Over this past year being a Deb, I’ve shared the interview questions with several guest authors. Each time, one or two questions have caught my eye, and I’ve wondered how I would answer them. Now that it’s my turn to be a guest author, here’s my chance! As a continually hybrid writer, I’m remixing them with some fresh questions from the other Debs about UPTOWN THIEF… Talk about one book…
It is the 2nd Monday in a row that I have the great honor of kicking off The Debutante Ball celebration of another one of our authors—this week, Aya de Leon! I am so grateful to have met Aya on The Debutante Ball! She has been a constant source of positive energy She is wonderfully funny and honest, and always keeps our spirits high. I have learned so much from…
So my debut novel, UPTOWN THIEF, is a heist book with a romantic arc; it features women of color and has hard-hitting political content, plus it’s gritty and sexually explicit, with a cast of sex workers. It’s a literary/commercial hybrid, genre-straddling, wild concoction of a book. And I didn’t know how to launch it. I dropped into my default position: compartmentalize. I had planned three small launch events. I envisioned…
This week, we’re talking about regrets. My definition of a regret would be an instance in which things are not working out in my life due to decisions I’ve made in the past. For example, some big challenges in my life are due to sexism, but I don’t regret being born female, and I don’t think sexism would have less of an impact if I had done something differently. It’s…
This week on the Debutante Ball, we’re talking about superpowers. My main character, Marisol Rivera, is a superhero of sorts. A Latina Robin Hood, her superpower is to rob from the rich and give to the poor. She doesn’t have arrows or a hat, but she does have this pair of “invincibility shoes” that add a certain superhero accessorizing to her life. In the following scene, Marisol is talking with…
One of my favorite things in fiction has to do with stealth, sneakiness, and subversion. I love spy stories and heists. My books are full of secrets, both stealthy secret missions and family secrets long buried. The other thing that I love is stealth in the process of delivering subversive messages. One of my favorite things about women’s fiction, romance, and genre fiction in general, is how much the mainstream…
Last week, I turned in a very rough and raggedy second draft of book #2 to my editor at Kensington. Ordinarily, writers only turn in finished material to their publishers, but the commercial or genre publishing clock is different. When I sold my book in a two-book deal, it was based on a series that I had proposed. Commercial and genre publishers’ business and marketing concept includes building a fan…
Enter the backstabbers… When my novel was on submission and I first got notified by my agent that an acquiring editor wanted to talk to me about my book, I was thrilled. I knew that a conversation with an editor was the next step on the way to getting a book deal. A phone call meant that the editor was really serious about wanting to acquire my novel. So I…
