Today I'm especially glad to be hosting author Alison Kent on the Girlfriends Cyber Circuit (mostly because it means I don't have to come up with anything particularly clever to post, so I can just take cold medicine and go back to bed). Alison is the author of Larger Than Life, a sensual romantic thriller that's part of her popular SG-5 series about a group of covert operatives.

After being beaten and left for dead in the New Mexico desert, Smithson Group agent Mick Savin tries to piece together his last few days. He remembers bits and pieces: gathering crucial intel. An ambush by Spectra thugs. And then…nothing, except waking up in some medical center in rural West Texas. His mission was top secret. So how did he end up here?

The answer is Neva Case. If the former big-city attorney hadn’t been out in her pick-up, Mick wouldn’t be alive. Mick’s never met anyone quite like Neva. She’s smart, sexy, and passionate. She also has a secret. Neva runs the Big Brown Barn, an underground shelter for young girls forced into unwanted polygamist marriages. Neva would do anything for these girls—and that’s what worries Mick. Neva may be trusting, but Mick’s instincts tell him that something’s not quite right. He’s not about to let someone get to Neva and the girls on his watch. Especially when one of the girls brings trouble straight to the barn's front door . . .

Now, with the shelter in unimaginable danger and time running out, Mick is in for the fight of his life, one that could cost him the woman he’s come to love more than anything…

Here's the interview:

Q: What inspired you to write this book?
A: 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 community had moved into an area not too far from my fictional location.

Q: Describe your creative process.
A: I work with Christopher Vogler's "The Writers Journey" concept, and apply it to a three-act structure. I have a plotting board - an idea inspired by a good friend, Cherry Adair - that hangs on my bedroom/office wall. It's divided into sections for twenty chapters, and I use color-coded sticky notes to jot out the plot points and character growth that needs to take place in each act and each chapter. I also have a character board. I have to have visuals of all my story people and often of the locations. The first thing I develop is characters. I'm a very character-driven writer so I have to know these people that I'm sending on these adventures. And, no. I don't do character outlines or charts or anything more in depth than naming my cast and finding pictures and tacking it all up on my wall. I get to know them as I write. The next step is to plot out my story's three main turning points - then hope like mad I can fill in all the pages between!

Q: Do you have any writing habits or rituals?
A: Not really! I write full time so I get in the hours and pages when the muse (and the deadline) demands! I do like to work outside, whether in the backyard garden my daughter has set up, or at the park, or wherever. Seeing as how I live on the Texas Gulf coast, however, I'm limited on that!

Q: How much, if anything, do you have in common with your heroine?
A: I'm no doubt as obsessed with my writing as she was with her cause!

Q: Do you prefer dark chocolate or milk chocolate?
A: Milk if it's Hershey's *g*, dark the rest of the time!

(The Darth M&Ms are gone, alas (except for my secret hidden stash), so I had to make it a generic chocolate question.)

Q: You sold your first book on national television. How did that happen?
A: CBS 48 Hours was doing a segment called "Isn't It Romantic?" on the romance industry. I lucked into being at the right place at the right time. They wanted to profile an aspiring author, and went to Harlequin (to my current editor, in fact) to get the name of someone who had submitted to them. They didn't necessarily insist that it was an author Harlequin was going to buy, but my editor told me she would never have put anyone through that if she hadn't intended to buy the manuscript. It was great fun being interviewed and having one of my critique meetings captured live, as well as having that phone call there to revisit anytime I want to pop the tape into the VCR!

Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on the next book in my SG-5 series, DEEP BREATH, due out in April 2006. LARGER THAN LIFE is part of this series that features a group of private covert operatives working for and funded by a philanthropist who is ex-military himself - and whose motto is "Boldly going where law-abiding, rule-stickling, by-the-book pussies won't - to do what needs to be done." *g*

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to say about this book or the process of writing it?
A: This book was the first time I'd used my plotting board, and it made the book fly. I wish I'd adopted such a process long ago!

Visit her web site at http://www.alisonkent.com.


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