Fans of hot fiction and Stiff Rain Press, please welcome to the
blog Dakota Rebel! Dakota is our premiere author this month at SRP. She’s
relatively new with us, so it’s time we got to know her a little better.
Dakota, you may be newer to SRP, but you aren’t new. Where have you been all our lives?
Oh, I’ve been around
the block a time or two. Wait…that didn’t come out the way I intended. I just
meant that I’ve been writing for a couple different publishing houses and I am
so excited to have found another wonderful company I get to call home.
It's a sexy, dysfunctional family but we're happy you're one of us. ;) When did you start writing and what brought you to it?
Typical author answer – I don’t remember a time when I
wasn’t writing. From my early beginnings with imaginary friends I was making up
stories and creating characters. As I grew up so did my creativity and now I’m
thrilled to be able to share the voices in my head with the rest of the world.
And we're really glad you are! Among some of the Twitter-savvy fans, you’re known to write in
huge chunks, accomplishing a ton of writing all at once. How do you do it?
Well, the trick is to not write for weeks at a time. Then
when you finally sit down you’ve been stewing over your scene for a month and
all you can do is type it out. That is terrible advice by the way, in fact it’s
not even advice at all. It is more of a cautionary tale. I would never
recommend this way of writing to anyone. If you look at my Twitter feed, yes
you will see 2-3k hours. But you only see them about once a month because that
is about the only time I get to work on my books. I am forced into a corner by
the time I take to #wordwar with my author friends. If I could work every day
and be consistent, my hour counts would be less astronomical I assure you.
They're very impressive... envy-worthy even if they do come in spurts! So would you say that your best writing time is early or late?
Late for sure. I don’t do early. I have a day job in
addition to writing and being a wife and a mom and a chauffeur and a therapist
and a dry cleaner and a maid and…anyway, I get up in time to go to work and
that is it. Not one minute earlier if I can help it. Night time is just as
chaotic, obviously, but I manage to work better then if I get to work at all.
What brought you to kink/taboo writing? What do you like about it?
I like the freedom it
affords me with my characters. Sometimes my boys are just a little naughtier
than other houses are happy with. At SRP I can stay true to my story and to myself
and I appreciate that so much.
That sounds like a provocative promise. What are you working on now?
I am ‘actively’
working on Reagan, the second book in the Baine Family series. But unofficially
I have been spending a lot of time writing dialogue for a book that I was not
planning to write. Things are coming in clips and partial scenes so I write
them out in One Note so I can come back to them later. But Reagan is next up in
my schedule. Considering it releases next month I really should get it to my
editor soon.
Can you give us a sneak peak?
Reagan Baine works for a
special forces unit of the US Army. Her first kill was at the tender age of
eighteen when she took a contract on her boyfriend, who had turned out to be a serial
killer half werewolf, half vampire.
When the object of her
current manhunt discovers that she’s after him, he draws her back to Detroit
Michigan, where she will have to face her past again, but this time she won’t
be alone.
Though she has worked for
years to distance herself from relationships, she finds that she is drawn to
the two men escorting her back home. And they aren’t about to let her go
without a fight.
With a vicious arms dealer on her trail, she
finds herself having to learn to trust the monsters she’s spent years fighting
and discover that opening her heart again may not be as painful as she’d always
believed it would be.
Wow! That sounds great. You probably have a writer-friendly place to do all your daydreaming, huh? Tell us a little about your writing environment and how you set
yourself up?
I have a beautiful
glass top desk with the word love in many different languages etched into it. It
is currently buried under a mountain of notebooks and craft supplies though, so
I’m usually writing on a barstool at my kitchen counter or, if I’m really
lucky, in bed with a closed door. But that doesn’t happen very often. As long
as I have my laptop and a glass of tea I can usually write anywhere when I’m in
the mood to do so.
Is there one thing that will trip you up and keep you from the
keyboard? How do you avoid it?
My family sidetracks
me constantly. I am always being pulled in a hundred different directions and
don’t seem to have much time to work. Hence the large bursts of writing every
so often rather than the steady stream that others are able to produce.
Obviously there is no avoiding it, so I make do with what I can get and use my
free time to hang out with my loved ones. It’s a pretty awesome trade off so I
can’t really complain.
Dakota Rebel thanks for taking a few minutes to give us the inside scoop
on how you tick! We’re so glad you joined us on the blog today.
