Walking The Edge with Sue Ward Drake

What do a former army sniper and an uptight ghost tour guide have to do with each other? Well, there’s the way the army veteran gives the woman-with-better-things-to-do soldering glances. And the way the French Quarter ghost guide can’t seem to turn around without running smack into his broad chest. But they’re both beating the bushes to find her hearing-impaired younger brother and decide to do that together—for totally different reasons.

Let’s do a quick Q & A about my romantic suspense, WALKING THE EDGE, which you can find in the groceries and the drugstores and on the shelves of all major book retailers RIGHT NOW!

What did you like best about writing Mitch and Cath’s story in WALKING THE EDGE?

One of the best things about writing a story set in my old home town is that I get to vicariously relive all my favorite things—the rich aroma of coffee and chicory from the French Market coffee stand, the piquant bite of boiled shrimp, the winter fog rolling over the river levee and creeping through the dark streets.

Another thing that was fun was returning to New Orleans and photographing locations where the action takes place—and actually being tourists this time. Because lots of readers have visited New Orleans, and I wanted to be sure I evoked the sorts of memories they might have.

You can see some of the locations and images I used to inspire the scenes in this story here: https://bit.ly/33ZmTeE

What about the character’s growth issues do you identify with?

The hero, alpha to the core or my gosh how would he have survived the army for fourteen years, needs to step back from being so goal-driven. He has to realize he’s doesn’t need to prove himself to his older bothers because he’s worthy as he is, flaws and all. The heroine struggles with trust and how to protect the only family she has.

What are some of the other characters like?

There’s Cath’s ex-boyfriend who fancies himself a fashion plate and is more concerned with his appearance than his personal relationships.

Her office manager, modeled off one of the dear friends I had while living in the Quarter.

There’s Mitch’s three brothers, Kurt(who’s hearing impaired with some of the same problems I’ve got), Jack, and Hal, all of whom don’t mind telling Mitch what they think about his lack of progress—and his relationship with Cath.

Then there’s Mitch’s elderly aunt with her daytime soaps and her penchant for collecting Mardi Gras beads from all the carnival krewes. 

Last but not least, Tiger, Cath’s orange tabby kitten.

Readers have described WALKING THE EDGE as a page-turner. Action-packed, exciting—and fun!

Here’s the blurb:

Ex-army ranger Mitch Guidry never should have let his brothers talk him into joining them in the Big Easy. Particularly when they have him going head-to-head with the very last thing he needs: a feisty redhead who has more opinions than even his hard-headed brothers. Loyal and overprotective to a fault, Catherine Hurley will do everything she can to stop Mitch from finding her fugitive brother...and yet, he can't get enough of her.

Cath should be furious with the overbearing ex-ranger who shows up on her doorstep looking for her brother. Sure, Mitch Guidry is hotter than a Louisiana summer and pushes every one of her buttons, but he's also an immediate threat to her family, and family is everything to Cath. Unfortunately, the only way to save her brother is to stick to Mitch like glue. But sharing close quarters with him while they search for her missing brother together proves to be more than a little challenging...particularly when it comes to protecting her heart.

A survivor of the devastating hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Sue Ward Drake currently resides in Nevada where there is zero percent chance of a hurricane. A former Harlequin author, she loves giving her readers romantic suspense laced with dynamic characters and presenting workshops on creating a hearing impaired character. 

You can find her at www.SueWardDrake.com and follow her on BookBub, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

 

WHY I WRITE ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

Hi, I'm Sue Ward Drake. 

I’ve been a writer all my life. A column for my high school paper. Travel journals. Poetry (published when newspapers published poetry). Advertising copy. I cut my reader’s teeth on Nancy Drew mysteries and early adventure stories that were in my school library. Eventually, I moved on to Helen MacInnes who held her own with the male post-WWII, Cold-War thriller writers—and she wrote romantic suspense.

After joining RWA and beginning to read the longer contemporaries with suspense elements, I wrote and rewrote a few manuscripts, selling the third one, I think. My first published romance follows both the mystery and the thriller genre models.

For someone who doesn’t like roller coasters and who used to give herself nightmares just by looking at paint spatters on her bedroom window, I’m surprised the suspense is actually easier to write than the romance, though I’m fascinated by what makes people tick, romantic couple-type people. For the suspense, I usually have to go over and over a scene to produce the proper edge-of-the-seat tension.

The most difficult aspect is getting the romance and the suspense to coalesce into a unit so one can’t be separated from the other.

I am currently working on more romantic suspense stories. My re-released first romantic suspense, HEAR NO EVIL, has plenty of suspense and a MacGuffin. And then of course, there is romance. I find having to juggle two or three elements fascinating and the most fun way to spend my writing time.

For Molly Light, painting is her path out of a silent, solitary world. Now her talent is awarded with a once-in-a-lifetime trip to paint under the blue skies of the Mediterranean. Her journey to Greece with the brooding, enigmatic stranger who awarded her the prize, plunges her into the terrifying world of international intrigue from which there seems no escape. Nor can she escape the suspicion in this man’s eyes whenever he looks at her—or the overpowering desire his every touch arouses.

Bent on revenge for the brutal torture he’d once endured, Stefanos Metadorakis believes Molly is sharing secret military plans with a U.S. enemy. His instructions are to accompany her to Greece, watch her every movement—and mood—not fall in lust with her. But he’s inexplicably drawn to Molly, and it’s not long before their passions explode. As distrust mixes with desire, dangerous forces are closing in, their sights set on Molly. Can the lovers forget the past and learn to trust each other enough to survive? 

With a childhood spent in a house full of dark windows in every room, Sue Ward Drake developed a vivid imagination for spooky happenings. Her sometimes undependable hearing gave her a chance to imagine the worst, and she grew fond of suspenseful tales. After a lifetime traveling the globe including a year in Spain, nearly that long on a Greek island, and over thirty-four years in New Orleans, she now happily resides in Nevada with her husband of thirty-nine years within minutes of the mountains and no more than three hours from the sea.

Sue will be speaking at Emerald City Writers Conference in Bellevue, WA October 25 - 28, 2018 on disabled characters and how to frame and write emotion. Please visit her at: www.SueWardDrake.com or on Twitter at @SueWardDrake.

Explore Romantic Suspense on a Greek Island with Sue Ward Drake

It’s summer. Beach time. A time to kick back and soak up the sun for at least a little while.

And what better beach than one on an island, right?

There are all sorts of islands: some lush with tropical growth, some barren and dry, some so far north they’re mostly ice and/or covered with lava, like Iceland.

But when I think of islands, I think of those ancient ones scattered in the Mediterranean between Egypt and Europe where one can find marble ruins rising on a headland or fig trees growing next to a footpath, heavy with fruit the size of plums.

Small islands attract us because they’re so self-contained. Life there is separated physically from the outside world. This aspect makes evoking suspense in a story set there easy.

The second half of HEAR NO EVIL, my romantic suspense previously published by Harlequin and now indie-published, is set on the Greek island of Paros where I lived about eight months over a span of two years. Conjuring up distinctive sensory details wasn’t hard since everything was so different from my everyday life up to then: drawing water from a well with a plastic bucket on a rope, lighting kerosene lamps, closing windows with wooden shutters, and cooking all food immediately since there was no refrigeration.

Recent photos show the same sculpted-by-centuries whitewashed houses in Parikia. The bougainvillea trees look bigger, and I’m sure the fig trees on the path to the Valley of the Butterflies are, too. But the sunlight, quiet, and blue sky (of summer) are still the same.

The only ancient bits visible on Paros are the marble quarry the classical-age Greeks worked and the section of the main town of Parikia called the Castro. Houses and stairs climb up what looks like a beehive but had probably been a fortification at one time.

Hotels and cafes still populate the waterfront that extends along the harbor from the Castro. There aren’t many paved, or even dirt, roads, and farmhouses scattered through the hills can often only be reached by dirt footpaths, some bordered by high stone walls shoring up fields, some open and skirting small, whitewashed family chapels.

Going home to my farm house one night after an open-air movie I saw the altar candle shining through the small back window in the apse. I imagined someone inside ready to burst out the door and block the path. LOL. I rushed past, but I’ve always remembered that spurt of panic and used this in a scene in HEAR NO EVIL to scare the heroine.

You can find Sue in the following places:

 Website: www.SueWardDrake.com

 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SueWardDrakeBooks/

Twitter: @SueWardDrake https://twitter.com/SueWardDrake

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/suewarddrake/boards/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16679714.Sue_Ward_Drake    

A Swimmingly nice author from Nevada, Sue Ward Drake

By Diana McCollum

Author Sue Ward Drake lives in Reno, NV. I met her on an online loop through Rose City Romance Writers. She has a good sense of humor and is a dedicated writer. I'm delighted to introduce this talented lady to all of you. Let's give Sue a warm welcome.

Here are a few questions, that I wanted to know, and I thought you might too.

      1)  Is Romantic Suspense the only genre you write?

I have dabbled a bit in contemporary romance, or more specifically romantic comedy. I have 1-1/2 stories done on a “Three Scots in Search of True Love” trilogy which definitely uses my personal experiences visiting different areas of Scotland. The first story of this series needs some modification, though, before I can submit it to any publishers.

If you find some extra hours in the day, please let me know and I can get this done.

2) Have you traveled to a lot of different locations and do any of them play a part in your writing?

I love to travel and have visited some places in this country specifically for research. I’m always curious about what’s over the hill and studied languages in college.

I have visited Greece several times. The first time was for a month purely to see the ancient sites while on vacation from studying in Spain for a year. Three years later a friend from college and I took advantage of an airlines fare sale to go to Italy, Yugoslavia (Croatia, now), and Greece.

That summer/fall was probably the closest to a “gap” year since I had no job to come back to. Someone told me about an art school on one of the islands in the Cycladic group. I investigated that and wound up living in a little farmhouse outside of town. Many of my experiences there found their way into HEAR NO EVIL.

2    3)    What gave you the idea for "Hear No Evil"?

To be honest at the time I was looking for something unique that might snag an editor’s eye. I had already written and submitted two stories to Harlequin.  I was lucky the editors at Silhouette books (which later became part of Harlequin) agreed to buy my hearing-impaired heroine.

It was fun to use some of my own experiences adapting to a loss of hearing in that story. A story with a disabled heroine would make it easy for the villain to put something over on her, and I loved writing woman-in-jeopardy suspense, anyway. As a teen I read Helen MacInnis (Decision at Delphi, Ride a Pale Horse, etc.), who wrote these types of stories.

When I came back to the States from Greece and subsequently Germany, I was interested in doing any writing I could. I remember reading an article in the local paper about Janet Dailey who wrote for Harlequin, but I couldn’t figure out who I would contact about that. There was no Internet then. It wasn’t until a few years and a couple of failed efforts at a detective story later that I found the address for Romance Writers of America in the back of a book on writing and selling popular fiction. There was a local chapter and I joined.

4) What is your favorite genre to read?

Adventure/suspense. And if there’s humor, that’s an extra bonus. I love the movie Romancing the Stone.

5) Can you share with us a typical writing day for you? From Dawn to Dusk?

I can give you a typical Tues/Thurs/Sunday because those are the days I have better control over my mornings.

I get up and go to the health club to swim for an hour, come home and eat breakfast. I am so not a coffee and toast person. I need fuel. Then I come into my office and start work on my latest story.

My dad used to read the newspaper at breakfast and sometimes lunch. I’ve followed in his footsteps and now I’ve got a book or my iPad with downloaded books always at hand.

If I’m lucky and have no shopping to do, I come back into the office and work another 3-4 hours in the afternoon.

I find I have to really focus on the story and get it down, once I spend hours figuring out the plot. I hate the plotting/suspense part because it takes so many days. I’m always looking for ways to focus and sharpen my ideas. I try to write a logline and a synopsis to jell the story before I start, or at least after the first 3 chapters.

The drafting process is a lot like that of a potter throwing clay on a wheel. Then the real writing (revising) begins.

If I’m lucky, the other days of the week follow this scenario with some other type of exercise. I’m a happy camper if I get my blood moving early.

6) What are you working on now?

Thanks for asking, Diana. I am on the second draft of what I thought was going to be a novella, but the story may work out to be about 55K words. It’s a companion story to Stefanos and Molly’s story (HEAR NO EVIL) in which the child Nikos is all grown up. Though I did not make up the Greek settings in HEAR NO EVIL, Nikos goes back to his home island and I’m doing a bit of imaginaneering to adapt the setting to the needs of the story.

A short story with Stefanos and Molly set in the years following HEAR NO EVIL is on the backburner (thinking/wondering stage).

But I like to enter contests. If I get a story in front of one of finalists judges, this may change the what-to-write-when schedule. Nothing is poured in concrete.

        Thanks for having me, Diana. I like nothing better than discussing writing. Feel free to come chat with me at @SueWardDrake on Twitter or SueWardDrake Books on Facebook. You can find out about my new releases onSueWardDrake.com.

For Molly Light, painting is her path out of a silent, solitary world. Awarded a once-in-a-lifetime trip to paint under the blue Grecian skies, she must accompany the handsome, enigmatic stranger who granted the prize. Sensual sparks fly, but when their journey plunges her into a chilling conspiracy, she suspects he’s not the man he pretends to be.

Bent on revenge for the brutal torture he’d once endured, guilt-ridden loner Stefanos Metadorakis believes Molly is sharing top-secret military plans with the enemy. His instructions are to escort her, watch her every move and mood—not fall in lust with her. But he’s inexplicably drawn to this beautiful, damaged woman and before long their passions explode. 

As distrust mixes with desire, dangerous enemy forces are closing in, their sights set on Molly. With their lives in the balance, can the lovers trust each other enough to foil a deadly espionage plot?

Thanks for the interview, Sue. I really enjoyed interviewing you. Best of luck on sales! "Hear No Evil" is available at Amazon.

HOW TO KEEP THE FAITH by Sue Ward Drake

Sue Ward Drake drew on her experiences as a hearing-impaired woman to write her hearing-impaired heroine in her soon-to-be-released romantic suspense novel, HEAR NO EVIL.  ~Sarah and Judith~

SUE WARD DRAKE
(Photo by Mari Corn)

Now I know it’s way past New Year’s Resolution time, but that’s essentially what this little piece is about. How to keep the faith, when it’s easier to give up.

Because you’ve been trying to lose weight, or graduate from college, or get fit, or write a novel for what seems like forever. Should you forget about achieving the impossible or plug on?

When I published my first book, a romantic suspense, HEAR NO EVIL, with Silhouette Intimate Moments, I could not contain my excitement. Then I discovered I had to turn in more ideas. They weren’t happy with just the one! Imagine.

I slaved away on several proposals, each one I was sure worse than the one before. Instead of sending them into my editor, I changed my genre and flamed out. There were extenuating circumstances, or so I tell myself. I recently got back my rights and will self-publish HEAR NO EVIL again within the next few months.

I am currently on my second iteration as professional writer, but I can never have enough inspiration. 

Tips and tricks on how to stay motivated—at whatever:

• --Practice affirmations. Instead of plugging into music at the gym—an impossibility since I am nearly deaf—I recite affirmations. I am creating/living the life I want. Because I am a talented writer, I easily make my own opportunities. I easily wear a size 10, etc.
• --Visualize success. An oldie but goldie. Make a vision board if you have to, or just write down what you want. Henriette Anne Klauser wrote a book on how she fulfilled her dreams this way.
• --Clip articles from magazines and newspapers and review the folder along with one for story ideas if you’re a writer. I have one from the New York Times wedding section about a bride who when she wanted something would go after it with a “sort of mythological force.” 

Newspaper syndicated columnist Jeff Herring wrote about “destination thinking.” He talks about not making excuses, about reminding yourself daily why you want this particular destination, about breaking down the journey into small enough steps so you begin to see them as manageable.

 Remember there’s an unlimited supply of success. I particularly like this quote of Nora Roberts, who got her start as a Silhouette author.

“If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never get it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”

I hope you will continue with whatever you resolved that night at the turn of the year with a champagne glass in your hand. You can do it. ~ Sue Ward Drake

Please watch my TWITTER account for the date of my re-release of HEAR NO EVIL, a story with a hearing-impaired heroine. 

Bio

Sue Ward Drake has lived in many places: New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, Greece, Baltimore, Nevada, and Germany. All are fodder for her stories. Her hobbies include hiking, travel, cooking low density meals and, of course, reading. She is a member of Romance Writers of America, Thriller Writers International, and Mystery Writers of America.