Tag: paranormal | The Worldshapers

July 12, 2020July 12, 2020

Episode 56: Kelley Armstrong

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An hour-long conversation with New York Times-bestselling author Kelley Armstrong, author of numerous fantasy, mystery, and thriller novels in multiple series for adults, including the thirteen-book Otherworld series, which began with her first novel, Bitten, and other series and standalone novels for young adults and middle-grade readers.

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kelleyarmstrong.com

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@KelleyArmstrong

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@KelleyArmstrongAuthor

Kelley Armstrong’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Photo of Kelley Armstrong — Photo by Kathryn Hollinrake

Kelley Armstrong is the bestselling author of numerous fantasy novels, mysteries, and thrillers, for adults, young adults, and middle-grade readers, both standalones and in multiple series.

Born in Sudbury, Ontario, she grew up in London, Ontario. She went to the University of Western Ontario to study psychology, with plans to become a clinical psychologist, but on the brink of grad school, realizing such a career would limit her writing time for many years, switched paths and went to Fanshawe College in London, studying computer programming.

While getting her education, she married and had first child, a daughter, then took a full-time job programming for a bank while continuing writing. She sold her first novel, Bitten, in 1999, and had two more children, sons, before it was released in 2001, at which point she quit her job to write full-time, which she’s been doing ever since.

Among her series: Otherworld, Cainsville, Rockton, Darkest Powers and Darkness Rising, Age of Legends, and the Nadia Stafford crime trilogy. She has also written several serial novellas and short stories for the Otherworld series. Starting in 2014, a Canadian television series based on Otherworld, called Bitten, aired for three seasons on Space and SyFy. Kelley lives in rural Ontario.

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

So, Kelly, welcome to The Worldshapers.

Thank you.

Now we’re both authors in Canada, but I don’t know that we’ve ever actually met each other in person anywhere at any conventions or anything like that. I can’t think of a time.

I don’t think so. We’ve probably passed somewhere at some convention because it’s a, you know, relatively restricted literary landscape. But, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t recall.

Yeah, it’s a small literary landscape, but it’s a very, very large physical landscape. And Saskatchewan and…you’re in Ontario?

I am.

Yeah, they’re actually a long way away from each other.

They are.

When we moved up here from Texas when I was eight years old, it was the year of Expo ’67. And I was excited as we were leaving Texas because I thought, we’re going to Canada, and I’d get to go to Expo 67, and my parents had to point out to me that…

It’s a long way.

…we would be closer–we’d be just as far away from Montreal in Saskatchewan as we were in Texas; basically, it was pretty much the same distance. In my defense, I was only eight, so.

Exactly.

Well, so this…you have two books coming out this week–month–which we are going to talk about a little bit. But first, I’ll do what I always do with this, which is take you back into the mists of time–I’m going to put reverb on that one of these days, the mists of time–and find out, well, first of all, where you grew up and then how you got interested in writing. And probably you started as a reader, because we all do, and the sorts of things that drew you into this field and, you know, all of that stuff. So, how did that all happen for you?

Yeah. So I grew up in London, Ontario, and it is that typical thing where you start off by reading. I was a very young reader. I was the oldest child, and my parents were very keen on teaching me how to read. Neither of them was a huge reader themselves, but they understood literacy was important, and so, their first kid, they were doing everything right, making sure that I was learning to read. So, every night, after dinner, while Mom cleaned up, Dad would be reading these books. And I very quickly learned to read that way. And for me, it turned into, “I want to do that.” I would take those stories and do what we would now call fanfiction, where I would take what I had heard and maybe create a new story for those characters or a story with different characters in that world as some way of working on what the author had created and building my own stories on it and then, getting older, was moving into creating entirely my own stories.

Well, what were some of the books that influenced you back then?

So, certainly back when I was very young, I can’t really recall. We have sort of gone through trying to work that out. It was a whole lot of really simple Golden Book readers. So, none of them stuck. So, the ones that stuck came later. There was one series about Irish setters, and they were adventure series where each…one was Big Red…and each one had a different Irish setter.

I remember reading Big Red.

Yeah, exactly. So all those…Hardy Boys, too. Read so many Hardy Boys. They always had much more interesting adventures than Nancy Drew, so I devoured Hardy Boys. And some of the classics, but really I was looking at the adventure stories, the mystery stories, and the stories with the animals.

So when did the fantasy side of things start to creep in?

So yeah, people always ask, where did that come from? And I always jokingly blame too many early Saturday mornings watching Scooby-Doo. That supernatural-combined-with-the-mystery was perfect. But I think it was more, when it comes to stories, mythology has them, so I very quickly got into mythology. I knew the Dewey Decimal System number for the myth and folklore section. So I would be there pulling down those books when I sort of ran out of stories in my own area to read.

When you started writing as a young person, well, did you share your writing with other people? I always ask that because I did, and I found it was like, oh, people actually like the stories that I tell.

Exactly. Yeah. Because I was so young and I was telling stories before I could write them down, so, at that age, you don’t have any of that…when people get older, and they start thinking, do I want to share this or not? As a kid, no, of course you share it because you have created this thing. So certainly, early on, sharing everything with parents, siblings, etc., friends and so on. It’s only when you get older that you start double-guessing, do I want to actually share this?

Did you have any teachers that sort of encouraged your writing along the way in high school or around that time?

I did. I certainly did, certainly in both elementary and high school. I was doing a lot of writing and getting a lot of really good feedback on my writing. So I often joke that, you know, they really tried to steer me away from the fantasy, the supernatural, etc. “You could write normal things,” but the normal things were what interested me. So it’s good that they still encouraged me despite the fact that I was not necessarily writing the kinds of stories that they were hoping for.

I always tell a story that when I was about eleven, I wrote my first complete short story that I remember actually finishing, and it was called “Kastra Glazz: Hypership Test Pilot.” So you could tell where my mind was early on. And there was a teacher who, you know, he was my junior high English teacher, and I showed it to him and he took it seriously, and he critiqued it and said, you know, “I don’t understand why your aliens to this and why does your character do that?” And I still credit that with taking it seriously, taking the writing seriously, with having helped set my mind on, “Well, I’m going to keep writing, and I’m going to write better things going forward.”

It is, and it’s very important because, yes, even if it’s not necessarily what they’re hoping you would write, or it’s not a genre that they read, just that overall encouragement means a lot. Without that, I wouldn’t have gone on.

But you didn’t actually go immediately into writing. You studied psychology to begin with, I believe, is that right?

Yeah. I went to Western for psychology undergrad. I was planning on going on to masters and doctorate and becoming a psychologist. I was heading into grad school and realized I was heading into that kind of a career where there’d be a lot more schooling, and I would not be writing, because university was the one time where I didn’t have time to actually write fiction. So I thought, I’ve got this long time where I’m probably not going to be writing, do I want to wait that long before I try to at least…? My sort of goal was, maybe someday I’ll be able to be a part-time writer and part-time at some other career. So I switched gears there and went to college for computer programming. I had been doing that way back from the Commodore 64. It was a big interest of mine. So I did that. Got your typical corporate cubicle job that let me write and study the craft of writing.

Do you find…I mean, psychology would tend to tie into writing in some way. Did you find that what you studied in that field has been beneficial in your writing career? And the computer programming? I mean, I always say, nothing you do is wasted when you’re a writer. Have you found that?

It’s true. Because people always sort of look back and they say, you know, was that a waste, or when I see young people heading into college, university, and their ultimate career is writing, and they just want to totally focus on that. And I say, anything that you take is going to help. Psychology for characters, absolutely. Because it helps with my character backgrounds to know if I want a character who is like this at 35, what type of background did they probably have to get them there or what life experiences could they have had that get them where I want them to be at that age? And of course, programming meant that I did not have to hire anyone to, you know, code those early websites.

I had a Commodore 64 for years, and I did a lot of programming at the time, too, in BASIC, and I did some quite complicated things. You know, I created a whole music entry system to use that synthesizer chip that it had. And you had to put in like three different values for each note. And yet I did all that, and it worked. And then I thought, “But, you know, other people do it better than I do.” And I was never tempted to stick with programming because, again, it was more like, well, that takes a lot of time. I could be writing.

Commodore 64 with disk drive, monitor, and joystick.

It did. Yeah. I was doing the old text-based adventure game, so I was writing text-based adventure games, which of course took a whole lot of work just for a very short, short and simple one.

Well, your first novel was Bitten, which came out in 1999 or was sold in 1999. It came out in 2001. How did that come about? That’s kind of your breaking-in moment. Or had you had some short stories before that, or how did that work for you?

Yeah, I had had a couple of short stories published, but nothing significant. And I had been writing novels. So, when I made that choice to go into programming instead of going on to graduate school, that meant that I then knew that I had to get serious about writing. And it meant writing novels, joining writers’ groups, taking writing courses. So I was doing that. I was writing novels. I was writing novels that were to market. So whatever was…I had one that was, for example, a female private eye, in the time period when we were seeing a lot of that. When I got to…so, I finished three novels, no interest, no interest from publishers or agents. And then, I decided I was going to work on this one idea that I had for a book about female werewolves. And I figured nobody’s going to ever want this, so this is just totally for me. And it was all freeing that way, too, like not be saying, “I’m writing this in hopes of getting it published,” But just I’m tired of trying to get stuff published. I’m just going to write something for myself. Got it done, and of course, started thinking, “Well, is there any chance?” So I had a writing instructor take a look at it, and he thought that it had promise, so he offered to recommend me to an agent, and she took it on, and it took off from there.

And there’s been quite a few since then.

There has been, yeah.

So is it a fairly straightforward, you know, once that one came out, it was successful, and you’ve been doing it ever since?

Yeah. Not…certainly now people look back and say, well, clearly Bitten was successful, and I’m like, not actually, no. The publisher, my American publisher, bought the first two and then was not interested in a third book because they just weren’t selling. They started selling more with the third book. But yeah, you certainly get that where…they were successful enough that I was able to keep publishing, and from where I stand now, 20 years later, that’s the big measure of success, is not how much you make or how many copies you sell, but just can you keep finding a publisher to want more books?

Yeah, that sounds familiar.

Yeah.

Now, I’m going to ask you this, even though as somebody who’s worked in Canada as well. I think I know the answer. But have you ever…has being a Canadian author but published in the US market, has it been a good thing or a bad thing, or has it made any difference at all, do you think?

It’s been a good thing for me because certainly I make more. I mean, having that extra market…I mean, a Canadian bestseller is, what, 5,000 copies? I mean, that’s not going to give you an annual income even if you’re doing one per year. I mean, being able to have that US market, that’s where sort of the much bigger incomes coming from. And then that drives getting a UK publisher, getting the foreign publishers, and it’s all of that. I mean, Canada is great, but actually being able to make a living off of strictly being published in Canada would be tough.

Yeah. Well, let’s talk about what you have coming out this month. You know, two books in a month is not bad.

It’s weird, yeah,

And another one coming in October, I think.

Yeah. And it was kind of an odd thing because, yes, so what is my second middle grade came out early this month. There was supposed to be a standalone thriller coming out in August, because they usually obviously don’t keep them quite so close, but the standalone thriller got bumped up to the end of June. So I end up…because it’s the same publisher in Canada for them, Random House, and they didn’t see any crossover t you’ve got. You’ve got, like, your fantasy middle-grade book and your standalone adult thriller, they’re like, “There is no crossover.” So it’s not like I’m going to be competing with myself. It just makes it tougher for me promoting to be making sure to mention that I have two books coming out.

Well, and I did want to ask you, even before we start talking about The Gryphon’s Lair, which is the middle grade, um….when did you make the step into the. Both middle grade and young adult markets, I guess?

Yeah. So for a young adult, that came back…so, the first one came out 2008. Would have meant I was writing it in 2005. And that was back when you were seeing a little bit more interest in young adult books. I had a daughter who was hitting that age, she was twelve, thirteen, and she wanted to read Bitten. And I was like, “Absolutely not.” So I said, how would I write something that is that type of book in that world, but with teenage characters. So that became The Summoning. And then after it was written, you were seeing publishers wanting that, because that’s when Twilight started taking off. So, they were looking for more paranormal YA, and I happened to have some. So then that one sold. Middle grade took a little longer. I have sons, too, so when they got to be the middle-grade age, I was writing with a friend (Melissa Marr), she also has a son that age, and we decided that we would co-write middle grade for our son. So that was the first trilogy, the Blackwell Pages, based on Norse mythology. And then I kind of took a break from middle grade there and then went back. Last year was the first in this new series.

OK. I have to ask you, does your daughter read your books? Did she read that? Because I have a daughter who’s nineteen now and the only one of mine she’s read are ones I’ve actually read out loud to her, and she really seems to be reluctant to read my stuff. And I think it’s because if she doesn’t like it, she wouldn’t know how to tell me.

I know. And that’s really tough. Now, my daughter reads everything, and she’s obviously, she’s like twenty-eight now, so if she read everything…

She’s probably read Bitten by now.

Yeah, exactly. She reads early…she reads sort of drafts when they’re at the point where I want her to take a look at it. She helps with that. Now, my sons are a different thing. Yes. They read the trilogy that I wrote them, but let’s just say that they are not exactly saying, “Hey, Mom, what else do you have?”

So I had, I still have, a niece, when she was a teenager–this is a long time ago now, probably my first book–and she said she didn’t want to read it because she didn’t want to know what was going on in her uncle’s head. Which I thought was funny.

Exactly. I mean, that is the weird thing, too, if you write. Yeah. Bitten has some sex scenes in it, and it was like, yeah, do you really want to know what your mom’s going to write for that scene? No, the answer is no.

Yeah, that’s certainly part of it. Well, we’re gonna talk primarily about The Gryphon’s Lair book, but we’ll also mention Every Step She Takes, which is the standalone that’s coming out, because we’re going to talk about your creative process and it will be interesting for me to hear the difference between your planning and writing for an adult novel, and your planning and writing for the younger age group. But first of all, how about a synopsis about The Gryphon’s Lair?

So, The Gryphon’s Lair is book two in a series. The basic concept is that we’ve got this set in a fantasy world, completely fantasy world, with monsters. This world has monsters, but they’re based on science. So, there’s no magic in this world. If you’re going to have a, say, a basilisk that can turn people into a stone, it can’t really do that, but it can shoot a neurotoxin that can paralyze someone. So you’re doing things that are science-based rather than magic-based. The main character is a princess. I mean, there are a lot of princess books out there. I wanted to take my try at going ahead and doing that in a slightly different way. And she is a twin. She’s supposed to become queen, and her brother is supposed to become the Royal Monster Hunter. That’s how this always works. And she would much rather be the Royal Monster Hunter. He would make a better king.

So, an accident happens and they’re able to switch places. So, in the book one, we saw her first sort of forays as the Royal Monster Hunter, book two, we’ve got, she is in charge of a young gryphon, because while it’s called A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying, the slaying part is pretty light. It’s really more like being a monster conservator or a monster ranger, where you’re trying to help people live with, you know, monsters being in that land. And sort of moving the monsters out when they get in, killing them if you have to, but it’s more about a conservationist idea. So, she is raising a young orphan gryphon, and it becomes a little big and dangerous. So in book two, she has to take it into the mountains where the gryphons live and try to take it back home.

Sounds like a great setup for a story.

It’s a lot of fun.

Maybe just a brief bit about Every Step She Takes, too. When I say they’re coming this month, I should explain to listeners that we’re recording this in June. I guess Gyphon’s Lair is already out, right?

Yes. And then, yeah, every step she takes comes out on the 30th.

So it’ll be out when this airs, which goes live, which will probably be…it might be August. So if you’re hearing this, you can get these books.

Exactly.

So, Every Step She Takes, maybe a little bit about that.

Yeah. Every Step She Takes, standalone thriller. It’s about a woman, Genevieve, who is living in Rome, and she’s living a very ordinary life. She’s a music teacher, has a boyfriend. She’s very happy with this life. She’s a former American. And she gets this package addressed to Lucy Calahan, which is a name she hasn’t used in 10 years. Turns out that she was the victim of a scandal when she was 18. It was a celebrity scandal, and in trying to get out of that, she ended up finally just leaving and coming…and going abroad, and ended up in Rome. Now she’s getting a call from somebody who was involved, who wants to make peace with it, who wants, who has come to understand that her role in it was not what she thought and called Genevieve back to make peace. And she goes back to make peace, and the woman ends up dead. So, that’s kind of a problem, because she is dead and Genevieve is being framed for it.

So these are two very different books…

Very different books, exactly.

So let’s talk about how these things come about. I mean, it’s a cliche to ask, where do your ideas come from, and yet, it’s a valid question. Maybe if you don’t like it that way, I often say, what was the seed from which this novel grew?

Exactly. Exactly. And for the Royal Guide series, that was actually…it comes from two things. So it comes from video games. Witcher. I was playing Witcher years ago, playing probably the second or third one, and thinking, “You know, I really like the monster hunter concept. I really it. I feel like I’d love to do something with it in fiction. Not that idea obviously, but just that very basic monster-hunting concept. And I played around with it as a young adult book. So the book was pretty much the concept was the same in that it was a princess who had a twin brother, they really wanted to switch roles. I wrote about 5,000 words of it, and it wasn’t really gelling. Just something wasn’t working. And I put it away, and every now and then I would come back to it and say, “I really like this concept. What’s not working?” And one day just had this epiphany of, “What if it was middle grade? What if, instead of being seventeen, she’s twelve.” So that, of course, meant a total rewrite, but when I rewrote, I could see, yes, that absolutely works with…it had that level of fun and lightness that it needed. The original version with the teens made it much darker, and it just wasn’t quite gelling. But in the middle-grade version, it just popped.

And that one came from sort of…not exactly random, but, you know, just something else that you were doing. Is that kind of typical of where ideas come from? They can come from anywhere, in other words?

Yeah, it certainly can be, where it’ll come from something that sort of sparks an idea, and then I run with it, and by the time you get to the final product, it doesn’t necessarily bear any resemblance to the original concept, or the original where I sort of took that from. I mean, nobody’s going to read Royal Guide and think, “Aha, she was clearly influenced by Witcher,” which is a very adult and very different story. But yes, I can sort of say that that’s where it started, and then my brain keeps on spinning on that concept until I make it my own.

On the mystery side, is it any different?

No, it’s very similar. Certainly with the, sort of grain for Every Step She Takes, we see a lot of things now, particularly when we see #MeToo coming out, where we see these stories of young women who made mistakes in some way and the way they were demonized for them. I feel like, I hope we would not necessarily do at this point, where we can look, where, at the time, it was very clearly the young woman had seduced the guy who was in power, etc. But I was fascinated by the way that we presumed that she was guilty, even when you can look back now and she would have been like, you know, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, early twenties, and the guy’s like forty or something, and yet we still somehow see that Lolita complex, where clearly she was the instigator, and she’s the one who got all of the fallout. That’s where that idea started from, but of course, once I took it and ran with it, it does not bear any resemblance to any actual case.

Now, what does your planning process look like? Do you do a detailed outline? You know, are you a pantser a plotter? There’s another cliche question for you, but what does it look like to you?

Yeah, I think like a lot of writers, I’m somewhere in the middle, and I’ve developed my own sort of process by now, where, when I go into a book, I have a very good idea of that Act 1. I know what the setup is going to be. So if we were to take something like Royal Guide, for the first book, I know exactly what the setup is: these two twins, and they’re in the wrong positions, and we’re going to have…a gryphon is attacking, and we’re going to have, the brother goes off after it, sister is left behind, and she’s going to sneak off after them. Things are going to go horribly bad, and we’re going to lose our current Royal Monster Hunter, which then means that that position is now open for someone who’s way too young. So that’s Act 1. And I know that going in. I know my characters. I know my setting. Once you get past that, I know the major points. So I would know, how do these two add up switching rules? What is she going to have to do to prove herself? What is her voyage going to be? What do I want? I mean, often in a story like that, you get this very elongated training session, where a character is going to be the Royal Monster Hunter, so now let’s spend half the book showing her in training. And I knew I did not want that. So, how do I work around that? So, I would know all the major parts, and the final act, what she’s going to face down, she’s obviously going to face down that, you know, gryphon that killed her aunt in the early part of the book. She’s going to have to come full circle and face down that gryphon. So I know that’s what’s going to have to happen. I have no clue when I start writing where this is going to happen or how it’s going to happen. Because, if I was to go and decide exactly how that happens, by the time I reach that point in the book, it would no longer fit.

On the mystery side, you often…they’re often quite intricate, and you have to be careful about what information you provide and when. Do you do more detailed planning for mysteries than you would for a straight-ahead kind of fantasy story?

You would think that I would, but I actually don’t, and it’s because a lot of the mystery is shaped through editing. So I will go into it certainly knowing who I think is the killer, etc., that could change. And mystery fans hate hearing that you get like partway through the book and change who the killer is, but it’s not like you’re being cheated because then you continue writing that, and then you finish that book and go back and you craft and edit and you put in the correct clues, you get rid of the clues that pointed in the wrong direction. It’s not as if you sort of go off on a 90-degree angle and cheat halfway through. A lot of it really is formed through that editing process of saying, OK, now that I am done, where did I put in clues that led nowhere? I mean, yes, you want some red herrings, you don’t want too many of them, or where am I missing clues that would have pointed towards this, and going back and filling all of that in.

What does your actual writing process look like? Are you like, know, a quill pen under the tree on a piece of parchment writer or…?

Computer. Yeah, because I grew up on computers. Now, I did write…my earliest stories were on a typewriter, and so, having done the longhand and done typewriters in my past, I’m still that generation that remembers what a glorious thing word processors were. Like, you did not…you could edit to your heart’s content. You didn’t have to be, you know, getting it right the first time. You could go in and edit and change things. So, yes, totally computer-based.

Do you work at home or do you go out…I mean, right now, we’re all working at home, basically, but…

Exactly. Yeah. No, I’ve got a writing cabin in the back field. So I live rural. We live on 10 acres or so, and so I’ve got a little cabin in the way, far back. It’s off-grid. No Internet. No, you know, everything. So I just go back there and work.

Sounds nice.

It is!

I was going to mention, on the word-processor side, since you are familiar with the Commodore 64, you probably remember a program called PaperClip?

Yeah, yep.

That was my first word processor, and for a long time, in my early books, they all had 10-page chapters, because you got 499 lines of text in a PaperClip file, and that was as far as you could go.

Right, yeah, exactly.

And that works out to about ten pages of manuscript format. So for a while, all my books had the same length of chapters because of PaperClip.

I think mine, still, if you were to look at my chapters, they’d probably all be between eight and 12 pages.

Yeah. I think I still fall into that kind of a zone as well. So, you talked a little bit about working on the mystery side, on revision, and so forth, but in general, once you have a first draft, what does your revision process look like?

So, I write a first draft right through. I don’t stop. If I decide that I’m going to make a change in plot, I mean, something as drastic even as getting halfway through a book and saying, “OK, I’ve decided that this character’s father is now dead,” even though he’s been alive until this point, I’m going to decide that he died, like, ten years ago, I don’t actually stop and go back and fix it up. I just keep on going as if he’s been dead for ten years and making lots of notes on things that I want to change. So, once it’s done, put it aside for a couple of months, come back to it. Do usually once sort of go-through on the computer, which is more of a revision one, where I’m moving stuff around, adding stuff in, you know, killing off father, you know, ten years ago, etc., going and fixing all of that. And then, if I have time, doing a round of paper edits, because even though I’m so computer-based for my writing, I still find that I edit best on paper, paper and pen, so I can see it, and it looks like an actual book story. And then it goes off to the editor after that.

Yeah, it’s…I’m a little bit older than you, but I also started on a typewriter and then switched to the computer, and the way that you write sounds very much like the way that I do, too, and I was…who was it I talked to? I guess it was John Scalzi I talked to…one of my very first interviews on here, and he talked about how he does a rolling revision, but he’s always written on a computer. And he never went back to that time when you pretty much had to do a single draft all the way through before you did your revisions. And he thought that there is a connection between having once worked on a typewriter and doing it that way. I don’t know about that.

I don’t know, because, yes, certainly in my early word-processing days, even with Bitten and my early novels, I did that, where I would write, and I would go back and edit and I would write and go back and edit. But I got so caught in that endless editing, and I would be editing things that I would later just cut right out because I’m pretty ruthless in the revision and I will cut out entire chapters. I will lift out 20,000 words and put in 20,000 words of stuff. It’s much harder to do that if I’ve spent time perfecting this, you know, chapter. It’s easier to pull out a first draft chapter than a chapter that I have polished, you know, five times, so…

And the working on paper resonates with me too. I am currently doing page proofs for my next book from DAW, The Moonlit World, which, by the way, is werewolves and vampires. But yeah, you know, once you get to page proofs, there’s stuff that you can’t believe that you left in the original file that you sent because it just somehow comes out differently when you see it in print than when you see it on the screen.

It does, yeah.

Now, once you’ve got a draft, you mentioned that your daughter reads stuff, do you have other beta readers? Do you do that, or are you self-contained more?

Yeah. It completely depends on what the project is. If I’m gonna be working on a series, if I’m partway through a series, there’s fewer early editors at that point. But if it’s a brand-new standalone or if it’s a new first novel or if it’s a new novella, I’m more likely to send it to my daughter, or I’ve got critique partners, and they will see it before my editor does. Now, if it’s, you know, say book three in a series, book four in a series, it’s going to go to my editor first, because by that point, I kind of know what I’m doing, and there’s not as much of that, “Is this working?” The editor knows what to expect, and I can go there. And then a critique partner or my daughter may come in at a later point if they just say, “I’d just like to read it.”

What sorts of things do you get…you mentioned, “Is this working?” Is that kind of the focus of that level of reading?

Yes, certainly for that first–if it’s standalone, if it’s first in a series–I’m really sending it to somebody to say, just generally, “Is this working? Is this flowing? Do you see any major issues with it? Do you see that it’s too close to anything that you may have read?,” even, because you never know, you can send it to somebody, and they’re like, “I just read something that’s very similar to this recently.” So, it helps to have that totally trustworthy critique partner who, before the editorial process, can help me get it cleaned up, because, by the time the editor sees it, I don’t want to be embarrassed.

One thing I forgot to ask was, are you a fast writer or a slow writer?

I am fast, and I do a fast first draft. I think it’s because of that mow right through it, not stopping to edit. I want to stay in the voice. I want to stay in the mood, and I want to keep that going. So I’m going to…now I’m not nearly as fast as some people I have met. I am relatively fast in getting that first draft done.

It’s always relative. There’s…no matter how fast you are, there’s somebody else…

Yeah, exactly.

…who says, “Oh, I did a hundred and fifty thousand words in a week.” When you get to the editorial stage, what sorts of things do you generally find the editor commenting on? What kind of changes are requested, if any?

There are always…it’s always interesting to go back and see because there are always those things that, in the back of my mind, I knew was a problem. But even after 30-odd books, I’m still at the stage where, “Yeah. OK, that’s probably a problem,” but I’m hoping it’s just me because fixing it is a lot of work. And then they come back and say, “Yes, that is a problem,” OK, thanks. And then they say it independently, where I don’t say, “Is this a problem?” I do, sometimes, if I’m concerned. But that independent verification of, maybe a plot point that I feel like, eh, that’s not quite gelling for me. Or they might come back…certainly in a series, especially, coming back with, like, “We need more of a reminder of who these characters are, we need less of a reminder of, you know, plot points from previous books because we don’t want to…if someone hasn’t read previous books, we don’t want them to be not willing to go back. If they already know who the killer is in the past two books, they’re not going to want to go back and read them, right?

You’ve worked with a lot of different publishers, which means you’ve worked with a lot of different editors. How has that been?

It’s been good. Ninety percent of the time it’s such a good experience. They bring up the things…I always say that, you know, most of my editors, there’s about 80 percent of what they say I dead-on know, “Yes, you’re totally right. Either I already knew it or, as soon as they say it, I see it. Then it’s about 15 percent where I’m not sure, and I have to think more about it. And it’s only about five percent where I can say, “I understand what you mean, but that’s not right for my book.” So, 90 percent of my editors have fallen into that group. There’s always the occasional one that you’re just not going to gel with. Whatever I’m working on, they are looking for something different. They very clearly are looking for a different kind of story than the type of story that I tell. And I can’t sort of twist myself to give them the type of story they want, because that’s not what my vision is for that book.

You were talking about the editors saying things that you kind of knew in the back of your head. My main editor, of course, is Sheila Gilbert at DAW Books. And all of us who work for DAW, like Tanya Huff and Julie Czerneda, and all those people. We all have this thing in the back of the head, “What would Sheila say?” And even though, you know…I do exactly the same thing. I will know that there’s something there that, you know, “I bet she says something,” but I’ll think, “Maybe not.” And sure enough, she always comes back and says, “You know, I didn’t…this needs…whatever,” you know. So…

Yeah, this needs to work. This little area here, this motivation or this plot point just needs a bit of work.

And that’s what editors are for. When I work with new writers, you know, sometimes, I’ll run into people who are concerned about what editors will do to their work. And I say they will generally make it better. That is really what they’re about.

Exactly. There’s a lot of fear, I think, with new writers, they get some kind of feeling, or they’ve heard stories where the editor is going to demand bizarre changes, like demand that you change your werewolves into vampires or your female main character into a male main character. That doesn’t happen. What they’re in there doing is just helping you shape that story, because it’s hard to tell when you’re that close to your story, whether or not it’s actually working.

And speaking of characters, one thing I kind of forgot to ask along the way was how you go about developing characters. I mean, you know who you need in the story, from the big picture. But then how do you flesh them out? Do you do a lot of character sketches or writing in their voice or any of these various tricks that some people use, or how does that work for you?

Yeah…I’ve sort of learned to do this combination where I certainly do dive in at the beginning, and I want to know who they are, what’s their biggest fear, what’s their main goal, what do they want most from life, and what do they want most from this situation? And, you know, what are some of their hobbies? What are some of their interests? What are some of their dislikes, their past experiences, all that psychology stuff? But I still have to get into the writing because I can certainly say that if it’s the first book in a series or it’s a standalone novel, when I start writing, I can say the character is like this, and by the time I’ve hit, you know, ten, twenty thousand words, that character has shifted. And then I have to go back and adjust that early part.

Yeah, that’s often a revision step for me is to make sure that the character’s consistent.

Yeah.

Do you ever find, as some do, that minor characters become major characters without your knowing it was going to happen?

It definitely happens, where, yes, you come up with what you expect to be a minor character…I always use one example from my first book, Bitten. So, there was this renegade werewolf, he was one of the bad guys, and in the first draft, I killed him off at the end of chapter three. But then was like, “I really like him. I feel like he has more to him.” So I thought, OK, fine, I’ll keep him alive till the end of the book. I kept him alive till the end of the book, and I killed him, and then I still was like, I still feel like he had more. So then, I let him live. He eventually ended up becoming part of the pack and becoming a major character. And in the last book of the series, he appears to have died, and it was kind of an in-joke for everybody who knows how hard I try to kill this character early on.

Well, I did want to ask you about series writing. I’ve been on a panel–at CanCon, I think it was–talking about writing series–the most I’ve ever done as a five-book series–what the struggles of writing a series? The challenges and the rewards, I guess.

Yeah. I guess…the rewards are easy because that readership growth and that readership loyalty, that, if the series takes off, if it finds its audience, they are right there hungry for the next book. And that’s a whole lot easier than standalones, where you’re reinventing the wheel every single time and looking for a fresh audience. So, the series has that built-in audience if it works. The drawbacks are obviously, especially when you go into a long series, running out of ideas, running out of originality. Certainly, with the Otherworld, the only reason that it got to 13 books was because I changed narrators. So, every few books, one of the minor, one of the secondary, characters would become the narrator, and the other characters would fall into the background. So, it would instead be a story about this character’s corner of the world, so you’d start with werewolves for two books, and then spin-off to a witch and get her corner of the world for two books. And then, you spun off to a ghost and get her corner of the world for a book. That kept it going through 13. Nowadays, I don’t think I would ever get that long because even by 13, by changing characters, by the time I finished the series and went on to something else, I realized how tired I really getting. I didn’t see it until I went on and did something new.

I often wonder about the challenges of continuity…I mean, even in a trilogy, continuity could be a problem. Did you do something to try to keep track of all those little details that just pile your pile up?

Yeah, yeah. There’s the series bibles. And now what I do is my daughter is in charge of those and she…when she’s doing her reading, she’ll usually read one of my books for just that, you know, for fun and for general feedback, but then later on, after it’s completely done, past proofs, everything, she’ll take it and enter it into the bible. So if there’s new information, it goes in there. And then, on the next book, when she goes and does that first read-through, she can first read through the bible, and she will in that read through notice, “OK, Mom, you said this here, and it seems to contradict something.” You know, something like, you get a minor character’s age wrong, you know, you said they were twenty-eight here, and they’re twenty-seven now in book two. Unless they regressed, that does not happen.

Yeah. There’s that and, the other one that that’s happened to me, is that because I’m writing…you know, sort of like you, I have a kind of a general idea, but then I’m making up a lot of stuff as I go..and this was in the five-book young adult series. And I made up something in the first book. And by the time I got to the third book, I really wished I had not made up that particular aspect of how the magic worked, is what it was, because I wanted them to be able to do something, and I had shut that door in my face without even knowing I was doing it, three books before.

Yeah. And it really is that you kind of learn to try to not give absolutes. You try to, you know, learn with that first series, to try to, in future series, instead of saying, “It’s not possible to do this,” you will say, “It’s usually done this way,” or “As far as we know, it’s not possible to do this..

“It’s never been done.” That’s a good one.

Exactly!

Well, let’s move on to–this is where the reverb should come in again–the big philosophical questions. Why do you write? And why do you think any of us write? And in particular, why do you write the kind of stuff that you choose to write?

Exactly. And for me, I think it still is…I’m still that reader. I’m still the kid who was the reader who wanted to tell stories. And it still is for me. You know, I love reading other people’s work because I don’t know what’s going to happen. You know, you can read someone else’s story, and it’s entertaining in a way that is original to me and fresh. However, writing my own story, it’s exactly what I want to write. It’s exactly the type of story that I most want to tell. So, all my favorite themes, my favorite tropes, my favorite character types, archetypes, are going to be in there because that’s what I’m doing. I always, still, because I started as a reader who was trying to write to entertain herself, I’ve kept that where, I still have to be my own first reader. And if I’m bored with a story, I need to stop and look at it and say, “Where did I lose interest?” Because for now, it still is, I love writing, and I always tell a story of…I think I had about three or four books out, and I was on a panel, and somebody said, “Now that you’re doing this for a living, do you still love writing?” And so they went down the panel, and when it got to me, I was, “I absolutely still love this. I can’t believe that I can make a living doing this.” And after the panel, one of the panelists said, “Oh, honey, you just wait until you’re at Book 10, that that will change.” And I’m at 35, whatever it is. And no, that has not changed. And I think that’s really important for me, that I still love what I’m doing and I still can’t believe that they actually pay me for this.

Well, on a bigger scale, what do you think is the impetus for telling stories for all of us who do this?

Yeah, and I don’t even…it’s really hard to say. I mean, certainly, the reader feedback is lovely. I mean, that sort of moment when somebody tells you how much a book of yours meant to them. And it can be that it meant something because it came at a difficult time in their life and it provided escape, etc., or it can just be, “I love these books, and I’ve read them to death.” And that’s a really important thing, and it’s a wonderful ego boost, and it feels like you’ve shared something of yourself with them. But I’m not even sure whether that’s the main thing. I mean, that’s obviously important, and the feedback is wonderful. But if I was to say that I could never get feedback again, would I keep on writing? I would. It probably wouldn’t be as enjoyable because I would be constantly worrying, are people out there actually liking what I am writing? That feedback helps to reassure me, but I just feel like, for me, it’s that storytelling. I feel like for a lot of us–I mean, when people say they want to become a writer and you tell–and once they really realize what that means, I think they figure they’re going to write a book and make a lot of money, or…I always figured, as a kid, if I could finish a book, like finishing a 100,000-word book would be so huge that very clearly it would get published. Ha-ha-ha, no. And I think once they realize…I’ve had so many people have said to me, “I wanted to be a writer, but then I got to know you and saw you, like, on a personal level how hard you work,” and said, “I don’t actually want it that badly.” And I’m like, that’s OK because I do.

I mean, I’m twenty…well, more than 60 books with all the nonfiction and everything…and I still love writing. And the thing is, you know, the whole thing of would I do it even I wasn’t knowing that people were reading it, well, I did, you know, a good nine or ten novels before I published anything. So I guess…and I was still enjoying the mere fact of writing the stories, even though I wasn’t finding a readership.

It is, because certainly with those early books, the unpublished ones, I would finish it and it wouldn’t sell. And there’s that moment of, “I shouldn’t even bother continuing,” but I couldn’t do that because every time I would go back and say, “I’ll right this next one for me,” because I couldn’t not write even when it wasn’t working out.

Well, and what are you working on now?

What I’m working on now is a young-adult thriller. I’ve taken a couple of years off of doing young adult while I got my middle grade going, and I wanted to come up with an idea, I felt like I wasn’t coming up with the right concept for next one. So I am working on that.

And where can people find you online?

You can find me at KelleyArmstrong.com. And on Twitter, I’m relatively active on Twitter and Facebook (@KelleyArmstrongAuthor). Not so much on Instagram, but I occasionally remember to host mostly pet pictures.

Yeah. I always struggle with Instagram. I would like to be more active on it, but I keep forgetting about that one somehow.

Exactly. I do, too.

And perhaps should mention everybody should know that it’s Kelley with an e, K-e-l-l-e-y.

It is. Yes. Although I also have the domain without the extra E, so if you type it in wrong, it should redirect you.

I should do that with Willett because that second T is constantly dropped off. Even if they put it in right–like, the Saskatchewan Book Awards judges put out their comments from this year’s, and I had a book nominated, and in the first part of it they put two Ts on it, by the time they got to the end of it, they dropped that second.

Yes, it does. It is not…I mean, I get so much that doesn’t have the E, that was one of the first things I did was snag that domain that didn’t have the second E.

I should look and see if it’s available. That would be a good thing.

Yeah.

All right. Well, thank you so much for being on The Worldshapers.

Thank you!

That was a fun conversation. I hope you enjoyed it.

I did. Thank you very much.

Well, bye for now.

OK, bye-bye.

September 21, 2019March 17, 2021

Episode 35: Lisa Kessler

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An hour-long conversation with Lisa Kessler, bestselling and award-winning author of dark paranormal fiction, including The Moon Series, The Muse Chronicles, The Night Series, and the new Sentinels of Savannah series that begins with Pirate’s Passion.

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www.lisa-kessler.com

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Lisa Kessler’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Lisa Kessler is a bestselling author of dark paranormal fiction. She’s a two-time San Diego Book Award winner for best published fantasy/sci-fi/ horror and best published romance. Her books have also won the PRISM Award, the National Excellence in Romance Fiction Award, the HOTE Medallion Award of Merit, and an International Digital Award for Best Paranormal. Her short stories have been published in print anthologies and magazines, and her vampire story, “Immortal Beloved,” was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award. When she’s not writing. Lisa is a professional vocalist and has performed with San Diego Opera as well as other musical theatre companies in San Diego.

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

Welcome to The Worldshapers, Lisa.

Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Now, I usually start the show by talking about how we know each other. This is kind of a different one, because basically I know you because I was on your show, so…

Right. Yeah. You’ve been on Book Lights a couple of times and we always have such a great time. Plus, we have the musical background. So, I feel like we already know each other so well.

We will talk a little bit about Book Lights a little later on, too, so you get a chance to talk about that….I think I hear cats in the background.

Yes, sorry. My cat never comes in here, but she just decided to come in and be on the radio. So sorry about that.

It’s quite all right. Mine’s asleep somewhere or he might join in as well.

He’ll hear the other cat, and they’ll have a conversation.

I think it was my second interview, with John Scalzi, there were cats in the background. So, it’s kind of a Worldshapers tradition, so…

Oh, well, good. Maybe my cat knew that, and I wasn’t aware.

He’s probably a long-time listener. Well, we’ll start by taking you back…I always say this, and it’s kind of appropriate, considering the book that we’re going to be focusing on, Pirate’s Passion…take you back into the mists of time, but perhaps quite not as far back as the 18th century, to find out when you became…well, first of all, where you were born and where you grew up and then how you became interested in writing and specifically in writing tales of the paranormal and the fantastic.

Well, it’s kind of an interesting story because it’s sort of paranormal and I promise that it’s true. I grew up in San Diego, and after I graduated high school, I got into our family business–we made hospital window blinds–and so I travelled a lot for trade shows. And one of those trade shows took me to New Orleans. And some background. I sang opera and musical theatre, music was my focal point, but I always wrote for fun. And I was madly in love with Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, but anyone who was a fan back in the ’90s, it took a year and a half for another book to come out. And way back in the day of the Internet, when there were…remember net groups and things like that?…there was an Anne Rice one, and I met some other women there, and we started our own Yahoo! group to write our own vampires while we would wait for the next vampire book. So I probably did that…I would write every night my own vampires just for fun, probably for like eight years. I never thought about publishing anything.

But I had a trade show in New Orleans. And so, since I was in New Orleans, I had to get my palm read. And the palm reader gave me the reading and it seemed pretty right on. And then as we were leaving, she stopped me at the door and said, “Can I ask you something?” And I said, “Sure.” And she said, “Are you a writer?” And I said, “No, I sell window shades.” And then I thought about it and I said, “Well, I write for fun every night.” And she smiled and said, “You’re gonna be a famous writer someday.” And I was like, “What?” And my brain would not let it go. And by the time I got back to the airport, I had written out a plot outline for my first book, Night Walker, which was Mayan vampires in San Diego. Very cool book, but it took me a really long time to get that published. But I wrote it in six months, and I had no idea that all those years I had been practicing.

I got to meet Ray Bradbury a couple times before he passed away, and he always believed that you had to write somewhere around 800,000 words of crap before you became a storyteller. And I never knew that that was what I was doing. I filled up a whole hard drive with text documents of my vampires and never with any inkling that I would publish it. If I hadn’t seen that palm reader, I don’t know that I ever would have gotten that nudge to try and get published.

And then I wrote short stories—that was where “Immortal Beloved” came from—because I thought, “I’m not sure I’m a good writer. I’ve just been writing for fun.” So, I wrote a bunch of short stories and I got five of them published in publications and I thought, “OK, so I’m not horrible,” And I went on from there. But without that palm reader in New Orleans, I…it just wasn’t on my radar. I was so busy singing and working. The writing was just for fun. So, she really changed the course of my life that day unexpectedly. It was very, very strange. And now I write full time. So, who knew?

So you said that you’ve always written. Did you actually start as a kid? I know many of us writers do start whenever we’re quite young. Did you start way back then?

Yeah, I did. I did write when I was a kid, but I never thought I was going to be a writer. I wrote my first book in sixth grade. They actually bound and published it for me in the school library. And thankfully, when they re-did the school library, somebody on the school board found me and brought my book back. It was called The Wonders of Unicorn Creek. It was all of like twenty pages, but that was my first book.

I thought you were going to say, “Fortunately, they threw it out when they re-did the library,” but…

Mo, I got that wonderful book back. But I never…I always wrote, but I didn’t have that, you know, I just never realized I was going to be a novelist. That was never on my radar until New Orleans.

So, when did the music come in?

Music has always been my first love. That was…my dad was a musician, and as soon as I got to junior high, I was in choir and I had all the solos and in high school and right out of high school, I was taking private voice lessons and getting in San Diego Comic Opera and Lyric Opera and stuff like that. It was just, music has always been my first love and passion, and I still have a church job, so I still do sing every week. And that was really where my focus was. And I wrote…but during all of that, I was writing every night. I was building good skills for becoming a writer without any idea that I was ever gonna be one. So it’s very, very odd.

So, you mentioned that you started with short stories. Where was “Immortal Beloved” published? It was one it was a finalist for Bram Stoker Award. Where did it fall in there? Was it like your fifth one or was it an earlier wonder? And what was it about? Because I’m not familiar with the story.

Oh, OK. “Immortal Beloved” was…I was trying to write some short stories that I could try to get published to see…because I really had no concept if I was a good storyteller or not. But I had had the idea about…because I’m very musical, I had the idea about Beethoven, and nobody has figured out, you know, who his “immortal beloved” was, and I was really into writing vampires. So I thought, “What if Beethoven’s immortal beloved really was immortal, and what if it had to be a secret because he was a man?” And so, anyway, the story takes place today, but the vampire is hearing a child prodigy playing the “Moonlight Sonata” and he’s wondering if it’s Beethoven. It’s a really cool story. And I wrote it as an experiment. I wrote it while I was listening to the “Moonlight Sonata” over and over. And it really has, like ,three different acts. And so, the story kind of follows that same kind of structure. And it got…it’s been republished quite a few times. It’s in an anthology that’s out right now called…I’ll have to look it up, I can’t remember what…Dead Souls, that’s what it’s called. It’s a paperback anthology called Dead Souls, and it’s reprinted in that right now. But it was a fabulous experiment. And the story came out really well. I was really proud of it. I did my research and I felt like at the end, maybe Beethoven was in love with a male vampire.

Well, there was a whole movie called Immortal Beloved, of course, which did not have a vampire but was also dealing with that question of exactly who the immortal beloved was.

And somebody recently, they found some DNA or something, I don’t know, but I saw it pop up again recently and they still don’t know. But they think they’re closer to figuring it out. I don’t know. It’s a great mystery, though.

So, talking about “Immortal Beloved,” and I’m also going to get into your research, because obviously there was some involved there, when we talk about the book. So, why don’t we start talking about the book? Now, you’ve written a lot of books. How many series do you have at this point?

I have five series so far. Three of them are finished and I’m currently writing two others, The Sedona Pack and also the one we’re going to be talking about, The Sentinels of Savannah.

The Sentinels of Savannah, and the first book is called Pirate’s Passion, which I read. So, why don’t you give a synopsis of it so that I don’t give away something that shouldn’t be given away?

Okay. Well, there’s actually a novella that’s like the prequel just to get you into the whole world. But basically, there is a pirate crew that sank outside of Savannah over 200 years ago, in the 1700s. But the thing was that their final plunder was supposed to be the world’s greatest treasure. But when they took over the ship, all they found was a wooden cup that seemed to always have water in it. And so, they all drank from this without realizing that they had taken a sip from the Holy Grail. So, all of these men are still alive. They’re now immortal. And so, most of them still live in Savannah and now they have regular jobs. They have made a replica of their ship so that they can still sail. And their captain is still pirating, but he’s pirating in real estate.

And so, anyway, I made this special division of the government, Department 13, who deals with paranormal threats to American citizens. And because they’re the government, they have to…there’s laws, and they can’t steal, but he meets up with the immortal pirate crew and gives them the option of stealing now for the government. So they are going back to some of their piracy ways and also helping America. So, it is really wild and fun series to write so far.

And it is, of course, a romance, as well as paranormal, paranormal romance, kind of right there in the title. So who is the romance between?

So, in Pirate’s Passion, the romance is between the ship’s pilot, do the guy who steers the ship, and a historian who works for the Maritime Museum in Savannah, Dr. Charlotte Sinclair. And she has some secrets of her own. It was a wild adventure of a book to write. And the thing is, when you’re writing romance with these big paranormal elements, it’s really hard to balance the two. because you want the romance readers to get that happy-ever-after that they want, but when you have paranormal elements, a lot of times the stakes are gigantic. You know, the world could end, there’s lots of death and all that kind of thing. So, for me, it’s always a fun juggling act to keep it even, so that the romance is achieved, but we also get a really fun adventure with lots of danger. For me as a writer, I need lots of danger. When my kids were younger and at home still, they who see me sitting at the computer chomping on gum, going, “No, the story is stalled. What’s happening?”, and I had taught my daughter, “Well, it’s time to raise the body count,” because nothing gets things moving like a dead body. So anyway, a lot of people die in my books, as well. But balancing the romance with that is always a challenge. Bu in this book, it was it was not so difficult because the hero and heroine had a lot of spark instantly, which is always fun for me.

Yeah. I was going to ask you about that element of it, because I haven’t read…you know, I’ve read a lot of urban fantasy and I’ve read a lot of paranormal stories, but not paranormal romance, and certainly that balance is different than if it were just an urban fantasy.

Right.

You know, in an urban fantasy, you might have a romantic subplot, but it’s not quite as front and centre as the romance is in Pirate’s Passion. And, of course, there’s also the difference in the cover art.

Right, definitely. Yes. If you’re writing paranormal romance, the market is that there’s some kind of man chest on there, man chest and some kind of fog. And that’s what makes readers go, “Oh, it’s paranormal.” But, yeah, in urban fantasy, there’s almost always a big romance, you know, subplot going on. But in urban fantasy, there doesn’t have to be a happily ever after, and in romance that’s the deal you’re making with the reader. So, like, if it’s a mystery, the deal with the reader is that you will solve the crime by the end of the book, and the deal with the romance is that there will be a happily ever after, somehow. You may not know how that’s going to happen, but somehow there will be a happily ever after at the end. And so it does make it tricky, because if you don’t meet that, the readers are really disappointed. And in urban fantasy, you’ve got a little more wiggle little room, because you can have happy for now, you can have that they break up at the end. But there’s another book, so maybe they’ll get back together, you know? Like Sookie in the Sookie Stackhouse books, you know, she had many happy-for-nows with all different people. So, you have a little…more options there.

You couldn’t do that in a paranormal romance because the reader is expecting a happily ever after. So, in a paranormal romance series you’ll usually see some kind of band of brothers, you know, like this one has a pirate crew, because although all those characters will be in every book, I need a different character to be able to get his happily ever after. And that’s why werewolf shifters and things like that work really well in paranormal romance because you have a whole pack, and each one gets to be the hero of a book.

Does paranormal romance draw in readers from the more regular fantasy side and also draw in readers from the romance side that might not otherwise venture into that territory? Is it like a place where they come together? Ecumenical, sort of?

Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think paranormal romance is like a gateway drug to fantasy for romance readers because they get that taste of the worldbuilding and, you know, the worldbuilding and those super high stakes. You know, the world could end, you know, a city be destroyed or something like that, and it’s a whole new thing because other…there’s lots of genres of romance, historical, contemporary, romantic suspense. Romantic suspense can sometimes have super high stakes also. But the fantasy elements are all in paranormal romance. So, if a romance reader who maybe typically reads historicals stumbles across a time-travel or a paranormal romance or something like that, that can be their first experience sometimes with that kind of genre and can lead them toward, you know, urban fantasy and maybe even high fantasy.

To be fair to the cover art with the “man chest”…

Yes.

There was, of course…for a long time, urban fantasy seemed to be distinguished by the bare midriff of the female protagonist.

Exactly. Exactly. And urban fantasy, for a long time, it had to be the female protagonist, she had to be in black leather and high-heeled boots. And it’s like, if you read the book, the, you know, the women are, like, kicking ass, and I’m sure it wasn’t in high-heel boots. But that was what needed to be on the cover. But all of that is really like marketing and bookstore…you know, what people are expecting, I think. I don’t know who came up with what those need to be, but they sure stick.

Now, we’re using Pirate’s Passion as an example of your creative process. So, where did the idea…I know that’s a cliché, “Where do your ideas come from?”, nevertheless… where did the idea, or the seed, that grew into Pirate’s Passion come from, and is that typical of the way that your ideas come to you?

Well, actually, it was really neat. I got invited to be part of an anthology for the Romantic Times. Romantic Times was a magazine that would have the Book Lovers’ Convention, a national convention, where people came from all over the world. Lots of Australian readers would come to that one, and they wanted…it was happening in Atlanta, and so they called it Moonshine and Magnolias. And they wanted…they picked twenty romance authors, of all different genres of romance, to write a novella that was set in the south. And they needed…and the only requirement was it had to include Atlanta. And I’ve been to Atlanta, and it’s not like my most favourite city, but my grandmother and her family were all from Savannah. And I love Savannah. I’ve been there before. It’s very haunted city. It’s just, it’s so gorgeous and so much history. And so, I thought about Savannah. If I set it in Savannah, I could put the bad guy in Atlanta. And then I’m thinking about it, and I’ve been to Savannah before, and Savannah is all ghosts and pirates. It was a big pirate hub back in the day. You can go The Pirates’ Inn restaurant. It used to be a bar back then, but it is still there. And you can go inside, and they will show you the pirate tunnels that are still there, where they would get…they would get you so drunk that you would pass out and they would drag you through the tunnels onto a ship. And when you wake up out in the ocean, they’re like, “Well, you’re our ship’s doctor now.” So, anyway, you can still see those in Savannah. And when you walk along River Street, you know, they have all the pirate stuff. And so anyway, I thought, “Well, if I wrote a pirate book, but I don’t want it to be historical, I want it to be now, how can I make these pirates immortal?” And then I thought about the Holy Grail and I thought, “Ah, that could work.” And the whole thing came together.

And when I wrote the novella for that event, my agent wanted to read it, and so I sent it to her, and she wrote me back, she goes, “I forgot to eat lunch, I was reading this, and please tell me the whole crew is gonna get a book and let me sell this series.” And I was like, “Okay.” So, anyway, I started working on, you know, what the crew stories would be so that I could give her a series synopsis. And she sold the whole series. So, I’m writing…I’m finishing book four right now. And then there will be four more. There’s eight books altogether.

So….that’s kind of an unusual way for a series to come about…

Right?

…where have some of your others come from? You know, images, characters, settings, what kind of gets you going?

My other series came from short stories that I wrote. When I…the first time I met Ray Bradbury, I had only, I had written my first book. I had written Night Walker, the palm reader told me, you know, “You’re going to be a writer.” Well, I was new, so I didn’t realize how many rejections you get. Oh, my gosh. And I would get so close with an agent and then they would go, “On second read, we’re just not sure, but we’ll be excited to see it on the shelves.” And I’m like, “What? You think it’s gonna get published and you won’t represent me?” It was very frustrating. And I was working for a literary paper in San Diego, and we did an interview with Ray, and part of the perk was that he was going to come down and speak in San Diego and we were all going to get to meet him. So I was beside myself. And so, when I finally got to meet him, I asked, I told him, I had written a book and I’m getting a lot of rejections, what can I do to improve my writing? Because I was sure it must be me. And I thought he would recommend a book, and instead he told me, “Write a new short story every week for a year.” He said, “By the end of the year, you will be a new writer.” And since I had already sold short stories and I knew you didn’t make very much money off of them, I thought, “I don’t know.” It took me a few weeks to decide, “Okay, this is Ray Bradbury. He knows what he’s talking about. I’m going to do this.”

And I wrote the first one, and I ended up having so much fun I wrote a short story every week for a year and a half. So, I have I have over 120 short stories and a few of them just stick with you. And one of them ended up being the first chapter of Moonlight, which was the first book in my Moon Series, which is still my most popular series to date, but the first chapter was that short story, and when I wrote it, I couldn’t let the idea go. So, I wrote that book and the second book in that series while I was writing a short story every week. So, it was the best thing I ever did. Ray Bradbury is a genius and was totally right.

My Muse Chronicles series came from one of my short stories, as well. I wrote a short story called Unemployed Muses Anonymous, and it was that the Muses were still here, because they were daughters of Zeus, so they’re immortal, and they were living in New York and they were all unemployed. And each of them, their personalities were coloured by what their muse was. So, the Muse of Tragic Poetry was a pessimist and the Muse of Dance couldn’t stop wiggling, and anyway, it was a really fun short story to write, but I couldn’t let the idea go that it would be really cool to have this group of women in today’s world who maybe, when they turn eighteen, realize that, you know, they’re the vessel for this muse. And so, anyway, that series was the most incredible writing experience I’ve ever had. It was just amazing, those books, and the way the whole series turned out wasn’t anything like I expected. It was really very inspired. So, I had planned six books, but in the book where I was supposed to kill off one of the muses, it turned out that wasn’t going to happen, there was a new hero who came on the scene and he was not going to let her die, and I called my cover artist and said, “I’m super sorry, but we’re going to have one more book.” So, there actually were seven books in that series. But it was all from that short story. So that, really, those inspire me a lot.

Ok, so that just takes it back one more step, though. If you’re writing a short story every week, you’re having to come up with a lot of ideas every week. So how are you generating those?

Yes, that was the hardest part of writing a new short story every week. Oh, my gosh. So, sometimes I would be so desperate that I would go look at odd news. If you go to like Yahoo! News and CNN, there’s, way in the corner, there’s “Odd.” And if you click on it, it’s bizarre stories of things that have happened. And so, I found a lot of short story ideas that way, and I learned so much doing it, because…you need a story idea. So, you go, and you find this story about a rogue wave. I’m like, “What the heck’s a rogue wave?” And then I go look on YouTube and I’m, “Wow, those are terrifying.” So anyway, I did all this research and now they think that the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in the Great Lakes, they didn’t know, because we didn’t have cell phone videos and things back then, but rogue waves happen on the Great Lakes. And so now there have been ships where they have video of these rogue waves coming on the Great Lakes, and they think that’s what split the Edmund Fitzgerald. So, anyway, so I wrote a shipwreck story.

And I read about this strange hailstorm in Death Valley that basically took out all the power, and it was so strong that they closed the highway, and so I wrote a sci-fi story about that it was really aliens, and all this kind of thing. So, I found a lot of things looking at weird news.

I was so desperate, sometimes I would look at songs that I like and see if I could come up with a story to go with the song. Sometimes, the ideas just showed up and I was like, “Thank you!” Sometimes I wrote spinoff stories from other stories. The other thing, too, that was fun was I tried to challenge myself to write stories I never thought that I would, just see if I could. So, I wrote…I’m not a big sci-fi reader, but I wrote, like, five sci-fi stories. And I wrote one about a gunslinger, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. Who knew?” But it was a great experiment because you learn to research faster, you learn to get ideas faster, you write faster, you edit faster. I mean, in the beginning, it would take me an entire week to write and edit the short story, and by the end of my year, I could sit down Sunday afternoon with an idea (finally!) and then write the whole thing, edit it, and have it up by midnight, because I was so much faster by then. So, it really was a great thing for my tool kit, as a writer, to keep your brain going and coming up with ideas and writing them down and not picking it apart so much. You know, get the whole idea down and then edit it. And I feel like learning beginning, middle, end, it all works for writing novels because each chapter is, you know, similar to and has that same flow as a short story.

Is this something you recommend to other writers, to beginning writers who are looking to up their game?

Definitely. Definitely. I used to…I’ve been too busy now, so I haven’t done it…but I mentored five writers through it, and they all wrote a new short story every week for a year. And it was the coolest thing. I mean, most people would drop out partway through. It’s really hard. It’s a marathon. But five of them finished. And it was so exciting to see. And we would make it, Sunday night was deadline night, and they all would post their stories, and I would give everybody feedback on their stories and encourage them for next week, and all that kind of stuff, and to see five of them finish, and they were so much better by the end of the year, it was really inspiring. So, I hope that eventually I’ll be able to do that again, because it’s really hard to do it on your own, and I think having a group, the little bit of peer pressure and all, it really helped. They were all cheering each other on, and it was it was a great experience.

When I did it, I did it alone, but I had a blog—this was back in MySpace days—and so for fun, I was just writing my story and I made Sunday night deadline night and I would have put it up on my blog on MySpace. And I didn’t realize at the time, but I was building a readership before I ever had a book come out. I had, I think, over 6,000 subscribers to that MySpace blog who were waiting for the free story every week. And I met Ray Garton, who is a horror master, Grand Horror Master winner and everything, I met him through that. He had stumbled across one of my stories on my blog, and he messaged me and said, “You can write! That was great. What are you doing?” And I got to meet him at Book Expo, and he gave me reference when I was looking for an agent, and all of that just happened because I was writing a new short story every week and putting it up on my blog. And it did get to be a little bit of peer pressure, because the subscribers were waiting on Sunday night, so I felt like it had to go up.

But having that group where I was, you know, cheering these writers on, it was really exciting, and they got so much better. We would compare at the end their first story with their last story, and it was amazing. Ray is right. It’s the best way to improve your writing, for sure.

Well, coming back to Pirate’s Passion, and all of your novels, once you have that idea, what does your planning and outlining process look like? Do you do a detailed outline or are you more of a make-it-up-as-you-go-and-worry-about-it-later, or how does it work for you?

Yeah, yeah. I’m a big time pantser, unfortunately. Sometimes I look at my plotting friends and I’m like, “Dang it, I wish I knew what was happening next.” But the flip side of that is for me, writing can be magical, because cool things happen that I never thought of, and they’re always so much better than what I had thought was going to happen. And so…I always feel like…Ray Bradbury used to talk about that there’s, like, a superconscious up there that wants stories told, and when…he used to think that when you get a story idea, it’s downloading in your head and it’s your job to, like, dictate that, you know, follow the story and let it spill out. You don’t get to direct it, kind of thing. And I feel like by letting myself not have a big outline, it gives me the freedom to let the story go where the story needs to go.

And there are times where I’m like, “I don’t know, this is way off…” Like, in The Muse Chronicles when I’m suddenly going, “Oh, my gosh, I have to add a book.” But it was the right thing to do for that series, and I loved that book. It was great. So, that was all good. But had I been so pinned in by my series outline, and my book outline, you know, I would have just gone, “Sorry, she has to die.”

And, you know, as a writer, for me, part of the fun is the discovery. And so, I try not to pen it in. I mean, for my publisher, they do need a series outline, so I come up with who the hero and heroine will be and sort of what the adventure will be. In the pirate series it’s, you know, which relic are we going to go after of each time, and that kind of thing. But beyond that, I leave it wide open so that I can discover it as I go. And a lot of times, character growth, too, because your characters change as events happen. And so, as a pantser, I’m constantly asking, “what if” and “why?” You know, “So, what if this happened? And why did they react like that?” And that is how the story unfolds for me, that’s my process. And, “How can I make it worse?” I’m always asking, you know, “What, if this happened, why did they react like this, and how can I make it worse?” Well, it’s Savannah, it should rain. So, for me, that’s my process.

I found when I was doing the short stories, I tried plotting for a few of them because I was doing it as an exercise to try new things, and the three stories that I tried plotting, I never finished the story, and I realized that for my writing process, if it’s already basically written, I have no impulse to put it together. I feel like it’s already done. It’s already, you know, it turns into a term paper instead of a creative experience. So, I don’t I don’t do a big outlining, even though sometimes I get stuck and I’m like, “What’s going to happen now?” And I look at my friend across the table who has notecards and she knows what’s happening, like, “Dang it!” So, you know, it all comes down to how your writer brain is fixed up, and I think there’s pluses and minuses to both, but you’ve got to go with what works for you in the end.

What does your actual writing process look like? Are you sitting in a home office a certain number of hours a day? Do you go out to coffee shops? Do you sit under a tree with a notebook and a quill pen? How do you write?

I don’t write by hand. I have to type. But I have a writing chair at home, so I usually write a little bit at home. Panera is my office away from home, and a lot of times…I have some local friends who are writers, too, so a lot of times they’ll come meet me at Panera and we’ll all write. And that’s always fun, because when you start to get stuck, if you see everyone else is writing, you’re like, “Okay, I got to keep right. I’ll come up with something.” So, that’s fun as well.

I am not an every-day…I know there are some people who say you have to write every single day, and I am not like that. Because I don’t plot. I write two chapters at a time and then I go back and edit those two chapters, because the only way I can be fearless is if I can promise myself that if I took a wrong turn, I’m only going to lose two chapters. So, I write two chapters and then I edit those two chapters, and so, it makes my book go a little bit slower, but in the end, I can turn in my first…my first draft is clean, so I turn those in. So, it works for me. It just makes that first draft…it takes a little bit longer than somebody who can just, you know, put it all out there and then rewrite. I’m not a rewrite, so… But for me, because I don’t have an outline, it’s too scary to write the whole book, and the thought of a rewrite gives me hives, so I do two chapters and then I go back and edit. So there may be, you know, where I write three days and then I edit for two, and then I write for three and I edit for two, and then, you know, I might be busy, so I’m doing something else. And sometimes I have deadlines overlap, and so when I get edits back for a book, I have to set aside the one I’m writing because my brain will not compartmentalize like that. I have friends who can write one book in the morning and edit a different book at night, and I can’t. So, when I get edits, I might have to set the book aside and do the edits on the other book and then go back. So I think…I think I lost my thread, but that’s basically my writing process.

Well, you kind of answered the next question, which I normally ask, which is about the revision process, but it sounds like you do essentially a rolling revision, two chapters at time, so that when you have that draft at the end, it’s actually a finished draft, not just a rough draft that you’re going to go back through from the beginning.

Yes.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about your theatre background, because I’ve talked to other authors who have theatre backgrounds, like Orson Scott Card, for example, who’s written multiple musicals and directed plays and things like that. And from my own experience, I want to see if you find this as well. There’s a usefulness to being a stage performer when it comes to keeping track of where people are in relationship to each other and how they interact with each other within a space. That’s what I find. And of course, I also find that being an actor ties directly into being a writer because it’s basically the same thing: you’re pretending to be somebody else and trying to make that person come alive. Is that your experience?

Definitely. And being, you know, with a musical theatre background and opera and all that kind of thing, music plays into it a lot. Like, I build playlists for my books before I even start writing, because when I get that, when I’m going to start a new book, I usually know kind of what the theme of the book is going to be. So, I look for music, movie soundtracks, classical music, even songs with words, I have those on there, too, that will back up, you know, who I think the hero is, the heroine is, the, you know, plot things, that kind of stuff. And I think if you come from a music and acting background, I think that you are able to blend those arts together to make your words, you know…to inspire your words, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. But, yeah, I definitely feel like having that background helps my helps my writing very much.

And, just speaking for myself, my current book, Master of the World, and the one before that, Worldshaper, my character likes musical theatre, so I get to make musical theatre jokes throughout the book, so that’s fun.

Oh, I love it.

Now, you mentioned then, there is still some editing, some maybe not rewriting, but what sorts of things do you find yourself editing afterwards? And I presume this is after it’s been to your editor and it comes back for comment.

Well, and I forgot to mention this, too, I do have beta readers, I have a team of four beta readers, and they read my two chapters at the same time as I’m writing the book because I like to get their feedback as far as…you know, one of them is really good at catching typos, that even after editing, I missed, I’m like, “What?” But there are a couple of them who are really good at character motivations, and they’ll tell me, “Oh, I hate that guy!” and I’ll go, “Good. You’re supposed to hate that guy,” you know, but they give me their feedback, and a couple of times it has been really helpful because, like, one of them said, “He seemed like he would have been angrier. He would have been angrier at that.” And she was right, and so I boosted that up.

So, a lot of times when I get my edits back from my editor, it’s things that I thought were clear that really aren’t clear on the page. I have a writer friend, Mary Leo, who…my favourite saying that she has is, “You don’t get to travel with your book to explain it.” And that is so true. So, sometimes, you know, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience, too, where it seems totally clear to me, you know, why he did that, but it’s because I know the character inside and out and sometimes I don’t get enough detail on the page so that, you know, the editor’s like, “Well, he seems like a jerk here.” And I’m going, “Oh, because I didn’t…” And sometimes…I know I’m a rusher when I write, I’m always wanting to get to the next good part, so I leave out details. Like, one time I had an editor note somebody had gone to urgent care with a stab wound, and I had things happening with this other character, and then suddenly a nurse came in and the editor’s like, “Whoa, there’s a nurse? When did they get into urgent care? What’s happening?” And I was like, “Oh, maybe I should have them get out of the car and walk inside.” But I was so excited to get to the next part that I completely missed getting out of the car and getting…you know. So. usually when I get my edits back, it’s things like that. Like, it was clear in my head, but I didn’t necessarily get that on the page.

And when you’re writing romance, too, a lot of times the editors will look for beats in the book that they think are coming too soon. You know, they said, “I love you” too soon. And sometimes it’s the right thing for the book, and that’s OK. But, you know, they’re looking for things like that, pacing and that kind of thing. But usually…I’ve never had to do a rewrite, thank God, but usually it’s stuff like that.

Well, we’re getting fairly close to the end of the time here, so I wanted to, first of all, before I ask you my big philosophical questions, I wanted to ask you about your program, Book Lights, and how did that come about, and what is that about? I mean, I know, I’ve been on it, but you tell us what it’s all about.

Yeah, well, Sheila English owns Circle of Seven Productions and she makes fabulous book trailers. If you’ve ever seen a commercial on cable TV for a Christine Feehan book, that was Sheila English, she makes those. She is a huge book lover, and she’s also now a published author herself, and she founded Readers’ Entertainment Radio and they have two shows, Readers’ Entertainment and Book Lights. So there’s two shows a week that we do. And, I had been on both of those shows as an author and Sheila sent out one of her newsletters, and I noticed at the bottom she said that she was looking for another host for Book Lights, “So if you know anyone, please send them my way.” So, I emailed her and I said, “Well, I would do it,” And she said, “Really?” And I said, “Oh, I love talking to writers. That would be super fun.”

So, anyway, she had me jump in and try, and I have had such a blast. I’ve been so lucky to talk to so many different writers. And I talk to them from every genre. I’ve had horror authors on and women’s fiction authors on and romance and fantasy and sci-fi. And I never get tired of, you know, hearing from all these different writers from different places. I’ve had people from England and Greece and, of course, Canada. And it’s just, it’s fascinating to me, you know, how people write books and the cool ideas that they come up with for them, where I’m like, “Wow, I never would have thought of that.” And so, it’s a really fun show, and it is not pointed at, you know, we always talk about the author’s new release at the beginning, but it devolves into what we’re all interested in and what TV shows we should binge and all this kind of thing. So, I feel like for readers, it’s a very reader-focused show. It’s readers who are listening. So, I feel like at the end the readers really get to know that author much better. And I hope if it’s a new author to them that they’ll be willing to take a chance on that new book because they’ll be going, “Oh my God, that author watches all the shows I do. And, oh my God, they ride horses and we have a horse ranch!”, you know? So, hopefully…my goal is always that hopefully new readers find new authors, because as an author myself, we’re constantly looking for new readers to fall in love with our series and go and read our backlist and all that kind of thing. So Book Lights is a really good forum for that.

Well, and The Worldshapers, of course, came about because I wanted to talk to authors about writing and so, yeah, authors are generally very interesting people to talk to you.

Yeah, I think so, too.

Now, that does bring us back to the big philosophical questions I’d like to, sort of, wrap up with. It’s really one question, which is, “Why do you write?” with subsidiary questions of, “Why do any of us write?” and, specifically, “Why do you write tales of the fantastic?”

Oh, wow. That is a philosophical question. Well, I think that writing, especially these days, is more important than ever, fiction writing, because fiction…stories have been around since human beings have been around, you know, there’s cave paintings of stories. And I think that Ray is probably not wrong, there’s a superconscious that that needs stories to be told and songs to be written and all these kind of things. And so, I feel like, when you get a reader email from somebody who says, “Thank you so much, I love your books when I’m going for dialysis and it takes me away while I’m going through this,” or somebody who has lost a loved one and they write you an email that this book, you know, gave them welcome relief from all this grief right now that they’re going through and that kind of thing… I think that books also teach us to empathize with people who are very different than we are. Obviously, I am not an immortal pirate, but writing this series…

Spoiler!

Really, I know, right? Spoiler alert. But writing this series, I really dig into the question of what would it do to you if the world around you is constantly changing and you are not? And each character, I get a different facet of that. Because it affects each of them differently. And so I learn.

And I think that fiction teaches us to empathize and learn about people, as opposed to a historical event. You know, it’s not like a textbook. When you go on a story and you go on a hero’s journey and you see people change, it reinforces to you that you can change. You can be anybody you want to be. If this person could do it, you can do it, you know, kind of thing. And I think that there is a magic in that. And so, I think that writing is important, and I feel like when I get these story ideas that they need to come out because they’re going to serve some kind of purpose that I may not even know. But they need to be told. So, we do.

Well, this is…The Worldshapers, of course, again, is the name of this podcast, and that is something you’ve kind of touched on there that I like to ask is if, you know, do you hope that your fiction is…changing the world might be a little grand, or even shaping the world might be a little grand, but at least shaping readers in some fashion and having some sort of impact on them?

Yeah. Definitely. I hope that, if nothing else, it provides an escape from, you know, something that they need a break from. And also, I hope that through the books…there is always, especially in in romance, there’s always a character arc where they’re changed by the end of the book. And I think that that’s powerful. And I hope that that helps people understand, too, and empowers them that you can change you. You know, if you don’t like who you are today or you don’t like how your life is today, it doesn’t have to stay that way. You have that power to change that. And in romance, you know, it’s the powerful emotion of love and how that changes you. But in all fiction, you know, there’s always this change, and I think that that is important. And I hope that my books help people see that that’s possible.

I wrote a novella called “Night Angel,” which…I bawled so much writing that book, but I hadn’t planned on writing it, because this character had been, he was immortal, but he had been like so damaged that he’s a shapeshifter and he shapeshifts into this big hawk, and he can’t fly anymore because part of his arm was ripped off. And, you know, he lives forever and he heals, but he doesn’t regenerate like a lizard, so… So, I wasn’t going to write his book, but readers kept asking if he was going to get a happy-ever-after. And I’m like, “Oh, my God.” But that novella was so powerful to me as a writer because I learned and I…when I was in high school, I used to be a teacher’s aide for the deaf classroom, and so I learned sign language and all this kind of thing. And so, I made the human character, she was deaf from…there was a bombing in Ireland, and so she was deaf. And he crosses paths with her and learns from her that you’re not less, you’re just different. You’re not, you know…handicapped, I think, is this label that makes people feel like they’re less. And you’re not, you’re just different. And she taught him that. And that was such a powerful thing that I learned writing that book. And so, anyway, I do hope that readers come away with a new, maybe even just a new empathy for other people around them and in their life.

Well, I think what’s interesting is that fiction doesn’t just change readers, it changes the writers as well. We all discover things, as we’re writing these stories, about ourselves and about the way we look at the world that maybe we didn’t know going into that story. Do you find that your experience?

Exactly. Yes, definitely. And that’s part of the love of writing. You know, we do all this research and then we throw it into a story, and you put them in situations, and you realize, “Oh, my gosh,” you know, and you learn, too. So, yeah, it definitely changes you, some books more than others. But, yeah, it’s an amazing process, and as human beings, we’re so lucky that we get to do it.

And hey, we can even bring that to a musical theatre quotation because of course, in The King and I, there’s that line about, “If you become a teacher, by your students you are taught.”

So, yes, exactly. That was great.

If you’re an author, by your characters you are taught.

Yes. We definitely learn from our art, for sure.

Well, and that brings us to the end of the time. So, where do people find you online, should they wish to do so? And I’m sure they do.

My Web site is lisa-kessler.com. And I’m also on Facebook and Twitter. I’m easy to find, just Lisa Kessler, writer. And I’m also on Goodreads and Pinterest. Pinterest is really fun. I put up pictures from scenes of every book I write because I use it while I’m writing. But if you’ve read any of my books and you want to see if you were picturing people the same way I was, you can go to Pinterest. It’s pinteres.com/ldydisney, and find me there also. And I do have an author newsletter, you can sign up on Facebook or on my Web site. And I often give away free short stories, free sneak peeks into books that aren’t out yet, so there’s always something fun in there. And I’m also a Tarot card reader, so every month you’ll get a Tarot card for the month with a little reading with it. So, sign up for the newsletter, too.

And what are you working on next?

I’m finishing Pirate’s Persuasion next. And then I will be going back to the wolf pack to write Sedona Seduction. So, that’ll be fun.

All right. Well, thanks again for being a guest on The Worldshapers. I had a great time. Hope you did, too.

I did. Thank you for having me on.

And maybe I’ll be talking to you on your program again sometime. You never know.

Right? When you get that next book out, you know where to find me.

Thanks again. Bye for now.

OK, thank you. Bye bye.