Good afternoon! Thank you so much to take the time out of your busy day to answer our questions.


What brought you to writing? Was it a teacher who inspired you, or was it a story that grabbed you and wouldn't let go?

Well, I have been making up stories and world building in my head for as long as I can remember and I started writing in third grade. I was fortunate enough to have had some excellent writing teachers in high school (Mr. Kelly, thank you, you’re the best!) as well.

But it wasn’t until I was in New Orleans seeing Pearl Jam that the idea for Triad came to me and then months later I was on bed rest for a high risk pregnancy and I had the time and I decided to give the writing thing a chance after having set it aside for many years.

As a mom, do you find it hard to carve out time for writing?

Yes! I have three kids from nearly eight to nearly a year old and they all have different schedules and different needs and so it’s pretty much impossible for me to write during the day. I have to write at night after everyone is in bed.

How do you write? Computer, pen and paper? Plot outline and sticky notes or fly by the seat of your pants?

It really depends on the story. Triad just came to me and I wrote it, without an outline. It just came to me and I went with it. Touch of Fae was a bit slower and I used a basic outline. With Witches Knot, the third Charvez witch book, I had to use an outline because the emotional tension and interaction between the characters is so delicate and intricate that I wanted to be sure I did it justice. Sometimes a story demands to be told but it takes me a long time to tell it and I need to map out the entire thing or I lose it all, other times, it just flows.

I only use pen and paper when I am on my second edit, although I do carry a pen and paper with me everywhere I go – you never know where an idea will hit you (Witches Knot came to me while waiting in the car for my son to get out of school)

Is there any particular ritual you go through before writing? Yoga? Candles? Music?

I’m mildly obsessive about music and so each book I’ve written has a soundtrack. I have my discman (no mp3 player yet, soon though!) and a stack of CDs, a big bottle of ice water and a pad and pen for those notes that come to me as I’m writing. Other than that, I’m good to go. I usually write on the laptop instead of the desktop because I don’t have email or the internet on the laptop and I have no willpower.

How did you choose Romantica as your genre?

Well, I believe that there is a lot of emotional depth to sex but the level of detail I go into pretty much left me with the option of erotica and erotic romance. I met Anya Bast online and she was such a great friend and a big help with advice when I was just starting out, before I’d even thought of sending anything to Ellora’s Cave. I read a lot of romantica and realized that it would be a potential genre for my writing.

Now, I love the freedom of erotic romance. I love that I can be as detailed as I want to be, write the characters I like and that I have very few rules. Romantica is a frontier really and it appeals to the maverick in me. I like being able to write what I want to write.

I've been seeing a number of discussions on the Yahoo groups about Happily-Ever-After. Do you feel that HEA is necessary to a romance novel?

Well, not in the traditional sense. By that I mean a heroine finding her own strength and perseverance at the end of a book is a HEA to me. She doesn’t need a man to find that and she doesn’t need to end up with one or marry one at the end to have a HEA either. So far, my books have HEA in the traditional sense although I do have one, a contemporary novel, where there is a HEA but the road from page one to the end is not a straight one.

Most of the time, I like that kind of resolution, it works with the story that the heroine and hero end up together, but if a story is well written, they can go their separate ways and still have it be a romance.

But I’m not a traditionalist anyway. I like authors who take chances and break rules. If a story is told well, an author can bend it and create a new take on an old standard and still have it be a story you want to hear.

Congratulations on your new release, Triad. Can you give us a little info on it?

Thank you! Lee Charvez is a witch born in a family where all of the women are born with inherent gifts of power. She is a witch dreamer, she has the ability to walk in dreams and the subconscious and work magic there too. There is only one Charvez witch dreamer a generation and she’s the strongest in decades.

She meets the man of her dreams, literally, when she bumps into Aidan Bell outside their apartment building in New Orleans. He’s a nearly three-hundred year old vampire with the face of a wicked angel and he has no problem with claiming her as his own. As if that isn’t miraculous enough, there’s another man, a powerful wizard, Alex Carter, who makes their partnership into a triad. Problem is, there’s no time to sit back and enjoy her newfound loves because there’s a demon out to destroy the source of her powers and her entire family in the bargain.

Could you also clue us in on the sequel, A Touch of Fae?

Of course! A Touch of Fae is the story of Em Charvez. Em’s magical gift is that she’s an empath and has a great deal of intuitiveness when it comes to magic and research. It’s during her scholarly research that she discovers the existence of a book which might be a threat to her family and she sets off to find it before anyone else does.

Of course, the book is Fae and the Faerie Queen sends her finest warrior, Conchobar MacNessa, to watch the human witch to figure out just why she’s looking for a lost book of powerful Faerie magic.

Con is a ten thousand year old warrior who after months of following the intelligent and empathic woman around, falls in love with her. The book takes Em and Con all around the world and even to Tir na nOg, the Isle of the Fae.

There’s also a Dark Fae after that book who has a personal vendetta against Con and the race to find and control the volume is one in which all could be lost.

Is there anything else you're working on right now?

Yes, Witches Knot, which is the third book in the series and this one features Holly, a cousin who grew up not knowing she was a Charvez. It’s also a ménage story. And, Enclave, a mainstream paranormal action/suspense with some romance in it featuring a female vampire warrior in modern day Los Angeles.

Would you like to add anything else?

Thank you FAR, for this opportunity and thank you to all of the readers who’ve taken the time to read Triad! Please feel free to drop me a note at laurendane@laurendane.com!

Thanks you so much for taking the time to answer our questions. If you're interested in finding out more about Lauren Dane, check out her website at: http://www.laurendane.com/default.php. If you would like to purchase her book Triad, you can do so at http://www.ellorascave.com/productpage.asp?ISBN=1-4199-0219-9.


Interviewed by: Serena