An Interview with Gretchen Craig

How long have you been writing?

I wrote my first novel in my early thirties. I had three small children at that time, a job, and a house and a husband. Where did I find the energy? I dunno. I guess I was young and hungry for the writing life. Then I started teaching and that career is absolutely consuming. I didn't begin writing again until I left teaching four years ago. Since then I've written five novels. Always and Forever is the fourth one written but the first one published .That first novel is still in a drawer, waiting for a rewrite.

Why did you decide to write historicals?

I love to read historicals! And because I know more history, or think I do, from reading well-researched novels, I take care to be accurate as well. But really, doesn't your imagination take off when you are in another time, another place? What was it like when women wore those voluminous skirts, listened to their fathers, married whom they were told to -- and yet, yearned and ached and dreamed as women do today?

Place seems particularly important in your books.

Yes. I'm especially taken with books that help me feel the ice under my feet or the sweat on my brow when I'm reading. The climate, the bugs, the birds, the terrain - all those things affect the way we live our lives. For instance, it's hard to be romantic in the moonlight if the mosquitoes are biting your neck, or the bears are roaming around outside. Instead of traffic, my characters have to deal with bedbugs and privies, but they still struggle and love and persevere.

Do you try to send a message or make a statement in your books?

I don't want to write a polemic, but certainly the themes in my books are important. In Always and Forever, for example, slavery provokes a lot of discussion. No one needs to be shown slavery in a novel to know it was evil. Those days are well documented. But I hope the inner lives of people in terrible circumstances is shown, and that is what I'm after. To show how we are human under all kinds of conditions, how we live and love and strive no matter where, when, or how we live.

Hate to bring it up, but a lot of romances are, well, sexy. How would you rate Always and Forever on a sexiness scale?

Hmm. I think my characters are certainly sexy, especially that Bernard Chamard. Phanor - he's a sexy guy, too. I even think poor old Albany Johnston is appealing, though Josie doesn't see it. But I take your point. The sexual tension in my book is there, I hope, but not much explicit sex. It's a point my editor and I talked about. But Kensington has other lines, like Aphrodisia, that specialize in more sexually explicit scenes. I like the tension and the yearning better than the actual doing it, at least on paper!

It's extremely difficult to get published these days. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

It's the same process as getting to Carnegie Hall. Practice! Very few writers publish the first novels we write; most of us have a closet full of manuscripts not worth an editor or an agent's time. A common mistake, certainly in my case, is that Hey, I've read a gazillion books, I know how to punctuate, I can write a book. Sadly, no. Most of us simply are not looking at how a book is put together when we're reading. I recommend going to the on-line bookstores and navigating to the writing section. Choose one or two books, or more if you can afford it, for starters. Read them. Read them again. Put the advice into practice. Buy some more books, and repeat. You'll want books on characters, structure, dialogue, viewpoint, editing, and so on. Of course, you could take university courses instead, or as well! Then write and write and write some more. And don't neglect to join a critique group of like-minded writers.

What are you writing now?

My second Zebra book will be a sequel to Always and Forever. The sons and daughters of those characters are living in a time of change. Abolition is in the air, even in the depths of the South. Marianne Johnston is swept into the abolitionist cause, and even though her involvement threatens her family and their plantation, she risks all for the sake of freeing the enslaved. Her activities bring her to discover the man she had despised as a ne're-do-well is as passionately involved as she is. Together they join arms - and finally hearts - in their pursuit of justice.