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What’s so wonderful about Teresa is her consistency. Her unfailing ability to never let a reader down. When I walk into a bookstore and see a new Teresa novel, I pick it up without bothering to read the back. I just know….it’ll be that great.Her newest book, Some Like It Wicked, was no exception. It was everything I ever want in a book: thrilling, romantic, sexy, real, honest. It was the perfect blend of sweet and bitter, light and dark, humor and sex. It made me read my favorite stories from Teresa’s backlist: The Vampire Who Loved Me, Yours Until Dawn (one of my absolute FAVORITES!!!), A Kiss To Remember (Another FAVORITE OF MINE OF ALL TIME IN ANY GENRE!), Thief of Hearts, a Whisper of Roses, Lady of Conquest, Shadows and Lace, Heather and Velvet, Once an Angel, Fairest of Them All, Breath of Magic, Touch of Enchantment, The Bride and the Beast, Nobody’s Darling, Charming the Prince, After Midnight and One Night of Scandal.

Wow, I just listed every Teresa book as my favorite. Like I said, she’s consistent.

So here she is, a woman who just thrills me….Teresa!

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1. Tell us about your new book, Some Like It Wicked.
I’m celebrating my return to Regency historical romance and the Scottish Highlands (after doing my two vamp romances) with SOME LIKE IT WICKED. The book features Simon Wescott–one of my baddest bad boys yet! Think of him a sweet and fizzy cocktail with a splash of Sawyer from LOST, a twist of Captain Jack Sparrow and a spritzer of Cary Grant. If you indulge in too much of him, you might wake up with a hangover but I can promise you that you’ll have no regrets! Simon might be a knight in tarnished armor but Catriona Kincaid is determined to make a hero of him. When she goes to Newgate to get him out of jail, she offers him both wealth and freedom if he’ll help her find her missing brother and reunite her clan. But Simon has his eye on a much sweeter–and more sensual–prize. And don’t worry, Bethany! Your ARC is in the mail…really…just like my tax rebate and that prize from the Publishers Clearing House.

2. You’ve written over a dozen books. On your great, informative website, it says you actually have 17 books and over 7 million copies in print. All of them have been national bestsellers. Does that add pressure, or does that make you sit back and say “I’ve made it?”

SOME LIKE IT WICKED will be my 18th book. For me, it’s always been about creating a body of work. My goal from the very beginning was to try to write one “keeper” a year. The greatest thrill will always be finishing a book but a close second has to be glancing over at my bookshelf and seeing my published books all lined up. I think the pressure worsens the longer you write instead of getting easier because you always want to keep challenging yourself and to come up with something that feels fresh to you and your readers. The day I say “I’ve made it” should probably be the day I retire.

3. It has always been said that it is difficult for a woman to carve out a career for herself. What struggles have you faced?

I’m an only child with parents who were in the front row of every school play I was ever in so that gave me a tremendous amount of confidence. I’ve also had the privilege and pleasure of working primarily with women in both of my careers–nursing and writing. I just never paid any attention to anyone who said, “This is impossible” or “You can’t do this.” I do believe there’s a glass ceiling in many professions, including romance writing. But with historical romances and authors like Lisa Kleypas and Julia Quinn now consistently charting as high as #1 and #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, I believe it’s possible to crash right through that ceiling and shoot for the sky. The greatest struggles for me have always been internal ones like perfectionism.

4. You’re a member of several writing groups, most notably, the Romance Writers of America. How important are those groups to you, to aspiring authors, to readers?
I would recommend that anyone serious about a career in romance writing join Romance Writers of America. Some of the benefits include the amazing annual and local conferences, access to networking with editors and agents and the reams of information you get from their monthly publication, website, etc. But by far the most important gift that RWA gave me was my friends! We room together at conferences, we chat for hours on the phone, we have e-mail loops where we laugh and cry over our personal and professional struggles and triumphs. I try to remember that when this life is done, it won’t be the number on a bestseller list I remember but the privilege of knowing such wonderful women.

5. Every single book you write is lyrical and and grande but also very charming. Did it take a lot of time to develop that “voice”? What was the journey like?

Oh, thank you, Bethany! I think “voice” in a writer is very similar to “voice” in a singer. It’s something you’re born with but it’s also influenced by every book and writer you ever read while growing up. I once heard Mary Jo Putney say that she was born with the “natural voice of a 19th century essayist” and I can totally relate to that because I can hear my historical characters speaking with such clarity it’s as if they’re real. Growing up, I always loved books like T.H. White’s THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING so there’s also a strong thread of whimsy in my voice. As far as developing the ability to write sensual tension, I certainly can’t discount the influences of writers like Tom and Sharon Curtis (who also wrote as Laura London) and Judith McNaught. Since I’ve written in almost every sub-genre of romance, I’d have to say my greatest influence in that vein was Jude Deveraux, who switched so effortlessly between historicals and contemps and paranormals in her early career.

6. You were an RN before becoming a full time writer. How difficult was it to balance such a demanding job with another very time consuming, demanding job?

I started writing the same year I started nursing so I worked as a registered nurse for nine years while I was writing. My sneaky little trick was to work the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift on my nursing job and write in the mornings. I’m a morning person so I knew my most creative hours were in the morning. I wrote 6 books by simply writing from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. every weekday. (I had to knock off at 12:30 to watch AS THE WORLD TURNS :)) I retired from nursing to write full-time in 1992. Oddly enough, I was probaby more productive when I was working both jobs because I was so focused. Now that I can wander around all day answering e-mail and glancing into the refrigerator, it seems like I get less done!

7. Finally Teresa, besides writing, what are some other passions you indulge in? And by indulging in those passions, do you feel that helps your writing?

Oh, absolutely! I’ve always felt that if a writer doesn’t have a “life”, eventually the creative well will run dry. My husband and I are big bikers (a la Lance Armstrong, not Evil Knievel). I adore baking and decorating, which also fulfills my incredibly strong creative drive. Like most writers, books and movies are my lifeblood and nothing makes me happier than to settle in for a rainy afternoon with the BBC version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. I’ve always had a passion for all things cultish and quirky a la STAR TREK, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, LORD OF THE RINGS, etc. My current “crushes” of the moment are Colonel Shepherd and Ronon Dex from STARGATE ATLANTIS. I always say I have the best job in the world because I have to study the “beautiful male animal” so I can write him well in my books ;).

Tags: So Thrill Me!, Teresa Medeiros // Add Comment »

Snakes & Arrows: Part Three

No word yet on Snakes & Arrows Live. My “friend” isn’t returning the text I sent. Go figure. 

I did, however, get my airline tickets, which, when added to the cost of my Rush ticket, brings my total expenditures for this show to over $500. Spending that kind of money for three hours of pleasure on a balmy night in your hometown . . . you’d think it was a broad, not a band, I was coming back to see. 

But, with moving to California, the cost of inflation, and the price of gas (and a defiant finger raised at the Prius), that is, for now, the price of entertainment. 

My faithful readers remember last week’s development of S&A beyond the Neil-centered bildungsroman of Tracks 1-3 that watches the tender child come of age in an unfriendly world (with “Far Cry” a more terrestrial protest and “Armor and Sword” a more spiritual one) and then the rush of memories while traveling on “Workin’ Them Angels,” the song that doesn’t attempt to sort out the past, but simply accepts it as part of the “rear-view mirror” landscape. “The Larger Bowl” kicks off the second part of the album, with its Prince-and-the-Pauper comparison cleverly negotiated in the Malay verse form Neil introduced us to, the pantoum. [I’m still looking for any evidence that there’s a double-reference here to a hashpipe. Other than the Hendrix-inspired lead for Track 7, I’m empty-handed and still curious, so if anybody has any leads, let me know.] “Spindrift” is an eerily cool, if somewhat misplaced, track that, in the lyrical and musical style of Vapor Trails, with its meteorological-relationship metaphor (which, actually, reaches all the way back to Presto’s enchanting “Chain Lightning,” when Neil figured out if you can make a hit out of a vague song based on the obsolete Beaufort weather scale [“Force Ten”], then you could mine the glossary of a handy copy of A Field Guide to Weather Systems for song material). 

A cool instrumental later is the album’s centerfold, the Middle East-meets-Middle West “The Way the Wind Blows,” with its careful criticism of politics and global philosophies. Lerxst, aka Guitar Hero Alex Lifeson, follows this song with a short, simple burst of Hope, and, lest we fly too high on this brief happy interlude, we are reminded that Neil is without faith in anything or anybody in the aptly-named “Faithless.” This marks the end of what I see as the second part of the album—the part that looks to the outside world, with its differences and problems, and tries to navigate the issues at stake, with “Faithless” bringing the speaker back into the picture and setting the stage for Part Three. 

“Bravest Face” starts off with the simple hook, “Though we might have precious little/ It’s still precious.” Doesn’t have quite the same effect as, “Nah I ain’t sayin’ she’s a golddigger.” What it does do is remind you that this isn’t glam rock or hip-hop (well, you probably would’ve figured out at least the latter by now).  Rather, this is a real person who may be the world’s greatest drummer admitting that he doesn’t have much of anythng. Sort of makes you wonder which party he would identify with in “The Larger Bowl.” The verse launches into a cool meta-moment with 

I like that song

About this wonderful world

It’s got a sunny point of view

And sometimes I feel it’s true

At least for a few of us 

which, of course, is NOT this song! It’s almost like Neil’s saying, “Look guys, I wish I could write those sappy songs you and I would like to listen to but I can’t. Sorry. Life sucks too much.” 

In the second verse he does the same thing with TV: 

I like that show

Where they solve the murder

That heroic point of view

It’s got justice and vengeance, too

At least so the story goes 

In both instances, though, the focus returns to the “darker,” “messy point of view . . . for so many among us.” The song ends with a real downer pep-line: 

In the whole wide world there’s no magic place

So you might as well rise, put on your bravest face 

Somehow, this part of the album takes me back to Presto, my other Rush favorite. The title track has this cool line: “If I could wave my magic wand/ I’d make everything all right.” Okay, so both songs admit that it doesn’t matter if you’re a rock star, cashier, or Indian Chief, none of us can work our magic. But the 1990 Neil was the optimist-realist: 

don’t ask me

I’m just improvising

my illusion of careless flight 

Now, a decade and a half later, there’s no more illusion, and no careless flight, only a weary stage walk. Few rockers make it to this age intact, and where others have found their comfort in drugs and playmates, Neil built a family that was utterly destroyed through no fault of his own. With no religion or substances to fall back on, what more could he do than rise and put on a brave face? I hate to psycho-analyze Neil (or any celebrity), or try to understand something that I really can’t, but the lyrics beg for an honest connection, a particle of mercy . . .  

“Good News First” is the logical follow-up to “Bravest Face,” and even musically, seems to me almost an extension. The opening line is eager to trump the one from the previous track’s in the anti-hero contest: 

The best we can agree on

Is it could’ve been worse 

I have to confess, this is one of my all-time favorite songs, but, as was the case with the first few times through “Losing It” (Signals), I can’t hold back the tears on this one. Every chorus finds my eyelids trembling out of time to the beat of the drums as Geddy wails: 

You used to feel that way

The saddest words you could ever say

But I know you will remember that day

And the most beautiful words I could ever say 

I’m still not 100% sure what this song is about, other than what’s clearly stated, and maybe that’s why the bridge still makes me lose it every time . . . I don’t know. The electric guitars go away for a few measures and this clear, double-tracked Martin D-12  takes front seat, with some subtle synth-orchestral hits in the background, as the words ride the acoustic surf through the ear canal and into the soul: 

Some would say they never fear a thing

Well I do

And I’m afraid enough for both of us—

For me and you

Time, if nothing else, will do its worst

So do me that favor

And tell me the good news first 

And the guitar solo, a simple, modal affair in the style of Presto but with the achingly simple, solid tonal qualities that are uniquely S&A, finally gives me a break from the heart-wrenching words that, poignant and articulate as they are, can only lead you to the space where words fall short, and only music—in this case some of Rush’s finest—can express the inexpressible.  

This is a tragic, beautiful song that will probably be underrated and misunderstood by most. But some of the best art always goes that way. 

At this point in the album, it should be clear that it’s not Neil’s past and the lost innocence that is a part of growing up that takes center stage—it’s the future and the uncertainty of living the world that dominates the middle of the album that weigh on Neil, weigh on the guitars and drums, and finally on my own heart. 

Thankfully, there is once again an instrumental respite from such a powerful song, and this time, it comes in the form of the dryly funny “Malignant Narcisissm.” Again, I’ll refrain from trying to figure out the etymology of this title, other than to say I think the significance of the song is as a relief from the heavy lyrics, that the title is supposed to make you smile (at least, it’s funnier than “Faithless” or “Good News First”), and the music is short, fun, and—I can’t resist—narcissistic. Especially that last little bend—what a weird, pretentious, and air-headed way to end a song. (I’d like to know who came up with that one.) 

“We Hold On” is another classic Rush closer. Since Hold Your Fire they have this precedent of ending albums with these interesting, even more introspective than usual songs that never get played live: “High Water,” “Available Light” (one of the most beautiful, timeless songs of all time), “You Bet Your Life,” “Everyday Glory,” “Carve Away the Stone,” and “Out of the Cradle,” which, interestingly, ends with the repeated (and re-repeated) line, “Here we come out of the cradle/ Endlessly rocking.” An interesting statement for a rock band recording their first studio album after a six-year (their longest) hiatus. 

But their latest closer is such a well-crafted finish to a solid, rich album! I honestly don’t know how they do it. Each verse begins with “How many times . . .,” which, when repeated at the head of each stanza, really conveys the repetitive nature of life. I love the verse 

      How many times

      Do we chafe against the repetition

      Straining against a fate

      Measured out in coffee breaks 

which was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which is my favorite poem, in case you were wondering).  

Lifeson’s guitar work is interesting, inserting a mode into a riff in the bridge section that, again, is a subtle reminder of the Middle East (and is the first time he’s resurrected that mode since “YYZ”). Otherwise, the song is typical post-Test for Echo—chaotic, heavy, and dissonant, but, in this case, with various atonalities eventually resolving themselves. And the songs last note is this sort of hasty resolution to this simple power chord—almost the admission that there is no good resolution?! Sometimes I’m not sure how far you can take these readings, because obviously the composers do many of these things at a sub- or semi-conscious level. (And here I have to echo the words of my Lit professor Steve Carr: “You should give a writer or character at least as much complexity or believability as you would like others to give to you.” That’s my justification.) But nobody, even the poor bastards who never had Carr to teach them how to read Blake, Swift, and everything else, can’t argue with a well-constructed piece—lyrics and music lead and follow, around again, in a merry dance performed for the listener. And, if you have the benefit of listening live, then the show becomes more of a masque, where the audience becomes part of the dance, feeding the band, becoming the energy they capture to make magic. And who says Neil’s drumsticks aren’t a pair of magic wands? 

Those of you who spent the money on the album itself will appreciate something that listeners who illegally downloaded it will have to imagine. Again, finally, I direct you to Hugh Syme’s artwork. Look at the picture that accompanies “We Hold On,” and you’ll see this car driving toward this house framed by a sunset. It’s an interesting moment of suspension between the lines 

      How many times

      Do we weather out the stormy evenings

      Long to slam the front door

      Drive away into the setting sun 

Clearly, we are meant to perceive the car (which is the same Plymouth used in the artwork for “The Larger Bowl” . . . hmm . . . maybe we can identify where Neil situates himself in that one) as driving back home. Yet it’s also driving into the setting sun, which is ties the theme with the driving-your-car-as-therapy “Workin’ Them Angels” and “Spindrift,” which has these ideas of trying to find someone as the wind blows from the east. Maybe it’s just my recent move out west, maybe it’s the knowledge that Neil moved to California after his tragedy, but there’s an interesting undercurrent of, well, currents that laces the songs of this album together. It’s like you could almost feel the current flowing . . . 

If I could sum up the direction of this album, it’s this: Neil, and the rest of humanity, is born into a world where snakes and arrows await him. Snakes and Arrows is a game, like Chutes and Ladders (or like Life), but snakes and arrows isn’t a fun game where somebody wins—it’s real life. And there are times in the game to hit the road and run like hell, other times to put on your bravest face, other times for introspection, but at the end of the day, each of these “times” is defined by the currents, tides, fates, what have you, of something we can’t control.  

Like the solitary pine

On a bare wind-blasted shore

We can only grow the way the wind blows 

And, like that pine, regardless of the season, at the end of the day, we must hold on, while we can . . .

Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush // Add Comment »

I have a list of blogs I go on to every single morning. I have ten blogs that I consistently read and the one that has been the most fun, consistent, and entertaining for me has got to be Kristin Nelson’s PubRants. Her’s is the first I read the minute I get my computer fired up and logged onto the Internet. I feel oddly out of balance when I can’t check to read her daily musings; she’s just become a part of my routine.

It’s also funny to note that a lot of the authors I’ve interviewed have either come directly from her blog or have some sort of six-degrees-of-seperation thing going from her blog. I got extremely interested in both Hank Phillippi Ryan and Sherry Thomas after reading just their query on Kristin’s blog - and have since become big fans of them both. I first heard about agent Nathan Bransford from Kristin’s blog - whom I interviewed just a few weeks ago. I became aware of agent Rachel Vater’s blog which led me to Jeaniene Frost and Rachel Vincent, two other authors I have interviewed and adore.

Kristin is a lovely woman and probably won’t ever admit it, but her blog is an extremely powerful resource. It’s exceptionally clever and the tone with which she writes just makes you feel like you’re speaking to a friend.

And she knows her job! It’s so blazingly apparent that the only thing I’ll say about her amazing talent is this: the minute I get my novel done, she’s the first one I’m querying.

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Associated Content listed you as one of the top ten blogs for writers. Reading your blog (pubrants.blogspot.com) it’s easy to see why. So let’s start there:

It’s an incredibly daunting task - especially when you have so many other tasks to get done in a day - to think up a good entry, write it, edit it, reread it, post it, and then moderate it. Yet you have a new post up every day. Where do you find the discipline?

I have to laugh because I imagine quite a few of my readers would raise an eyebrow over the “editing” part. I’m notorious for doing a blog in 15 minutes and posting. Sometimes the editing part doesn’t really happen until the next day when I reread a posted entry and see my “oops” on the page as clear as day. That’s part of why I can blog though. I literally will only spend 20 minutes on an entry and post. I do try and give it a quick reread and edit for coherency and grammar but I’m only human.

Your blog is incredibly successful. Your topics range of query letters to editors to marketing to your authors. Is there anything, however, you won’t talk about.

I won’t talk about projects in process—as in currently under submission awaiting editor response. I won’t talk about anything that is confidential to a client. When I post a submission letter or a client’s original email, it’s always with his or her permission. When I’m having an issue with an editor, I don’t talk about that. I keep my entries to more general things about publishing or issues that are universal.

We live in a strange and amazing time right now. There’s a lot of entertainment at our disposal - more than ever. But the number of people sitting down to read a book are, unfortunately, declining. So my first question, what’s your take on the current atmostphere of reading and books? And second, what do you think that we, as an industry, can do to promote more reading - especially from young people?

The trick is getting young people excited to read so you have to allow them to read what they want—even if it’s not on an “approved” list. If a young person wants to read a comic book or a graphic novel, let them do it. If a young person is falling behind in reading class, let him or her choose the book to read so reading can become exciting again. As parents, teachers, adults in young people’s lives, we need to be caught reading ourselves. The good majority of adults only read something like 2 or 4 books a year (or less I’ve heard). No wonder kids aren’t reading. They aren’t seeing it modeled.

People don’t go into publishing for the high income potential, but you’ve done amazingly well. What’s a splurge for you?

A nice vacation is a splurge! If a sale was particularly spectacular, my hubby and I do keep a nice bottle of champagne on hand so we can pop it open and toast the good sale. Sometimes I’ll do a nice dinner out to celebrate. For the most part, we are pretty sedate. The agency is growing and there are a lot of costs associated with growth so we tend to be rather cautious and budget conscious. The agency is still too young to let me loosen up too much.

Tell me how Nelson Literary Agency first began.

I worked for another agent before heading out on my own. At my first agency, we did almost nothing but nonfiction and I knew I wanted to handle fiction—genre stuff to boot! When I brought that up with the agent I was working for, she didn’t get the appeal of romance, SF&F, and children’s etc. It just simply wasn’t her cup of tea and she really didn’t want her agency to grow in that direction. I can certainly understand that so I went out on my own after attending the Denver Publishing Institute in 2002. I highly recommend that program by the way.

And you’re not only a graduate of that institute, but you also graduated from the University of Missouri in Columbia. Did you have ambitions to become a novelist yourself?

I also have my Masters from Purdue University where I studied creative writing under National Book Award nominee Patricia Henley. So I guess I did when I started but I just love the business side of it so much. I’m not saying that I’ll never dabble again on the creative side of things and write a novel but I don’t see it happening at this moment in time.

Would you ever consider writing a nonfiction book? Perhaps something like Janet Evanovich did with her How I Write book. Yours could be How I Agent.

Interesting question but nonfiction isn’t my passion so right now I don’t see it happening. I know enough to never say never though!

As an agent, you deal with contracts, lots of contracts. What prepared you for that?

Every day I thank goodness for my contracts manager Paula Breen. She’s the former director of contracts at Random House and that lovely lady has taught me everything I know. She’d laugh though because oddly enough, I’ve taught her a thing or two as well. When she tells me that one of my requests is unlikely to get fulfilled (and that it’s not “normal” for a contract), I just ask “why not?” Funny enough, those questions have led us to have interesting discussions with various publishers and we have gotten some unique and special things in our contracts.

To switch gears a moment, let’s talk about writers. You deal with them while they’re aspiring, while they’re querying, while they’re editing, while they’re published, while they’re marketing. You see a writer at her worst and best. To you, what is the most fundemental thing a person can possess to become a published writer?

Perseverance and talent. Perseverance because talent isn’t always recognized right off. But also the good sense to move on when a project isn’t happening and to focus on the next one because that project might be the one to open up all the doors. I just see writers beating that dead horse to death again—if you know what I mean. If project 1 doesn’t land you an agent, write project two. You are only going to grow as a writer.

Is there anything you wish people would stop doing in query letters addressed to you?

It’s not about what I would wish them to stop doing. It’s more a question of what I wish they were doing! Just recently I did a whole series of pitch paragraph workshops on my blog. If more writers could learn how to nail that pitch, it would make a huge difference for me and for them. So my advice? Read back cover copy of the books in your genre to get a sense of the rhythm. Then discover your plot catalyst that moves your story forward. This catalyst almost ALWAYS happens within the first 30 pages of any given novel. Nail that in your pitch. No need to summarize that rest of the novel. The pitch is just meant to be a teaser to encourage an agent to ask for sample pages.

Writing a book is a thrilling time, but being the one to discover that precious gem in the slush pile can be just as amazing. What has been a particularly touching time for you in your career thus far?

The big sales are always fantastic and exciting but it’s the projects I love but then take forever to sell but then finally do that give me the most pleasure! Another is being proven right. For example, I shopped an author a couple of years ago and just about every publisher passed with some excuse or another. And now she’s building into a big success. Aha! I was right, and I love that feeling.

Finally, Kristin, though the question is cliche, I’m asking it because I know your answer won’t be. What advice would you like to give all the authors out there who want to and are about to query you?

Nail that pitch paragraph in your query letter. It’s not that hard to grab my attention if your story is cool and original enough and only that pitch paragraph will tell me how it is so. That and check our website for our submission guidelines but that’s a given. Good luck to all the writers out there! May you find speedy representation.

Tags: Agent Kristin Nelson, So Thrill Me! // Add Comment »

It’s hard to be in the publishing industry, in any capacity, and not hear about JA Konrath. I first became aware of him through the blogland. His blog, jakonrath.blogspot.com, is one of the finest writing resources out right now. It’s incredibly factual, extremely helpful, and highly motivating. His take on the publishing industry is spot-on refreshing.

It was through that blog - hearing his “voice”- that I became interested in his books. I picked up Whiskey Sour. Read it in one day. Picked up the next book. And the next. Checked out his website. Super impressivo.

JA is just that kinda guy.

But then I went back and read his books again, though this time I did it as a writer, with a critical eye and careful analysis the whole way through. It’s easy to write pure drama; it’s easy to write pure suspense; it’s easy to write pure comedy. Not so easy to combine all three. JA does it seamlessly.

When I was putting together this series, his was one of the first names on the list.

So here is in, ladies and gentleman…..JA….Konrath….

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You’re a big proponent of self-promotion. You’ve traveled many miles, far and wide, for the sake of your books. You’ve met a lot of booksellers and reached many readers. But as any traveler will tell you, there are certain sacrifices that must be made. Do you have a hard time justifying those sacrifices? Is there guilt at all? If so, how do you handle that?

I make a lot of sacrifices, mostly sheep and goats. Not sure if it helps or not, but it does help to cut down the stress.

Seriously, guilt is a useless emotion. We all have to figure out what is important in our lives, and decide how much time, energy, and money we need to spend to pursue those goals. This isn’t sacrifice. This is balance.

I’ve said recently that we live in a strange but wonderful time right now, with a lot of entertainment at our disposal. But I did read (and I’m sorry, I can’t remember where) that more and more young people are NOT reading. What do you think of the current book climate and how can we, as writers, get more young people to read?

We need to beat a love of literature into them. It took my parents eighteen spankings before I embraced Beverly Cleary. Now I love Henry Huggins, so much that he stood up at my wedding. Bless you, Henry Huggins!

I’ve only asked one other person this question about this topic. And I’m going to ask you it now because you always have such unique perspectives on the book industry. So if I may: I interviewed your friend and colleague Barry Eisler. We talked about brands and how they effect books. He said: “I don’t feel the brand inhibits me (I hope not—I’ve worked hard to develop it); rather, I feel it provides a foundation I can build on.” (http://luxmagz.com/lux_blog)

So first, what do you say your brand is? And second, do you feel the same way Barry does, that branding is a good thing? Or do you think branding is simply another form of boxing someone in and typecasting?

Barry’s a smart guy. And so sexy too. Do you think he likes me? I mean, in a manly way, not with kissing or anything.

Do you think he’d kiss me?

Oh, and that stuff on branding, yeah, I agree. My brand is funny/scary thrillers. They’re written for a specific demographic, and having a brand helps us find each other. It doesn’t inhibit. It magnifies.

Let’s talk about your blog. Your blog is an amazing resource for authors. Have you ever entertained the notion of making it into a book, like Janet Evanovich did with her How I Write book?

It actually already is a book. All you need to do is print up all the blog pages, then paste them together with Elmer’s glue and make a cover with construction paper and crayons. I like red crayons best.

Okay, I’m being silly.

I like blue crayons best.

But truthfully, why sell information that can benefit others? Let them have it for free. That seems like a cooler thing to do.

On your website, you offer your readers several free stories and at one point, you actually had your first novel (and second novel, if I’m not mistaken) available for free download. Now, a friend and I got into the discussion just yesterday about posting art - a person’s life work - on the internet. So my first question: what made you ultimately decide that was something you wanted to do?

As of this writing, there are four novels plus a short story collection available for free download on my website, www.jakonrath.com.

My webmaster and I are working tirelessly to figure out how to also download free beer.

The fact is, people want two things in life: Information and entertainment. A website should offer both, for free. If a site is just a big commercial for your books, it will turn readers off. But give them some laughs, some pointers, and a few hours of good reading, and some of those people will then seek out your books.

Has it helped your sales?

Sure. Probably. Maybe. Tough to tell. I get a lot of email from people who say they downloaded a book, loved it, then went out to buy my other books. But I also get a lot of email from Nigeria, claiming I won the lottery. I don’t even remember buying a lottery ticket. But I’m meeting the guy next week to straighten it all out…

There have been reports about e-readers being impersonal. People like the feel of a book, the smell of a book, the sound of the pages as they turn, over the fast downloads and light-weight portability of the Sony or Kindle. Do you believe people have a different experience when reading on an e-reader as opposed to reading with a book?

The experience isn’t on the page. It’s in the reader’s head.

E-books will rule the day. Sooner than many people think. Remember, we were never going to give up our VCRs, our LPs, or our CDs. Media is eternal. But formats change all the time.

Let’s switch gears a moment. As a writer, you labored so hard for so long, you researched, you rewrote and rewrote. Then…you finally get the sale. Your debut novel, your tenth story, Whiskey Sour, gets sold. How did that change your self-image? Did it validate you?

The thing that changed me most was the money. Now I buy and sell people, ruining their lives, just for my own amusement. Also, I bought a foosball table, and I don’t even like foosball. That’s how decadant and wasteful I’ve become. Just now, I flushed eighty six dollars down the toilet, because I can.

As for validation—it’s nice to be accepted for your efforts, but it’s better to have a good family and a few close friends. And a fast car. A blue one.

Your latest blog entry: Reviewing Reviews (read at jakonrath.blogspot.com) talks about reviews and how they help sell books. But I’m wondering, as a writer, how do reviews, specifically, advanced reviews, make you feel? Are you nervous about them, about how your book will live up to the hype? Are you excited about them, about how many of your peers love and endorse your work?

Everyone has an opinion, and all opinions are valid. I’m happy to be read, happy to be reviewed. If someone doesn’t like my books, it’s my fault that I didn’t resonate with that reader, and I hope they’ll give me another shot.

But getting into this business, or living life, looking for approval or adoration is a one way trip to Zoloftville.

Reviews are a tool to sell more books. Don’t take them personally—the good ones or the bad ones.

Writing is a learning process. You have your early, unpublished works available to the public on your website (jakonrath.com). You can read there why you decided to publish them, but I imagine that your books are like your babies. I for one, think it’s very brave of you. After all, how many writers say their first few manuscripts will never see the light of day. Yet you’re putting your work out there, for all to see and review. Scared????

I’m very scared. I haven’t left my house in twenty years. Also, I save bits of string.

Writers, by their nature, crave acceptance. But the level-headed writers get over that quickly, and realize this is a business.

Some people will like me. Some won’t. None of it really matters, as long as you have a foosball table. And beer.

Finally JA, writing is the best of professions and the worst. What has been a particularly wonderful moment for you?

Every time I write “the end” on a manuscript, I’m the happiest guy on the planet. We don’t have much control over this business, or even our careers. But finishing a book is within my control, and I celebrate every time…

Tags: JA Konrath, So Thrill Me! // Add Comment »

When Brian first proposed a series of close readings on Rush’s new album, Snakes and Arrows, he was actually pretty hesitant about it.  He just wasn’t sure if it would be “too much”.   I told him to shut up and that I would be the judge of that.  :) 

 So I read Brian’s entry…. 

And Brian, as he is known to do, surprised me.  Honestly, what I was expecting was nothing more than a review.  What he gave me was a careful, thought provoking, criticial analysis of a band he very clearly “gets”. 

So I posted that first entry (last weeks Friday Night Rush’s post), and told him to keep going with it.  Make it a series, why donchya?

He, thank heavens, agreed.

Entertaining and lovely, sophisticated and mature, Brian’s latests are meticulous pieces of prose that read as effortless as rainy-day fiction.  It is my pleasure to give you Brian’s second entry in his series-within-a-series:

Snakes & Arrows: Part Two

 I’m still waiting for the Snakes & Arrows Live album I pre-ordered in February. It was supposed to arrive April 15, but because of a lame mailing address error it was lost. I had a new one shipped out by the first week of May, free of charge, but I left for Cali a few days before it was supposed to arrive. 

Rumor has it that one of my friends is hanging on to it “for me.” Great. 

Near the point of despair of ever receiving the CD I paid for half a year ago, last night I finally caved and started listening to the live tracks on YouTube. Big mistake—two of them sounded terrible, and I was too disappointed to listen further. I chalk it up to whatever punk had too much time on his hands—surely Rush couldn’t sound like that. This is their fifth live album, and they still sound amazing…but I’ll take my double-pressed vinyls over some YouTube fan video any day. 

Last week I explored the deeper meanings behind Tracks 1-3 on S&A. My read is that, taken together, they are the most personal “Neil” songs on the album and tell a story. “Far Cry” is the story of how the world affects the young (who in turn shape the world) with some creepy nods to religion, nuclear warfare, and a weak protest to cosmic fatalism—“I can get back on . . .” “Armor and Sword” is the long, wearying ballad of the long, wearying journey to each one’s personal heaven, with each child born heir to “snakes and arrows.” “Workin’ Them Angels” wraps up this coming-of-age theme (a bildungsroman for Neil, for every “child,” and most especially for Western ideology) with a retrospective of the past offered via travel (with wonderful subterranean connections to Peart’s spectacular Ghost Rider). Almost like “Roll the Bones,” with it’s accept-without-understanding “Why are we here? Because we’re here—Roll the Bones,” “Workin’ Them Angels” chalks up numerous inexplicable “razor edge” skirmishes to working “them angels” overtime. (And, presumably, the price for employing them as such is at least time-and-a-half, although Neil leaves this one up to the listener to decide.) 

This week’s focus is what I’ve arbitrarily grouped as Part II of the album, the longest, most diverse, and most musically progressive of the three parts. The first one, “The Larger Bowl,” is most immediately notable for the parenthetical “a pantoum” that follows the title. Since I didn’t know what a pantoum was (I bet you don’t, either), I went to dictionary.com and learned that it is a Malay verse form characterized by lines two and four of one quatrain being repeated as lines one and three of the following quatrain, for as many quatrains as is needed. Neil is a clever guy, and not only is this a chance to bring together Malaysian culture and rock music (how often do you encounter that?), but it syncs nicely with the message—on two levels. 

First, there’s the repetition across different melodies. The effect this creates is unlike any song I’ve heard before—the words are the same, but they are sung differently a few lines later. It’s the performative aspect of a text at work—the words  

   Some are blessed and some are cursed

   The golden one or scarred from birth 

are sung over multiple melodies with multiple phrasings—just as the principle of the prince and the pauper carries from Elizabethan to Middle Eastern to Ancient Greek to American culture. This probably sounds like another over-reading, but before I even decided to look up pantoum I already got the trans-cultural sense from the form of the poetry. 

The other cool way it works is the way the primitive, if I can use that word, Malaysian culture is fused with the progressive rock sound in the body of this song. It’s a weird juxtaposition that took me many listens to get used to it. I admit this was my least favorite song on the album for the first six months and I didn’t really enjoy it until recently. It’s a weird song! But perhaps that’s the point: it’s weird, but eventually we accept it because it’s Rush, and it’s part of our musical world and we’re supposed to accept it, just like we’re supposed to accept the income gap (or insert your other favorite “gap” here) because it’s part of our world. Note the artwork, with the shiny Plymouth rear-end opposite the little tin toy-car (which is cleverly reflected in the Plymouth’s chrome bumper). 

Neil Peart and Hugh Syme . . . the best lyrical/artistic collaboration in rock music history. 

One more thing about this song: it is, for the most part, the simplest Rush song I’ve ever heard, in musical terms. It has four chords (and they’re pretty typical ones), a simple acoustic guitar pattern, and has a beat so simple your mom could play it on the steering wheel—definitely a  contrast to the first three songs, which rock out in various ways. But Lerxst, the guitar hero who’s been hiding out for the last fifteen years or so, uses this drab landscape to bust out his first real guitar solo since I was in the third grade. We’re not talking “Free Will” or “Tom Sawyer” here, but still, the way it builds from this simple pentatonic into the shrill crunch of pull-offs and pinch harmonics is both a reminder of the contrasts that fill this song and the building, the moving on, of Rush, as they take the elements of their musical past—very evident in the first three songs—and move on to really new material. 

Well, almost. There’s one exception, and it’s track five. I rarely—very rarely!—criticize Rush, but here I have a minor bone to pick with our Canadian buddies, and that’s the placement of this song. It doesn’t belong after “The Larger Bowl,” and probably doesn’t even belong on this album. The dissonant, heavy guitars sound like Lifeson on “Vapor Trails” and the metaphorical lyrics using a natural phenomenon that nobody’s heard about to describe a relationship between Neil and somebody were the defining feature on VT. Not that it isn’t a cool song—any song that compares ocean “spray that’s torn away” to a feeling between two people, with or without the haunting, bassy guitar riffs, is enough to get my vote. But the whole musical composition, the lyrics, and the feel make me think this was a mid-album project between VT and S&A, and the last place this song belongs is after “The Larger Bowl.” Who knows. Maybe someone higher up made a dumb choice and screwed the bandmates over. Maybe they couldn’t figure out where to put it and felt that sticking it in between a pantoum and an instrumental would make the listener feel as uneasy as Neil claims to feel in the song. 

Moving along, the next track is “The Main Monkey Business,” and since it is an instrumental and I’ve never heard any official explanation for the goofy title, I will refrain from trying to make connections that even I will admit are tenuous, at best. Instead, I’ll say a few things about the first instrumental from Rush in ten years. 

1. This song rocks. Not in the style of “A Passage to Bangkok,” but more in the vein of those cool tribal songs from the late 80s / early 90s, a la “Mystic Rhythms” and “Scars.” (Perhaps there was some inside joke about monkeys that somehow got this jungley song the MMB title?)
2. It is the longest and most impressive instrumental on the album, and the longest instrumental in almost thirty years! (Last studio-recorded instrumental over six minutes was “La Villa Strangiato,” off Hemispheres (1978).)
3. The highlight of the song is right around the 1:20 mark—that cool little bass drum/bass register fill. It makes my subwoofers buzz every time, and makes the dog at the end of the street start barking when I drive past.

Next, we have “The Way the Wind Blows.” It’s hard not to spend a whole blog just talking about this one, since it is probably the most significant song on the whole album. Notice the following, as I offer you another numbered list: 

1. It’s the middle track on the album, placed dead center.
2. It’s bracketed by instrumentals, which directs the listener that much more to the lyrics. (It’s the only time Rush has ever done this.)
3. At the show last year, they played this really powerful video, and the audience was hushed for the whole song. Usually the audience will cheer for the cool drum fill, or the guitar solo, or Geddy’s weird on-stage Jewish dancing while playing the bass, but this song had the audience spellbound.

The song’s message is open and obvious: it attacks the war, it attacks prejudice, and it attacks people on both sides who would readily “attack”—verbally or physically—someone they perceive as different from them. 

   Now it’s come to this

   It’s like we’re back in the Dark Ages

   From the Middle East to the Middle West

   It’s a world of superstition 

   Now it’s come to this

   Wide-eyed armies of the faithful

   From the Middle East to the Middle West

   Pray and pass the ammunition 

The whole song draws these eerie parallels between the two worlds, the Middle East and the “Middle West.” The fighting is an obvious comparison, but some later lines, like 

   Hollow speeches of mass deception

   . . . Like crusaders in unholy alliance 

could just as easily refer to a dictator and his allies as it could to President Bush and his allies in the War on Terror. Unlike a lot of angry musicians, this isn’t a caustic, irreverent rip on Bush; it’s a careful, poignant comparison of two societies that are perceived—and correctly so, on some levels—as being very different. 

It seems to leave them partly blind

And they leave no child behind

While evil spirits haunt their sleep

While shepherds bless and count their sheep 

The obvious reference to “No Child Left Behind” has disturbing connotations to the education systems in the Middle East we read about that teach children to hate the US. And shepherds may conjure up images of some impoverished Afghani in the foothills, but knowing Neil’s dislike of televangelists (and networking it with some earlier lines in the album), the Western “shepherds” are likely preachers who bless the leaders of the war and “count their sheep”—look at the size of their congregations, those who follow them, the way a military leader might size up his army. 

The anti-chorus, the soft, gentle, “We can only grow the way the wind blows,” is a protest to needless fighting. You can’t change the tide, you can’t go against the direction of natural elements. It’s not a song about peace, per se, it’s a plea for sensible, thoughtful action—and a not so gentle criticism on Western hypocrisy. 

The bluesy Hendrix-style lead riffs are both ultra-cool and evocative of an earlier time—a time when the US was putting a few men on the moon and thousands more in Vietnam. Is it a coincidence that Lifeson’s first bluesy riffs since “A Farewell to Kings” appear on this song? 

I think not! 

Lest you get depressed by the war, and the dark nature of Neil’s lyrics, you shouldn’t turn the album off now, o faithful listener (not that you’d even think of that). You get a break in the form of another Rush first—“Hope,” the two-minute instrumental that features Alex playing an acoustic guitar that is folksy and progressive at the same time—sort of a Michael Hedges or Doyle Dykes kind of sound. Don’t just treat this as an interlude, a pee break, because this is a really cool song that enriches the generally depressing album. If the title doesn’t lift you up, then the liner note, which begins with the familiar, “All songs composed by Lee and Lifeson, with lyrics by Peart,” and continues, “except ‘Hope,’ composed and performed by Lerxst Lifeson, all by his own self,” should be enough to bring a smile to the face of the most depressed emo. (Which brings up an interesting question: Do emos listen to Rush??  . . . Stand by,) 

“Hope” is very, well, hopeful, with a real pentatonicky sound in the dropped-D (perhaps DADGAD?) tuning. It was performed live and will be done again, and it is the only time I’ve ever seen my guitar hero alone on stage. It was a strange, exciting sight, and is over shortly after it’s begun . . . as hope often is. 

Track nine, the last one in my series today, is “Faithless,” and follows “Hope” in it’s title—but in an anti-parallel way. The bridge is this slightly morbid 

I don’t have faith in faith

I don’t believe in belief

You can call me faithless

But I still cling to hope

And I believe in love

And that’s faith enough for me 

If anybody fails to see the numerous biblical references in this album, you should really consider giving your Rush tickets to somebody more deserving. I mean, seriously, for an atheist, Neil has more biblical allusions than Billy Graham on a Crusade Reunion Tour. Faith, hope, and love . . .  

The cool thing about this song is the Middle Eastern feel to the music—the mode of the lead guitar provides a superb backdrop to the lines  

Fools and thieves are well-disguised

In the temple and marketplace 

And the chorus? Each line is a nature simile punctuated with a “I will quietly resist.” (Hmm. Reminds me of a song . . .) Fittingly, the artwork showcases a Middle Eastern-looking desert (how a desert can look Middle Eastern is beyond me, but it does) with a single flower blooming in the middle of the night. 

   Like a flower in the desert

   That only blooms at night

   I will quietly resist 

And thus ends the eclectic second part of the album—from “The Larger Bowl” which takes Neil out of his world and throws two different worlds together, and takes Lifeson out of the daiquiri business and has him ripping solos again and bumps over “Spindrift” to some sweet instrumentals bracketing the album’s theme, to a final song that, however briefly, moves you into a soundscape that is semi-Middle Eastern. And, interestingly, subliminally juxtaposes the faithful jihadists that we Westerners have come to associate with the Middle East (however unfairly) with the utterly faithlessness of Neil, who will, once again, take front seat in Part III. 

Stay tuned, my good readers, as I prepare for the last S&A blog . . . and as I continue to hunt down the elusive live album in the spindrift of the Postal Service . . .

Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush // Add Comment »

Mark Henry has the kind of personality that just dwarfs everyone by comparison. He’s so alive! So vibrant! So bold!!! Funny as hell. He took photos of my camera crew as they were taking photos of him! He makes me laugh and you know what they say…..If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything….
Dying is easy…comedy is hard. In your novel Happy Hour of the Damned, you do both. Tell me about the evolution of your book, from story idea to full fledged Barnes and Nobles shelf holder.

I’d just read David Wellington’s Monster Island for fun and was really turned on by his sentient zombie villain. I think that was when the idea hit. What if instead of your regular rotting shambling zombie, you had Samantha from Sex and the City (or any other snarky chick lit-ty character) drop dead and wake up a zombie. What would happen?

I wrote a short story that introduced Amanda Feral, ad-exec and flesh-eating ghoul. It was called An Acquired Taste and was really poorly written but still fun. Shortly after, I attended the Willamette Writer’s Conference in Portland and went to one of those group pitch sessions, not thinking that I had anything. But the timing must have been right, because that editor asked for pages (which I hadn’t written) and then kept asking as I cranked the novel out. I think it took a total of 8 weeks to complete the entire first draft, which–naive as can be–I submitted. I’d never written a novel before, so I had no clue how writers poured over ever detail in revisions, or I would have done that.

A month after I’d submitted the complete manuscript, I got an email from the editor reporting that she was excited about the book and was sending it on to her senior editor. It was about that time that I started my agent hunt–after some prodding from an author friend. I hit the bookstore and went through anything resembling my mash up of genres, scoured the acknowledgment for names and then e-queried like a fiend. Jim McCarthy from Dystel and Goderich responded promptly with interest, read the manuscript and offered representation. When that call came in I thought I was going to have a heart attack. It’d only been a couple of days since I queried. I signed on and boy was it a good decision. Jim had Happy Hour sold within a week (back then it was called The Undead Socialite’s Guide to Nightlife, in case your readers like a little trivia).

I seem to hear your name everywhere! The Fangs, Fur and Fey Community especially like you. In this current climate of Facebook celebrity and self-promotion, how much does the internet help or harm a career?

It’s true. I’m ubiquitous at this point. I’m a moderator at Fangs, Fur and Fey and a founder of the League of Reluctant Adults. I blog, Livejournal, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. A pal of mine recently set up a yahoo fan group thing called The Glamazombies, it’s so active my new mail alert is beeping like a busy signal.

Whether it hurts or helps, I don’t know. I suspect anything will help. Bloggers are getting book deals on the strength of their content and voice, so why not us a journal entry to reach out to potential readers. It’s also great fun and I love to chat whether it’s online or in person. So if you ever see me hanging out somewhere, don’t hesitate to come up to me.

You’re the co-founder for The South Sound Algonquin writer’s group in Washington. Can you tell me about that?

When I made the decision to write full-time, I took a course at a local community college to kind of find some direction, or something–I didn’t really know why at the time. It turned out that the course was really more of a critique group and not very well run, though there were a few people in the class that were serious about their writing and we continued on our own. The South Sound Algonquins are up to seven members now and we meet weekly to read pages, brainstorm and critique each other’s work.

It’s kind of funny to note, some of the most irreverent and potentially offensive scenes from Happy Hour were read aloud and hotly debated in a local family coffee and gelato shop.

How do you balance being a co-founder, writing, being a member of other organizations, and then just being a husband? Have you had to make any particularly tough sacrifices for your writing?

Tough one. I owe it all to my wife, really. I’m able to write full-time because she was smart enough to choose a career in banking. When I gave up the day job (psychotherapy), I took on the household responsibilities and freed up a ton of time to write. I was lucky. If I hadn’t hit on the right idea, I’d be pursuing a career in life-coaching right now.

As far as sacrifices, there was that goat. You won’t tell anyone will you?

Most people don’t get into publishing for the high income potential, yet you’ve done and continue to do really well. When you were writing Happy Hour of the Damned, did it feel like you were handling lightning? Did you have an inkling that it would explode the way it did?

I knew I had a good idea but whether the timing was right, I had no clue. Zombie movies were bursting out of Hollywood and yet I hadn’t seen a ton of zombie fiction, let alone zombie chick lit (I’ve yet to see one since). I was counting on people being ready for an anti-heroine in urban fantasy, as well as, as a aggressively comedic voice. I’m just glad it paid off.

Your peers all like you. I had the great fortune of meeting you at the Romantic Times Convention and I’ll be honest, it was hearing all that praise from other writers that made me want to meet you. And you didn’t disappoint! You’re as funny and charming and intelligent as everyone said you were. In writing, where you’re mostly alone with your thoughts, how important is it for you to have that interaction with other authors?

Thanks. But, whether they like me or not, I don’t know–I’ve seen sneers. Actually, everyone I’ve met has been wonderful and very open and supportive. It’s immensely important to make these connections because it’s a lonely job. Probably one of the reasons my writing group is so important to me, as are my group blogs (League of Reluctant Adults and Fangs, Fur and Fey), is that feeling of being a part of something. But it’s a double-edged sword. Those same outlets can be my biggest distractions from writing.

Being a debut anything is hard, but especially so for a writer. What has been an especially thrilling, exciting moment for you?

The sale of the series was huge. I paced my house for hours calling everyone I knew to let them know what happened–seemingly TO me. I’d almost removed myself from it like I’d won the lottery rather than written something that people liked. I seriously couldn’t believe Kensington liked it enough to buy it (and two more). It was astounding. About a month later when my agent called about the Showtime network optioning the book for a possible series, it was exactly the same. I was freaking out.

Tell me about your next book Mark.

Road Trip of the Living Dead continues the adventures of Amanda Feral, as she and her undead friends travel across country on a–you guessed it–road trip to get some closure with her dying mother and escape from Gil’s homicidal client. Along the way, the gang runs into some flighty Lovecraftian elder gods, horny skinheads, a masochist named Fishhook and a sexy werewolf with a little necrophilia in mind–but don’t let that gross you out, Amanda’s only kinda dead.

This one is much more linear in construction and a ton funnier. While the plot may push people’s buttons regarding family relationships, there’s enough high octane action and fiendish snark to keep readers of Happy Hour of the Damned satisfied.

Finally, on the road to publication, there are of course, many paths to take. Have you been happy with yours so far, or are there things you wish you would have known before you did them? Can you tell me them, so that other aspiring writers can learn from them?

Mine was so backward, which really fits my personality, but doesn’t seem to resonate for many aspiring writers. I garnered the interest of an editor based on an idea and without having written a word of the novel. I was sort of prodded along to complete Happy Hour and then ultimately had to play catch up and get an agent to negotiate a deal for me.

I can’t imagine it going any other way. It was fate.

I hadn’t even been writing for a year, before the novel sold. I’d never written a novel before this one, either. It’s been amazing though. I guess the best advice I could give would be to pursue writing and publication as though you couldn’t fail. Completely remove that doubt from the equation. I did.

Tags: Mark Henry, So Thrill Me! // Add Comment »

Toni sent me both of her books with the nicest inscription in each. She has gorgeous penmanship. She is a gorgeous lady. Her books are lovely. They made me laugh out loud, and I never, EVER laugh out loud when reading. Toni is just a gritty, down-to-earth, funny lady. With great joy….T to the O to the N. I.

Tell me about your road to publication.

Eleventy quibillion years ago, when I was in fourth grade, I wanted to be a writer. I wrote terrible poems, which I think only got worse as I got older and the teenage years descended like locusts, leaving only WOE and ANGST. By college, I had brief bouts of sanity, whereupon I attempted architecture, business and then journalism.

In spite of a fine history of liking to eat and wanting a roof over my head, I still wanted to be a writer.

I ran into a former high-school teacher, who’d also been a librarian, who asked me the tough question: why wasn’t I submitting for publication? Have you ever run into one of your former teachers? THEY ARE SCARY. It’s like they can retroactively fail you or their eyes shoot truth serum rays or something, and I did not want to stand there in front of my two-year-old and explain I hadn’t submitted anything because I was a big honking chicken. So I took her advice and started writing and submitting to the local paper.

Over the years, and we are not discussing how many, maybe more than two but less than a hundred, I wrote more articles than I can remember or count for newspapers and magazines. I started querying and submitting (and getting sales) at national magazines, but my real love was fiction. I tried my hand at a novel, but it was a spiraling mess, and my husband could see how frustrated I was. (And EVERY husband out there just substituted the words “complete raving loon” for “frustrated.”) So, being a very wise man who liked to wake up breathing in the mornings, he encouraged me to go back to school for some writing classes.

For a while, I was lured to the dark side (screenwriting), and landed an agent, and did a lot of stuff that was almost-but-not-quite what I wanted to do.

But then, I had this idea. An idea for this funny, take-no-prisoners kind of southern woman, who loves deeply and means well, in spite of the chaos she causes, and I wanted to write that story and be true to that story. So I quit screenwriting. (I had had some offers if I’d move out there. I was not going to move the family.) I had a hard time convincing my agent that yes, I was serious. I was quitting to write a novel. (I think she still thinks I am going to change my mind.) But I quit, and I started writing Bobbie Faye. I wrote a quick draft in script form, because I was used to it, then a friend showed a friend, the lovely Rosemary Edghill, who said, “Send me some chapters.” And I did. She gave me some notes (smart, smart woman), and taught me how to write the kind of synopsis an agent needs (”I did not think you could make this worse,” she said of one draft of that synopsis, “but you did.” That’s because I am an overachiever. It took a lot of tries before I figured out that writing a marketing synopsis is a lot like writing a non-fiction article, and that I could do.) Next thing I know, I’d signed with an agent and Rosemary had pitched it to and editor, who made an offer, and St. Martin’s Press bought that book and the next two based on three sample chapters and a synopsis. Almost twenty years from the point where I saw my old high-school English teacher and she’d said, “Why aren’t you submitting for publication?”

(Thank you, Mrs. Ross.)

Your first book, Bobbie Faye’s Very (very very very) Bad Day was a big success. I read a lot of great reviews about it on the blogosphere. When you were first writing it, did you feel like you were on to something special? Did you think it would be so well received?

Well, thank you for the compliment, and last question first, did I think it would be so well received? Dear heavens, no. I was just seriously praying that people weren’t going to be lined up saying, “You killed TREES for THIS?” and demanding my computer be burned. I AM NOT KIDDING. I had nightmares. I was writing an over-the-top kick-ass female heroine with two strong males in a chase across the southern Louisiana swamps, the kind of woman who inadvertently sort of blows things up, and I had no idea if anyone would be able to relate to her. But she’s the kind of woman who’s having to deal with multiple demands, under strict time constraints, with very little in the way of money or resources or help, and with a huge dollop of bad luck, and somehow, I think I struck a nerve. So many of us have to juggle marriages and jobs and kids and families and crises and drama and trauma and money issues, so I think we want to root for someone who gets to be the hero (or heroine, in this case).

I did feel like I was onto something, but I am the same exact person who said, “Nobody will ever buy a bunch of rocks with faces painted on them,” and “who on earth needs a cell phone that does more than just place a call?” We don’t let me play the stock market for a good reason, so I had no clue if what I thought about the book had any merit.

Some of the biggest names in publishing have blurbed your books. People like Allison Brennan, Harley Jane Kozak and Gayle Lynds. First, can you tell me how your story came to be in those people’s hands? And second, to me, nothing is more motivating and inspiring than being able to hear from professional peers. What was your reaction when you saw all those wonderful things these authors had said about your work?

I met all three as a direct result of my involvement with the INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS, which is a young, but extremely fine, organization for thriller writers and fans. Gayle is classy and smart and very wry, and I want to be her when I grow up. I got to know Harley better through a group blog, THE LIPSTICK CHRONICLES, which is one of the best group blogs around, and I loved her humor in Dating Dead Men, which was her first out at the time. (Dead Ex is out now, and is very funny, go get it.) Harley would later be my mentor for Killer Year (see below), and I think she’s amazing. I got to know Allison Brennan a little better from another great group blog, MURDER SHE WRITES, and then I met her at ThrillerFest. She’s brilliant and smart and funny, and did I mention brilliant? (Her latest, Tempting Evil just came out… get thee to a store now. She writes dark thrillers, and she’s fantastic.) We’ve become good friends in spite of the fact that she is STILL more brilliant than me on her worst day than I’ll ever be on my best, AND she’s funny AND she’s nice. It was either become good friends or have her killed, because seriously, did I mention the brilliance? Geez.

As for my reaction… you know how every once-in-a-while, you have that horrible I’M NAKED IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS AND THERE’S AN EXAM feeling? Well, me either. But I’ve HEARD some people have those and they’re gut-twisting scary and embarrassing. Because not all of us are Angelina Joile. (Okay, an aside here. A note to Angelina: I am asking you, for the love of God, look ugly for one day. One. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. You are six months pregnant with twins, for crying out loud, do something like bloat a little. Pretend to have a zit. I don’t care what, just give the rest of us a little help here.) ANYWAY, you’re dreaming you’re naked and NOT Angelina Joile and when you wake up, you feel an absolute sense of relief that you just dodged a bullet? Well, when authors of this caliber not only take the time to read, but to give such positive feedback, there’s that same sense of overwhelming gratitude, because there is always the fear that you haven’t accomplished what you set out to do.

You contributed a story to Killer Year. That anthology was extremely well received as well. So let’s stop here and magnify this a moment. First, how did you come to be involved in Killer Year?

When I first had the sale, it was a euphoric feeling, followed almost immediately by abject fear because people are going to read my stuff and I cannot stand there and explain that I wrote that sentence when my kid was sick or there was a hurricane–it has to stand on its own, and it’s a truly terrifying realization. Rob Gregory Browne told me about a group of debut authors banding together to basically be a support group and to try to figure out the challenges of the first year, of all the marketing stuff and publishing lingo and secret handshakes (still haven’t deciphered those). Rob and I have been friends for… I dunno, more than a dozen years, and he’d won the prestigious Nicholl contest, so I trusted his judgment. (And he’s a damned fine writer–his debut Kiss Her Goodbye is flat spooky awesome.) Among the leaders of that group were J.T. Ellison, Brett Battles and Jason Pinter. We ended up with thirteen as our final tally, and we also ended up liking each other tremendously. But where I think we were really lucky… and luck had a major role in this… is that everyone was a terrific writer. So many of the group got prestigious reviews and have been nominated for or won national awards, and you just can’t plan something like that. Not long after we formed the group, the ITW adopted us and gave us mentors (and I asked for and got Harley). We became very good friends, supporting and learning from one another as we each went through our debuts.

Was writing the story for the anthology different from writing your fiction?

They wanted me to write a SHORT story. I can’t even write short answers for this interview. I was terrified and I kept procrastinating and JT kept asking me where was my story? And I did not have a clue. Until about two days before the deadline, and I suddenly dreamed the entire story and wrote it in one afternoon. Ironically, I knew it would work immediately, because the broken time frame really is part of the point, and there’s an allusion built into the title of the piece that resonates all the way through and gave it depth. It’s a Bobbie Faye story, but told in a sort of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino-esque way. And if that didn’t just scare the hell out of you… heh. Mostly, I realized I loved writing short stories, because they allow a freer reign and imaginative structure where all of the elements of the story are playing more than one role, and that becomes an interesting challenge.

Tell me a typical writing day for you.

Wake up, chaos, chaos, solve problems, internet surfing. Open the file. Phone calls, email, more chaos, blogging, blog-hopping, then suddenly realize how that scene should work, go back to the file and start. Write, write, oh look, something shiny, or worse, CHOCOLATE IS IN THE HOUSE CALLING ME. Back to the book, TWITTER, book. Wedged in there somewhere is eating, trying to exercise. I tend to stop in the early evenings and spend time with my husband. Then I get serious about writing and it will flow until the early morning hours. I’m a night owl, so the daytime / first hours are my least creative and get taken up by friends and business, but the night? I’m writing.

You’re a wife, mother of two, and have a double masters degree. Were you writing at the time you were pursuing the degrees? If so, how did you manage to balance it all?

Technically I’m something like nine hours away from that double masters in screenwriting and philosophy of film (because why stop at ONE underpaid degree when you can have TWO). I’d have to pass a French exam and my entire memory of all of the French I took years ago is comprised of “merci beaucoup” and “mais non.” I was not only writing at the same time as the degrees, I was helping to run our very small construction company (think guerrilla warfare, especially through two very bad economic slumps here), and I did my dead level best to attend all of the kids’ activities. I have absolutely no idea how I balanced that. I think it was adrenaline, a complete lack of sleep, and caffeine. I have no idea how the rest of the family put up with me.

Being a debut writer is thrilling and exciting and nervewracking all at once. What has been an exceptionally wonderful time for you thus far?

There are so many… the friendships, the supportive people I’ve met. Getting a letter from a fan, because honestly, nobody has to buy my book. Nobody has to take their limited free time and choose it from the library and then read it, so it’s an honor if they do, and when someone takes that extra moment to tell me something they liked, it’s a real high. And I think being able to walk into the bookstore and see it on the shelves will always remain sharp and sweet.

I see on your great website, tonimcgeecausey.com, that you have a list of your appearances. You just attended the Romantic Times conference this past April and you’ll be going to the Romance Writers of America conference in July. How important are those conferences to you? Do you recommend all beginning authors go to conferences?

Conferences are terrific, and I’d highly recommend them. I feel like I’ve learned so much, because it’s one of the rare times in a writer’s life where you’re in the same room or able to listen in on panels of a lot of other published writers and learn. I’ve made so many permanent friendships as a result of attending a conference, and many times we’ve helped each other through this publishing process. I am not a natural extrovert (no one ever believes that, I don’t know why), so it’s a little intimidating for me to go to a place with a lot of other people, but I always come home recharged and having learned so much, I’m very glad to have participated.

Can you tell me about the new book due this May?

It had been a whole freaking month since Bobbie Faye Sumrall had blown up anything or been shot at, and that was almost a new record. Then her diva cousin Francesca waltzed up to where she manned the gun counter in Ce Ce’s Cajun Outfitter and Feng Shui Emporium and everything just went to hell. Fast.

Francesca’s mom has disappeared with exceptionally valuable diamonds swiped from Francesca’s dad (difficult marriage) so of course Francesca broadcast to every insane psycho (family included) that Bobbie Faye could recover the ersatz family jewels.

Accused of one man’s murder, Bobbie Faye’s on the run as an unintentional Pied Piper to a rabid band of thieves. She has to find the diamonds, figure out the motives of the dead sexy FBI agent who’s pressing her for more than just the jewels, all while racing to side-step her steamy (and steamed) detective ex-boyfriend before the deadline arrives and the diamonds disappear.

Bobbie Faye Sumrall is back in fighting form in this second installment of crazy, wacky adventure through Cajun country.

And your books sold in a three-book series. What can we expect in the third book?

Next May… right now, we’re on a one-a-year plan.

Finally, Toni, you’re a published author. Is it everything you dreamed it would be?

It’s so very much more. It’s more fun… it’s harder, but then, good things usually are, and hard work makes the joy of seeing the book that much greater.

Tags: So Thrill Me!, Toni McGee Causey // Add Comment »

The show is now less than one month away. For those of you who are excited, well, you should be. For those of you who aren’t, I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve your readership…

Today I’m going to drop the usual How Did Rush Affect Me This Week theme that seems to creep into my writing and focus on the latest: Snakes and Arrows. Now, why should S&A, or my literary-musical critique, be of interest to you? Well, according to my source (www.2112.net/powerwindows), the current tour is “quite a bit more varied . . . 9 of the 13 tracks from the new album were played live (the most songs [Rush] ever performed in support of a new album . . . ). The paragraph goes on to list some really impressive, er, somebody-has-no-life statistics about what makes this tour so unique. If that stuff interests you, then great.

But I know you’re all just dying to hear what I have to say about S&A! (And you know I’ve got tons to say!) There are, of course, a number of outstanding Rush albums that have been produced over the years. Highlights include Moving Pictures (1981), the “Sum of the Parts Album,” as I think of it—an outstanding collection of Rush classics; Grace Under Pressure (1983), aka P/G, one of the most brilliantly crafted albums as a whole, and in my opinion, the best album-as-a-whole they’ve had; and Presto (1990), my personal favorite, and probably the most under-rated Rush record. But S&A is the latest in the series of Rush’s best, and, song by song, I’m gonna tell you why. (If you haven’t listened to the album a few times, or don’t have a copy handy, then you might want to download (legally, of course) some mp3s and follow along.)

Track 1, “Far Cry,” was the first single released and is still probably the best-known song from the album. It really sets the tone for the album, with the “wandering madmen . . . speaking in tongues” in the first line immediately drawing a connection to religion. The lines

It’s a far cry from the world we thought we’d inherit
It’s a far cry from the way we thought we’d share it
You can almost feel the current flowing
You can almost see the circuits blowing

Really reach back to Signals and P/G, where “The Weapon (Part II of Fear)” and “The Body Electric” talk about a sort of Orwellian, pre- and post-Apocalyptic worlds, respectively. “The Weapon” was way ahead of its time, linking violence, religion, and fear:

With an iron fist in a velvet glove
We are sheltered under the gun
In the glory game on the power train
Thy kingdom’s will be done
And the things that we fear are a weapon to be held against us . . .

“The Body Electric” is a little lighter (I actually think it’s pretty funny, and I seem to recall reading that Neil said it was supposed to be a dryly amusing song). It opens with this C3-P0 in a Tattooine desert image and resolves into another Lucas reference, the more obscure (but no less brilliant) THX 1138, at the end of the film. Without delving into the history behind the song, or the TV show that was spun out of it, it’s basically the story of a robot that has escaped into the desert and is slowly dying. At the end,

It replays each of the days
A hundred years of routines
Bows its head and prays
To the mother of all machines . . .

Again, there is this interesting linkage of religion, fear (“And it’s scared out of its wits”), and, here, technology. If “The Weapon” is pre-apocalyptic, and “The Body Electric” is post-apocalyptic, then “Far Cry” seems to be smack dab on the tip of it all, with the “current flowing” and the “circuits blowing.” Or, more dangerously, at the end of the song,

You can almost see the circle growing
You can almost feel the planets glowing

It took me a few listens to draw the connections: the mushroom cloud is accompanied by an expanding ring, as the blast simultaneously moves up and out, and “glowing” is a sort of radioactive word. And the “crack in the sky” that Neil attempts to fly through—well, that seems to be as readily applicable to a thermonuclear ceiling as it is to the lightning “crack” in the album art for “Far Cry” . . . or the cracked sky on the cover of P/G.

One more thing about this cool, catchy, guitar solo-less song: the hook is this ultra-simple “I can get back on” which is repeated each time. At first, I thought, hey lots of lines get repeated in music, but—and this shows how much time I have on my hands—this is the only line in the whole album lyrics that is repeated. (I’m not counting lines repeated in the vocals, just in the lyrics.) Yes, I checked, to try to disprove my hypothesis. Since it is the only instance, I feel confident in saying this: Neil is really trying to convince himself that he can get back on top of the world, ahead of the wheel. He is The Little Engine That Could (“I Think I Can, I Think I Can”) and the repetition is his own attempt at telling himself he can do it. Look at the artwork, and this dark reading is supported by the fact that the lightning has singled out the baby carriage, and the rainbow, for all you would-be hopeful readers, is off to the corner of the page, disappearing into the sea. And instead of a dove symbolizing peace, we have a predatory hawk patrolling the skies.
This is not a happy song.

“Armor and Sword,” the next one, is even darker, and I’ve heard complaints that its too long. It’s certainly not a radio-friendly, easy-listening tune. The opening line is where the title comes from, and helps explain the baby carriage on the previous page:

The snakes and arrows a child is heir to
Are enough to leave a thousand cuts.

The child growing up, or the bildungsroman theme, is what connects the first three tracks. (Sort of a David Copperfield set to music.) Remember Vapor Trails? The last song, “Out of the Cradle,” seems to have been picked up with the baby carriage in “Far Cry,” and the poor kid has no idea what he’s in for, as defenses are built, “a place of safety/ And leave the darker places unexplored.”

The religious references really take off here, with the repeated line, “No one gets to their heaven without a fight,” and the riff off of St. Paul’s spirit versus flesh, “Sometimes the spirit is too strong/ Or the flesh is too weak.” Although Neil has made it very clear he’s an atheist, this song leaves me wondering. The cool bridge section has this creepy chord progression and finishes with the words:

The battle flags are flown
At the feet of a god unknown

It seems that there is a chink in the armor of The Professor’s atheism, a bit of doubt and irresolution that is making him uneasy. Otherwise, the song is, as has been suggested, long, although the sort of endless fight that it describes makes this length acceptable to me—I’m partaking in a bloody fight just listening to the slow, plodding, dissonant music. Also, for music theory fans out there, note the 3/4 to 4/4 time signature shifts—this is a trope really common on this album, enough so that I would say it is one of the defining musical elements of S&A.

Moving on to the final song of the day, another 3/4 to 4/4 song, “Workin’ Them Angels” is my favorite, and closes what I perceive as the Neil-as-protagonist portion of the album. This song is the happiest of the three, and the most mature, a collection of reflections “down a desert road.” (An interesting side note: Neil has a lot of references to desert roads, such as “Dreamline”—“We travel on the road to adventure/ On a desert highway straight to the heart of the sun” and a chapter in his book Ghost Rider entitled “The Loneliest Road in America.”) Each verse is punctuated with a memory, each one ostensibly a memory of some time in Neil’s past, called to recollection in his motorcycle travels. We have a memory “humming at the heart of a factory town,” which networks nicely with the workin’ angels, overtime, and the cool black-and-white pic of the dude in the factory with the angel wings. Another memory, this one “strumming at the heart of a moving picture,” is a clever reference to Rush’s most successful album (yes, that would be Moving Pictures), but also seems to link up films with music and landscapes, as the medium for memories. The final verse is punctuated with a cool double-image, a superimposition of memories “drumming at the heart of an English winter” and “beating at the heart of an African village.” For the under-informed, Neil spent some time as a teen in London, when he was becoming a good drummer, and much later, traveled on bicycle through parts of Africa, where he became a disgustingly amazing drummer.

These memories provide a nice counterpoint to the chorus, which is a retrospective:

All my life
I’ve been workin’ them angels overtime
Riding and driving and living
So close to the edge

The second chorus, interestingly, changes slightly to become

Riding and driving and flying
Just over the edge

This follows the “moving pictures” memory, and sounds to me like our boy Neil is making a cool double use of the “living on the edge” motif. My reading is this: there were exciting times in his life when he lived on the edge, or even flew over the edge, a la Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Perhaps when Moving Pictures came out was one of those times, and the exciting, fast-paced life he led was being supported by some unknown group of “angels” that kept him going.

“Living so close to the edge,” though can also mean the exact opposite of flying high: it can mean you’re so low you’re at the edge, ready to jump, or about to fall off. And at these times, the “angels,” whoever/whatever they are, have kept him from going off the deep end.

 And I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the easy swing time in the verses gives way to this awkward phrasing in the choruses in that slow 4/4 time in what seems to be a contrast between the easy riding/driving on a road and then the more difficult task of sorting through memories—the reliving is itself work, and Geddy’s phrasing, along with the rhythm changes, puts you in shotgun with Neil (or, perhaps, on the back of the bike). We’re along for the ride, and it’s not as easy as “Flying High Again” with Ozzy—this one requires more than a bowl and a nickel bag full of freshly cut grass.
From the “Hemispheres Chord” on “Far Cry” (it’s actually an F#11) to the weird modal shifts in “Armor and Sword” to the beautiful rhythm work on the guitar in “Workin’ Them Angels,” Rush is moving away from the single-minded distortion and dissonance in Vapor Trails (although we get reminded of this in “Spindrift”). Just as S&A has dealt with different times in Neil’s life and his personal growth, the album represents a significant growth for an already mature band.

Next week: Part II of the album, Tracks 4-9.

Tags: Brian Corlett, Friday Night Rush // Add Comment »

 I’ve always loved cats. They’re just so cute and adorable and soft and they have such personality! I have two cats of my own. I love them intensely. So it was with great delight that I found a book, nay, an entire SERIES featuring my beloved feline friends. Only the cats in this particular series aren’t so cute as they are hot and beautiful. They aren’t so adorable as they are rebelious. And they aren’t so soft as they are muscled and strong and dangerous. But they do have personality. A lot of personality!

The cats in Rachel Vincent’s Pride series are wholly unique, from the mythology surrounding them to the character idiosyncrasies to the motivations that inspire each to do what they do.

I really had no choice but to fall in love with this series. Thanks, Rachel.

On your great blog, you talk a lot about the craft of writing and the business of publishing. You interact with fans and have tons of great giveaways every week. How has blogging impacted your career and how has it impacted the way you write?

I love blogging! Interacting with readers and with my fellow writers is one of my very favorite aspects of this job, and I’d never give it up! I’ve met many wonderful writers and made tons of friends all over the world through blogging. I’ve gotten offers of cover quotes from writers I met online and have received invitations to multiple conference (not all of which I can attend) from people who found my blog. I also receive regular invitations to guest blog, do interviews, and cross-promote from people who read my blog.

As for how it’s impacted the way I write? Blogging has definitely taught me to be a better proofreader! With a novel, there’s usually plenty of time to correct mistakes before the book goes into print (though a few always slip through the cracks). But when you blog, it’s tempting to just hit “post” before you read through what you’ve just written. And since I’m paranoid about grammatical errors and typos, I must, must, must fix any mistakes I find, or that are pointed out to me. I like to think that’s had a positive effect on my fiction writing too.

Do you think author blogs are helpful or hurtful to a writer’s image?

I think that depends on the blogger. If you’re careful never to write anything on your blog that you don’t want the whole world to know, blogging can be very helpful to a writer’s image. But if you think of it as a private journal or a chat with your best friend… well, you’re much more likely to contribute to the destruction of your own reputation. I’ve learned never to blog when I’m upset, or when I’m really tired, and always to clear my “behind the scenes” posts with my editor first, to make sure it’s okay to share this bit of news or that juicy tidbit.

I also take a firm stance on negatives. If I don’t have anything nice to say about something, I won’t blog about it at all. I don’t review books I didn’t like, and I absolutely will not let my blog be a forum for anyone’s grievances. Including my own. Words you put on the internet do not disappear, even when you delete them. So blog responsibly, people!

Websites are obviously so important for a writer. You have a great website, rachelvincent.com It’s newly redesigned and filled with tons of FAQ’s and behind the scenes tales. Where you completely responsible for the look and “themes” of your site? How would a beginning author get a website as nice as yours?

Why thank you! There are still some glitches to be worked out, and I have ideas to improve what’s already up, but I’m pretty happy with it for the moment, and I love a website with a lot of content. As for the design, my #1 fan did it all. (Note: “#1 fan” is actually a nickname for my sig. other. NOT a reader I met through my work.) He drew the header image himself and designed the layout. That poor man! I’m very picky about my website, but I never know exactly what I want until I see it, so he’s put up with a lot of, “Well, that looks nice, but it’s not quite…there.” I’m glad he’s hanging in there with me, because I’m not willing to hire a web designer if that means giving up control of the content. When I want something to be added, I want it added my way, and now, not when the designer has time to get to it. Maintaining my own website lets me do that.

To switch gears, you have seven manuscripts that are either already published, in the final stages of pre-publication, or in draft form. Do you find it difficult to compartmentalize and go from one project to another? Because I know I have a difficult time turning off “magazine” mode and switching to “novelist” mode!

Um, let’s see… I currently have Stray and Rogue on the shelf, and I’ve already written Pride and Prey (books 3 and 4 in my werecat series), as well as MY SOUL TO TAKE (book 1 in my YA series). I’m contracted for four more books (two werecat, two YAs), bringing the total so far to nine books, currently scheduled to be released through 2010.

I do sometimes find it difficult to move from one series directly into the other, because the content and voice are so different. But that’s a challenge I welcome.

To my great delight, I had the pleasure of meeting you at the Romantic Times Convention this past April. You’re adorable and charming and so young! So let’s talk about that for a moment: do you feel that the road to publication was more difficult because of your age, or different in anyway?

Thank you! It was great to meet you too. And I swear, I’m older than I look. People tell me all the time that I look much too young and sweet to write such gory, gritty novels. But I’ll be thirty this summer. Yes, it’s traumatic, and to deal, I’ve settled on a strict regimen of denial and chocolate.

As for my age affecting my road to publication, no, not really. No one asked me how