My darlings, please give a warm, warm, welcome to Kathy Ivan. She is a jewel among women. (I totally messed up on her blog date and she was incredible gracious and understanding, and had no problem with me scheduling her over a month after the originally agreed upon time. Try to find that in other authors. It’s not easy.) So I hope you’ll look into her books, and definitely show her some love today!
Thanks so much for letting me spend the day with you. I’m thrilled to be a part of your blog.
Let me be honest. I love the paranormal worlds in romance fiction. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, psychics and zombies, I love ’em. Give me a paranormal romance and I’ll devour it faster than you can blink. It’s definitely one of my favorite genres to read. Throw in some steamy romance and I’m a goner.
Never thought I’d write it though.
Romantic suspense—that’s what I write. The suspense, developing the plot. Having the heroine and the hero race against the bad guy, overcome all the obstacles thrown in their way, follow the clues, have lots of sexy times along the way, figure out the mystery, defeat the villain, profess their love and live happily ever after.
Story after story, this was my premise, my formula. The problem—something was always missing. I didn’t get the satisfaction, the extra oomph I’d get from reading all those paranormal romances with their otherworldly specialness. So I decided to go for it and combine the two genres I loved, romantic suspense and paranormal. Desperate Choices was born. My heroine is a psychic living and working in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Her ex-beau is a private investigator who comes asking for her help. His godson is missing. And the story was off and running. It unfolded with just enough of a paranormal element added into the suspense that it was believable and the readers loved it as much as I did.
Desperate Choices became my first published book (from Carina Press) and it won the 2012 OKRWA International Digital Award for long suspense.
My latest story, Second Chances, is a paranormal romance, introducing you to the world of Destiny’s Desire lodge in the Colorado Mountains. It’s the first in a series, reuniting soul mates destined, though they’ve be separated due to outside interference. They’re helped to be together with a little assistance from the Fate-Keeper who runs this special place. The first novella is available now and book two will be out in Spring 2013.
For some people normal is normal and that’s okay. I’ve learned the hard way when it comes to my writing world, paranormal is my normal.
Bio: An avid reader of all types of romance, Kathy writes both romantic suspense and paranormal romance. Kathy makes her home in the heart of North Texas doing her best to deal with the Texas heat. She’s a member of Romance Writers of American (RWA) and the Dallas Area Romance Authors (DARA).
And guess what? Ms. Ivan is also giving away one of her books! The winner can choose a digital edition of either Desperate Choices, or Second Chances. What do you have to say to that? 😀
My husband Michael and I have often worked together over the course of our more than 50-year-long marriage: from the joint film reviews we wrote in our twenties, to nine years together as booksellers, to our current copyediting business, where we charge by the word so we don’t have to worry about the cost to a client of the occasional time-consuming battle royal over a comma. (And yes, we love editing romance.) When I was writing erotica and romance, Michael’s part in the collaboration sometimes took the form of direct intervention, like his rewrite of my meandering synopsis of The Bookseller’s Daughter. It might also entail his bringing home some new book, casually remarking, as he put it on the coffee table, that I might find it interesting – most notably, an anthology called Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, which sparked the thoughts at the heart of my last romance, The Edge of Impropriety. Or it could mean taking my editor’s side when I resisted her request to change a scene in Almost a Gentleman. Bullheaded as I was, Michael changed my mind by convincing me that David and Phoebe would not have done that sex act at that point in their relationship. Continue reading