SHELLY LAURENSTON
Affaire de Coeur's Author of the Month - December 2009
AdC: When did you start writing and why?
SL: Every writer will tell you they’ve been writing since they were kids because most of us have been. I had a novella series in high school that all my friends read involving the fictional daughters of mobsters who take over the New York Five Families. It was quite violent with a high sense of fashion, but funny. Then I got to college and I had trouble finishing any of my stories. I’d start them and then run out of energy halfway through, after I’d edited the first twenty or thirty pages until they glistened. Eventually, I stopped writing all together except when I went to grad school for film and wrote movie scripts that I never finished.
Then I moved to California and started in what I like to call ‘non-glamorous’ magazine publishing, got married, moved to marketing in health care, moved to marketing in Internet, and got divorced. In that time (about nine years), I’d started writing different stories in different genres trying to find something that I enjoyed enough to keep writing. Mostly mystery and fantasy, but again, I couldn’t finish anything.
Then a year after my divorce was final, I was sitting around wondering what I was going to do with my life when I read a novella by MaryJanice Davidson, “Love’s Prisoner.” It sounds funny or maybe over the top, but that novella absolutely changed my life. I had no idea romances had changed so much since I used to read them in high school and I suddenly had a genre I could enjoy writing because it combined my love of fantasy and paranormal with my love of romance and hot sex.
Once I found a genre I loved writing, the rest sort of flowed from there. I haven’t stopped writing since.
AdC: What is your favorite book?
SL: That is such a hard question for me. Kind of like asking me what’s my favorite movie. I wouldn’t be able to answer that without giving you several lists with different genres and based on my mood at the moment, etc., etc. It’s the same with my books. I don’t have a book I can hold up and say this is my favorite over all others, because it depends on my mood. For horror I go for Stephen King and Clive Barker; for fantasy Margaret Weis, William King, Asa Drake; for Sci-Fi Steve Perry (love sci-fi movies more than books, though); and for romance I go for Lori Foster, Nora Roberts, Rhyannon Byrd, MaryJanice Davidson, and Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. This isn’t to say I’ve read every one of these authors’ books or liked every one of their books, but when I go to my keeper shelf for a good, solid re-read, it’s their books I find and the ones I go for. Again, of course, depending on my mood.
A lot of things depend on my mood. Heh.
AdC: You write paranormal. How did you get involved in that genre?
SL: I’ve always loved sci-fi and fantasy since I was a kid. Dragons were always close to my heart, although I can’t explain why. Since my dad took me to my first New York Renaissance Faire (poor guy had no idea what to make of that world) I’ve been surrounding myself with dragon T-shirts, posters, drawings, necklaces (lots of necklaces), and pewter statues. But I don’t know why I was drawn to this mythology growing up, and I have no idea why I didn’t leave it behind when I became an adult. I’m sure my parents thought it was a phase. Too bad for my mom that me being a doctor or lawyer was a phase. But my love of dragons and all things paranormal—not a phase. Instead a deep, geeky, abiding love that I have since discovered melds quite nicely with the “closet romantic” I’ve always been.
AdC: Isn’t it a little weird that your hero and or heroine change from a bear or a wolf into human form?
SL: Nope. Don’t think it’s weird at all.
AdC: Brava, in a scale of 1-5 with 1 being lowest, is one of Kensington’s hotter lines, second only to Aphrodisia. Is it harder to write sex scenes with shifters? Where is your focus when writing…on the paranormal aspect or the erotic aspect?
SL: My focus is on the story. Every author’s focus should be on the story, no matter what genre they write. The rest will flow from the characters you create and the situation you place them in.
And for me it’s not harder to write sex scenes with shifters because, in my books, they’re always human when they screw.
AdC: What is your idea of a perfect day?
SL: A day when all my neighbors are out of the apartment complex so I don’t have to hear anyone’s music, TV, arguing, belching, child crying, or dog endlessly barking while I try to write. THAT’S my idea of a perfect day.
AdC: Do you have any hobbies?
SL: TV, TV, and more TV. It’s the one thing I’ve never gotten bored with. I also love video games, but I’ve had to pull back on playing because it’s easy to lose hours and hours during game play and I simply don’t have the time for that anymore. When you sign those contracts, publishers actually expect you to deliver things on time. It’s a real hassle when you’re fighting an orc with your guild and low on HP.
AdC: What authors do you admire both within and outside the paranormal realm?
SL: MaryJanice Davidson, Nora Roberts, Stephen King, and Twyla Tharp. Twyla Tharp is actually a dancer/choreographer (a brilliant one, in fact) but she wrote a great book called THE CREATIVE HABIT on managing and developing the creative process and she’s been my (unbeknownst to her) spiritual guru ever since.
AdC: What is the worst thing about being an author? The best thing?
SL: The worst? Not being able to write a hell of a lot faster.
The best? Being able to write and have people actually want to read your story.
AdC: What do you expect to be doing 10 years from now?
SL: I hope I’m still writing but that I’ll be writing from my house by a lake. My neighbors will be a few acres away so I’ll have no idea what they’re up to at any moment of the day and I’ll be able to have more than one rescue mutt who can treat me like I owe him something just because he’s so dang cute.
AdC: What can we expect from you next? Do you intend to remain in the paranormal genre, or are you branching out?
SL: My next Pride book will be out the summer of 2010 and is titled BEAST BEHAVING BADLY. My next dragon book under the G.A. Aiken name will be out Fall 2010. For now I’m staying in the paranormal genre, but life is ever changing, so who knows what I’ll decide to do down the road?
AdC: Pass on some words of wisdom, please, to aspiring authors.
SL: Read your contracts and don’t think about writing or being a writer—just write. The rest will fall into place.
|
