Mandy Harbin has a seemingly innocent career as a technical writer. But after hours (and on the weekends), she’s hitting the keyboard, weaving passionate love stories as a romance writer. Her novel Darkest Sin makes the transition from e-book to paperback this winter.
Q: A lot of romance writers say that the steamy love scenes are the hardest things for them to write in their novels. Do you find them difficult? Why or why not? How long do you typically spend writing one?
A: It depends. … Sometimes they’re not very long; sometimes it’s an important, pivotal scene and it’s going to require more effort. It is harder for me to write a romance scene. In fact, I’m in the process of writing the third book in my Woods Family series, and Sunday morning I got up and got my coffee, and I was at the sex scene and I was yawning while I was typing, and I had to stop because I was like, “I’m not in the right mindset. If I’m yawning, that’s not going to be good.” It’s different whenever you’re going through the story, and you’re able just to hammer it out. With sex scenes they can’t be tedious. They can’t be the same. They’re the same body parts, but you have to make it unique each time, or people will skim through the sex and get to the story. I want my books to have a great plot as well, but the sex is also part of the erotic story. The sex scenes themselves have to play a part in the books that I write.
Q: What do your friends and family members say about your writing hobby?
A: My mom is really excited for me. Even my dad is. Darkest Sin was recently reviewed in RT Book Reviews magazine, ... so when it came in the mail he was going around the neighborhood showing all his friends. He hasn’t read the book, I’m pretty sure. But my mom with my young adult series helped me with beta reading and some initial editing. You can’t edit your own work. You can come back to it, and you’re going to skip over stuff. She has really great insight into story ideas. My parents are really excited for me. Whether they get in and really read the erotic stuff, I don’t know. … My friends think it’s the coolest thing.
Q: How long does it typically take you to write a novel?
A: It really depends on how much time I can devote to it. I’m a very visual person, and I love to watch movies, so I’ll actually draw out a three-act structure on paper, and I’ll know what’s going to happen by the end of act one, the middle, what’s going to throw me into the third act, the major plot points of the story. ... I’ll pull up Excel and I’ll draft out every scene. ... At that point I’ll know about how long the book is going to be. If I do that legwork at the beginning — I’ve even written character bios so I can understand where my characters are coming from — when I actually sit down and start writing, [it] can go by pretty quickly. I’ve written a 100,000-word novel in a month. ... I can do a 30,000-word novella in two weeks. And sometimes the prep work only takes a couple of days because I already know how I want the story to go. I don’t ever start a book without knowing how it’s going to end. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to end that way, because whenever I start writing I do let the story dictate how it wants to flow, because it’s been my experience that if I force it to my outline and it doesn’t feel right, it’s just not going to end up the way that it needs to be. When I wrote Seasons Change: Summer, which is the first book in my young adult series, I actually scrapped the whole last bit of my outline, and it became the ending to the second book.
Q: Romance novels are often judged by their covers. How important is a cover to book sales? Are there certain design elements that sell and don’t sell?
A: I think it’s very important to book sales. As a writer, depending on your publisher, you may not have a lot of say-so as to what it looks like. Whenever I submit my book, whenever it goes through the editing phase, I have a cover art form that I have to complete, and I can give my ideas about what I want the cover to look like. I like for it to have a sexy look. If it’s an erotic book, it needs to have that sexy vibe to it — usually a man without a shirt on or a man wearing an open shirt or in a sexy pose. The woman has to be a beautiful woman. But I’ve also noticed that whenever I write, I try to make the female character a little bit more believable to everyday women. They don’t feel 100 percent secure about their bodies, and they don’t want to read about a model-beautiful woman because they can’t relate to her. So, when I write the story, I try to make it more relatable to women. But we all want the men to be beautiful and sexy.
Q: Does writing erotic fiction ever impact your relationships with men?
A: I’ve only brought it up once, and the response I got was “Is this part of your research?” No, I keep my private life separate. So, then I worry since I am single that a man is going to read my books and go “Wow! She must be really good in bed!” To me, it’s fiction. It will always, always, always be fiction. … So, yeah, it does come into play a little bit, but I just have to take it with a grain of salt and try to have a tongue-in-cheek response to it.
Q: And do you have any say over what goes on the cover? Picking models, etc.?
A: I do have some say as to the feel of it. With Darkest Sin, Brody is the main character in the story, and he’s a really big blonde man. I needed the hero to emulate that. The actual model himself I didn’t get to pick. With my cover I think they used stock images that they purchased, but they do have photo shoots, and they have models that they hire. Once I’m in [the business] a little bit longer I may have some of the top models that they pick. In fact, there is a convention in October (Romanticon) and they’ll have the models there and they’ll be able to sign their [cover images]. Angelo [Riguero] is a pretty popular one with Ellora’s Cave. In fact, with Amazon you have tags for your books at the bottom for when people search for your books and there is actually an Angelo tag.
Q: Will you give everyone a teaser of Darkest Sin?
A: It starts out with a prologue with Xan dealing with her husband. She got married young and her husband is really wealthy and he ends up being in the mob and she doesn’t really realize this going into it. The beginning of the book starts out with her trying to get away from her husband … the first chapter is several years later. It touches on some of the things that she had to do to get to that point. She is obviously really leery of men. She has a teenage son that she has to watch out for, and at this point her ex-husband has attempted murder charges. That’s the only way they were able to put him in prison, and she’s in a witness protection program. She had to testify against him, and at this point in time he is now eligible for parole. That’s where the story picks up … Brody and his group are actually mercenaries and they work in a garage there and they take on jobs the FBI can’t handle or they don’t want to for political reasons. It’s actually set in Mayflower. They put her in this Arkansas town because they are going to hire that group of mercenaries to watch after her. Brody is one of those mercenaries who she becomes involved with, and he has amnesia from a certain period in his life and he can’t recall it, and whenever he sees her — she’s a single mom, he doesn’t want anything to do with single moms, he likes going out and if he needs to have sex he’ll go sleep with whomever, he doesn’t really do relationships — he recognizes her from somewhere. Since he has amnesia, that worries him since he knows that in his past life he was a gun for hire. Now you have his story of where does he know her from and her [story] of having to run from her ex and [the two stories] merge.
Q: Are you religious? If so, does writing this genre, especially something titled Darkest Sin, require some self-negotiation or arouse some controversy for you?
A: I grew up Assembly of God, and I do consider myself religious. I pray every day. I guess the way that I look at it is I’m here and whatever I do is through God’s will whether it’s my god or somebody else’s god. In that respect I feel totally comfortable with what I do. I have friends who attend Baptist churches and I have family members who go, and they read my stories and they worry — like if I post a comment on Facebook, they may say “my pastor’s gonna see that!” But I think that in this day and age it’s different even from what it was 20 years ago.
Q: Since you don’t really use the scientific terminology, is it difficult to come up with new words or new euphemisms for male and female anatomy?
A: It is difficult. In fact, even my publishers have documents on euphemisms and other words that you can use just so you’re not using the same words every time and then not using the clinical words every time. In today’s contemporary erotic romance, they don’t want the flowery words either, so you kind of have to find that balance. And then even with certain publishers you’re not allowed to use certain words even though you would think it would be acceptable. Women don’t want to read “tits” in the book unless it’s coming from a male point of view because a guy can look at a woman’s breast and think “tits.” Women don’t look at each other’s breasts and think “tits.” You have to be careful as you how you play that and sometimes they will come right out and say no... Like with Ellora’s Cave [publishing company], you can’t say “he blew his wad.” It’s interesting to sit back and read all the dos and don’ts in erotic writing.
Q: So you are making the leap from eBooks to paper books later this year. How excited are you? How did you get picked up for print?
A: I’m very excited about that. All of my publishers are eBook-first publishers. A book has to meet certain criteria in order for it to be eligible to be released in paperback. It has to be so long. My Woods series are novella length. The word count itself isn’t going to be eligible for paperback unless they group them into an anthology, which is very possible if they decide to go down that road. [Darkest Sin] is actually the first one to become a paperback. It came out as an ebook in March, so it is available on Amazon and on Barnes and Noble.com and through other retailers that sell eBooks. When I attend Romanticon in November, it will debut there for conference attendees and there will be a book signing. It will be my first official book signing. It should be available for pre-order at Barnes and Noble and Amazon after the convention and it goes on sale officially in December in time for the Christmas holiday.
Q: On your website, your books are called “erotic novels.” Is there a difference between an erotic novel and a romance novel?
A: Technically there is, but I consider all mine romance. ... With Ellora’s Cave, I think they coined the term “romantica” as their line of erotic romance. If you’re looking at it strictly in business terminology, an erotic novel does not necessarily have to have a happily ever after ending. It’s basically more of the porn side of the books. I’ve heard people say “mommy porn” when it comes to Fifty Shades of Grey and other romance books, and if that’s the term that society wants to pin it with then I really wouldn’t argue with that. Although that’s not the way that I look at it because with porn there is no plot — it’s to get to that end result. With erotic romance, it’s more of the romantic story, it’s just that the sex is detailed in the book itself
Q: You write young adult and erotic novels, which are two opposite genres. Why did you choose such different things to write about, and do you ever get in hot water over it?
A: I don’t get in hot water over it, and I actually really debated using two different pen names for the two different genres. Even every now and then I still wonder if I should have done that. The reason why I didn’t, and even though with branding, technically the idea behind branding is you stick with one and you really market that one under that pen name, but with me, I like to read all. I like to read everything, so I felt like a lot of my fans probably would, too. As long as I clearly noted which was which, it would keep me out of the hot water situation. My young adult publisher also publishes erotic romances, but I don’t publish any of mine through them and I’ve made that as a personal choice just as another step to keep my young adult series separate from my erotic lines. I’m actually considering writing MM, which is gay male erotic romance, and I may or may not decide to do a different pen name for that.