April 20th, 2011
It’s been awhile since I’ve hosted another author here on my blog, but today is a special day for fellow Music City Romance Writers member Carolyn Rosewood. You see, today is the launch date for her first novella, The Last Soul.
Q. The Last Soul is your first published novella. You describe it as a sexy paranormal romance. Tell us about this story and what paranormal element(s) you use.
A. Faina, the heroine, has been dead for one hundred and fifty years, but she’s about to become human again. All she has to do is seduce Jace Blackmon, the most honest financier ever to grace the city of angels, into signing away his soul.
Jace Blackmon has fallen in love with his fantasy woman. But when he realizes she was tricked by a demon to bring about his ruin, including the revelation of a long-buried secret to the media, he must choose between his heart or life without her.
The paranormal element is the demon world interacting with the human world, but in a way that keeps the humans guessing. Faina takes true demon form only once in front of Jace, when they’re threatened by a man with a gun, and it’s so brief he questions his own senses. Then near the end of the story, Jace is confronted by three other demons, but by then he’s in love with Faina and is no longer freaked out.
Q. I love playing cast the movie. So, if The Last Soul were to be made into a movie, who do you see playing your main characters?
A. This is always so hard for me because I tend to think back to actors from Hollywood’s glory days! I could see Jennifer Ellison as Faina and Johnny Depp as Jace.
Q. How long have you been writing?
I’ve been writing stories since I could print. I was the geeky kid in junior high and high school who carried around a notebook and wrote stories in class, just for fun. My English teachers loved me. About ten years ago, I wrote three novels, but I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It wasn’t until two years ago I joined RWA and began to get serious about my writing career.
Q. Tell us a bit about your writing process.
Once the idea for the story forms, I pick the hero and heroine. I decide what type of names they’ll have and research them until I find the right ones. Once I pick them, the characters come alive for me and take on faces, body types, hair and eye color, and personalities. Then I can write them. I’m a pantser. I have a general idea where the story is going, and I know the ending, but the rest takes shape as I let my characters talk to me.
Q. You actually had two sales very close together. Haunted Heart, a contemporary romance, is coming out from Etopia Press July 1. Tell us about that story.
Haunted Heart is the story of a woman who returns home after ten years of living in Hollywood to restore a century home left to her by her beloved great-aunt. The man she hires to restore it is the one who hurt her in high school. As Rowena and Van work out the rift that tore them apart as teens, they also uncover a plot to make Rowena think the house is haunted. The men behind this plot include a fake ghost hunter and one of Van’s own crew.
Q. What are you working on now?
I’m finishing up the sequel to The Last Soul, Hunted, another paranormal novella. The heroine in Hunted is Jahi, Faina’s best friend. She’s being hunted by a fallen angel, and the hero not only has to protect her, but has been hired to find this rogue fallen angel.
Q. Last year was your first RWA National Conference. What are the top three things you took away from the conference that you think have really helped with your writing career?
Nationals helped me see the big picture. I really got a sense of how tight the romance writing community is, and how much the authors rely on others for support. I learned persistence and patience are the keys. And, I figured out we have to know who we are as writers, and build from that place.
Thanks for being here today, Carolyn.
To learn more about Carolyn and her writing, visit her website. To buy Carolyn’s book, go here.
