Before I start I want to thank Daniel Boucher and the entire staff here at The Novel Blog for inviting me. I love that this is a place readers can visit to get honest, real opinions about current books on the market. And I’m thrilled to be here.

Okay, on to the questions…

Hmm…balance. Not something I’m particularly good at. Remember that Jack Nicholson movie Something’s Gotta Give? That’s my life. Something is always giving.

I learned long ago that I’m not Superwoman, and when I got serious about writing I knew there would be things in my life I’d have to let go of. To make up for my deficiencies, I surround myself with people who fill in the gaps: My best friend is a whiz at organization. She keeps me up to speed on what’s happening at our kids’ school so I don’t miss something important and she schedules our runs (she’s also my running partner) so the stress doesn’t overwhelm me. My husband is a detail guy. If I’m worrying about deadlines he arranges everything so I can get away and write. And my mom? She’s a peach. She steps in whenever I need her help with the kids.

Since I am a woman, first and foremost, I always feel like I’m letting things slide in one area or another. But I know I’m doing what I love and I’m modeling passion to my kids in a way they might not ever experience it otherwise. And that knowledge pretty much keeps me balanced. Most of the time, anyway.

Well, I’m definitely an enigma amongst my writer friends who all knew they wanted to be authors by the age of eight. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted to be for a really long time. I’d always loved to read, but when I went to school I studied science instead of literature. In retrospect, I should have known the voices in my head were not normal. But I didn’t know any better. Didn’t everyone have stories tumbling around up there? I didn’t think it meant anything. So I got a degree in science, considered medical school, finally decided I couldn’t handle seven more years of school and went on to get my Masters in education instead. I spent nine years teaching junior high science then took a year’s leave of absence after the birth of my second child. Three months into my self-imposed house confinement with two screaming kids, I knew I was going to go insane unless I found something to occupy my brain. So I started writing.

At the time, I didn’t have any intention of writing for publication. I just wanted to keep myself from going nuts. But once the writing bug bites, it’s often hard to go back to the way things were. I got involved with some writers groups, told my family what I was doing and things went from there. When I was teaching, I used to focus on archaeology, geology and chemistry, so it sort of made sense that was the direction my books headed. And now…seven years later…I can’t imagine doing anything else.

For me it’s taking something—an idea—at its barest, and shaping it into something tangible readers can hold in their hands, and…if done correctly…get lost in for hours at a time. I used to relish positive feedback from my critique partners, but that doesn’t even compare to the way it feels to get fan mail from people you don’t know but who absolutely love your characters and the world you’ve created. Whenever I’m having a crappy writing day and that annoying little voice is whispering, “this totally sucks” in my ear, I open my fan mail folder and read what people have written me about the Stolen books. That, for me, is the absolute high of being an author.

Boring. Seriously. I wish it was this exotic story wherein I was lying on a tropic beach drinking mojitos and some scantily clad pool boy brings me the house phone with a message that my manuscript has gone to auction in a seven figure deal.

(What can I say? I write fiction…)

In truth, I was at home. It was a Tuesday morning. I already knew an editor had the book and was serious about it. My agent had called the Friday before and told me she needed a short synopsis ASAP for an editor who’d called that morning. I sent it, gnawed on my nails all weekend, went to a writers’ retreat with some friends and stressed (and drank too…in a lame attempt to ease some of the stress). Monday rolled around. No news. Tuesday morning hit. Nothing. I’d just about given up hope when I sat at my laptop to start working that morning and the phone rang.

It was my agent. She told me about the offer and paused, I suppose waiting for me to start screaming. I didn’t. I think I was too stunned to say anything. To which my agent said, “You did hear me, right? You are excited about this, right?” I’m pretty sure I mumbled an “uh huh” and signed off. Then I went and cleaned the toilets.

An hour later, I did start screaming.

My friends all love this story and often ask, “How could you go clean toilets after learning you’d just sold?” I don’t really have an answer except to say cleaning toilets was normal for me then and was one small thing I could do to stay in control of my life. Selling books? Not normal at all.

(Don’t worry. I’ve since adjusted my thinking.)

I read somewhere (years ago) that it takes the “average” writer five years, 4 months and five manuscripts to finally sell. I sold my 5th completed manuscript exactly 5 yrs and 4 months after I started writing. So I suppose you could say I’m “average” when it comes to my road to publication. That’s not to say it wasn’t without its highs and lows. There were times I was sure I was never going to sell. Times when I wondered why I was subjecting myself to even more rejection. Times when I wondered if pumping gas at the corner market might have been a better (and more profitable) career choice for me.

But somewhere along the way I think most writers (all published writers for sure) say, “You know, this is worth it. I love what I’m doing and I know someday I’ll sell.” I believed, and eventually my persistence paid off.

I wish I could say I float out of bed at 7am, sit down at the computer and the words flow endlessly until 5pm or so when I close my laptop for the night. But unfortunately, that’s (also) what we call true fiction.

Because I’m on the West Coast, I have to catch any correspondences from my editor (in NY) before 2pm my time. It’s not uncommon for me to get an email at 8am with the note, “Can you get this back to me today?” So a typical day for me starts around 9am (after my kids are all gone to school) checking email and correspondences and visiting a few blogs I haunt. Then – if I’m lucky and my characters are being nice to me – I’ll start writing. I may write until 11:30am when I have to pick up my youngest from preschool. Since he goes to school every other day, that’s not a lot of “quiet” time, and days when he’s home it’s virtually impossible for me to generate new words. When he’s home, I focus on promo stuff instead (which is really the bane of my existence but a necessary evil, all things considered) and may edit what I wrote the night before.

Most of my writing, though, gets done at night, after the Gremlins (my kids) are all in bed. I’ll write from 8pm until midnight, then call it a night. As I tend to be a night owl and not a morning person, this is the time when I’m most productive. Though I will admit I dream of the day all my Gremlins are in school full time and I can write uninterrupted from 9am-5pm. (But knowing my luck I still won’t be able to get anything done then either.)

I like to consider myself a “plantster”. I have a rough plot outlined in my head or on paper before I sit down to work on a book, but for the most part, I plot as I go. I can usually see about three chapters ahead of where I am. I know what’s going to happen next, but I don’t know everything all at the beginning. For me, it’s a good way to work. I think I might get bored if I knew it all ahead of time. Not knowing all the twists and turns of the story keeps the mystery of writing alive in my mind.

I’ll tell you honestly that I didn’t set out to write paranormal novels. I have always been perfectly happy writing romantic adventure & suspense. But just before STOLEN FURY sold, I had an idea for a new series based on Greek mythology. I’m a sucker for those old myths, and I’d done so much research about Greek mythology when I was working on STOLEN FURY that it was still fresh in my mind. So, I wondered…what would happen if the heroes had been real – you know those great adventurers who were mortal but blessed by the gods…Hercules, Odysseus, Perseus, Jason, etc. And what would the world be like today if their descendents walked among us?

The result was my first paranormal novel, MARKED, which releases from Dorchester in May 2010. I ran the idea by my agent, who said, “Sure. Give it a go. Let’s see what happens.” So I did – just for fun, as I waited to hear back on STOLEN FURY from publishers. MARKED was one of those books that pretty much wrote itself and I was just finishing it when STOLEN FURY sold. I sent it to my agent (who subsequently sent it back to me with “um, fix this” notes all over it), we went back and forth a bit on some world building details, and then she sent it out to a handful of pubs. My editor at Dorchester read it, loved it and immediately made an offer. And voila…a new series was born.

The new series is called Eternal Guardians, and it centers on a band of warriors descended from the seven greatest heroes in Greek mythology who protect their race and unknowing humans from rogue demons of the underworld. As Publisher’s Weekly reported MARKED, book one in the series:

To stave off a war with the demons of the underworld and protect his people from extinction, an Argonaut hero must find the woman who unknowingly fulfills an ancient prophesy, only to fall for her even knowing she is marked for sacrifice.

I did have one reader email to tell me she was very disappointed I was switching genres as she loves my romantic adventure books. But the truth is I’m not switching. I’m going to continue to write romantic adventure in addition to paranormals and I’m thrilled I have the opportunity to do both at this point in my career.

I have eclectic reading tastes. I love a variety of genres and authors from fantasy to young adult to romance by authors like JRR Tolkien, LM Montgomery and Larissa Ione. These days, my reading tends to steer toward research materials associated with archaeology, mythology and crime scene forensics, but now and then I’m able to squeeze in a read just for fun. I recently finished reading the Twilight Series – which was a lot better than I expected – and plan to pick up The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan when I head out on vacation in a few weeks (my 10 yr old daughter is reading it now and absolutely loving it).

Time recently ran an article about the romance genre (The Global Boom in Bodice Rippers, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1921627-1,00.html) that really had my hackles up. The article was supposed to be about the fact in this sluggish economy, romance novel sales are single-handedly saving the book industry. But that wasn’t the real point of the article. No, once again it was the media’s way of bashing the romance market for being so successful when other markets aren’t fairing as well. Forget the fact in 2008 romance fiction generated $1.37 billion in sales and was the top performing category on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists. Time was more interested in perpetuating the stereotype that all romance novels are “bodice rippers” and that romance fiction is “for women who move their hips when they read."

This type of narrow-mindedness really irks me. The majority of women (and men) who read romance are college educated, successful individuals who aren’t necessarily reading for the sex scenes (as Time would have you believe) but to experience the emotional ups and downs of life. Romance novels continually do well because they’re about real people in real life situations relating to each other on a very basic level. A common misperception about romance is that at its root it’s about the subjugation of a woman to a man in a relationship based on power. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Romance novels are primarily about women standing up for themselves. The majority praise independence, self-awareness and opening yourself up to the type of emotional intimacy that will make you a better person.

Romance really is a genre that emphasizes the characters in a story, rather than the plot. Don’t get me wrong, the suspense plot in my books is an integral part of the story, without it there would be no book, but at its heart, a romance novel is about how the characters grow and change because of the plot. I don’t read fiction for the plot alone. I read because I want to know how that plot is going to drive those characters to be something better than they already are. And that’s why millions of women (and men) read romances as well.

No. *sigh* I’m afraid I’m rather boring. So far my fans have been totally normal and completely wonderful. Though a writer friend of mine has a doozie of a story about an inmate and his detailed plans for her to leave her husband that I just might steal one day.

(After all, I do write Stolen books…)

Don’t give up. And for crying out loud, stop listening to your internal editor and just write. I recently had this conversation with a very dear friend of mine. She is what you would consider a “natural writer”. Her voice is amazing, her characters leap off the page…heck, I’d read a shopping list she wrote, that’s how enticing her writing is. And yet, she’s never finished a manuscript because she can’t turn off that voice that tells her she’s not good enough or that she’ll never make it.

I don’t consider myself a natural writer. I’ve had to hone my raw writing talent every step of the way. What I have above all else—and what successful authors possess—is determination. Even writers with only a spark of talent will someday be published if they have that drive that won’t let them quit until they get there. If you have that drive and you know you want to be published, then make it happen. Don’t let anything stand in your way.

Thanks so much to Daniel and the entire staff at The Novel Blog. And if you want to read more about me or my books, you can check out my webpage at www.elisabethnaughton.com.

Happy Reading!