SPOTLIGHT ON… Aussie Rural Novelist: Karly Lane

Welcome to SPOTLIGHT ON… Great Aussie Rural Novelists week, KARLY LANE:

1.         Describe yourself in one word:
Impatient

2.         The best thing about being a wordsmith:
You get to have conversations where you NEVER forget to say something really clever AFTER the argument! And you can make everything work out okay in the end.

3.         You wish you wrote:
Something deep and meaningful that made me sound extremely intelligent!

4.         If you weren’t writing, what would you be doing?
Driving my children and husband insane with my insatiable need to clean and bake and wait on their every need…….

5.         Favourite fictional character:
Jim Craig (The Man from Snowy River)

6.         If you were a character in a novel, you’d be:
Jessica Harrison, she gets Jim Craig in the end J

7.         What book has changed your opinion/stance on something important to you, and why?
My upcoming December release is a story that has a back story that is based on a local event that happened in my district around WW1. Through researching for this book, I developed such a huge love for my own family history and my town’s pioneer heritage.

8.         The one author you would you spend your last $20 on?
I couldn’t spend my last $20 on an author… my guilt factor wouldn’t allow me. I’d have to spend it on something practical like wine…oops I mean like food for my children!

9.         Biggest accomplishment to date:
I think it would be taking the plunge to self-publish. I’m lucky enough to be traditionally published with a great publishing house, but there’s definitely something to be said for having the freedom to have complete control over your books through self-publishing. It also gives me the freedom to publish in other genres which is difficult to do when you publish traditionally as they like to keep you in the one genre.

10.       What’s next for you?
More books! Two more rural fiction titles to come out over the next two years and lots more romantic suspense to come out under my other writing name of Karlene Blakemore-Mowle.

11. What attracted you to writing about rural Australia?
When they tell you to write what you know—for me, this was it.

12. Do you have a background in rural Australia?
For most of my life I’ve grown up in small rural towns all over NSW and QLD. I now live back in my home town on the Mid North Coast and am lucky enough to be able to draw on it and surrounding towns to set my books in.

13. What’s one thing you’d like readers to know about the rural romance genre?
That it’s as diverse as the landscape it’s set in. There are some things that are universal and it doesn’t matter where you live, you’ll be able to relate to them. I love that this genre has such a huge variety of authors writing in it. There’s romance and suspense in some; psychological thrillers in others, good old fashioned rural towns and family sagas feature in many. In short, there’s something to appeal to everyone in rural fiction.

BURNT by Karly Lane
Sebastian (Seb) Taylor and Rebecca Whiteman were high school sweethearts dreaming of a future together, when one terrible night forever changed their destiny. Eighteen years after the tragedy Rebecca has brought her children back to the town she left behind to start a new life. Seb, an elite SAS soldier in the Australian Army, has returned home injured, angry and grieving to face a town that hasn’t forgotten and a father who has never understood him. Rebecca has enough problems of her own without adding Seb Taylor to the mix; a failed marriage, two children to support and an annoying heavy breather who refuses to stop calling. The last thing she needed was her first love to make a sudden reappearance in her life… Karly’s latest novel, Burnt, is available online now.

Find Karly online at:
Website: http://karlylane.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/karlylane

JOIN ME TOMORROW AS WE CHAT WITH RACHAEL JOHNS, AUTHOR OF THE ARRA FAVOURITE CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE 2012 NOVEL, JILTED.