Sandra Antonelli is a delightful woman who has a way with words and a terrific sense of humour. I was delighted when I found out she was being published as I suspected those qualities would come across in her work - AND THEY DID! Below Sandra tells us how she went from a reader to a scholar to becoming a published author. One lucky reader can also win a Kindle copy of her new book
A Basic Renovation.
How I Went From West Point
to A Basic Renovation
There was a time in my life where I
lived without a television. However, we had a radio that was always
on, I possessed a very active imagination, I mean, I was awesome
at pretending, and I had a sort of TV in my head because I went to
the movies a few times a week.
No, I did not grow up in the ‘30s or
‘40s. We didn’t have a TV because we lived in Europe and there
was too much cool stuff to travel to and see in real life, rather
than on a small, black and white screen with a fuzzy picture.
My parents and my older brother were
voracious readers. As the youngest, I thought it was my duty to keep
up the family tradition of reading. We went to the library a lot. I’d
come out with a huge stack of books. Because my brother was reading
big fat books like the Count of Monte Cristo, that meant I had
to read them as well. As a result, the books I chose were often above
my reading level. I was 7 and reading stuff like West Point Plebe,
which I chose because I had no idea what a plebe was and
dammit, I was going to find out. Mixed in with the occasional Pippi
Longstocking, Encyclopedia Brown, Beverly Cleary book, and
those tales of what it was like to be a young man in his first year
at the United States Military Academy, I had The Scarlet
Pimpernel, The Three Musketeers, and pretty much
everything by Rafael Sabatini. For me, reading meant Captain
Blood, The Sea Hawk, Scaramouche—all high
adventure stuff with a bit fat dose of…romance.
Ah, there it is, that magical word.
Romance.
I noticed romance at about the age of
nine, but it was always bound within a swashbuckling adventure. At
ten I started to pay attention to the love story. I started looking
for the love story. At 13 I was quite a geek. Somewhere around this
age we’d moved to the States and got a TV. By then, I read science
fiction (because my brother did), I played D&D (because my
brother did) and I discovered the Gothic romance (because of a big
fat book I found at the library). While perusing the shelves for
another novel in Spider Robinson’s pun-filled Callahan series, I
discovered Charlotte Bronte and Daphne Du Maurier and holy crap, I
read Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and OH MY GOD Mr. Rochester
and Maxim DeWinter!!
By 14, I realized my high school’s
library had quite the collection of Harlequin romance novels. While I
was at home I read Sci Fi and Daphne DuMaurier, but when I was at
school I could read most of a Harlequin during the hour we had for
lunch, and pick it up to finish the next day. While other kids were
in the cafeteria eating, I was in the library chowing down on
Charlotte Lamb, Ann Mather, and Violet Winspear romance. I also read
anything Star Wars related, Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, as
well as James Michener and a bunch of other big fat books. The
majority of the books I read were about characters who were supposed
to be young, but they were older than me. This set a precedent. I
found I preferred reading about more mature characters who
weren’t all wrapped up in the angsty bullshit of high
school—because I wasn’t wrapped up in the angsty bullshit of high
school. I was a well-adjusted nerdy geek with a circle of friends who
all read (and went to movies).
Not only did my friends read everything
and anything, one of them was storyteller who went on become a writer
of an award winning YA series about a thief. Megan came up with the
best stories to tell me. Sometimes she’d write something down and
pass it to me between classes. Since we both had vivid imaginations,
after a while we came up with a story together. It was about a moody,
Rochester-esque thief named Christian and the woman he robs. Of
course, the characters were older than we were. Megan’s parts were
always awesome adventure bits. My parts were always scenes where, for
some reason, the characters were about to kiss. Megan’s stayed with
adventure and I’ve stayed with characters about to kiss. She was
published in 1996. I was published this year. Her characters are
young. Mine are mature.
So when I came to writing A Basic
Renovation—and you’ve been waiting for me to get here, I know
you have—I wasn’t really aware that I had a secret when it came
to writing a romance novel with mature-aged characters. I wrote ABR
novel for a Master’s Degree. A novel was a requirement of the
degree, as was a thesis. The thesis was the tricky part. I had ¾ of
it completed before I had to examine my writing and attempt to find a
research question somewhere in the text that I could use as focus for
the thesis. What this made me do was examine my reading tastes. I had
to write a romance novel, so what romance novels did I like to read,
which ones did I enjoy the most, and what had I written previous to
ABR, and what, if anything did they have in common?
If you said, the characters
were all older than me, then you’d be right.
Yet here’s the thing. I never
consciously set out to write romance novels with forty plus romantic
leads—it just happened. In everything I wrote, from the shitty very
first big FAT novel that will forever sit in a box in my wardrobe, to
ABR, even to the current work in progress that is part of my PhD, the
creation of every story followed the precedent I set from the age of
7. But because I was looking from something when I was writing ABR, I
had a moment that made me sit up and take note that female leads in
romance fiction were limited to an age range that started as early as
17 and seemed to stop at 35. Sure, there were some that crept in
under that line, and I had read those books, but how come there
weren’t MORE? I had noticed that
In my early days as a plebian author,
before I started down the route of romance writer turned romance
scholar, I looked to other more experienced authors for counsel. I
noted this advice as most useful: Write the novel you want to
read. Since there were so few romance novels with the older
characters I wanted to see, I went and wrote one for myself. Then I
wrote another. And another. And one more—A Basic Renovation.
And just because I like to read about
characters with maturity, because I went to so many movies back when
we didn’t have a TV, because I adore early romantic comedies from
the Golden Age of Hollywood, I had to make ABR a snappy, smart-assed
rom-com with a slightly Rochester-esque Dominic and not-at all Jane
Eyre-ish Lesley. I also had to give the world my version of a really
mature-aged romance with 92 year-old GP and his eighty-something
girlfriend, Eilish Flanagan. I had to set the novel in a place of
great beauty, Los Alamos NM, which was also the location of one of
mankind’s greatest, most horrible secret—the birthplace of the
atomic bomb. Like the pretty town, every character in the story hides
something or drops some kind of bomb; Dominic’s got a dirty little
nuclear family secret, Lesley is the detonator, and GP? Well, GP
drops the F-bomb.
About the book:
When it comes down to it, rats in the oven trumps Lesley’s desire to
never set eyes on another Brennan family member. So Lesley, a pro at
property redevelopment, scrambles to Dominic Brennan’s hardware store
for supplies. Dominic knows poison — rat and otherwise — and he sees it
in Lesley. The woman ruined his brother’s life. Now that she’s back in
town, Dominic’s afraid she’ll drag up the past, the secrets, and the
pain. They clash immediately, but mix in a teenage boy, a puppy, some
white paint, and some loud music, and what starts as cold fury
transforms into a nuclear attraction. This basic renovation becomes a
major life refurbishment for them both.
You can purchase A Basic Renovation {here}
You can follow Sandra Antonelli on Twitter and Facebook. Her website is http://sandraantonelli.com
To win a Kindle copy of A Basic Renovation please comment below with your name, your email, and tell us how you would like to renovate your home. The winner will be chosen on the last day of Aussie Author Month (30/04/2013) using random.org and notified via email. The winner will also be announced on Book Bites.
This prize has been donated by Sandra Antonelli and the competition is open internationally.
Congratulations Nae! You have won a copy of A Basic Renovation!
Aussie Author Month is a terrific initiative shining a light on Australian authors whilst
raising funds for the
Indigenous Literacy Project.
You can find out more {
here} about guest posting during Aussie Author Month. Let's share the love for our fabulous Australian authors!
“The first time is always the best, kid,” she said.
