Interviews

Heart to Heart Interview with Angela Knight

Heart to Heart: You've been a comic book writer and a newspaper writer. Are you able to use that past experience in some way in your writing now?

Angela Knight: Definitely. For one thing, my comic book editor, Dwight Zimmerman, taught me the nuts and bolts of character and plot construction. And in many ways, my action sequences still owe something to comics, in that they're intricate and longer than fight scenes in most romances. You'll see that in Master of the Moon, which features lots of sword fights and magical battles. My newspaper writing also had an impact on my work, because as a reporter I covered everything from town council meetings to murders. That gave me a solid knowledge of how crimes are investigated and how small towns operate. In Master of the Moon, my heroine, Diana London, is based on a real city manager I met while covering the town of Woodruff. In fact, the fictional Verdaville is a dead ringer for Woodruff, right down to the mill villages and tiny police force. The politicians of the real Woodruff aren't cynical and hapless like the ones in Verdaville, but I needed to take a little artistic license to make things tougher on my heroine.

HtoH: About that heroine….You've created an amazingly tough and sexy heroine who has a day job as a city manager and moonlights for the police department as a werewolf. When did you start thinking about this book -- and what were the challenges in writing it?

AK: Actually, I was inspired to write the book after I did a story on Woodruff's K-9 unit. I was very impressed with the dogs and their cop handlers and I started thinking: What if the dogs were werewolves? I loved that idea so much, I'm writing another book using it, featuring Diana's brother, Jim London.

HtoH: Some authors find it awkward to write sex scenes, but clearly you don't, and your readers love that. Do you have a working theory about writing erotic scenes?

AK: Love scenes must do just as much to advance the plot, the characterization, and the romance as every other scene in the book. They should not be something thrown in to titillate readers and satisfy an editor, because that makes them nothing more than porn, no matter how tasteful and well written they are.

HtoH: Clearly vampires and magical creatures intrigue you. Did you read Anne Rice as a teenager? Did you read a lot of fantasy as well? What other works inspired you?

AK: I discovered Interview with a Vampire in high school, and from then on I was hooked. I also fell in love with Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books, as well as Tonya Huff's Victoria Nelson series. I'm a big P. N. Elrod fan too; her vampire private eye series has always been one of my favorites.

HtoH: What new projects are you working on right now?

AK: I'm writing Master of Wolves, the sequel to Master of the Moon. Werewolf Jim London, investigating the murder of his best friend, steals a page from his sister's book and goes undercover as a police K-9. His partner is a beautiful sheriff's deputy with no idea that her German shepherd, Rambo, is actually a handsome hunk. Obviously, the fur will fly when she finds out the truth! (Sorry. I couldn't resist.) Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk to Heart to Heart readers!