INTERVIEW of KATHYE QUICK

by SANDRA DUGAS

1. Can you tell us something about yourself you’d like readers to know?

ONE RAINY NIGHT is a book dear to my heart.  I got the “call” two days after losing my home and almost everything I owned in the flooding associated with Hurricane Floyd in the fall of 1999.  I was up to my eyeballs in wet sheet rock and wet insulation when I learned my first book would be published.  Knowing I was finally fulfilling a dream kept me going through the long months of rebuilding my home.

By sheer coincidence, in ONE RAINY NIGHT, the heroine is caught in a hurricane and it leads to her meeting the man of her dreams.

If I had known I was going to be prophetic with my writing, I would have written about a lottery winner!

2. Many authors point to a defining moment or instance that led to beginning of their writing career. What made you decide to become a writer?

I remember it clearly.  I was a freshman in high school and in a journalism class I took just to fill up the schedule and meet an elective requirement.  The teacher was also the advisor for the school newspaper and assigned the class to go out and do a story suitable for the next edition.  I guess he didn’t have a lot of interest in the paper that year and wanted to see if he could scrape up something to print using his journalism class.  I did a story on a new class being offered in school that year.

Not only did I get an “A”, but I also was drafted onto the school newspaper and won a writing award from the local newspaper.  From then on, I was hooked on writing. 

It was a natural progression from telling real stories to telling the ones that kept gathering in my head as I grew up.

3. Have you any special habits that help get the creative juices flowing?

Unfortunately, all my habits are bad ones at the moment.  As with us all I’m sure, I struggle to find time to write and get all those people out of my head and onto the paper. 

One of the most important ways I found to do that was to join a critique groups that meets regularly.  That way, you have to write to bring something with you for others to critique.

I try to write for at least an hour or two a day, but it doesn’t always work out that way.  Having a deadline helps, even if it is a self-imposed one.  But make it realistic and attainable.

And, make no mistake, you do burn out.  When that writers’ block sets in, each person has his or her own way or breaking through.  For me, chocolate and watching either ‘Camelot’ or ‘My Cousin Vinnie’ (depending upon what I’m working on at the moment) usually works.

4. How do you come up with the ideas for your stories?

I rely heavily on the old “What-if”.

ONE RAINY NIGHT was plotted one day when I was stuck in traffic during a storm.  What if someone’s car broke down during a terrible storm and what if no one was around to help except a lone man who she thought was going to kill her?  What if she was all wrong about the guy; he was actually a handsome, knight in shining armor that came to her aid and rode into her heart.  Now what if that same man turned up a few weeks later as her new boss?  What if she could hardly face him, considering how “close” they almost became two weeks earlier.  But what if he was the only one she could trust to help to break up a stolen parts rings that was threatening the company in which they both worked?

See – that old “what-if.”

And sometimes I hear a song and it triggers a fantasy in my head as to why the songwriter chose those particular words; what event motivated him.  Daryl Hall and John Oates’ Melody For A Memory inspired me to begin a romance about a rock star coming back home to face the woman he left all those years ago on his way to stardom.  Only now, there’s an added complication – a starry-eyed fan is stalking him.  When the fan ends up dead, it is up to the heroine to prove the hero is innocent

And life in general can inspire stories.  A news clip on the Thunderbirds was the basis for another story jet pilot who needs the heroine to help save the team from being cut out of the budget by a feisty Congresswoman.  The problem is, however, the heroine lost both her brother and fiancée, who also were fighter pilots, in a plane crash five years earlier and she is not too anxious to relive that memory.

My son, Jarrett, inspired me to plot out a romance revolving around an incident when he was six and a ring bearer.  He refused to hold the flower girl’s hand; she was ‘yucky’ to quote him.  The storybook is about a ring bearer and flower girl who reunite some twenty years later to walk down the aisle again.

A writer never knows what might inspire the next Great American Novel, so he or she learns to have a notebook handy to scribble notes anytime, anyplace.

5. Where do you stand regarding the on-going argument of plotting versus writing-by-the-seat-of your-pants?

I can’t plot out an entire book.  I know where I want the story to go, sort of, and then I begin.  I always know the beginning and the ending, along with some pivotal scenes I want included, but I don’t always know how to get from one to the other.

I never believed that characters took over once a writer got started until it happened to me. 

I let my hero and heroine decide how the plot is going to move along.  Sometimes they do some pretty wild things, but we all wind up on the last page together.

6. Are there any authors you particularly enjoy who have inspired you?

I can’t get enough of Anne Stuart.  She writes from the heart and in terms with which we can all identify.  You can see a little of her heroines in everyday people around you.

As for romantic suspense, one of the best is Wings’ own Christine Janssen.  Chris tackles subjects, most writers would avoid, with an enthusiasm and slant that makes the pages keep turning.

7. What tips would you pass on to other aspiring authors?

The best advice I can give to new authors is to leave your ego at the door and never give up.  Rejections are part of the job; you don’t take them personally.  Besides, each one is proof to the IRS that you are really a writer for all the office equipment and supplies you are going to deduct from your income tax.

Seriously though.  There is a quote I think about when I get feeling discouraged.  I don’t remember who said it but it goes like this:

“Failure is simply giving up when you

didn’t realize how close you were to success.”

8. Your October release -- ONE RAINY NIGHT -- is Contemporary Romantic Comedy Suspense. Do you plan to delight us with stories in any other subgenres?

Comedy is my release.  I treat every moment with comic relief, much to the chagrin of my family, all of who are the targets of my humor.  It gets me through the hard times from losing my home in the flooding associated with Hurricane Floyd to losing my mom before she could read any of my stories in print.

Besides the contemporary romances I listed earlier, I am writing a historical based on a Greek Myth entitled DAUGHTER OF THE MOON.  I have always been fascinated by Greek and Roman mythology, and since Russell Crowe put on a toga, there has been some interest in my work.  (Thank you, Russell).

Plus, I was born in the coal belt of Pennsylvania.  My father and grandmother told me wonderful stories about coal mining.  My dad was a ‘breaker boy’ and my grandfather got caught in a mine fill, but survived.  He eventually succumbed to Black Lung, however.  Living near Pottsville, PA, I’m sure there was a Molly Maguire or two in the family and I have plotted an epic that begins in 1876 in the coal region and continues through oil.  It’s going to take years to write this one and I’d like to get better established before I start it.  Being a bit more established might give the book a better chance of getting published. 

I’ve named my hero after my dad, and my heroine in honor of my grandmother.  When my mom was alive, she hinted she wanted to be in the saga also, so I made her the owner of “Flo’s Place,” the house all the miners go to after payday to “relax.”   She wasn’t happy about her role, but at least she was in the book.