Baton blog hop!

What the heck is a Baton Blog Hop?

Each writer involved answers four questions and then passes the baton on to another person. I received the baton from my friend Olivia Howe, author of the Dark Love series. Her second novel in the series, Seeing Red, just came out this past Tuesday on her twentieth birthday, June 24!

What am I working on?

Wow – what am I not working on. Let’s see . . . the fourth novel in the Love Under Construction series, Planning an Addition, will be coming out on November 1. It will be followed by the Citadel series, a series of three novellas, with each book having a main character(s) who was a minor character in the Love Under Construction series; the first one is already well underway. There will be more Harper’s Cove novellas; one’s almost finished. So many readers asked about the other characters in Adventurous Me, one of my stand-alone novels, that I’m planning two more books from it. And there will also be a new series starting. I don’t want to give the name of it yet, but let’s just say it’s a departure from my usual. It’ll still be steamy, but it’ll be different.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

It’s unusual in that most of the main characters are well over forty. They’re not kids. They’re also working people; they didn’t mysteriously become millionaires from unknown sources. They worked hard and rose up through the ranks to be where they are. I’ve also discovered that I do something that few romance writers really do – I write villains, really nasty ones, psychologically damaged ones. I love them. So my work tends to be very different from the rest of the genre.

Why do I write what I do?

That’s a good question. I guess it’s because I love people, and I love to watch people fall in love. Plus I’m well over forty, and I get tired of 22-year-old sexual experts and billionaires. That’s so unrealistic that it makes my head hurt just thinking about it. I want my romances to be realistic, to be something that could actually happen to a reader. I want them to be hot; I want those over-forty characters to have the wild, passionate, uninhibited sex that I know people that age have, because I am one. And I want it to be as entertaining as humanly possible. Plus I try to always build in a “wow, I didn’t see that coming” moment. I love those!

How does your writing process work?

I wish I could tell you, because I honestly have no idea. My plots come to me fully-formed, and they usually only need some detail work to make them not only work but to be fully plausible as well. I start writing, and the characters just come out of the woodwork and make it all interesting. When that happens, I stop and get out a three-page character dossier and start filling it out on the character. It covers everything, physical description, personality, age, parents, siblings, kids, work history, everything. Then once I’ve got the plot pretty well settled, I go back and start doing detail work. I also work heavily off of recognizable holidays for time placement, and I go back with a calendar and do a timeline so I know everything is in the order it needs to be. Once that’s done, it’s time for hardcore revisions, then proofing and editing. That can take me longer than the writing (as it should). For a 170,000 word novel, it’s usually an eight-month process.

Time to pass the baton!!!!

I will be passing the baton to Liz Crowe, author of the Stewart Realty and Black Jack Gentlemen series. Liz is an outstanding author and loves to write books featuring soccer in which Spain never loses a game! Just kidding. But she is a soccer super-fan and a beer aficionado. Check out her work and go and visit her blog to see what she’s up to and watch her pass the baton on July 14!