Barbra Novac
Previous
Barbra
Bonds...
Click on the
links
to read
fantastic
Interviews
with...
Marilyn Lee
Cheryl Dragon
Nikki Soarde
Renee Knowles
Samantha
Sommersby
Wendy Stone
Nina Pierce
Barbra Bonds with...
Amarinda Jones
author of
Because I Can
Barbra - I love the idea of a power walk through a graveyard turning into the best sex of your life! Tell us about Shades of Gray, and what it's like to write controversial scenes.
Amarinda - Shades of Gray – pissed off call centre worker, Temperance, meets a vampire, Asher, and against her better judgment falls in love with him and battles evil.
Hmmm, are they controversial or just a little left of centre? I try to write everyday people who have extraordinary things happen to them in normal and occasionally strange places. I think people identify with them and either laugh or think I’m insane…either works for me.
Barbra - You like to write about bad boys. Do you have a theory about why we like them so much?
Amarinda - Because they challenge our good girl instincts.
Barbra - Which writers do you most admire? Why?
Amarinda - I like Janet Evanovich and Jennifer Crusie for their humor, Robert Goddard for complex intrigue and Georgette Heyer and MM Kaye for pure romance.
Barbra - Do you practise all your sex scenes?
Amarinda - ‘Laughing my arse off at that. I would like to say ‘yes, but
of course’ but most of it’s my imagination as I am far too pure to do anything
naughty.
Barbra - You use two favourite set ups of mine in your books. The hot CEO (Because I Can) and the hot teacher (Unbreakable). Where do you get your ideas for contemporary romance and how do you know they will have popular appeal?
Amarinda - I get my ideas from real life. Because I Can was based on a period in my working life. Unbreakable is about an older woman faced with the challenge of a young lover who will not let her go. How do I know the stories will appeal? Well, I don’t. I just work on the theory that people will identify with a certain situation and go from there.
Barbra - You like to switch a little between contemporary and paranormal. Which do you prefer to write?
Amarinda - Both are good. It’s all to do with what mood I am in and how
hormones are running at the time.
Barbra - Why do you write under two names?
Amarinda - I write mainstream romance under Janet Davies and erotic romance under Amarinda. My editor suggested it so as to give readers a choice in genre. So far it has worked nicely with cross readership.
Barbra - Will there be any more in the Men of Heart series
Amarinda - No. Men of Heart is two separate books – Swift of Heart and
Last Man Standing. The characters are where they are supposed to be.
Barbra - Where do you go, inside yourself to create? Is the same place that you can ‘brew' a hot sex scene from?
Amarinda - No, I don’t do any of the existential ‘going inside myself’ stuff. I rely on Tim Tams, fish and chips and champagne to fuel my ideas. Occasionally I will have Thai food…maybe Indian.
Barbra - How do you feel when you are ‘in' the creative process?
Amarinda - Wow…gee…I’m never ‘in’…more on the edge of it. I just staple
myself to the chair and make myself write no matter how I feel. I am not even
sure I have a creative process unless wearing pajamas and eating popcorn while
I type can be considered that.
Barbra - Do you like the editing process?
Amarinda - Oh puke - I hate editing. I tend to write the book and send it off and never expect to see it again - yet I do – with all sorts of corrections and things like “AAAARRRGGG!!! Are you trying to drive me to drink” in the margins. I am the queen of typos, split infinitives and I tend to make up words. It does tend to make my editor a little crazy.
Barbra - When did you first have a book in print? Was that a milestone achieved?
Amarinda - You know, as nice as it is to have a book in print, I think it is not the be all and end of the writing process. E-books have really taken off in a massive way. It’s nice to have a print book to give family and friends as a keepsake but just getting published in whatever medium is an achievement.
Barbra - What's in the future for Amarinda Jones?
Amarinda - Who the hell knows? I tend to fly by the seat of my pants and react to circumstances. It’s a lot more fun that way. Plan? Nah – not me – anything could happen to tomorrow.
Nina Pierce
author of
Fury Fluffy and Wild.
1. Can you tell us about Furry, Fluffly, and Wild?
NP - Celia Kyle was put out the call to Liquid Silver authors asking if anyone was interested in doing a shifter anthology. The woman is amazing and I really wanted to work with her. So I jumped through the crowd with my arm waving and shouted “ME”! Tina Holland was hot on my heels. He couldn’t really say “no” to two authors grovelling at her feet and the idea was born.
The next challenge … um, I’d never written a shifter story. Undaunted I did some research and worked on some ideas and Blue Moon Rising was born. It’s the story of a woman who is a polymorphic shifter. Now, don’t look at me like that. They exist. You know--polymorphic--more than one form. How fun is that? She’s both cougar and wolf.
2. I really liked The Healers Garden. The idea of a man striving for equality in a sexist female dominated world appealed to me enormously. Where did you get the idea for that? Where do most of your ideas come from?
NP - I love my debut novel The Healer’s Garden. Don’t tell my other guys, but Brenimyn will always be my favourite hero. *sigh* A gal never forgets her first. Ah hem, sorry, what did you ask? Oh, the idea. You know it was one of those stories that just happened. I started with the question “What if a disease killed a significant amount of the male population?” (because I have weird thoughts like that) and wondered what our world would look like and how the human species would continue. I just wrote the story based on that premise. It just grew from there. The whole bigotry of the male species grew organically as the story went on. I’m hoping to finish the sequel by the end of this year.
3. Which writer / writers are your inspiration?
NP - You mean did I start telling stories to my teddy bears? No. I have a very vivid imagination. (It’s one of the reasons I can’t watch or read horror stories… to much bad stuff to add to the dark nights. LOL!) And I guess I’ve always “made up” things about the people around me. But I didn’t really start writing until high school. For three years we were required to keep a journal. It was the first time I stepped away from the sciences and let my creative energy flow. Mostly through poetry.
In college my writing energy went into research and writing scientific papers. I loved it. Writing fulltime never occurred to me until my health forced my retirement from teaching in 2005. Not one to sit around and do nothing, I began writing novels. I had no idea how much I would love creating stories. I love to do research and come up with puzzle-like plots that keep my readers guessing until the end.
5. Will there be any more in the Tilling passion series?
NP - Tilling Passions was my first attempt at writing a series beginning to end. The overall plot running throughout the series was determined at the inception of the books. How the sisters would react to the situation and who they would fall in love with didn’t come together until I really started delving into their individual stories. I didn’t even write their stories in order. Well, I thought I did, but they changed things up on me. Characters have a habit of doing that as I’m writing. Anyway, each sister has her own book and it does stand alone, but if you read all three novellas in order, you really get a sense of the mystery hanging over their family which culminates in the last book.
6. Do you enjoy writing paranormal?
NP - Cole Takoda, the hero in Blue Moon Rising was my first shifter story. I wanted to know the “rules” of the shifter world so I read many shifter stories and what I discovered is … there are no rules. Oh, the freedom! Then I pushed it even further and made the heroine a polymorphic shifter. Cole is Jayda’s wolf mate, but she’s also cougar … oh, I feel a sequel coming on! The whole paranormal world is full of possibilities.
NP - I don’t plot my stories on paper so my first few chapters come out very slowly. I get a feeling for the characters--who they are and what their back story is all about. Sometimes the villain commits a crime and I have no idea who they are. Then one of the characters finally has this scene where it all comes together. That’s nice when it happens somewhere near the beginning because the rest of the story comes together very quickly. But my latest story, the villain didn’t share his motivation with me until the very end which meant quite a bit of rewriting of the beginning of the story to make sure the clues fell in the right places.
NP - Celebrate? I usually mourn the loss of the characters for a
little bit. It takes me a week or so to come down from the end of a book. And
another week before I can start something new. I’m not one of those authors who
have several books going at once. Though I can see the benefit of doing that.
The writing of the end comes fast and furious and is a real high. As I said,
writing the beginning of my stories is hard work and I usually try to put it
off for a little bit. Now getting a book contracted means dinner out!
9. Do you plot in a detailed fashion or do you design by the seat of your
pants?
NP - As I said … a true pantzer all the way!
10. What are you working on currently?
NP - I would like to feel settled in my career. Ideally I’d like
to be writing two or three novels a year for a print publisher. But I think
I’ve still got a few more stories to knock out before that happens.
website: http://www.ninapierce.com
blog: http://www.ninapierce.com/romanceblog
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/ninapierceauthor
book trailers: http://www.youtube.com/romanceauthor62
All books are available at Liquid Silver Books (my author page):
http://www.king-cart.com/cgi-bin/cart.cgi?store=linda018&category=Nina+Pierce
Wendy Stone
author of
Bound by Love, Captive Angel and Callie's Shadow
BN - Tell us about your three latest releases.
Well, they are three novels that I am particularly proud of. Bound by
Love, which is out now by www.Phaze.com,
is a Scifi/fantasy piece set on another world. My heroine was from New
York City and gets herself kidnapped by a warrior race that believes women are
sex slaves and little else. Adrianna ends up changing the mind of her
particular warrior. Along with a magic mirror and a nasty witch, it's a
fun book.
Captive Angel is out through www.eternalpress.ca. It's the first in a series, which they've also picked up. We've got an emergency room doctor, an injured man in chains and a really diabolical bad guy that keeps them on the run. Lots of twists and turns in this one, including a huge red ruby heart that has mystical powers. I wrote this about ten years ago, but the disk it was on was lost when we moved. So I rewrote it two years ago for the National Novel Writers Month contest. I think it came out better the second time, actually.
The third was my Nanowrimo contest entry for last year. The novel is Callie's Shadow and it is out through www.nobleromance.com. I'll tell you, my editor there took that novel and squeezed it until it came out pure and beautiful. The story revolves around four characters, a vampire, an Atlantean warrior, a werewolf and a man who can blend his molecular structure to match anything he wants. The four are members of ASP or The Agency for Supernatural Police. They are responsible for keeping the supernatural world out of the human world, and policing supernatural beings. Relationships form but a rogue "Old One" Vampire comes to town with plots and plans to make it his own.
As you can tell, I'm excited by all three novels.
BN - Which writers do you most admire?
WS - Oh there are so many. I think Sherilynn Kenyon. Her Dark Hunter series is phenomenal. I also love Lynsay Sands. Her explanation of why Vampires are what they are is sensational. Of course, my old stand-by, Nora Roberts as both herself and JD Robb have kept me in reading material for quite a while. I think her "In Death" series is amazing. How hard it must be to take the same characters, adding and subtracting a few along the way and keeping the books fresh and interesting and with tons of sexual heat. You've got to admire the lady for that.
BN - What led you to write stories for Literotica?
WS - I showed one of my stories to an online friend. He pointed me to Literotica. You know, I don’t think I ever thanked him for that. It took me about two weeks to decide to post and after I hit the submit now button, I stared at my computer screen and bit my fingernails for almost the entire week it took to post the story.
BN - You are a prolific writer on Lit. Do you know at the
beginning of a story how it will end, or does it speak to you as you
write?
WS - I don’t even know the ending of the next chapter until I get there. Sometimes my characters decide to do as I had planned, other times, they throw me a curve. I had a story called Captive Angel, the bad guy was explaining to Angel about his life and the next thing I knew, he was telling her that he’d met and had sex with her mother and that she was his daughter. That was a huge surprise to me.
BN - Do you have an external editor on Lit?
WS - I did at one time, a very nice man who was doing me a favour by editing for me. He rammed home some of the more basic grammar problems, such as it’s/its. He wasn’t a writer and wasn’t affiliated with Literotica. But I’m a very impatient writer, I want to submit my work as soon as I’ve written the last word. So half the time, what you see hasn’t even been read over
BN - How long does it take you to complete a story?
WS - Have you ever heard of the Nanowrimo? It’s a contest done in the month of November designed to force writers to write. You have to write at least fifty thousand words of a novel in that month. Last November, I did two in the month. It all depends upon the characters and how they are speaking to me.
BN - How do you feel about reader feedback? What do you want to
say to readers about reader feedback?
WS - I love my readers. If it weren’t for them, I’d be writing for no one again and be back to the nail biting I was doing before. They just grew out so I’d rather not. I don’t mind negative feedback, I know all writers get it. I do hate the anonymous emails that ask me questions that I’d love to answer and don’t have any way to do it. If you’d like to know something, leave an email address. Trust me, I don’t do forwards…lol.
BN - When did you first publish?
WS - July of 2007. It was like a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to be a writer and when Phaze gave me the opportunity…Well, I can’t thank their Publisher, Kat Lively, enough for the opportunity she gave me.
BN - Was it a hard cover book or an e book?
WS - I started with e-novel. But Beastly Intentions and A Gamble Worth Taking did so well that Beastly went into print in March and Gamble is due to come out in print late summer sometime.
BN - What do you think of the e book phenomenon?
WS - I think it’s fantastic. For me, there is something about holding a book in your hand or walking into a book store and breathing in the smell of the paper and print, but hey, e-novels save on trees…
BN - What do you think of the e book phenomenon?
WS - I think it’s fantastic. For me, there is something about holding a book in your hand or walking into a book store and breathing in the smell of the paper and print, but hey, e-novels save on trees…
BN - What would you like your readers to know about you?
WS - My readers are very important to me. I try to take their emails into account when I am writing. If there is something someone wants me to write and it catches my fancy, I’m very happy to have the inspiration. I also want to thank them for buying my books, for reading me, for writing and letting me know what they think, and for all their support. They are the best.
Thank you, Barbara, for interviewing me. Happy Reading all!