Interview Celia Cooper
by
Barbara Edwards
1. Since I don’t know the name of your book, as yet, would you please tell us the genre?
“Old Enough to Know Better” is an Encore L’ Amour imprint. My heroine is over forty (she’s forty-ish).
2. Would you like to give us teaser of your story?
Diane Wallace is an older woman who has chosen to settle in a small town in Virginia to escape her colorful past. She swears she will not get involved with a man again—until she meets Justin Anderson. Gentlemanly, muscular and younger, she finds herself imagining all sorts of wicked things involving this ruggedly handsome man BUT she has made a promise she wants to honor. When Justin is unable to stay in his own home because someone has planted bombs inside, Diane guardedly offers, in lieu of a sterile hotel room, an extra room in her warm home.
Bombs in Justin’s home are just the beginning of the odyssey Diane and Justin will share. The end of this story finds these two caring a great deal about each other. Their mutual admiration has turned into a friendship and the beginnings of honest love. Sometimes it just takes the right prince.
3. What is the driving force behind your desire to write?
The inability to keep my characters quiet while I try to sleep. Actually, I always created stories in my mind but never put them down on paper because they weren’t literary. Like others, I felt that unless my stories rivaled those of Hemingway or Conan-Doyle, they weren’t worth the paper to write them. However, the characters weren’t satisfied taking a back seat.
A short story written for a contest as a tribute to my terminally ill father-in-law (which became one of twenty five finalists) spurred the desire to put words to paper, critics be damned.
4. How have events in your life colored your prose?
I greatly admire those writers who create Regencies and tales of Scottish Lords and Dukes. I am tied to my own history when it comes to my stories. I’ve traveled from Florida to Alaska, New Jersey to Hawaii and many, many points in between so I have a lot of background to use for stories. My father was a military man and in a crucial job. As such, he was away from the family sometimes for months on end. My mother made sure we were kept busy by visiting places like the Grand Canyon, New Mexico, Yosemite and Yellowstone. When we lived in the East, we must have visited every battlefield of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars as well as the national monuments. As a kid, you hate being dragged around but I discovered later that all that background really helps me know where to locate research for my stories and my memories are still clear about how the museums and monuments appeared.
5. Do you create your characters, or do they simply evolve with the story?
My stories are character driven. Before writing, the stories in my head were “get back” stories, you know the kind—you’re standing in the middle of a crowd with your mouth gaping, looking like a complete idiot because some bully loudly insulted you and your brain had fallen asleep leaving you with the deer-in-the-headlights look. The stories always involved me saying something snappy and the bully melting to the ground like the wicked witch as I stand victorious being congratulated by others who had felt the sting of the bully’s remarks. Consequently, my stories seem to create themselves with fully developed heroes and heroines. The secondary characters seem to evolve in the story. Hopefully by the end of the story, all my characters are more than two-dimensional.
6. Do you outline your characters? And if so, do you do it before or after they "come on the scene" in your story?
I don’t really “outline” them as such. They appear on page fully developed but I do have to list characteristics. I can’t have my blue-eyed blonde in chapter 4 become a green-eyed redhead in chapter 9 unless she intentionally makes the change. But I still need to remember what to change! When I first started “Old Enough to Know Better”, I neglected to jot down simple things like eye color, height and a few other “silly” little details for each character and proceeded to confuse the living daylights out of myself. After frantically searching for fifteen minutes to find out if the heroine was staring into “his warm brown eyes” or “breathtaking sea green eyes”, I was cured. Won’t do that again!
7. Do you outline your plot or does it develop as you write?
The first book came so quickly I didn’t outline because I was busy putting it down on paper. Since that time, I’ve concluded it is easier to outline and use that as a rough draft because it helps me to see the flow of the story. The storyline is not set in concrete and sometimes I’ve veered way off the outline but having the direction of the story set up helps eliminate glaring inaccuracies and keeps time elements correct.
8. With what authors, if any, do you dream of being mentioned in the same breath by an avid reader?
I would love to be mentioned in the same breath as Jackie Collins and eventually hope to write well enough in other genres to be compared to Andre Norton, Mercedes Lackey and my personal favorite, Agatha Christie-someday...
9. Do you have other works published?
I have a fantasy story published in an anthology, Enchanted Realms II that was published in October 2002 by FantasyWritersWanted. It’s a short story of a dragon and the woman who falls in love with him. I’m proud to say that the ending has surprised everyone who reads it and I’ve had works published on The Scarlett Letter webzine.
10. Do you have other stories/manuscripts in the works, or finished and waiting? If so, tell us more. If not, what do you think you’d like to tackle next?
Currently, I’m trying to put my bottom in the chair and get moving with the sequel to “Old Enough to Know Better”. It is a story that was suggested by my editor, Lorraine Stephens (darn her hide!). She took a liking to the Detective, Corey Williams, in “Old Enough” and suggested it might be neat if he had his own story…and so was born “Sun in Sagittarius, Moon in Mazatlan.” As soon as I’ve finished “Sun”, I have two Woman’s fiction stories, two fantasy stories, and a science fiction story that keep calling me to finish them. I can only hope they have the quality Wings seeks to be published by Wings.
11. If the Blue Fairy showed up with her magic wand, what wish would you ask to transform your art at this point in your writing career?
I guess immediately I’d like to write like Nora Roberts but in actuality, I would like to have more persistence in my personality to sit myself down and just write. As writers, what we do is write. At least, that’s what we’re supposed to do. It’s so easy to stray from the project at hand and every time I sit down on the couch four more ideas for books pop into my head. Oh, yeah, I’d like to win the next big lotto so that I could quit my mortgage-paying job and write all day. (Wouldn’t we all?)
12. What brought you to Wings?
I’m a card-carrying member of Romance Writers of America and on one of the loops there was a rather heated discussion of “real” publishers vs. epublishers. I’m not really sure whom the author was that mentioned Wings but her comments were so glowing I made a point to go to the site and pull up the submissions page. The response was warm and immediate and I knew I’d hit pay dirt. I think from the time I submitted to the time I signed was only three weeks and Lorraine Stephens patiently answered each and every one of my questions. Since that time, I have found the Wings family to be supportive and the best cheering section anyone could have.
I have friends signed with the “big” houses and I’ll tell you right now, we have it better than they do. At Wings, there are no midlist authors. We’re all stars. I like that.
Whatever it was, welcome aboard.
Thanks for introducing yourself. Hope to see much more of you in print.
Barbara Edwards
Another Love, 4 1/2 stars from Romantic Times, available January 2003 from