Author of the Week - Deborah Coonts

Welcome back to Buy a Book, Tell a Friend!

This week Deborah Coonts visits the blog. I met Deborah in person at an RWA meeting in Las Vegas in 2010 and I haven't laughed quite that hard in a writing meeting. This woman writes fantastic romantic suspense that takes place in Las Vegas, and she makes you laugh so hard, don't drink while reading. Deborah is so great to talk to with her dry, laid-back humor, although she'll tell you she's anything but laid-back. Today I asked her one question about what in her real life inspires hilarity in her books.

BBTF: Humor is a huge theme throughout your books along with the suspense. What is your funniest (recent) real life experience?

Deborah: The funniest thing that has happened to me lately?  Moving, but not quite in the way you might think. Moving is horrible, for sure. Each time I do it I swear the next time I’m just going to sell everything and start over in the new locale. Of course, I never do. So, like every move before I sold the old place, bought a new one. Moved the furniture. Relicensed the car as well as myself. After a few short but interminable weeks, the move was complete. Sort of. While it’s painful, changing one’s permanent address is relatively easy. Changing one’s perspective is not.

After so much time in Vegas, apparently I had absorbed its … sensibilities. Reentry into the real world came with some bumps and bruises. 

For instance, the other day I went to my new doctor for that whole annual thing we all so look forward to. The nurse practitioner came in the room to take my vitals and ask some questions. As she got settled, clipboard on her lap, I cut to the chase ticking off the questions I knew by rote from my time in Vegas on my fingers as I worked through them. “In the last year, I’ve not shared any needles with anyone. I’ve not taken any sort of mind-altering anything, unless you count riding on the Slingshot on the top of the Stratosphere—that gave me nightmares for months. Oh, and there was that night where I decided sampling all the inventory at that new whiskey bar was a good idea—all that alcohol probably killed any pesky germs I had floating around, right?” I paused for her nod then forged ahead completely missing the rising incredulity in her eyes. “I’ve slept with one man, zero women, zero transgenders, zero transsexuals, and zero gender non-specific.” Yes, the State of Nevada is very interested in its citizen’s sex lives.

When I finished the nurse was very quiet, her eyes as big as saucers. “I’m almost afraid to ask,” she finally said. “But gender non-specific?”

I shrugged as I felt the color rising in my cheeks. “I’m not really sure. My former doctor never specified. Best I can figure those would be men who are pussies.”

She rewarded me with a laugh.

“You don’t have any of those in Texas?”

She blew at a lock of hair across her forehead. “Honey, we got more of those here than we can say grace over.”

I’m not sure this is a good thing, but at least I’ll feel at home.

 LOL Uh, yeah, not sure about that designation, but I'd offer them blessings, too. You can find out more about Deborah Coonts's books on her website. Be sure to buy a book and tell a friend. Happy reading!

Author(s) of the Week: Adriana Kraft

Welcome back to Buy a Book, Tell a Friend!

This week Adriana Kraft visits. I met the writing team of Adriana Kraft in 2013 at the Hot Mojave Knights Romance Reader Event here in Vegas and had such a wonderful time having frank discussions about life, romance, and the balance of writing with a husband and wife team. They write erotic romance set in the real world. Today I asked them one question about how writing has affected their own relationship.

BBTF: As a husband-and-wife writing team, how has writing together strengthened your connection as spouses?

You’ll notice there’s an assumption embedded in the question – Siobhan assumes the impact of our joint writing efforts has improved our relationship rather than stirred up troubled waters…

In the beginning, it was not so! Any partners who want to stay together over the long haul have to learn how they’re going to handle conflict productively: which things to go to battle over, how to broach the subject when differences are tender, when to recognize the deep tendrils of issues buried in past history and let something go, how to reconnect when feelings are raw and wounded.

We’ve been married thirty-four years, and we’ve been writing together (or trying to) for nearly half that time. Getting started wasn’t pretty. I had a long standing pattern of doing pretty much anything to avoid conflict, and hubs – well, he’d learned to shut things down and tough it out in order to survive. I think we both agonized over how to give each other useful feedback and how to receive it. I know in the beginning, I wasn’t very constructive (destructive, more accurately), and it took a while for both of us to dare start over. It would have been easy to derail our entire fiction writing enterprise before it even began, and we came pretty close.

What’s interesting is that at that stage, what helps writers helped us: research, workshops, beta readers, and critique groups. It was easier, in the beginning, for both of us to receive feedback from outsiders. We read some marvelous books (Michael Seidman’s The Complete Guide to Edition your Fiction and William Noble’s Shut Up, He Explained), joined RWA, took excellent workshops (Pat Schneider, Jennifer Crusie), and learned from others what we needed to do to improve our fiction.

I’m a family therapist (in another lifetime), and systems theory tells us any living system will die if it shuts itself down from outside input. Remaining open was our lifeline during that phase. It certainly gave us language and perspective for tackling disagreements (over fiction, or over anything else, actually).

What we finally learned, about the time our work started getting published, was that those “disagreements” often rose out of problems our characters were having. We’re quite convinced our characters have a life on the other side of some veil we can’t see through – they challenge us when we’ve misunderstood them, and the trouble manifests in our relationship. We have to stop and connect with the characters to sort it out. We think that deepens our story lines and helps readers bond with our characters, so it’s all good: what helps the characters and the stories helps us. At this point, sometimes, it’s hard to know the difference!

One more thing… Siobhan knows we primarily write erotic romance. Do you suppose that’s the angle she wanted us to talk about? I’m not going to share any great personal details here, but I’ll just say that the enterprise of creating story arcs with lots of hot sex scenes and crafting the characters who populate them has definitely kept us invested in learning about sex, talking about things sexual, and keeping the libido going. It’s a win-win, and we write an occasional blog column called Stay Sexy to share some of what we learn.

So, um, yeah – writing romantic suspense and erotic romance together is a big positive at our house-on-wheels. I love my life.

You can find out more about Adriana Krafts's hot, erotic contemporary romance on their website. Be sure to buy a book and tell a friend. Happy reading!

Siobhan