Interview with Romantic Suspense Author Robin Patchen and a Giveaway!

Welcome to Readers Write to Know! I asked you, my readers, what questions they would ask their favorite authors if given the chance, and the authors visiting my blog answered them! I’m always excited when I have a friend as my guest, and this week my good friend Robin Patchen is helping us launch the interview series! Robin writes such exciting books. I love being part of her brainstorming team and listening to how she sets them up. I can’t wait for your to hear about her latest release. I hope you enjoy her interview as much as I did. Read on to see how to enter to win a copy a hard cover copy of Running to You, book 1 in the Wright Heroes of Maine series.

Tell us a little bit about yourself: I’m a wife, mother of three, and proud Gigi to a precious one-year-old boy and his little sibling, who’ll make his or her debut this February. New Hampshire transplants to Texas, my husband and I are the worst sort of yankees–the ones who stay. (Well, the second worst sort–we’re obviously Red Sox Fans.) We love our new home state of Texas–when the temperatures are reasonable. The other six months of the year, we love our air conditioning. I’ve been a writer all my life but didn’t start writing fiction until I turned forty…which was a few years back now. Since then, I’ve written almost 30 novels, most of which have been published. I spend most of my life at this novel-ing thing. You know, writing and talking about writing and teaching writers and thinking about stories and plotting romance and mayhem and jotting down random lines and fun words and… Essentially, my entire life revolves around my family and the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

Tell us about your book: Sheltering You is the fourth story in the Wright Heroes of Maine, a romantic suspense series that revolves around a family on the Maine coast who get caught up in all manner of trouble, including cults and ancient antiquities and terrorists. Here’s the blurb for Sheltering You:

In the sleepy town of Shadow Cove, Maine, a woman’s desperate flight becomes a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse.
 
After escaping Iraq with her twin sister, Jasmine seeks refuge from Qasim, the terrorist she was forced to marry. She’s determined to carve out a safe haven in this peaceful coastal town for herself and her unborn child. But her polygamous husband’s relentless pursuit threatens to shatter her fragile world, leaving her with nowhere to hide.
 
Enter Derrick, a guardian angel in the guise of a friend.
 
Drawn to Jasmine’s quiet strength, Derrick vows to shield her from harm, even as the boundaries of friendship blur into something deeper. Unaware of Jasmine’s secret, he agrees to help her rescue and hide another Iraqi refugee woman and her younger brother in the US. Derrick will do anything for Jasmine, his heart yearning for a connection she refuses to embrace.
 
All the while, Qasim is closing in.
 
He took Jasmine as his second wife for one reason, and she carries that reason her womb. Once his heir is born, nothing will stop Qasim from bringing him home to his beloved first wife and disposing of Jasmine—and he will take out anybody else who stands in his way.
 
Join the Wright Heroes of Maine for an edge-of-your-seat international romantic suspense that takes you on the run with a heroine in hiding, a secret baby, and unrequited love.

What inspired you to start writing, or did you always want to write? I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but when I was young, I didn’t know what I wanted to write. I studied journalism in college, but I didn’t love writing news articles. I worked in marketing and PR for a few years, and then I got married and had children and put aside my love of writing. Years later, my husband gave me a laptop for my birthday. I’d had a story bouncing around in my head for months, and I decided to write it down. I had zero plans to publish the story at that point. I just thought that, maybe if I wrote it down, I could get it out of my head. But I fell in love with writing fiction. That story will never be published, but the process of writing it down taught me so much about writing and storytelling. Even if the book itself isn’t good, the process of writing it changed my life.

Do you have your plot-line and character development already laid out before you begin writing a book, or do they develop as you write? The longer I write, the longer my outlines get. When I first started this, I’d have a general idea of where the story was going and then dive in. Over the years, I’ve tweaked my plotting process (thanks to the help of books and talented writer friends). Because I try to write four books a year, I don’t have a lot of time for rewriting, and a good plot keeps me on track. It also makes my stories deeper when I know who the characters are, what makes them tick, and what they’re afraid of–and why. As a writing coach, I encourage authors–even pantsters–to have at least a basic understanding of those things before they start.

Do you have per-determined length in mind when you first begin a book? I do! For a full-length book, I always aim for about eighty thousand words–and usually hit ninety-five or a hundred. Even nearly thirty books into this, I’m a terrible judge of how long my stories are going to be.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers? As an editor, I’ve worked with a lot of new writers over the years. While many of them improve with every project, not all of them do. The difference, at least for some, is the willingness to accept advice and put it into practice.

Great writers are humble. They understand that they don’t know everything, and they’re always seeking to learn and improve. The more I know about this writing thing, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

I edited a book a couple of years ago for an unpublished Christian writer. She was so furious with the edit that she demanded her money back. (I didn’t give it to her.) I hope and pray that, once she cooled off a little, she realized that maybe she didn’t know everything. I hope she learned something from that edit, eventually.

On the other hand, I heard a story about the great Francine Rivers at a writers conference just a few years ago. She wasn’t on the faculty. She was sitting in the room taking copious notes.

Even when the advice irritates you, even when you’re ninety-nine percent sure you’re right, try it. See what happens. I bet you’ll learn something.

Do you write your books for your own enjoyment or more for what you think people would want to read? Is it okay to just say…yes? I write stories that excite me. And I’ve found readers who like the same kinds of stories. I think that’s the trick–not writing to a certain market but finding the market that loves what you write.

I assume when you start a book, you pretty much have the plot laid out. Do you ever change your mind later on in the book, and go in a different direction? Even though I thoroughly plot my books, the stories rarely follow those plots perfectly. I wrote a novel last year–Rescuing You–that went way off the rails. The hero and heroine needed to escape from Iraq, which I thought would take about forty thousand words. When I reached the midpoint and they weren’t even close, I called on my writing friends for help re-plotting the thing. It’s one of my favorite books, but in the middle of it, I feared I’d need to scrap the whole project.

What is one thing that you never saw yourself doing and either do it now or have done? Owning my own business. If I had known when I indie-published my first book everything I’d need to learn over the years to do this successfully, I would have run far, far away. Sometimes, ignorance is a gift. I never thought I had the discipline, or the business acumen, to be self-employed. But I learned one thing at a time, usually not a day before I needed to know it. Here I am, almost a decade after that first indie book came out, and I love it. Again, I point to my many writer friends who’ve helped me along the way. Without them, I would have quit a long time ago.

Find Robin online:

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Find Robin’s book online:

Sheltering You: Terror in Shadow Cove (The Wright Heroes of Maine Book 4)

Price: $4.99

1 used & new available from $4.99

Enter to win a hardback copy of Running to You, book 1 in the Wright Heroes of Main series!