Meet Susanna Fraser, Published Author

Good Tuesday Morning all!

Please help me welcome author Susanna Fraser. After you read about her first sale to Carina Press and absorb her advice, ask her tons of questions! (Her weekly word counts amaze me!)

Thank you so much for having me at Pink Fuzzy Slippers today! My first book, The Sergeant’s Lady, has been out almost exactly two months, and I’m happy to have a chance to come talk about it and my new work, too!

How do you find time to write with family and job obligations?

It isn’t easy! I’m married with a 6-year-old daughter and a full-time job, so if I’m not careful writing can get squeezed to the margins of my life. I have a notebook computer I take to work with me, and on my lunch hour I try to eat quickly so I’ll have 20-30 minutes at the end to write. In that time I can write 400-500 words. Then, after my daughter goes to bed around 9:00 or 9:30, I shut my office door and keep writing till I’ve written 1000 words total on the day.

That’s a typical day. Some days if I’m tired, stressed, or sick it doesn’t happen at all, and when my husband was at a week-long conference recently, I was satisfied if I managed 500 words per day. And some days the words just flow and I can hit 1500 or 2000 words.

How do you get over writer’s block?

I once heard Bernard Cornwell at a conference say that there’s no such f***ing thing as writer’s block. We’re doing something we love, something that’s a lot easier than, say, a nurse’s or a teacher’s work. And a nurse can’t call up the hospital and say, “I just can’t come in today. I have nurse’s block.” That’s obviously ridiculous if nursing is your job. And if writing is my job, then I need to do it whether I feel like it or not.

So I just make myself sit down and write. Sometimes that’s all it takes. The first few hundred words are slow and painful, but then I hit my flow, the characters come back to life on the page, and I feel good.

When that doesn’t work, I’ve learned that sometimes the problem is me, and other times it’s the writing itself. In the latter case, I look at the scene and try to figure out what’s gone wrong. Do I need more conflict? Should I try a different POV character? Does this scene fit the story at all, and if it doesn’t, what else can I try?

But when the problem is me, usually I’m being too hard on myself. I love to write and I’m stubborn, so I’ll try to write through sickness, through exhaustion, through family crises, at my mother-in-law’s house on Christmas morning, and so on. And that’s when I have to remind myself that while nurses can’t call in with nurse’s block, they don’t work 24/7/365, either. They have days off, they take vacations, and they get sick leave, bereavement leave, and the like. I’m allowed to do that, too. I don’t have to write every day. Five or six days out of every seven is fine. I don’t need to write when I have the flu, and it probably wouldn’t be my best work anyway. And there’s no need to write on Christmas…unless of course my daughter and her cousin are so quiet and happy with their toys that I get a good moment to sneak off by myself with my characters.

How do you come up with your ideas?

On the broadest level, I became fascinated with two aspects of the early 19^th century: Jane Austen’s novels and the Napoleonic Wars. When you’ve read your copy of Austen’s complete works to tatters and find yourself describing the Battle of Waterloo over dinner using your cutlery to represent troop movements, it’s only natural to write Regencies focusing on the military side of the era.

I often get the ideas for individual books through a sort of dialogue with existing stories. With The Sergeant’s Lady, I’d read three books in a row where a seemingly cross-class relationship was resolved when the lower-class character turned out to be the long-lost child of an aristocrat. I decided I wanted to write a book where the common character was exactly what he or she seemed to be, forcing the hero and heroine to face up to their class differences and find a way to move beyond them.

For my next Carina book, A Marriage of Inconvenience, I’d watched the 1999 movie version of Mansfield Park and thought, “Well, that’s one way of making that book more accessible to a modern audience. But how would I do it?” And so I took a very similar set-up, with a poor relation heroine who’d learned to be meek and mild to stay on her rich relatives’ good side, and built it from there.

What are you writing now?

A Marriage of Inconvenience comes out April 11, 2011, so I’ll be going through line and copy edits between now and the end of the year.

As for new writing, I’m working on a historical fantasy with strong romantic elements set, like The Sergeant’s Lady, with Wellington’s army during the Peninsular War. I love the setting, and I’m having fun with the fantasy elements—among other things, it’s given me a good excuse to write a heroine who, like me, is more than a bit of a tomboy, and who gets to have high-stakes adventures with handsome warrior-men.

More about The Sergeant’s Lady :

Highborn Anna Arrington has been "following the drum," obeying the wishes of her cold, controlling cavalry officer husband. When he dies, all she wants is to leave life with Wellington's army in Spain behind her and go home to her family's castle in Scotland.

Sergeant Will Atkins ran away from home to join the army in a fit of boyish enthusiasm. He is a natural born soldier, popular with officers and men alike, uncommonly brave and chivalrous, and educated and well-read despite his common birth.

As Anna journeys home with a convoy of wounded soldiers, she forms an unlikely friendship with Will. When the convoy is ambushed and their fellow soldiers captured, they become fugitives—together. The attraction between them is strong—but even if they can escape the threat of death at the hands of the French, is love strong enough to bridge the gap between a viscount's daughter and an innkeeper's son?

Please stop by Susanna’s website to learn more about her and to read excerpts from The Sergeant’s Lady and A Marriage of Inconvenience. Also, one commenter on this post will win a $10 gift certificate to Amazon.com.