I'm a character-driven writer. Have always been a character-driven
writer. But over the last three years or so have found myself gnawing at the self-imposed restraints (note: SELF-imposed *g*) insisting that writing romance meant I couldn't write suspense. "Write what you know" was always the problem; it certainly was never "write what you love." I love suspense. It's been my choice of pleasure reading for years. It's also what will draw me into a movie, or hook me on a television show.
But I'd heard enough readers complain that combining the two genres ended up short changing one or the other - if not both - that it put me off making an attempt. And my romances were doing so well, why mess with a sure thing - except that it's hard to say no to an insistent muse.
Late in the autumn of 2002, I took a day, wrote a 3-page pitch (yes, pitch - very light on details, the briefest of outlines, almost none of which I ended up using in the end) for an erotic suspense (yes, erotic -why not punch through to the other side of the envelope *g*), and emailed it to my editor. She wrote back almost immediately with one quick sentence, something along the lines of, "I have an idea for this."
After hashing out the experimental packaging with the publisher, we went to contract soon after, turned that pitch into a series. The first five "Smithson Group" stories were released between October 2004 and February 2005 - one single title, four stand-alone novellas, all in trade paperback. And it appeared that my suspense reading and watching had paid off as reviews compared the books to Mission: Impossible, James Bond, I Spy, Alias, and Die Hard. Which brings me to the current installment, LARGER THAN LIFE.
As with each of the others, this book draws on the same cast yet doesn't require that the reader be familiar with the previous SG-5 adventures. This particular story was inspired by real life events which I fictionalized into a version all my own. The idea came from a prime time news program about a woman who at sixteen fled a forced marriage to her cousin in the community of Colorado City in northern Arizona. She now helps other girls escape life under polygamous strongholds. I watched the show with the words "what if" swirling, and I knew I wanted to write a heroine who had taken up a similar cause. Strangely enough, I set my story in far West Texas never knowing a sect of the same polygamous society had moved into an area not too far from my imaginary location.
Because this was still marketed as romance (and actually says "contemporary romance" on the spine), I made sure that the emotional journeys romance readers expect from a genre read were a huge part of the overall arc. And so color me surprised when the Booklist review said, "This one won't win Kent too many fans among romance readers, although admirers of her original Bond and Gor adventures may enjoy it.
It starts out with two teens running for their lives, then gunshots. Next a dog is beaten, and Mick is hogtied and sadistically dragged along rocky ground by two thugs on ATVs. And that's just the introduction to the story, which crams cult practices, abuse, and child prostitution into another graphic tale of sex and organized crime featuring one of the SG-5 team." I had no idea what I'd written wasn't a romance!
Alison Kent is the author of three novels and she blogs
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