JO ROBERTSON: Becoming Banana Bread

Mocha Banana Bread--see Recipe Page

My guest is award winning author of romantic thrillers, Jo Robertson  She’s also a member of one my favorite groups, The Romance Bandits. 

Every morning I eat a banana. 

Not because I really like bananas at all; I'd much prefer a juicy peach or ripe pear, grapes or strawberries.  But I eat the banana instead. 

Actually, it's not so much a whole banana as what I call a "banana stub." Every morning my husband eats a banana, but since he doesn't want a whole one, he leaves me the stub. Mind you, if I don't eat that stub, it'll be there the next day anyway, and there'll be two banana stubs to eat or throw away. I can't stand waste, so I eat the stub.

My husband and I have completely different ways of buying bananas. I prefer them yellow with no bruised spots, but even if they turn a bit brown, they're still very edible to me. My husband buys them green and calculates exactly how many he needs to buy at a time to eat his daily banana portion and leave me the stub.

I figure a banana should never be thrown away. Why?

You guessed it.

Banana Bread.

In fact, when I frequent my local 7-11 store, I'm often delighted to see there are only bruised and slightly brown bananas. I see a banana bread loaf or banana pudding (another favorite of mine) looming in my future.

Sometimes when you start out wanting one thing, you just end up with something else. And often, in my experience, that something else is quite unexpectedly delicious and delightful.

I don't know about other writers, but my writing "well" is a lot like that. What I had envisioned as a simple piece of fruit ends up as a dessert, with all its varied ingredients – walnuts, sugar, vanilla, eggs – and all its varied layers – vanilla wafers, pudding, sliced bananas and whipped cream.

At least that's what I hope happens.  My ideas start small.  I don't think there's a large idea in my head (okay, maybe a lot of tiny marbles rolling around like Buckyballs, those tiny magnetic balls that were all the rage at Christmas).  Check it out here http://www.getbuckyballs.com.  But, like those magnetic beads, I hope I can twist and shape and create something quite beautiful out of those small kernels of imagination.

My characters also are like that. I'll see a feisty, ambitious, perhaps obsessively-driven woman. Lots of energy (of course, because you can't have the other traits if you're chronically tired) to deal with what drives her. I probably don't even know what drives her, but I suspect it borders on the edge of mania.

She can't rest, can't relax, can't love – until she solves the dilemma. At this point I'm not sure what the dilemma is, but I know the hero will be her Selexa. The one who helps her ground herself, center her soul so that she can accomplish her mission (should she choose to accept it and – of course! she will – this is a romance story at  heart).

I know the hero's a pretty solid, stand-up guy although he carries a bit of baggage from his past; however, he doesn't let that past define his future. He's an optimist and he sees in my slightly pessimistic heroine the woman who will complement him, although at the get-go he's sure she's completely insane.  Or trouble with a capital T.

What begins as something pea-sized in my head can flourish in my imagination into something quite large. And it always astounds me!

It's the same with my cooking. I often begin with onion, pepper, and garlic in olive oil. But what I add next is a mystery to me – a little meat, some beans, veggies, spices (who knows which ones) until the "smell" is just right. Yeah, I cook by odor. Then I taste.

I think I write a lot like that.

Readers, have ever embarked on what you thought was a small sojourn that ended up being a wild, wacky journey?  Started one project that ended up being something else?  Walked down one road to find yourself somewhere entirely different from what you'd imagined?

What about you, writers?  Do you find that a tiny kernel of an idea is the starting point for your story?  Or do your stories come in full-blown Technicolor?

I'm offering a free download of any one of my trilogy – "TheWatcher," The Avenger," OR "The Traitor" – to one lucky, random commenter!


THE AVENGER– Jo  Robertson
A clandestine government organization called Invictus "recruits" outstanding athletes for secret projects. But their top agent Jackson Holt has special, almost preternatural, qualities not even the Organization can explain.

Olivia Gant, professor of Ancient Studies at a private college in California, was once Jack's childhood sweetheart. But when he deserted her, he left her alone to combat her stepfather's drunken attentions and her mother's careless neglect.

Nearly twenty years later, their paths cross in a mission to fight a bizarre religious serial killer whose methods include crucifixion and burial alive. Olivia and Jack battle for happiness against years of secrecy and distance as they use Olivia's expertise in Latin and Jack's special gifts to track a brutal killer.

Can Olivia forgive Jack for his long-ago betrayal?
Can Jack allow Olivia to witness the terrible Change that makes him such an effective killing machine? Excerpt (you can read the first couple of chapters on Amazon)


MY REVIEW


BUY: AMAZON, BARNES and NOBLE, SMASHWORDS

Jo Robertson, a former high school English teacher, lives in northern California, near the beautiful Sierra Nevada foothills. She enjoys reading, scrapbooking, and discussing the latest in books, movies, and television shows. Any "spare" time she has is spent enjoying her seven children and grandchildren.

When her Advanced Placement English students challenged her to quit talking about writing and "just do it," she wrote her first completed manuscript, "The Watcher," which won Romance Writers of American's Golden Heart Award for romantic suspense in 2006. The second book in the loosely-connected trilogy is "The Avenger," which won the 2007 Daphne du Maurier Overall Award for Excellence. "The Traitor is the third book in the series."

Jo's books are romantic thrillers, which means they straddle the line between mainstream thriller-suspense and romance. She feels that a strong relationship in a book makes the danger more intense. Readers have commented that they especially enjoy her complex, three-dimensional villains. 

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WILD TURKEYS

My guest is award winning thriller-suspense-romance writer, Jo Robertson  She’s also a member of one my favorite groups, The Romance Bandits. 


Jo’s debut novel, THE WATCHER, won Romance Writers of America's 2006 Golden Heart Award for romantic suspense.

Jo is here to talk about wild turkeys…

Did your mind go straight to Wild Turkey Bourbon at the title of today's blog? Well, I'm not talking about that kind of wild turkey today. I'm talking about the feathered friend kind.

Sort of.

On the way to the dentist recently I nearly hit two wild turkeys with my car as they dashed across the street. The environmentalists in our town have done a good job of preserving creek and wooded areas, so I wasn't surprised to see the birds skitter across the four-lane road.

But seeing them me think about how writers are a bit like wild turkeys – they often stand out in crowds, mainly because their minds always seem to be somewhere else.

Writers think a lot. They think about thinking. It's called metacognition, and a writer metacognates all the time. If she did it in grade school, educators called her "easily distracted." In high school or college, she was "flighty," and in the work place, "unfocused."

In reality, writers are anything but distracted, flighty or unfocused. We wouldn't survive long in this industry if we were.

But we are free thinkers, letting our minds – conscious and subconscious alike – roam freely, snagging here and there on an idea, a phrase, a character, a scene, moving on , trolling deep waters or shallow pools. Hence, we may seem out of step with the people around us.

Our ideas and inspiration come from everywhere, skittering through our creative minds like those wild turkeys.

Photo Credit: Henry Zeman

Not only are we wild turkeys in our disparate ideas and stories, but we're like them in the venues we choose to publish through. We're all struggling to find a place in the publishing industry.

The truth is that the way we look at books, purchase them, and collect them is in the throes of significant change, and publishers of all kinds – the NY Big Six, small presses, e-publishers and digital first – are all scrambling to see what's going to happen to the book publishing industry.

It's not so much that digital publishing has increased significantly.  Electronic books still account for only about 15-20-% of the market, which leaves a good 80% to the print business. It's more how quickly digital publishing has increased – exponentially. And it's got everyone wondering what the future holds.

The one point all seem to agree on is we need writers! Writers of all kinds. Writers who think inside and outside the box, those who march in step with their fellow writers and those who march out of step to some weird meter in their heads.                                           

My journey into publishing began with the purchase of my Kindle in December. The moment I held that baby in my hands, I felt like I'd birthed another child. And I knew I'd never give it up. I also knew I'd never purchase another print book again unless it was a gift for someone without an e-reader or was unavailable electronically.

When I realized that the New York publishers weren't excited about my Golden Heart winning manuscript or my Daphne-winning story – too much romance, too little romance, not enough suspense, too much suspense, all of which I translated into "Where can we place your book on the shelf in the brick and mortar bookstore?" – I realized I needed to find a much bigger store.

A virtual bookstore. Digital publishing provides shelf upon shelf for the reader to pick among, and tons of tags, descriptors, and categories for them.

Deciding to take my career into my own hands, to move at my own pace, was a seminal moment for me. I like the control I have, choosing my own genres, setting my own pace.

Once I made the leap to indie publishing, I felt like one of those wild turkeys tripping across the road – free, but a wee bit scared I might get mowed down by a speeding car!

Now that The Watcher is in print and available soon electronically, I feel my wild turkey has come home to roost.

How about you, readers? What large or small decision have you made that felt wonderfully liberating or frighteningly scary? Share the deets.

Inquiring minds want to know!

The Watcher--Available now.

THE WATCHER Forensic psychiatrist Kate Myers believes the killer of two teenage girls in Bigler County, California, is the same man who savagely murdered her twin sister over fifteen years ago. Working on sheer tenacity, she sets out to prove it. Deputy Sheriff Ben Slater hides his personal pain behind the job, but Kate's arrival knocks his world on its axis. He wants to believe her wild theory, but the idea of a serial killer with this pathology is bizarre. Together they work to find a killer whose roots began in a small town in Bigler County, but whose violence spread across the nation. A Janus-like killer, more monster than man, fixates on Kate and wants nothing more than to kill her again. Excerpt

BUY: Available in print on Amazon  Available as e-book, August 19th. 

Like many writers, I penned my first story at a young age.  However, a family and a teaching career put my writing dreams on hold until my Advanced Placement seniors conned me into writing my first complete manuscript.  That story, which subsequently won RWA's Golden Heart Award in 2006, was THE WATCHER.

From the moment I put my fingers to the keyboard, the
barrier between my brain and the paper lifted, the story flew from my mind, and I fell in love with everything about the process of writing.

Raised as an Army brat, I lived in Germany as a child, Northern Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Idaho, and Utah before finally settling in Northern California.  Whenever I visit my sister in Virginia or my brothers in North Carolina and Florida, upon returning home I remember again why I love Northern California, home of the ancient redwoods, the fecund forests and the rugged Pacific Coastline.

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