An Interview with Karen Docter

The Reading Cafe would like to welcome Karen Docter as our guest today. To introduce you to Karen, below is a short bio about her from her site:

I write contemporary and romantic suspense novels. I’m working on the first of the Thorne’s Thorns series about six foster brothers, the women they love, and the dangers that threaten them.

I’m a member of Romance Writers of America®, Colorado Romance Writers, Kiss of Death Romance Writers, and From the Heart Romance Writers. I love writing, reading, music, camping, fishing, and spending time with my family.

Let’s meet Karen and begin our interview.

TRC: Karen, we at the Reading Café would like to thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. 

Karen: Thanks so much for having me. This will be fun!

TRC: Would you please tell us about yourself.

Karen: I’ve been happily married to my best friend for 32 years. We were a blind date that never ended. 🙂  I’ll be forever grateful to my bank supervisor for tricking me into meeting him. He believes in me and is my strongest supporter. I have three children and seven grandchildren who bring much love and pleasure into our lives. I love camping, fishing, cooking (share my recipes on Fridays on my blog), gardening and reading. I collect dragons and books.

TRC: When and how did you first become interested in writing? 

Karen: I’ve always loved writing. I was one of those nasty girls who always set the grading curve in school. If the assignment said to write a five page essay, I usually doubled that…a slight challenge now. I tend to be a long writer. I couldn’t write a short story now if you paid me…well, maybe if you paid me! J It would just take me a while to cull it down to the essentials after I finished it.

Writing is me at the core. I wrote diaries and journals when I was young. Poetry helped me to express my angst of the teen years ~ all those lonely, broken hearts played heavily in my poems. I graduated college with a Liberal Arts degree and a B.A. in Technical Journalism. At the time I graduated, reporters made slightly less than the local paper boy so I never used my training. I put myself through college using my business skills and it didn’t make sense to walk away from the career I’d already built.

Writing languished when I got married and started having children, but I rediscovered my love when my middle daughter was two years old and I made the decision to stay home with my kids. It didn’t take me long to start missing my challenging career. We were living in a mountain community, had no real neighbors, I was babysitting a passel of munchkins under the age of five, and slowly going nuts for adult company. So, I decided to make up a few of my own…and the rest, they say, is history.

TRC: What was your first book ever published?

Karen: Satin Pleasures is my first contemporary romance novel. It released on Valentine’s Day 2012.

TRC: It has been several years since your last published novel, when you published Satin Pleasures.  Was there a specific reason why you did not write a new book for this period of time?

Karen: Satin Pleasures is my first published novel (February 2012). You can find the Kindle and paperback versions on Amazon.

But I can guess why there’s some confusion about my career. I’ve been writing for a long time and been all over the internet for years. I joined Romance Writers of America® in 1991 and have been steadily writing novels since then. I followed the traditional publishing route for most of my career. I generated interest in New York and Canada. A number of my stories made the finals or won writing contests. I even had an agent for almost two years.

However, I could never quite get the right manuscript on the right desk at the right time. I had one manuscript at a major publishing house in revisions for two years through four senior editors but one-by-one they moved on. The line eventually shut down. My agent retired. Health issues hit about the same time and my writing stagnated until we figured out what was wrong. I broke through the other side about a year and a half ago and hit the ground running. Deciding life was too short, I chose to go in a different direction and publish my own work. Best decision I’ve made in my career.

Now, I can’t wait to get to my laptop to write whenever possible. I plan to revise all of my “finished” stories to full-out suspense novels. There are two more romantic comedies pushing against my brain, too.

TRC: What do you find most challenging about writing?

Karen: Finding time to write! I’m both right and left brained, meaning I can write my heart out and still take care of business. However, I’m also a Type-A personality so I’m constantly trying to find a balance between business and pleasure, i.e. writing. I can easily spend an entire day tackling all of the social media, publicity, blogs, 5 emails, 8 loops, Twitter, Facebook…well, you get the picture! I try to set a timer (yes, I actually have an egg timer on my desk) so I can get through everything. On the other hand, being a Type-A also means I have an editor with 12-inch talons perched on my shoulder when I write. I can’t shake the stubborn thing off, which means I don’t write nearly as fast as I did when I started out, before I actually learned all of the rules. 🙂

TRC:  You write contemporary and romantic suspense novels.  Is there any book or author whom you read that helped move you into that direction. 

Karen: I love so many authors and read across almost all of the genres so I hesitated to mention one book or author as “the starting point” for me. However, tracing back to my childhood and voracious reading appetite, I actually can pinpoint the beginning of my love of both contemporary romance and suspense.

I fell in love with Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys detective stories very early. I couldn’t get enough of them. I had the complete sets of all three series. I eventually moved on to Perry Mason, Ellery Queen, and Mickey Spillane from my mom’s Reader’s Digest book collections.  I loved to unwind a complicated mystery, delighted in the twists and turns.

My love for romance didn’t begin in contemporaries. I was twelve when I discovered Barbara Cartland. I was young but they were “pure” so the librarian introduced them to me when I ran through everything in the kid’s section. Discovering the fun of a romantic story – grown up fairy tales – opened up a whole new world for me. It didn’t take me long to branch out. I still love reading across the genres, but my writing “home” is contemporary, whether it be straight romance or romantic suspense.

TRC:  How did you come up with the idea for Satin Pleasures?  Can you please tell us the premise of this story.

Karen: I draw ideas from my surroundings, articles I read, television programs, news…well, pretty much everything I see, hear, or do is fodder for stories.  I’m a “what if?” kind of writer.  Satin Pleasures was “born” in a traffic jam in the middle of the San Mateo Bridge that spans San Francisco Bay.

The situation I used to introduce Dan and Tess actually happened to me. I was a bit stressed at the time. Not only am I scared of heights and my family had just moved to the Bay area two months after the last major earthquake that toppled bridges, I was supposed to be on the other side of the bay as one of the meeting staff.  Watching the people around me spill from their cars to chat and play was also a unique experience for me.  I thought things like that only happened in movies…or books! J I was truly inspired when I finally drove off the bridge and went to my meeting.  I can’t tell you how tempted I was to turn right around and go home to write Dan’s and Tess’s story. And, no, that is not my Type-A personality showing!

I won’t go as far as say I was as stressed as the “soon-to-be-born” Type-A heroine, Tess Emory, but I could relate to her angst in not getting to the other side of the bridge.  She’s missing a crucial meeting she hopes will garner the promotion she needs to have the deposit for her father’s upcoming spinal surgery. Her guilt over what happened to him drives her, often beyond what is good for her health. It seemed only natural Dan McDonald would be the exact opposite of Tess although, in many ways, they are as alike as two peas in a pod. When he nearly worked himself into a grave a year earlier, he walked away from his high-powered financial consultant position to fish his way cross-country with his dog recuperating and teaching himself to “live.” He’s on the bridge on his way to help his aunt and mother launch their lingerie store franchise on the west coast…in the mall Tess manages. The last thing he wants is to be attracted to a workaholic like he used to be, especially since he has no intention of staying, but he ends up trying to teach Tess how to relax. Both of them learn a lot about balancing work and life and love.

TRC:  How much background research was required to write your novel?

Karen: I didn’t have to do much research for this book. I love fishing and camping. At one time in my past life, I worked in the main office of a huge indoor mall similar to the one Tess manages. I did quite a bit of research on breeding canaries with the idea of having the heroine’s birds nesting. The book timeframe precluded nesting, but I did keep the canoodling canaries. Part of the fun of this book is how Tess uses the birds to throw a wall between Dan and her attraction.

TRC:  Thorn’s Thorn is your new series.  Please tell us the premise of that series, and how many books you are planning for this series.

Karen: Police officer Ross Thorne, and his wife, Evelyn, only had one natural born son. But they also fostered five troubled boys into adulthood.  All of the boys were enough trouble at one time or another, they quickly became known as Thorne’s Thorns. The six brothers are now grown.  Each is strong, masculine, and making his own mark on the world.  I’m throwing a little, okay, a lot of danger their way and introducing each to the one woman they are destined to love and protect.  Patrick Thorne, the Thorne’s natural born son, launches the series in Killing Secrets.

The series titles are Killing Secrets (September 2012), Killing Proof (December 2012), Killing Ice, Killing Minds, Killing Games and Killing Promise.

TRC:  Killing Secrets is the first book, in the Thorn’s Thorn series.  Can you please give us a description of this first book.

Karen:  Rachel James finally escapes her brutally controlling, con man ex-husband when she provides the FBI the proof they need to prosecute him. Unable to find the money, he’s incarcerated as a flight risk until the trial. But somehow, he arranges for the prosecutor’s proof to disappear before the trial date and he’s released. Frightened, knowing he’s determined to reclaim Rachel and her little girl – his key to the James fortune – Rachel flees to Denver with the child who hasn’t uttered a word since her daddy went to jail hoping to keep the child out of his hands.

Contractor Patrick Thorne wants nothing to do with another of his mother’s charity cases. He failed his own wife so abysmally she took her own life as well as his unborn son’s. As the second anniversary of her death approaches, it’s time to concentrate on the bid he’s won and the saboteur trying to destroy his construction firm.

There is no room for trust in either of their hearts. But trust is all that will untangle the secrets that dominate their lives, free a little girl of her silent prison, and save them all from a serial killer who stands too close.

TRC:  What authors or books have most influenced your life or writing?

Karen:  A number of authors have inspired me because I loved their books and strove to write as well. Every novel resting on my Keeper shelf – it’s huge – has inspired me for one reason or another. However, the writers I’ve been fortunate enough to call my friends and critique partners over the years are my biggest inspiration: Tanya Moyer, and my We Are Scripsi partners Cynthia Woolf, Jennifer Zane, CJ Snyder, Kally Jo Surbeck, and Michele Callahan. These talented writers have affected my work as teachers, as critics, as friends likely to kick me in the backside as well as celebrate my successes. I will always be grateful for their support and inspiration.  It’s thanks to them that I’m where I am today.

TRC:  Do you have any desire to write in another genre, besides contemporary and romantic suspense?

Karen:  I’d love to write SciFi or something paranormal because I love reading them. At the back of my head, I have a Star Trek story and one or two paranormal stories bubbling. However, I barely have time to write what’s in my head now so I can’t allow myself to look beyond what I’m currently writing. A writer should never say never though, so you never know!

TRC:  Do you have a specific place you like to write? 

Karen: Outside. On the deck or the patio in Spring and Fall when it’s cooler. If it’s over 70 degrees forgetaboutit! Heat and I don’t get along. 🙂 I love writing on camping trips in our nearby Rocky Mountains, listening to the breeze whisper through the pine trees. I’m a brainstorming fool with a fishing pole in my hand. When I can’t have these perfect conditions, I have a wonderful writing “nest” couch in the media room. With my writing music surrounding me in the room, I can usually hit my zone.

 LIGHTNING ROUND:

FAVORITE FOOD: Seafood

FAVORITE DESSERT: Crème Brulee

FAVORITE AUTHOR: Too many genres, too many wonderful authors!

FAVORITE BOOK: Also too many to pick just one.

FAVORITE CHARACTER (NOT YOUR OWN): Sherilyn Kenyon’s Acheron

WHAT BOOK ARE YOU CURRENTLY READING: “Good Day In Hell” by J.D. Rhoades

LAST MOVIE YOU SAW: Bourne Supremacy (Bourne marathon last night)

Thank you, Karen for answering our questions. The Reading Café wishes you the best of luck with your books.  Keep us informed about your upcoming releases. We look forward to working with you again.

Karen: Thanks for having me! It was fun chatting with you!

If you are interested in learning more about Karen, you can find her at the following links:
Website: http://www.karendocter.com/
Facebook:
Twitter:
Goodreads:

Karen has graciously offered to give 2 members of The Reading Café a chance to each win an e-copy of her “Satin Pleasures’ novel. 

1.  You must be a member at The Reading Cafe. If you are not a member, please register using the Log-In at the top of the page, or by using one of our social log-ins.

2.  If you are using a social log-in e.g. Twitter, please leave your email address along with your comment.

3.  Please post a comment and say hello to Karen.

4.  Giveaway open Internationally

5.  Contests runs from August 25th – 27th.