| Interviews |
| Interviews with Linda Howard herself collected from Harlequin.com, All About Romance and Cresent Blues |
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| how men think. The way they describe action is not with exclamation points and all that. The more tense the action, the shorter and choppier the sentences when men are writing. LLB: A couple of your books seem to engender strong positives and strong negatives. Others, like Mackenzie's Mountain, are more universally loved. |
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| LLB: I really enjoyed Mackenzie's Mountain, but something that was a problem for me was that Joe, just a teenager at the time, was too perfect. He kind of reminded me of the hero from Bluebird Winter. Both were too good, but in Joe's instance, he was young, which made it a bit more unbelievable for me. Linda: Derek (from Bluebird Winter) was too good to write a full book about. I don't think he was too perfect, but he had no rough spots that I could dig my nails in and hold on to. Whereas Joe |
| Linda: These two heroes are different in some ways; they are alike in that they are both such "guys." They are just ordinary guys, they're slobs, they are men you feel like you could actually meet. They're not super-heroes or spies. That may even be part of their attraction. LLB: How does an author have to feel about men to write romance? Linda: I think for it to be real, you absolutely have to love men |
| I can't tell you how pleased we all were when Chance's story came out! Which are your favorite books? Do you plan to write more Mackenzie stories? Do you plan to write more series titles at all? Linda: I have two more contracted books with Silhouette and I will continue to write series titles as long as ideas occur to me. Any new ones, however, will probably not be connected to earlier books. LLB: Let's get back to Mackenzie's Mountain. There's a lot of interest in the timeline for this series. Can you help them out and clarify the settings? Linda: I've been asked about that before. The answer is that Mackenzie's Mountain was set in the present and all the books that followed are set in the undefined future. There are little hints in the books that very few people pick up on. In Mackenzie's Mission, reference was made to the second Gulf War. Plus, that airplane, that I totally invented, was a lot of study of aeronautics, that plane used systems that the Air Force would dearly love to have operational. In Mackenzie's Pleasure, I mentioned that Social Security had been phased out. |
| did have a flaw - he was so overwhelmingly focused on flying, he was so obsessed with it, that he was willing to brush women aside. And so I had to plant someone in front of him who refused to be brushed aside. Derek, on the other hand, had nothing that was preventing him from falling in love and as soon as he met her, as far as he was concerned, that was it. She was the one who had to fall in love. LLB: What are the joys and pitfalls of writing a series of interconnected books? What happens when you find secondary characters overpowering the main characters? Linda: Revisiting the characters, seeing old friends, finding out what's happened - these are the pleasures. The first time I ran into a secondary character overpowering a main character was when Kell Sabin popped up in Midnight Rainbow. I had to just ruthlessly slap him down or it would have been his book. Joe almost took over Mackenzie's Mountain. As a matter of fact, he came so close to taking it over that the reader response to Joe was absolutely overwhelming. LLB: One of our reviewers referred to hero Dane Hollister from Dream Man as "The Manliest Man Alive Ever, the hero you love-to-hate-to-love." Two years later, this same reviewer referred to hero Sam from Mr. Perfect "one of Linda Howard's best heroes ever: confident but not controlling, arrogant but not overpowering." Another of our reviewers said of Sam, "he is masculine to the max and so sexy he is almost illegal." Many readers, I think will find these two heroes very different from one another. Are they different, or are their heroines really the ones who have evolved? |
| to begin with. I do - I think they're wonderful creatures. I think every thinking woman should own one. My own husband is a total guy. He's normal, he fishes BassMaster tournament trail for a living - how much more "guy" can you get? He's also very protective. I guess romance writers take the best part of men and that may be the part that feminists have tried to deny them - truly the protectiveness, the every-day courtesies that men would love to extend to women but it's not politically correct anymore for them to open a door. LLB: How do you feel about the creeping of political correctness in romance writing? And, isn't it true that some of the best things about men are also the worst things, particularly in how they are depicted in romances? Linda: To me, political correctness is simply a two-word phrase for censorship. It's trying to tell people what to think, how to act, what to say. It's censorship. Someone may get their feelings hurt at a certain phrase, but that's life. Hurt feelings are, in the grand scheme of things, very negligible. LLB: How do you research the military and/or special forces? Linda: Through books and the Internet - and through contacts. I happen to know a guy who was in the CIA and through the years he was also a mercenary. Cops will talk to you - there's just a wealth of information out there. I've looked up how to make a bomb on the 'Net, I've gotten books on bomb-making, and - this is going to sound really strange, but, I made my first Molotov Cocktail when I was seven years old with a cousin of mine. I set fire to the living room floor when I was four, trying to melt crayons to paint a picture. LLB: Where did the idea for working in the Knights Templar come from in Son of the Morning? Linda: I already knew about the Templars; I came across them when doing some research on the Shroud of Turin for my own edification. I found out that the Templars are intricately interwoven in the history of the Shroud. The more I knew about the Templars, the more the story started growing. The character of Black Niall I actually had his name way before I had anything else. I probably had his name back in 1992 even though I didn't write the book until several years later. When I stumbled across the Templars, and knew that Scotland was the only European country not to persecute the Templars, I knew what to do with the name. It just went from there. LLB: Do you think you'll ever write another time travel romance? Linda: I didn't plan to write that one. I never know - a story may suggest itself. And, even though my editor doesn't know what to expect, she never tries to steer me away from anything. LLB: Can you share a small amount of personal and professional history with our readers? Linda: I have lived in the same county in Alabama for my entire life. I wrote my first book when I was 9 years old - didn't know a thing about chapter breaks. It just started and it went until it ended. I wrote totally for my own enjoyment for twenty years. I worked at a trucking company, where I met my husband, and all of a sudden, it was like the difference between light and dark, I got up one morning and said to myself, "Okay, let's see if you're good enough." Until then I had never even thought about trying to get published. That was twenty years ago. I have three grown step-children, three grandchildren, two golden retrievers lying beside me as we speak named Bit O'Honey and Sugar Baby, and we live in a big house that's very much a home and not a showplace. It's a house where the kids romp, the dogs romp, and you can sit on any piece of furniture. I do laundry and I cook - there aren't any servants waiting on us. Just last year I got someone to help me with paperwork one afternoon a week. |