It’s time for Duck Chat again. Welcome!

Today we have Kate Collins with us. She has a fun series I think you’ll like to hear about.

Kate has been writing since 1995 when she had her first child and decided to quit her teaching job. Since then she’s enjoyed terrific success with first her historicals and now her current mystery series. Gardening, exploring the Greek Isles, sampling wine and dark chocolate are just a few of her passions. Kate is married and she and her husband divide their time between Northwest Indiana and Key West, Florida.

Once you’ve read her interview, if you have any other questions for Kate or have a comment you’d like to leave, please do and you’ll be in the running for a $10 Barnes & Noble gift certificate that Kate is very graciously offering to one lucky commenter today.

Now let’s chat!

DC: Welcome to The Good, the Bad and the Unread, Kate. Congratulations on the success of your Flower Shop series. The ninth book was released just last month. For those readers who have yet to discover the series, would you tell them about it overall and then we’ll talk about a couple of the books individually.

KC: The Flower Shop Mysteries are intriguing, fast-paced, funny, have a touch of romance, and they keep you guessing, exactly the kind of book I like to read. I equate the series with my favorite sit-com, somewhere I like to visit regularly because I love the cast of characters. Readers can drop by Abby’s flower shop, Bloomers, located on the town square of quaint New Chapel, Indiana, watch Abby create floral arrangements, laugh at her assistants Grace and Lottie, drool over her sexy neighbor Marco Salvare, who owns the bar and grill two doors up the block, gasp at Abby’s mother, a kindergarten teacher/clay sculptress, whose works of art cause quite a stir around the square, and so much more.

DC: If you could retire any interview question and never, ever have it asked again, what would it be? Feel free to answer it.

KC: That question would have to be: Who is your favorite author?  When I hear it, I want to run screaming from the room. I compare it to being an elementary teacher (which I was) and having to decide which of my colleagues was the best. Could I answer that and ever expect to be invited out to lunch with them again? I don’t think so. However, I think I would be safe in choosing an author outside my genre, and that would be Barbara Kingsolver. She writes the most beautiful prose and fascinating stories of anyone I’ve ever read. I’m in awe of her writing. I would love to meet her one day.

DC: I’ve heard writers often say their stories take them in surprising directions, or dialogue flows from some unknown place. Is it the same with you? Do your characters surprise you sometimes?

KC: My characters take me all sorts of places, sometimes to places I don’t want to be. I hate when that happens. I have to outline mt stories loosely because as I write, I’m listening to the characters talking, and it flows naturally in directions I can’t anticipate ahead of time. And then there are minor characters who have been known to step in and take over. In my second Flower Shop mystery, my main character, Abby Knight, has to be a bridesmaid at her cousin Jillian’s wedding. But Jillian turned out to be such a delightfully irritating, funny character that I began to include her in all the plots. She’s the one who has surprised me the most. She can turn the story on its head when she enters a room. I love it! It keeps the story exciting for me.

DC: I read on your website that you enjoy gardening, working with your flowers and vegetables. Did your Flower Shop series germinate from that love of working with nature?

KC: You bet. I’ve been a gardener since I was a little girl. So when I was trying to come up with a setting for the series, I wanted something that I knew a little about and felt comfortable in. I also hung out at a flower shop to soak up enough knowledge to make my sleuth a credible florist, and in doing that, I found it the most delightful place to be. If I had to start another career, I’d be a florist.

DC: You have some cute titles on your books. Can any of them be credited to you, or is it like practically every author out there, your editor/publisher has chosen them all?

KC: Those titles are all mine, I’m proud to say. I agonized over each one of those babies for months.  I’m on the hunt now for the title for book eleven. It’s a long process.

DC: Do you ever argue with your characters while you’re writing? Who usually wins?

KC: I’ve had to toss down the gauntlet a few times, but for the most part, they know who’s in charge. (I use my teacher voice.)

DC: Let’s talk about the first book in the series, Mum’s the Word, where we’re introduced to Abby. Would you give us a look inside this story, how it all got started and what Abby comes up against throughout the book?

KC: I saw Abby Knight as a fearless, female knight-in-shining armor (hence the last name) — height-challenged, hot-tempered, red-haired, and always ready to stand up for what she believes in – most often at her own expense. After flunking out of law school, she used the last bit of her inheritance from her grandpa’s trust to make the down payment on a little flower shop named Bloomers, where she’d previously worked during summer months. From that base, Abby can do the two things she loves best – create floral arrangements and help people solve problems, which naturally gets her into sticky situation, including murder.

In the first book, she has just become the owner/mortgage-holder of Bloomers and is so proud of finally doing something right – she hopes. But she’s launched immediately into a tricky situation that just keeps getting more and more dangerous and needs a lot of guts and ingenuity to get out of – along with some help from the incredibly sexy Marco.

DC: With the series revolving around Abby and her mysteries, is she a one-man woman when it comes to romance? Can you tell us about her hero?

KC: Abby is a one-man woman, but what a man! I decided right away that my feisty little sleuth needed a male counterpoint who could tolerate her nosiness and always be there as back-up. This became Marco Salvare, a former Army Ranger who now owns the Down the Hatch Bar and Grill. Marco is all male, ruggedly good looking, and doesn’t much care for rules. What a match. It’s so fun to watch those sparks in the first book turn into something much more by book nine.

DC: What is sure to distract you from sitting down and working/writing?

KC: Free cell. It’s the bane of my existence. I should delete it from my computer, but I can’t bring myself to do it.  Also, email, Facebook, Twitter, my blogsite …. chocolate. Okay, just about anything.

DC: What has been your favorite book cover from all of your releases and why?

KC: That’s a tough question because I love all the covers and feel incredibly lucky to have them. But if I had to pick, I think I’d say Sleeping with Anemone. However, wait until you see the next one! Dirty Rotten Tendrils is purple! I love it!

DC: How about your least favorite cover?  Why?

KC: Maybe the cover of Slay It With Flowers. It’s yellow, which I thought would sell, but of all the books, that seems to be the one readers are least likely to pick up. And I love the story! The scenes where Abby gets bitten by sand fleas still cracks me up. Also, the murder is based on a true story from my hometown.

DC: How do you feel your male or female characters have evolved over your career? Do you think you write them differently now than you did when you started?

KC: I know I write them differently now because I know them better. I use that knowledge to reveal their deeper emotions and fears. After that first meeting between Abby and Marco, Abby’s got some issues to work out, so over the course of the series, readers get to see how that happens and how their relationship evolves and deepens, taking some surprising turns.

DC: Since it would be tough to squeeze in every book in the series, as much as we’d love to, is there one midway through the series you would choose to let readers know how things are moving along for Abby as it progresses?

KC: I think I’d direct them toward Shoots to Kill. The plot is full of twists and surprises, the characters are great, the mystery is intriguing, and Abby’s relationship with Marco hits a surprising bump.

DC: Is there a genre you haven’t tackled but would like to try?

KC: I wrote children’s magazine stories and historical romance before finally deciding mystery was right for me. I love comedy, too, so maybe someday I’d try my hand at romantic comedy. Right now, my series has all of that plus a mystery, so I’m quite content.

DC: What advice would you give to your younger self?

KC: Don’t be afraid to fail. Failures hurt but are survivable and, if you pay attention to them, they are invaluable lessons. Also, don’t let anything chase you away from your dreams. If I had listened to the warnings of how hard it was to get published, and then to get readers to find your books on shelves crowded with titles, I would  have been too paralyzed to send off a manuscript. My motto is to go for it.

DC: If you were a book, what would your blurb be?

KC: A Midwestern elementary school teacher, devoted mother and wife, avid gardener, staunch defender of animal rights, daughter of a police officer, plots murders for a living — and loves it.

DC: What would be your “voice’s” tagline?

KC: Fighting for truth, justice, and our Constitutional rights through humor and mystery.

DC: The latest book in the series is Sleeping with Anemone. What’s Abby up to at this point?

KC: Up to her eyeballs in trouble. After she learns that the giant Uniworld Food Corp is setting up a dairy farm factory in her hometown, she leads a protest to stop the corporation’s cruel practice of injecting bovine hormones into their cows, (all true, by the way, except for the fictional name of the company). Then bad things start happening – a burning brick thrown through her flower shop’s window, death threats, kidnapping attempts, and finally a murder – and although Abby wants to blame Uniworld, the evidence doesn’t point to them. Are they diabolically clever or is someone else after her?

DC: What romance book would you recommend our readers pick up during their next bookstore run?

KC: Christina Dodd’s latest.

DC: If you had never become an author, what do you think you would be doing right now?

KC: Probably teaching writing at the college level, or running a flower shop, or instructing Yoga, or…. Wow. So many choices!

DC: I read that you wrote several historical romances before your Flower Shop books, but information on them is a little scarce. Could you tell us about a couple?

KC: I wrote seven historical romances under two different pen names. They’re out of print now, but I’m sure copies are floating around used bookstores somewhere. I did four for Avon under Linda O’Brien, and three for Berkley. My favorites were His Forbidden Touch, and Beloved Protector, about two sisters who were very different in temperament.

DC: What’s on the horizon for Kate Collins?

KC: Right now, I’m contracted through book thirteen in the Flower Shop series, then we’ll have to see. They’re still going strong and my fans love the characters, so I’ll write them as long as people want to read them. And I’d love to do a new series one day, but what that will be, I don’t have a clue. I guess that makes me clueless!

Lightning Round:

– dark or milk chocolate?    – Dark

– smooth or chunky peanut butter?    – Chunky

– heels or flats?     – Flats

– coffee or tea?  – Tea

– summer or winter?    – Summer

– mountains or beach?   – Beach

– mustard or mayonnaise?     – Mustard

– flowers or candy?     – Too easy.  Flowers.

– pockets or purse?     – Purse.

– Pepsi or Coke?     – Water

– ebook or print?     – Print

And because we still enjoy the answers we get:

1. What is your favorite word?     – Plethora

2. What is your least favorite word?   – Very

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?     – A gorgeous sunset

4. What turns you off creatively, spiritually or emotionally?    – Stress, noise, intolerance

5. What sound or noise do you love?    – The three deep blasts of a ship’s horn as it leaves port. It’s soul stirring and romantic.

6. What sound or noise do you hate?    – Jack-hammering

7. What is your favorite curse word?     – Damn

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?    – Florist

9. What profession would you not like to do?     – Police work

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?    – “We have Ghiradelli dark!”

DC: Kate, thank you so much for being with us today!