Rebecca Chance is the author of six racy romance novels. Her
new bonkbuster, Killer Queens, was released earlier this month.
Can you
tell us a little about your average writing day?
Get up, drink cappuccino, eat some eggs and
white beans – I’m really trying to start the day with protein for energy. Go on
gossip websites, Facebook, Twitter. Answer emails. Read through what I did the
day before, try to start writing before 10am and to manage between 2-3k words a
day. I watch Judge Judy and go on FB and Twitter and email while writing, to
break things up. Then I really try to get out of the house – to go to the gym
or do some errands – I can get pretty stir-crazy if I don’t get fresh air. The
writing part isn’t glamorous at all – I need to keep my head down, keep
disciplined and keep going!
When
you are writing, do you use any famous people or people you know as
inspiration?
I could tell you but then my editor would
kill you! Like “Law and Order”, I like to say my stories are “ripped from the
headlines”, but I couldn’t possibly admit to basing my characters on real live
people… Princess Belinda, in Killer
Queens, is an imagining of what might have happened if Princess Diana
hadn’t died but had been forced to fake her own death and escape to the Atlas
Mountains with her sexy sheik lover….
What is
your favourite Women’s Fiction book of all time and why?
You know, I, like every single female writer I
know in tons of different genres, hate the term ‘women’s fiction’. No-one ever
talks about ‘men’s fiction’. Books by men are just.. fiction. Can you please
retire the term? As for female authors, I love Jane Austen, Agatha Christie,
Dorothy L Sayers, Victoria Holt, Tanith Lee.
What is
your writing process? Do you plan first or dive in? How many drafts do you do?
I come up with an idea for the next book,
then go out to my club Century to drink rose with my editor and ‘pitch’ it to
her. We talk it over, expand it, she’ll raise any objections she can think of,
I go home and write a long three-act outline – 10-12 pages – and send it to her
for her notes. So by the time I sit down to write, I really do know almost
exactly what I’m writing every day. It’s a huge help and I really recommend
this process!
What
was your journey to being a published author?
I started writing crime novels under my real
name, Lauren Henderson. I entered a competition in a magazine, and came second
– I got an agent to look over my novel. She didn’t take me on, but that gave me
the confidence to finish, and then I sent it to a girl I knew from university
who was working at a publisher, and she bought it! For nearly no money, but it
was still amazing. Then I got an agent, and foreign sales allowed me to write
full time.
What
are you working on at the moment?
My new book, Bad Brides! I wrote some spectacular wedding scenes in Killer Queens, but clearly I’m not done
with weddings yet…
Thanks,
Rebecca!