Tuesday Talk with Mary Janice Davidson

Please make welcome an author so famous, she needed her own bigass table off to the side at RT, the one, the only - Mary Janice Davidson...

Today MJD is giving away two - yes, count em, TWO ARCs of her upcoming THE ROYAL MESS. If you want to be in to win one of these then you gotta comment on this post. Winners will be drawn shortly after midnight Thursday (US EST)

Q - Do you drink PEPSI or coke?
A -Coke, of course! Pepsi, blech. Mud water. (The irony: my PR rep, Jessica Growette of JAG Productions, would say: “Pepsi, of course! Coke, blech. Mud water.” If we accidentally grab each other’s drink, you should see the gagging.)

Q - If you were stuck on a desert island and could only take 3 books – which ones would you choose?
A -IT, by Stephen King, SMALL SACRIFICES by Ann Rule, and GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell. But really, I’d much rather grab flint, fishing equipment, and a knife.

Q - If Pinky and the Brain ever really did take over the world, what do you think they’d do first?
A -Terrify the Fundamentalists.

Q - Which one of your characters would you most like to give to Nora so that she can kill them off and have Eve investigate their murder?*
A -Oooh, that’s an interesting one. Ah…let’s see…which poor fictional soul shall I sacrifice…I know! Tina, Eric Sinclair’s major domo. She’s already been murdered once, after all, and she’s lived such a long life, it’d be a challenging case. An awful lot of suspects…
Plus, usually in my books, if I kill someone off it’s a Kenny death. You know: not permanent. For a while, Betsy was my own personal Kenny, dying in each book but somehow being saved. That pattern was broken in UNDEAD AND UNEASY, where there were two deaths-for-real. Permanent deaths. Dead for-ever. Dead-dead. Disco dead. Dodo dead.

Q - Do you have any mentors in the romance industry? Tell us about them.
A -Well, just after UNDEAD AND UNWED came out, Laurell K. Hamilton was super helpful…offered to let me be her co-author at a book signing while she was on tour in the Twin Cities, asked me to be in an anthology with her (my response: “Why? Did you lose a bet?”), gave me tips for my own book signings…she’s very generous with her time and experience. The same goes for Christine Feehan (who read UNDEAD AND UNWED when it was still an e-book, gave it an amazing quote, and talked it up at chats and such) and Charlaine Harris, who’s just adorable and cool in every possible way.

Q - What do you say when confronted with detractors of romance novels?
A -I cry into a big bag of money. After I dry my tears with fifty dollar bills, I ask them if they’re aware that one out of every two paperbacks sold in this country is a romance novel. Then I strike them repeatedly until they lose consciousness.

Q - What is your best piece of advice for aspiring authors?
A -Do NOT quit. I started writing when I was 13. UNDEAD AND UNWED didn’t come out until I was 34. And I hit the NYT list when I was 36. A rather long apprenticeship…and if I had quit at any time in my teens or twenties, I wouldn’t be doing this interview right now, among other things! As Laurell K. Hamilton once said, “There’s plenty of room in this business for everyone.”

Q - Why should we read your books over all the other authors out there?
A -Um…because I’m a monster of selfishness and I insist upon it? No? Okay, how about this: because they’re good for a laugh, they’re a guaranteed HEA, and they’re a quick read. Diana Gabeldon, I am not. (I cannot even CONCEIVE of writing a manuscript that long…)

Q - Tell us about your latest release – what’s it about? Where can we buy it?
A -The latest one is UNDEAD AND UNEASY, book 6 in the Betsy-the-vampire-queen series. In this installment, I viciously yank Betsy’s support system out from under her and sort of force her to embrace her queenship. Torturing her was great fun!
I also have a book coming out at the end of August, THE ROYAL MESS, which is the last of the Alaskan Royals books (what if Alaska was its own country, with its own whacked-out royal family, and a bastard princess turned up?).

Q - Where can we find you? (give us your website, author loop, newsletter, blog, myspace etc.)
A - www.maryjanicedavidson.net
and, my Yahoo group,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/maryjanice/
You can sign up for my newsletter at my website.
And my blog, which I must shamefully admit is updated only monthly, if that:
http://www.maryjanicedavidson.blogspot.com/

Awesome. Thanks so much MJD. So peeps - all you gotta do is post a comment and you could win one of these fab ARCs.