Your questions put to....

Over the coming weeks we'll be adding Q&A's from some of our favourite Mills & Boon authors to the community. This week we've put YOUR questions to...

…Heidi Rice.           

What are your favourite books and authors? Sarah B
Okay, I could be all high-brow here and list some of my best-loved literary fiction such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn and Kerouac’s On the Road… But the only books I’ve re-read numerous times are stories by my favourite romance authors which would include pretty much anything by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Nora Roberts, Linda Howard, Rachel Gibson, Susan Mallery and Jennifer Crusie.

What’s your favourite time of year? Annie H
October, just before the clocks go back. Cold crisp air (always a bonus in London where it gets hot and sticky in the summer), autumn leaves in the park, the kids are back at school (so I can work without having the desire to commit murder), and we can have an open fire in the living room before the central heating goes on. Plus there’s trick or treating, fireworks night and Christmas to look forward to… And maybe even a snow day if we’re lucky.

If you were writing your first romance novel now, what would you do differently? Janet C
Hmm, that’s a tough one, as I only got published two years ago and I’m still super proud of that first book. But if you’re talking about my first finished manuscript (which didn’t get published)
I’d say I would have cut out all the whiplash-inducing head-hopping, decided not to make the heroine’s best friend a home girl from the Baltimore projects who talked in extremely unconvincing street dialect (I blame The Wire!) and made sure my heroine wasn’t deranged and my hero wasn’t a total A-hole. And that’s just for starters! But hey, it was a learning process.

What do you wish you'd known when you were first starting out as a romance author? Janet C
Apart from all of the above. I wish I’d known that a writer’s best friend is constructive criticism (and that your mum, bless her, doesn’t count). Not to be precious about your prose and to realize that Nora may make it look easy, but it isn’t.

When a book starts to give you trouble, what comfort food do you turn to? Michelle W
First and foremost it’s gotta be chocolate, but I’m happy to make do with a nice cold glass of white wine (I know it’s not food, but I consider wine food for the soul, and very comforting in the right dosage).

What do you do to procrastinate when a book is giving you fits (Internet time-wasters, etc.)? Michelle W
I happen to be a champion procrastinator so I could write a book on this topic without any trouble at all. Suffice it to say, I’ve even been known to do laundry in a pinch, but before I get that desperate I might scour The Pink Heart Society’s recent Male on Monday slots
(discovering new eye candy is never a waste IMHO!) or delve into the community or I Heart Presents blogs (where a lot of my favourite people hang out).

If you could be any one of your heroines, who would you be and why? Michelle W
Probably Mel from The Mile High Club, because she ended up being a best-selling author, she’s smart, sassy and sweet (like moi!) and not at all big-headed (not so much like moi!) and she got to marry super-sexy bad boy Jack Devlin, one of my favourite heroes … Plus they
had luxury pads in three cities I adore: Paris, London and New York (not that I’m mercenary, but why turn down prime real estate).

Although, come to think of it, I don’t know if I would have had the guts to do what Mel did with Jack at 50,000 ft!

What’s something you wish you’d known when you first started publishing? Michelle W
How to read royalty statements… Actually, I’d still like to know how to do that.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? Barbara W
When I was unpubbed, the best advice was to join the Romantic Novelist Association’s New Writer’s Scheme. It’s how I got my second manuscript up to snuff and onto an editor’s desk at M&B – and then got it published. Since I’ve been published, the best bit of advice came
from my editor, during nightmare revisions for my third book, which was…(cue ominous music here)… ‘Beware random Elvis impersonators.’

Since then I’ve managed to insert everything from 600-mile road trips to quaint village funfairs into that sentence. In other words, stay focused and only put something in your story if it has a really good reason to be there.

When does Christmas start for you? Sam S
Both my boys have their birthdays right at the start of December (and they’re not twins, so don’t ask me how we managed that) so we kick into Christmas mode straight after we’ve got the Groundhog Day Birthday Experience out the way.

We also have a little Christmas tradition in our family which involves writing a list of one Christmassy thing to do each day during December up to Christmas Eve. This year we’ve got Ice Skating at Somerset House and seeing the new Jim Carrey movie A Christmas Carol on our list, but if this festive season ends up being as frantic as last year’s I’ll probably slip Mum’s Annual Yuletide Nervous Breakdown in there as well
somewhere.

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Heidi Rice's latest book Public Affair, Secretly Expecting is available now.

Visit www.everyonesreading.com for a FREE download of Heidi's book Pleasure, Pregnancy and a Proposition.

www.heidi-rice.com

heidi-rice.blogspot.com