sat up the back!