Serena: Gotta Write Network would like to welcome the talented author Charlene Teglia. She has graciously agreed to answer a few questions for us today.
Your first book, Love and Rockets, came out in February 2005. How has being published changed your life, if at all?
Charlene: Things have changed in a few ways. There's the thrill of seeing my book for sale and it still amazes me every time that it's real. "Look! A book! With my name on it!" There's the thrill of hearing that somebody actually read one of my books and liked it. Mainly, though, it means my writer role has expanded to include a lot of business details, promotion, working through edits and revisions, and developing my proposal-writing skills along with continuing to write the books. I'm really grateful that I've had work experience that forced me to learn to multi-task and follow project management because that's very useful now.
Serena: Your books have earned several honors: 2005 Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Erotic Novel, 2005 CAPA nomination for Best Erotic Anthology, Love Romance's Reviewer's Choice Golden Rose Award, Fallen Angels Reviews Recommended Read and you are a three-time recipient of the 5 Blue Ribbon Award from Romance Junkies. Did you ever imagine having so many laurels within a year and a half of publishing your first book?
Charlene: No, I didn't! If you'd told me a year ago, I wouldn't have believed it. Talk about dream come true.
Serena: Can you give us a peek into your daily routine?
Charlene: The baby wakes up around 4 a.m. I turn on the coffee maker, start feeding her, and checking email. Most of my internet time is while I'm holding the baby on and off throughout the day. Once I've got the baby settled, the toddler is usually up so it's time to make breakfast and then get everybody occupied long enough for me to journal, write story notes, blog. And so it goes up until bedtime, working on writing, edits, doing a blurb, putting together promotional material, you name it. After the kids go to bed for the night my real writing time begins. I don't really have a daily page or word count goal, I just get as much done as I can every day until my eyes start to cross, and then I call it a night. I squeeze in as much reading time as I can manage (besides reading Dr. Seuss!) and I bounce ideas off my husband who is always willing to listen and let me know if my idea works or needs work.
Serena: How do you write? Are you an outliner? Seat-of-the-pantser? Character-driven vs. plot-driven?
Charlene: Very much character driven, and I love the plotting method of 'figure out the worst thing you can do to this character and do it.' I'm sort of a hybrid, I might start out not having any idea what form the story will take but before I get very far into it I'll develop a rough synopsis and have a good overall roadmap for the story. I use a method called outlining from inside, where you write towards a key scene and you know at least a few of the key scenes the story will have. I'm not as detailed as a hardcore outliner and I think I probably follow more of a map than a panster. During the story development stage I'll write bits of key scenes all out of order and then figure out where they go and create the story's structure.
Serena: Where do you draw most of your inspiration from?
Charlene: Life! There's so much going on all around us, all the time. Everybody has endless material to draw on. I'm always looking around and thinking, "hey, what if..."
Serena: I read The Gripping Beast and loved it. Can you give us a quick look into the writing of this book and a synopsis?
Charlene: The Gripping Beast had a lot of ingredients. Norse mythology, the ring cycle, Viking history. I'd read a book on art history that featured the design, the gripping beast, and that captivated me. I also read some physics books about whether time travel was possible and various explanations for it. I loved the idea of going back in time to the Viking age, and I also loved the idea of a man and woman from different times with very different values and beliefs falling in love and having to find common ground to make it work. It seemed to me that a modern woman and a Viking age man would have plenty of built-in conflict to resolve to get their happily ever after.
Here's the official blurb:
The wild magic that brought them together is nothing compared to what they find in each other's arms.
Lorelei Michaels, flamboyant lead vocalist of the all-female rock band The Sirens, has a passion for myths and legends. She just never expected to find herself actually living one.
While touring with the band, a Viking armband with an interesting history and a design known as the gripping beast throws her into a time warp full of Norsemen, macho attitudes and a lamentable lack of modern amenities.
Upon seeing the strange, beautiful woman being auctioned off, Erik Thorolfsson was mesmerized. Until the slave trader put his hands on her. With a roar of rage and sword drawn, he charged forward to take that which he wanted for his own. But he discovers owning her isn't enough. He has to make her his - for all time.
Serena: You have two new books coming out soon, one from Cerridwen Press, Yule Be Mine, and another from Samhain Publishing, Miss Lonely Hearts. Can you give us peeks into these books?
Charlene: Yule Be Mine is a steamy romantic comedy set in Burlington, Vermont with a heroine who's tired of matchmaking relatives and wants to enjoy the holiday season in peace. So she comes up with a terrific plan. Unfortunately, it doesn't include falling in love, which complicates everything. Yule Be Mine was previously e-published elsewhere and I'm really happy to have it at Cerridwen.
Miss Lonely Hearts is connected to my Samhain series, The Sirens, which begins with The Gripping Beast. It's an erotic romantic comedy set in Alaska. Here's the blurb for it:
When is a love letter not a love letter? When it's mail fraud. Or in this case, female fraud.
Jason Alexander is one angry Alaskan, and he's out to get his woman; the letter-writing Lolita who's running the Miss Lonely Hearts con game in his bailiwick. She's taking lonely Alaskans for a roller-coaster ride and cashing in on love. When she hits his adopted home, the patrons of his bar The Last Resort, the retired gambler takes it personally and goes out for justice.
Cassandra Adams has just been dumped by ex-fiancé number two. She's fed up with Romance Roulette and ready to trade her rosy daydreams for hardheaded practicality. The logical solution? She's going to search the classifieds for the mail-order marrying man she wants.
She thinks she's found him in Jason, alias Alex Sanders. He thinks he's hooked Miss Lonely Hearts. And the regulars at The Last Resort think it's high time Jason got married, so they're not about to clarify matters when they discover his mistake.
Together Jason and Cassandra will have to cut their way through the tangle of love, larceny and lies to unmask Miss Lonely Hearts and find a happy ending that's a sure bet.
Serena: Are you working on anything else?
Charlene: I have several more stories in The Sirens series in the works for Samhain. I also have the sequel to Love and Rockets underway, Jane's Addiction. I have more werewolves to follow up Wolf In Cheap Clothing. And there will be a sequel to Dangerous Games as well.
Serena: I've noticed that you write just about every genre within romance. The Gripping Beast was a steamy time-travel and Love and Rockets was an erotic contemporary. Is there any one genre that you prefer to write?
Charlene: I love it all. Romance has so much variety, so much room to experiment. Contemporary, paranormal, futuristic, historical, I intend to continue to write across the board. I'm very fortunate to have editors and publishers who don't insist that I write one subgenre, although you could argue since it's all steamy to full-on erotic that that counts as one subgenre.
Serena: Is there anything that you'd like to add?
Charlene: This is the greatest job I could imagine. I hear a lot of cynicism and complaints about the business of publishing, but I have to tell you it really is a dream come true. It's a lot of work but it's also a lot of fun. I love it.
--Interview conducted by Serena Polheber
July, 2006
