My guest today is Annette Gisby. With many books to her name, this erotic romance writer has plenty to offer readers. From M/M romance to M/F Mystery Suspense, there’s an e-book just waiting to be read.
Welcome, Annette, and thanks for being my guest today. Now, I’ve whetted everyone’s appetite, let’s get down to the questions.
Q. Where did you get the idea for The Prince’s Guard?
Most of my ideas come to me in the form of characters who pop into my head one day and they don’t leave me alone until I’ve written something about them. Recently I was diagnosed with Migraine Associated Vertigo. As well as the terrible dizziness, headaches and balance problems, it also plays havoc with your concentration and I knew I wouldn’t have the concentration for a novel at the moment, so I decided to concentrate on shorter stories, as is the case with The Prince’s Guard. It’s an erotic M/M BDSM story set in a fantasy universe.
Q. Tell us a bit about the heroes and in The Prince’s Guard.
Dashan is the eldest son and is the crown prince. There are various enemies of their small country who would love nothing better than to abduct him or worse, so he is assigned a bodyguard called Ryland. Dashan doesn’t want a bodyguard and is always trying to elude him, sneaking out of the castle disguised as a peasant for example, but somehow Ryland always finds him. What Dashan doesn’t know, but the king does, is that as well being a guard, Ryland is also a wizard and can easily track the prince down, no matter where he goes.
This leads to a sexy confrontation between them both when Dashan tries to sneak to a brothel that caters for men who like men and Ryland offers the prince what he wants: the chance to submit his will to someone else. I wanted to turn expectations on their head, you might expect the prince to be the dominant one, with all his life giving orders to people, but he wants to give up control.
Q. What are you working on right now, and what can we expect from you next?
I’m currently in edits for my romantic suspense novel, Drowning Rapunzel, which is being re-released by Pink Petal Books. It’s been revised and expanded since it was first published, so there are some new bits in it too. I’m also editing and doing the layout for my short story and novella collection, Shadows of the Rose to be uploaded as an ebook.
After that I have a couple of more M/M romances. One I think will be a short story, but the other one may be a novella, it keeps expanding. It probably won’t be a novel-length, but we’ll see.
Q. How do we find out about you and your books?
My website at http://www.annettegisby.n3.net
And my goodreads page
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/252221.Annette_Gisby
Q. How may readers contact you?
They can email me at Annette.Gisby ( at ) which.net
Q. Do you prefer stand-alone books or series (As a reader or a writer) ?
I read a bit of both and don’t really have a preference, it just depends what I’m in the mood for at the time. Fantasy is one of my favourite genres, and most of them come as a set of three or more. Some books work well as a series, for example crime novels with the same detective, but each is a different story in its own right.
Q. Do you ever experience writer’s block?
Plenty of times! When it happens, I go and do something else: go for a walk, do a bit of housework and have a think of where the trouble might be. I usually get my best ideas just before I go to sleep.
Q. Do you write an outline before every book you write?
I normally have a vague outline in my head and start writing and see what happens. Writing comes more naturally to me without a plan. I’d written a plan for my romantic suspense novel and throughout I had one character in my head as the ‘baddie’ and they were also down in my plan, but when I got to the denouement, it wasn’t him! It was such a surprise, but it worked really well for that book so I kept it in.
Q. What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
It probably won’t be a surprise that I love reading! Our house is full of books and there aren’t enough room on the bookshelves anymore. We have bookcases in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, study and lately we’ve been eyeing up the hallway to see if any would fit there.
I play computer games like Dragon Quest and The Sims, if I get my writing goal done that day, then I can play a game in the evening or read a book for pleasure. I’m not very good with shoot ’em up type games, my reflexes are very bad so I don’t tend to go for those. Games aimed at about seven year olds I can usually manage.
We moved house about three years ago which doubled our mortgage, so we don’t travel as much as we’d like, but before that we’d been all around the world to places like New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Singapore and lots of places in Europe. I love to travel and visit new places, even though I get very sick on most forms of transport, I was even travel sick on a bicycle.
Q. Are there any words of encouragement for unpublished writers?
Just two basic things: keep reading and keep writing. Turn off the self-editor in your head and write what you want to write. Don’t worry if it’s going to be marketable or suitable for that publisher or this one. Just get the story written first and then go back to polish it. If I kept editing as I went along, I’d never get any story finished. If you can find a critique group or partner, even better and you can encourage each other. You won’t find a publisher if you haven’t got anything written to submit to them.
Develop a tough skin for the inevitable rejections and bad reviews. Not everyone is going to love what you’ve written, so the best thing is to write to please yourself, because you are not going to please everybody else anyway. I couldn’t write a book that I wouldn’t want to read, even though it might be what the market is after at the moment (shape shifters, vampires etc.) They’re just not my thing so I wouldn’t write one.
Excerpt from The Prince’s Guard
One Comment
Thank you for having me, Jan. It was an interesting interview 🙂