Author Sharon Hamilton and Heavenly Lover

Today, my RWA sister, author Sharon Hamilton is here and has brought us her debut novel Heavenly Lover. If you stay till the end of the interview, there will be a giveaway.

Tina: You started writing relatively late in life. Please tell your readers what inspired you to put pen to paper.

Sharon: I’d always wanted to be a writer. Actually started writing in grade school, and have kept a journal ever since I was 5.

But life has a funny way of getting in the way, plus, I didn’t like what I wrote when I was young. I felt I didn’t have enough life experience. At that time, I was reading mainly classics. Romance was never talked about in my household. In fact, I never knew it existed. I thought it was porn. (tee hee)

After raising 4 children and having a successful sales career for some 25 years, our house burned down. Overnight, everything changed for us. So did my focus. I was relocated to an 800 sf apartment while my husband had to stay up on the property to take care of our animals. I started writing December 15^th 2008 and basically never went back to work!

All I can say now is that I’m glad I never discovered the joys of being a novelist while my kids were little. I would have sucked at being a mom and wife.

Tina: When most paranormal authors write about vampires and werewolves, you write about angels. Please tell us more about this world you've created.

Sharon: The house fire was really divine providence. I started thinking how really lucky I was at having to start all over. I actually started dreaming about angels, guardian angels in particular.

Then this story came to me in a dream. The rough outline of it just poured out. I went to bed when I got tired, got up and wrote. Went to bed with the story ideas, and woke up with the solutions. I became intrigued with the idea that a guardian angel, sent to save a human from committing suicide, could fall in love with a human. What would she feel? Would she risk her immortality, or worse, risk his soul to experience this forbidden love?

Although I like other beings and am working on 2 Navy SEAL romances, as well as 2 vampire romances, angels, at least the way I write angels, are not portrayed anywhere else the way my story shows them. I’ve watched movies and read other books, and no one shows them the way I do. As a writer, you have to love your work, and I do.

I also like the idea that angels have free will. My premise is this: Heaven isn’t 100% perfect by design. The Underworld isn’t 100% evil by accident.

My angels challenge and test this theory.

Tina:  In Heavenly Lover your hero tries to commit suicide at the very beginning of the book. This seems a hard sell for romance readers. How are you making sure that your hero is still a man a woman can look up to?

Sharon: Daniel, who is based on the actor Rodrigo Santoro (I have a video of him on my blog site in a commercial with Nicole Kidman), is a normal, Brazilian-born painter with tons of talent, but, like most artists, doubts his genius. He isn’t a weak man plagued by insecurities. He’s been targeted and preyed on for several months by a talented dark angel and his female accomplice. This creates in Daniel fear, doubt and insecurities, making him a prime candidate for suicide. The dark angel stages this so just the perfect things happen that send him over the edge.

Claire gets the emergency job. She is called in because she has a 100% track record saving humans. And, her unconventional ways are thought to be a good fit against the powerful and cunning dark angel.

Away from the negative influence of the dark angel, and with the help of his guardian, the fullness and passion of Daniel’s life blooms back. And that is what the guardian falls in love with.

Tina:  What plans do you have for this series? What other books are planned?

Sharon: The next book, being edited now, and hopefully uploaded just in time for the Holidays, is Underworld Lover. It is the story of the villain in Heavenly Lover, Joshua, a sexy and powerful dark angel, who falls in love with a human woman whose soul he cannot take. As in Heavenly Lover, the dark angel must make a decision in order to save the woman he loves.

Tina: What does your writing day look like?

Sharon: I get up usually between 4-5 AM, write until almost 6. I go back to my writing desk about 9 and write until noon. In the afternoon I do editing of completed works, if I don’t have other work to do for my husband’s real estate business. I also like to write before bedtime, especially if I haven’t made my daily word count of 2000-3000. On weekends I try to use the hours for polishing and editing the work I’ve done during the week.

Fridays are my “off days” where I go do something like visit a winery, an art gallery or watch movies with my husband.

Tina: Is there anything else you want your readers to know about you?

Sharon: My angel books are not in any way religious. The Heaven/Underworld I have created and the characters that live there are my own twisted spin, like a fractured fairy tale on the Bible and some biblical stories. But good always triumphs over evil. True love always conquers all.

True Love Heals in the Gardens of the Heart.

I like to think I have a direct connection to my higher power, but I fully admit, my antenna is bent.

Thank you, Tina, for having me. This book is partially dedicated to you. After all, I can’t thank you enough for having to suffer through some of my early versions of it!

And now to the Giveaway:

I will give away 2 Kindle copies of Heavenly Lover. All you have to do is comment on this blog and what comes to mind when you think of angels and romance.

Giveaway open internationally.

Want to find out more about Sharon? Check out her blog and her website:

Sharon's Blog

Sharon's Website

A Writer's Life --- and Giveaway

I'm blogging over at Sharon Hamilton's blog today. Here's a re-posting of my guest blog:

Stop by, and if you leave a comment on Sharon's blog post, you'll be entered to win an autographed paperback of Venice Vampyr - The Beginning (Novellas 1 - 3).

When I started out writing, I had a definite preconceived idea of what life as a writer was like: long stretches of sitting behind my computer, writing eagerly, would be interspersed with tea breaks and contemplating looks out through the window, then long lunches with my girlfriends, a little shopping in between. And by four p.m. my work for the day would be done, and I’d prepare a leisurely dinner for me and my husband or make a reservation at a nearby restaurant.

But becoming a writer was nothing like I’d imagined, yet everything I wanted.

My day starts early: I rise before 7 a.m. After a quick cup of coffee, I’m already at the computer, checking emails, sales statistics and sales rankings and make sure that all my books are still showing up at the various retailers. I’m a little paranoid that way, but after the things that have happened at various online retailers over the last few months (and I’m not naming names), I find it prudent to make sure my books are still for sale.

Once some of the admin work is out of the way, and I’ve replied to reader emails and guest blog requests, I start writing. I try to get about 4 - 5 hours of pure writing time in every day. On most days this translates to about 2000 - 3000 words or 8 - 12 pages double-spaced.

But if I thought that my day would then wind down, I was sadly mistaken. The rest of the afternoon and early evening is often spent with marketing tasks. Whenever I find a new retailer to upload my books to, a whole process of formatting and marketing starts. 

Only recently, I started uploading my books to the Apple iBookstore and had to discover that even though my ePub looked perfectly formatted on my computer, when I bought a test copy for my iPad, most of the formatting was gone: no indents, no justified text, no italics, no centered headings. It was a disaster. That’s when my real work started: I had to find out why my perfect ePub was suddenly not so perfect anymore. Needless to say, I spent hours correcting things and re-uploading. I’m a perfectionist that way. Now, every time I upload a new book somewhere, I purchase a copy for the appropriate device and make sure it looks all right. Would a publisher do that for you? Not sure. But frankly, that’s why I’m self-published, so I can control every aspect of my books. 

So, while other authors out there tell me that they don’t want to be both publisher and author, but would rather just concentrate on writing, I can’t let go of either. And even though it often is double the work, and many days I work 12 hours, I also reap all the rewards: I don’t have to share my royalties with an agent or a publisher.

But what’s even more rewarding is the knowledge that I was able to do it all myself. With the help of my faithful readers, of course, because without them, my books would be languishing on the digital shelf.