NT: Hi Pamela! Thank you for being my guest today.
Pamela: Thanks for having me! I really appreciate it!
NT: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? How long did it take for you to make your first sale?
Pamela: I knew I wanted to be a writer at about age nine or 10 when I read MISTY OF CHINCOTEAGUE and the world vanished around me. I realized books were magic. The could make the world around you vanish and replace it with a time and place you’d never been. The story lingered with me long after I read it, and I felt that was a kind of magic, too. I knew I wanted to write stories that crept into people’s hearts and became a part of their lives whether they realized that or not. I told my parents that I wanted to write novels when I grew up, and I don’t think they took me seriously at all. They do now.
As for my first book, I had an atypically easy path to publication. I wrote my first book over seven years. I was newly divorced with two small kids and a full-time job, so sometimes I was able to write only for a few hours on a weekend. But after seven years, I finished it. I sent out five query letters, signed tentatively with an agent who wanted some revisions. I put off the revisions for most of a year, then sat down and did them in three weeks. My agent loved them, and nine months later I had a two-book contract.
NT: You have a new release this month, DEFIANT. Can you tell us about it?
Pamela: DEFIANT is the third book in the MacKinnon’s Rangers series, which is set on the Colonial frontier in upstate New York during the French & Indian War (Seven Years War to Brits). DEFIANT tells the story of the youngest MacKinnon brother, Connor, and Lady Sarah Woodville, the niece of the MacKinnon brothers’ most hated enemy, Lord William Wentworth. Lady Sarah has been sent away in disgrace by parents who don’t know what to do with her and seeks the help of her beloved uncle. Before she can reach him, however, the party she is traveling with is attacked by a war party of Shawnee out to avenge the death of a Shawnee mother. Lord William sends Connor and Captain Joseph, the Mahican war chief who is blood brother to the MacKinnons, to rescue her and bring her back alive, knowng that if anyone can do it, they can.
But when they reach the village, Connor realizes the only way he’s going to be able to save Sarah is to fight the warrior who abducted her — and then claim her himself.
This will not make Lord William happy.
Here’s the blurb from the back of the book:
Major Connor MacKinnon despises his commander, Lord William Wentworth, beyond all other men. Ordered to rescue Wentworth’s niece after the Shawnee take her captive, he expects Lady Sarah Woodville to be every bit as contemptible as her uncle. Instead, he finds a brave and beautiful lass in desperate peril. But the only way to free Sarah is for Connor to defeat the Shawnee warrior who kidnapped her—and claim her himself.
Torn by tragedy from her sheltered life in London, Lady Sarah is unprepared for the harshness of the frontier—or for the attraction she feels toward Connor. When they reach civilization, however, it is she who must protect him. For if her uncle knew all that Connor had done to save her, he would surely kill him.
But the flames of passion, once kindled, are difficult to deny. As desire transforms into love, Connor will have to defy an empire to keep Sarah at his side.
For the visually inclined, here’s a link to the live-action trailer my son and I made together. He put his film degree into it, while I mostly stood around watching the sexy male model and giggling. But, as I was the money, I got to stay on set. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYQA2WhPz58
NT: Do you have a writing routine? What is your average writing day like?
Pamela: As soon as I can get other baloney out of the way — breakfast, shower, important chores — I sit down with my computer and write all day and into the evening. In the summer, I grow a lot of veggies, and that means that I’m outside very early watering the garden before it gets hot, harvesting the veggies, and washing/slicing/preparing salads and so on for later in the day. It’s a huge amount of work, but I really prefer organic vegetables, and the only way to know for sure what goes into them is to grow them yourself.
I’m always eagerly awaiting the first hard frost so I can quit doing that and focus more on writing. I love building a nice fire, then sitting beside it with my laptop and lapdesk sipping coffee and writing. That’s my idea of heaven.
FREEZE, zucchini plants! FREEZE!
NT: Is there anyone you use as a sounding board when you’re stuck on a scene?
Pamela: My sister, Michelle, is my rock. I can’t tell you how many hours we’ve logged on Skype talking about my books. She lives in Stockholm, so she’s eight hours ahead of me. But we manage to connect every week. She was here when I was finishing DEFIANT, which for some reason was very hard for me. And my sweet baby sister sat there on my couch till 4 AM night after night as I was writing to help me stay focused. My younger son Benjamin has been a part of discussing scenes and such since he was in high school. He just graduated summa cum laude with a film degree and is an exceptional writer, so maybe it’s been a good exercise for him. I have friends, too, whose feedback is always helpful. Author Norah Wilson, Marie Force… It takes a village.
NT: What was the most interesting thing you had to research and what was the hardest thing to research?
Pamela: Research is something I love to do. My college degree and work in graduate school was in archaeology, and I spent 20 years working as an investigative reporter. Compared to trying to prove that Person X is a depraved criminal, there is no difficult research in fiction. It’s just a matter of being persistent. I have my own techniques, and they work wonderfully well. And since I love it — LOVE it! — it never feels like work.
For the MacKinnon’s Rangers series, I research the French & Indian War extensively focusing on Fort Edward, Robert Rogers and Rogers’ Rangers, a band of colonial frontiersmen who helpd the ill-prepared British face a new kind of warfare here in North America. Don’t get me started or I’ll still be going at midnight.
NT: When not busy writing, what do you like to do in your spare time? (If there is such a thing 😀 )
Pamela: Well, there’s that ominously enormous veggie garden. I also have a very large rose garden, and I love it! In early summer, you can stand anywhere in my yard and just float away on the scent of roses. Deadheading the whole thing probably takes about three or four hours. In theory, I like to hike. I just haven’t done much of it lately. I live right next to the mountains, so hitting the trails involves maybe 10 minutes of driving to the parking lot. I love spending time with my kids. They’re both grown — the older one was born when I was a freshman in college, the second when I was a senior — and I adore them.
NT: What are the latest additions to your TBR? What are you most eager to read?
Pamela: Oh, goodness! I’ve got TRUE SHOT by Joyce Lamb that I’m reading. I have several Norah Wilson titles on my Kindle (GUARDING SUSANNAH, SAVING GRACE) along with Marie Force’s Gansett Island series. I want to read Sylvia Day’s BARED TO YOU. I have a shelf of Monica McCarty I desperately want to read. I think my most recent acquisition is BRIDE OF THE HIGH COUNTRY by Kaki Warner, which I also desperately want to read. Where does this reading time come from? Not sure.
NT: Any advice to aspiring authors? What craft books helped you that you would recommend to aspiring writers?
Pamela: People might throw rotten tomatoes at the screen when I say this, but I didn’t read any craft books. I didn’t workshop my books. I wasn’t a member of RWA. I didn’t belong to any writers groups or critique groups. I just sat down and wrote what I saw in my head. Granted, I’d been a working journalist for a while. I had my college degree and some grad school under my belt. But writing/language has always been my gift. I accidentally wrote an extra paper in a graduate level archaeology course, and the professor offered to auction it off. “She writes like a pro,” he said. “Bid high.”
I did take a creative writing course in college and one class about writing autobiography, and the feedback I got in both classes was overwhelmingly positive — at least where the professors were concerned. The students in the creative writing class were the black-clad clove-smoking sort who didn’t know what to think of a chick who was already a mom. Everything I wrote was savaged during critiques. In the middle of my last critique, the professor interrupted the students in the midst of shredding me and said, “Isn’t this interesting that you all feel this way because I think Pamela has written the only publishable work we’ve seen this entire semester.” Eat that, clove-smoking haters! That was awesome!
Poet and essayist Reg Saner was my professor for the autobiography class shortly before he retired. My writing just exploded in his class. I couldn’t get the words on the page fast enough. I would sit my baby on the floor with tupperware and spoons and just pound out as much as I could while he was diverted. At the end of the semester, Prof. Saner invited me into his office for my final critique and grade. I sat down and he said, “I’m afraid I have to apologize.” Naturally, this concerned me. He said that all he could give me was an A when it was clear that I was writing on a different plane than the other students. “Students come to me all the time and say, ‘I want to be a writer.’ I look at what they’ve written and tell them to do something else because they just don’t have it. You’re one of two students I’ve had during my entire career to whom I can say, ‘Go for it. You can do anything you want to do.’”
I cannot tell you what his words meant to me. It was an affirmation that THIS was the path I needed to be on, not graduate school.
I saw him a few years ago, and he knew I was published and was very happy for me. He said, “If anyone gives you a hard time about writing romance, ask them what they’ve published lately. The difference between what I write and what you write is that people read what you write.” (His Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo and the Anasazi is phenomenal, and I recommend it for anyone who enjoys reading nature essays.)
So my advice to aspiring writers… Read a lot. Follow your heart. If this is what you want to do, commit to it with the devotion of an Olympic athlete and make it your life. Don’t give up. When you do, you lose.
NT: What can your fans look forward to from you in the near future? What are you working on now?
Pamela: Right now, I’m working on STRIKING DISTANCE, the next book in the I-Team series. I hope to finish it soon. Theoretically, it will be out next spring. After that, I’ll be writing another historical, perhaps Joseph’s story in a follow-up to the MacKinnon’s Rangers series.
NT: If someone has not read any of your books, which would be the one you’d recommend they try first?
Pamela: For historical fans, I would say Surrender, the first book in the MacKinnon’s Ranger series. For romantic suspense fans, I would suggest Breaking Point or Unlawful Contact, Books 5 and 3, respectively, in the I-Team series. People who are adamant about reading things in order can start with Extreme Exposure.
NT: How can readers contact you?
Pamela: There are so many ways!
I have a contact form through my website, where readers can send me an email and also sign up for my newsletter. http://www.pamelaclare.com/guestbook.php
I’m @Pamela_Clare on Twitter.
I’m on Goodreads and have a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pamela-Clare/167939496589645
NT: Thanks for being our guest today!
Pamela: You’re so welcome! Thanks so very much for having me!
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