The last of your Roman Holiday Serial novels is being released today, I can only imagine how exciting that is. What was the inspiration for these stories?
It is exciting! This is just the end of the first season, though — we still have season 2 coming up, with five more episodes leading to our Happy Ever After.
This project started with Random House: they asked if I wanted to write a serial, and I thought, “Huh. I didn’t, but sure, okay, let me think about it!” I enjoy being given assignments. It’s the student in me — I have a thing for taking an assigned job and trying to figure out how to make it interesting for myself.
I think the earliest concept I had for the story was a road-trip one, but my agent, Emily, and I sat by a pool with daiquiris and chocolate-covered strawberries at RWA Anaheim and plot-brainstormed for about ninety minutes in order to get from there to the synopsis that Random House put under contract. It was poolside that we came up with Sunnyvale, Ashley chained to the palm tree, Roman the developer (although I think his name & identity came later). Then I did the planning, research, started writing, adding layers upon layers upon layers until Ashley and Roman felt like living, breathing people who could dictate their own story.
Not that I hear voices in my head. I’m always jealous of the writers who say they hear voices.
In my opinion you write realistic romance… not everything is flower bouquets and sex. Is that a conscious decision on your part?
It is now, but it’s the result of a process of evolution rather than something I set out to do. When I wrote Ride with Me and About Last Night, I was just trying to write books to sell to Harlequin Blaze. Those stories were my very best effort to write Harlequin category: the cross-country bike ride romance and the London-set ex-groupie museum knitter with the mafia past who rejects a perfectly lovely man named Neville.
Sometimes I wonder what I was smoking. And that’s not a dig at Harlequin, because Harlequin is great, but seriously? I thought those were Blaze novels?
It wasn’t until they were out and I had some positive feedback on them, as well as on my fairly weird Christmas novella, Room at the Inn, and my even-weirder train museum novella, Big Boy, that I started to get an idea of where my talents and interests really are, and to understand that I didn’t have to pull back on the realism because I could instead seek out readers who want it.
The realism also comes, I’ll admit, from the fact that I’m a deeply romantic person, but in sort of stealthy ways. My interest in romance came as a shock to my friends, I think because I’ve always been rejecting of feminine-typed concerns. I don’t want to be wooed with flowers. I don’t own any gemstones. I don’t paint my fingernails, or tend my fingernails, or care about fingernails. So there is a way in which, because writing these books is what I do all day long, I just have to insist on writing about people who are interesting to me, falling in love in ways that feel real to me.
Your characters are always so relatable and that’s one of the reasons I adore them. Do you fashion any of them after people you know?
Ha! No. But I do sometimes give them the names of people I know, either on purpose or by accident. And then I cringe with worry that it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass.
All of my stories are character-driven stories, I’d say — I’m not someone who can come up with endless convoluted plots. I’m super interested in what makes people tick, and I think fundamentally I just like people. So I’m an observer, and I’ll put pieces of myself or people I know, people I’ve seen at the playground, etc. in my stories. But at some point in the writing the characters get fleshed out enough that I can just ask, you know, “What would Ben say in this situation?” or “What’s Roman going to do here?”
Tell us a bit about your Roman Holiday Serial.
The idea for the serial is that, like television, this is a big story with smaller stories inside it. I was told to write two “seasons” with five “episodes” each, and I took this very seriously and tried to make it so that each episode of the serial would be satisfying. I also tried to avoid cliffhangers as much as possible, because I’m not a fan, but also because I think an “episode” should have a beginning, a middle, and an end — that it’s not fair to just cut out in the middle of the action and say “Tune in next week!”
Now, that doesn’t mean readers always love me at the end of the episode, because this is a romance, and it’s a long and rocky road for my characters. Some episodes don’t end happy, you know? Some issues aren’t going to be resolved right away, because that’s just the way it goes. But the episodes do end. There is movement & character growth, and a kind of slow progression through stages to the final outcome.
The thing that happened along the way with Roman Holiday is that the story got long. Random House, bless them, asked me for 100,000 words, and I wrote nearly 150,000, but no one has fired me yet, which is excellent. The reason the story got so long, I think, is that I was trying to honor the “episode” format. This is not just a 100,000-word book chunked up into 10 pieces. That’s what I did with Truly when I serialized it on Wattpad — I took a long, completed novel and broke it into ten chunks. But for Roman Holiday, I wrote the story in pieces, and I took the pieces very seriously as individual stories, almost as novellas. At the same time, I didn’t want the larger story to feel in any way disjointed. This is a continuous story: one main plot, one subplot, one straightforward timeline, primary focus on hero and heroine.
(Also, I came pretty close to breaking my brain.)
What I ended up writing — I figured this out along the way — is a romance epic. The hero and heroine both have major personal journeys to get to the HEA. They’re super interesting people. The ending makes everybody cry. It’s my own personal Lord of the Rings, I guess, except with ordinary people, and instead of trying to save the world they’re just trying to figure out how to be happy and less fucked up.
You posted chapters for a serial on Wattpad – Truly quickly became my Monday morning sunshine. Are you happy with the process and the feedback you got? Is it something you’ll try doing again?
The serialization of Truly was so much fun for me. I share my unpublished books with writer friends, and I share pages with Mary Ann Rivers and Serena Bell all the time, but I’ve never had this kind of immediate reader feedback before. It’s very different from a review — it’s emotion and gut-level reaction, sometimes even fury. It’s very personal, and I feel honored to be able to experience it.
The Wattpad serialization has also been such an affirmation for me that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be, because there were character aspects of Truly I worried about — Do romance readers want this? Will anyone get what I’m trying to do here with May’s fantasizing, with Ben’s anger, with this New York City whirlwind romance? Am I crazy? — but Wattpad readers have been so welcoming. And this is an audience where people are fourteen years old, nineteen years old, twenty-five, thirty-eight, fifty — readers in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, the Philippines, Singapore, India, Latvia, UK, Australia, ALL OVER — but they’re loving it. It’s a reminder, for me, that when we think narrowly about what “romance readers” supposedly “want,” we’re doing a disservice to real people and their craving to read about love. I think there are a lot of readers, at a lot of ages, with a lot of different backgrounds in a lot of different places, who want to read about ordinary love between ordinary people, treated as an amazing, exalted, life-altering thing.
If you could introduce one of your characters to another character from another book, who would it be and why?
I actually do this, very briefly, in a Roman Holiday episode from next season — I introduce Roman to one of the Camelot Series characters (I won’t say who). I think I would probably try to get some of the heroes of my stories together to hang out. Roman could use more friends, and I think he’d like Ben from Truly, or Caleb from Along Came Trouble. I mean, everybody likes Caleb. It’s impossible not to. Caleb could really gather up a nice big social circle around him for man-barbecues or whatever — go geocaching with the guys on the weekends, get out of the women’s hair. They’d be all back-slapping and smiling when they came home, sheepish for having had so much fun on their man-date.
Do you have any writing quirks or rituals?
I don’t think so. I did recently start buying myself a cute T-shirt from ModCloth every time I finish a book. Mostly because I’m too cheap to buy myself cute T-shirts at any other time. Now I have one with a fox, one with narwhals, one with mushrooms, and one with peacocks.
What is the one thing readers would be surprised to learn about you?
I think I’m supposed to say something like “I’m actually quite shy,” or … I don’t know. But the truth is, I come across pretty much as advertised. Do you expect me to be someone who is friendly, chatty, knows a lot about random things but is Midwest Humble (TM), and who would would also be willing to perform karaoke in a pink sequin dress and sneakers?
If so, I will not surprise you in any way.
What authors have influenced you?
It’s hard to say, because I have been such a reader for so long, and I read so many different sorts of books quite happily. I guess a lot of the Harlequin Blaze I was reading when I started writing romance — Isabel Sharpe, Leslie Kelly, Jill Shalvis — those all shaped what I was interested in writing. And then the contemporary and erotic romance that my friends write — Cara McKenna and Meg Maguire, Delphine Dryden, Charlotte Stein, Serena Bell, Mary Ann Rivers, Amber Lin — these are people who became my friends when I stalked them after admiring their work, for the most part. I’ve learned a lot from all of them. I’m always reading and learning, mostly through spongelike absorption, so I don’t always grok that I’ve learned something from someone until much later.
What is the last book that you recommended to someone?
I’ve been recommending Barbara Samuel’s The Sleeping Night, which is a gorgeous interracial romance set in Texas after World War II.
Any advice for aspiring writers?
Read read read read read. Write a lot — write anything — TRY STUFF. I always thought I wasn’t a writer because I didn’t have any ideas, but it turns out you can start with the barest little kernel of an idea and end up with a whole novel. The characters turn into people if you stick with them, think about them, give them space and time. So if you want to write but don’t think you have the chops to be “a writer,” try anyway. You might be surprised. Then, after you’ve written something, write something else. Finish stuff. Learn from screwing up. Devote yourself to revision, because nobody writes perfect first or second or third or fourth drafts. Fifth drafts, maybe. Aim for an awesome fifth draft.
Are you working on anything right now that you can tell us about?
By the time this interview goes live, I’ll be chest-deep in drafting my second New Adult title as Robin York. The first book is called Deeper, and the sequel is Harder. Both books together form the two-book romance of Caroline and West. Deeper is more Caroline’s book; Harder will be more West’s. And readers will get their happy ending! None of you care yet, because you haven’t read Deeper, but you will, I’m pretty sure. Deeper packs quite a punch.
Do you read a lot and if so, what are some of your favorite books?
I read a ton. I don’t re-read much, but I used to. When I was a kid, I read The Color Purple and Stephen King’s It over and over. I loved Gone with the Wind and Mists of Avalon. I always liked long books that I could drop into and stay there for the whole day. Watership Down. Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet series. Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. I’m all over the place, really.
If you could have written any book out in the world today, what would you pick and why?
Oh, I don’t know! I like mine. I mean, I wrote them on purpose. Is that bad? Maybe Deeper, my New Adult that comes out Jan. 28. I worked hard on it, and I believe in it, and I think it potentially has the power to effect positive change in the world if enough people read it.
Speed Questions
Coffee or Tea? Tea.
Cake or Pie? German chocolate cake.
Chocolate or Vanilla? Chocolate.
Morning or Night? Morning.
Twitter or Facebook? Twitter.
Sweet or Salty? Sweet.
Fantasy or Romance? Romance.
Comedy or Horror? Comedy.
Real book or E-book? E-book.
Favorite TV Show? Futurama.
Favorite Superhero? Wolverine.
Favorite snack? Cookies.
Biggest pet peeve? Pointless conflict.
Favorite word? Just. (Ask my copyeditors.)
Dream job (other than author)? Mediator.
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