1. What were you before you became an
author? Did this influence your choices as a writer?
Since there are two of us writing together under our
pen name, you get double coverage! I was a family therapist, a social work
educator, and a consultant, in addition to free-lancing as an editor. My
husband was a criminologist who did criminal justice research and taught in
social work schools—naturally, we met when we were both teaching at one of
them. We love drawing on our wide range of experiences as we craft our
characters and create the obstacles we throw at them.
2. Are you genre specific or general? I
don’t mean major genres but subdivisions or romance, mystery or paranormal.
We’re pretty specific, within two main subgenres: we
write romantic suspense that typically features one man and one woman with a
happy ending (after they solve the crimes and escape the villains, of course),
and we write erotic romance with a wide range of pairings: f/m, f/f, f/f/m,
f/m/f, four-way ménage, polyamory and more. Within both genres, we’re
especially interested in how characters evolve and change as they’re faced with
choices they hadn’t anticipated.
3. What is your latest release?
The Merry Widow, just released at Extasy Books, is
both an erotic f/f/m romance and a suspense story. We first started writing
this one to be an erotic romp, with the device of the threat of mob exposure to
push our characters into flaunting the mob with more and more sex scenes. We
probably accomplished that goal, but as the story unfolded, we came to care
more about Merry’s journey as a woman.
When her story opens, on New Year’s Eve 1999, widow
Merry Delaney is probably one of the most shut-down, despairing characters
we’ve ever met. We loved tracing (well, and creating) those tiny first steps
toward change—the ones she hardly even knows she’s making. By the time she’s
aware, she’s evolved into something she hardly recognizes, but she’s never said
“no” along the way. She’s also believed she’d never fall in love again. Now
that she has, she faces tough choices—if she continues to embrace her new
identity, will she lose her new love? What will she choose?
4. What are you working on now?
We’re polishing an erotic romance manuscript about a
Twin Cities photographer who specializes in erotic portraits and a Nebraska
schoolteacher who signs up for a course at the academy where he teaches –
unprepared for what he asks of her until she delves deeper into her own family
history and realizes where she comes from. As you can see, we love exploring
women’s self-discovery journeys – and of course, those journeys provide lots of
opportunities for erotic scenes.
5. Do your reading choices influence
your choice of a writing career?
They certainly did as we began to transition from
co-authoring academic pieces to co-writing romance a couple decades ago. I’d
delved into many classic women’s romances (in addition to being a major Jane
Austen fan), Mr. Kraft had grown up reading western adventures, and both of us
had explored major literary erotic authors. By now, our reading for pleasure is
more wide ranging and not so focused just on what we write. We’re both
currently on a Tudor and Medieval England binge, a welcome escape from our
editing tasks when we need one.
6. Where can we find you?
1 comment:
Thanks so much for having me today, Janet!
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