OBSESSIONS

At the core of all romance is finding true love. As a reader, we want the heroine to have all sorts of 'hot' adventures in the course finding her true love.

Please welcome back, Over Coffee, C. Margery Kempe. She writes hot sexy adventures and is fascinated with interchangable identities, strong heroines, adventure, spies, and...obsessions.

Intriguing list, isn't it?

Margery explains a bit about the power of obsessions in our writing:

Hello from London! Thanks so much, Sia, for inviting me back. I was here as part of the Ravenous Romance Ornery Eleven Blog Tour last month and I had such a great time I had to drop by again.

My novel Chastity Flame

Chastity is the story of a government operative who has a lot of sexy adventures on the way to discovering what might be true love -- she hasn’t quite been able to believe it, but she willing to risk a lot to find out. The novel also provided a chance for me to delve into some of my obsessions.

We have a tendency to look at “obsession” as a negative thing. We’re always hearing about dangerous people who form obsessions with celebrities. But obsessions can be quite beneficial, too. They form the base of any good ambitious project. I remember John Irving giving the advice about writing, “You have to get obsessed and stay obsessed” and it’s true. People ask me all the time, “how do you get so much writing done?” That’s the answer in a nutshell. The fact is that for most of us, no one’s going to pay us to write (except sometimes after we’ve already done it), so you have to want to do it very badly.

And you can use your obsessions to power that: a handful of my long-time obsessions make an appearance in Chastity Flame. My very first novel I wrote in high school was called Ace Spies, Incorporated and was a Mary Sue adventure starring a character who was clearly me and some thinly veiled versions of the Beatles (well, it was the second wave of Beatlemania in the 70s). A bit embarrassing to think of now, but I stuck with it for months and wrote a whole novel just to see whether I could do it (and yes, to have lots of fun dreaming constantly about the Beatles). The only people who ever read it were my friends. One of those friends claim to still have a copy; she’s just waiting for me to achieve real success so she can cash in on it. But it did firmly fix the writing bug into my life, though it took a long time for me to really develop it.

I also find it intriguing that even then I was interested in having all these interchangeable identities with my spy heroine. The story line was that she ordered a sort of adventure holiday as a spy, but then got caught up in the real thing (hey, sounds like a certain Bill Murray film, eh? I should sue!). I even wrote it under a pseudonym. So it’s not much of a jump to Chastity’s constant stream of fake names and identities.

Another obsession in the novel is London, my favorite place in the world ever since I first came here in 1980. I loved using various locations around town that I adore like the Millennium foot bridge and the Tate Modern. The opening scene allowed me to not only use the National Gallery, but to begin in front of a painting closely connected to another obsession: British comedian Peter Cook. Les Grandes Baigneuses is not only one of Cezanne’s most famous paintings (and the wallpaper image of my British mobile phone) but at the heart of a beloved sketch from Not Only But Also, the 1960s television show starting Cook and Dudley Moore. It’s not necessary to know this, of course -- it just makes me giggle. ;-)

My advice is trust your obsessions -- they provide fuel for your dreams and if you want to write, you need all the fuel you can get. Writing itself has to be an obsession if you’re going to get anywhere with it. You have to keep believing through long nights of bad writing and sometimes endless rejections. It always pays off if only in the fact that creating is a great joy. Sometimes that’s enough.

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C. Margery Kempe is a writer of erotic romance. In addition to Chastity Flame, she has a number of short stories with Ravenous Romance as well as other publishers. At present she’s working onthe sequel as well as a number of other projects, while keeping busy in her other life as a medievalist and English professor. Visit her website or her blog or follow her on Twitter.