Welcome Ms. Burton to Love Romances & More.  We are so happy to have you with us and we look forward to learning more about you and your wonderful books. 

Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an author. 

I’ve been writing erotic fiction for the past couple of years, but I’ve actually been in print since 1995. In the beginning, I wrote contemporary and medieval romances. It was a natural segue from sexy romances to erotic fiction. I also love the mystery genre, so I wrote the Gilded Age historical mysteries as P.B. Ryan. The sixth and last book in that series, A Bucket of Ashes, came out last month. 

How long was the Hidden Grotto series in the making from germination to publication of the first book HOUSE OF DARK DELIGHTS? 

I guess I started writing HOUSE and the series proposal about two and a half years ago. Bantam bought the series in a pre-empt, so it was a pretty easy sale. HOUSE came out Feb. ’07. 

How many books do you intend to write for the series? 

There’s no end in sight! Seriously, it’s an open-ended series, and I hope there will be many more books to come. I’m having a great time writing them, they’re selling well, and we’ve gotten three foreign translations so far: German, Spanish, and Serbian. You heard me. Serbian. 

The grouping of immortal beings is very unique.  Can you give a brief introduction of them to our readers? 

Sure. The Hidden Grotto books are set in an isolated French chateau inhabited by four immortal beings who look like exceptionally beautiful humans, but who all qualify as incubi, or “sexual demons.” 

Elic is a tall, blond Nordic elf who, by accident of birth, is also a dusios—that is, he can change from his natural male form into a female, and back again. 

Lili, whom Elic loves but can’t make love to, because of his physiology, is a succubus—a female incubus—who was worshipped as the Goddess of the New Moon in ancient Babylonia. 

Darius is a djinni who is very reclusive, because if he comes into physical contact with a human, he senses the human’s desires, which he is then compelled to fulfil. 

And last but not least, there’s Inigo, the pleasure-seeking, trend-loving satyr who has his own MySpace page, and who has become a huge favourite with my readers. 

The premise of the series is that these four thrive on sexual energy in the form of erotic encounters with visitors to the chateau.  

Oh—there’s also Turek the vampire, who visited the chateau in 1749 (in HOUSE OF DARK DELIGHTS), and who will return in the present day in Book #4, which I’m just starting to write. He’ll be a big fan of self-tanner. 

Of your characters Elic, Lili, Darius and Inigo, which intrigues you most and why?  Which causes you most grief? 

Although Elic’s sequential hermaphroditism (now, that’s a mouthful) is fascinating, I’d have to say that Darius intrigues me the most because of the complex psychology that comes into play when he’s forced to act upon a person’s deepest, darkest desires. There are times when those desires are foreign to his personality, as when, in HOUSE, Lady Charlotte Somerhurst  wants nothing more than to be held captive in the dungeon and forced to submit. At first, Darius dominates and uses her because it’s what she wants, but the deeper he gets into it, the more it takes over his mind, until it’s what he wants, too. This kind of thing can get pretty maddening, as you can imagine. 

I actually think Darius is also the character who gives me the most grief, because it's so difficult to get him interacting with people, and therefore having relationships with human characters. When you've got a character who actively avoids people and can shape-shift into a cat or a bird, or even become invisible, there are a little number of strategies you can employ to get him to accidentally come into contact with someone. As a writer, that's a big challenge. 

Do you try to follow an outline to your stories of these fascinating characters or do you allow them to lead you where they will?  Have they surprised you with their antics? 

Actually, the more books I write—I’ve published about two dozen—the more organic my approach becomes. I do start off with a brief working synopsis, if only because my editor needs to green-light the story concept before I launch into it. But I have no hesitation in veering away from the plan when my characters decide to go in a different direction. If you’re writing character-driven fiction—which, IMHO, is the best way to go—then plot and character are inextricably linked. The events in the story happen because characters make them happen. If you’re writing along, and you come upon an event you had planned, but you realize your character doesn’t have enough motivation to do whatever it is that initiates that event, you’ve got to rethink things. Likewise, your character will sometimes find himself in a situation where there’s only one logical course of action for him to follow, or maybe he has some kind of unexpected brainstorm, and it may be something that had never occurred to you. You’ve really got to allow for these deviations if you want your story to have a natural evolution and not feel forced or unreal.  

Your books are a delightful mix of erotica, mythology and history.  Were there authors or books that inspired you to pen these stories?   

I mention this a lot in interviews, so it may be old news, but when my twin sister and I were young adolescents, we discovered that our father had a collection of classic Victorian erotica in a dresser drawer, and that we could unlock that drawer with a bobbie pin. The books absolutely captivated me, and thus was my interest in erotic fiction spawned. An adult, I really enjoyed Pauline Reage’s  The Story of O and Anne Rice’s Beauty books and Exit to Eden—and to a lesser extent, because of the sometimes creepy content, Anais Nin’s erotica. 

As for my interest in—or, more accurately, obsession with—history and historical fiction, I blame Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth, a medieval romantic saga that, at some 900 pages or so, wasn’t nearly long enough. It’s been recently reprinted, BTW, and I highly recommend it. 

As for mythology, once I started researching sexual demons, especially the writings of the Church fathers on the subject, I was completely hooked.  

BOUND IN MOONLIGHT is the second instalment of the series and continues in the same manner of a collection of short stories and with the sexual demons as in the first.  It contains the tale of the daughter of the Grotte Cachée’s adminstrateur and its guardien Adrien Morel.  What was it that moved you to write this story? 

That story is the romantic element of a contemporary story arc that spans the first three books. I was really intrigued with Adrien Morel, a human with druidic gifts who must marry a gifted woman in order to produce gifted offspring who will continue his ancestral legacy of looking after the four immortals. The romance writer in me couldn’t help but imagine a scenario in which the love of his life, Isabel Archer (yes, named after the Henry James character) is an ungifted woman who is, furthermore, the daughter of and natural successor to his right-hand man. Should she actually take over this hereditary position from her dying father, one of her responsibilities would be to find a gifted wife for Adrien.  

The Isabel/Adrien story in BOUND IN MOONLIGHT does not resolve their conflict (yet), for which my readers are giving me no end of grief. I keep assuring them that they just need to wait for Book #3, WHISPERS OF THE FLESH, due out in October, which I guarantee will make up for it. ;) 

What was some of the more interesting bits of research you did for your books? 

Well, the Catholic theory on sexual demons, as mentioned before, which is just fascinating. For HOUSE, I had to research the order of service for a black mass, which is a sort of perverse inversion of a Catholic mass. Different practitioners have different takes on it, some of which are pretty wild. People think the black mass in my book is kinky; well, in this case, I think truth may actually be stranger than fiction. Other memorable things I’ve researched for my Hidden Grotto books: The original Hellfire Club, the different races of vampires, BDSM practices, electromagnetic vortexes, the customs of ancient Gaul, and how porn films are made. 

Please describe a typical day in your life. 

I usually wake up with my husband at 6am, make a pot of coffee, and start writing. My new schedule is to write 7 hours a day. In the past, it was usually to write 7 pages a day, but that hasn’t been working so well for me lately, for some reason, so I’m going with a 7-hour work day now. My husband comes home for lunch, which is a nice break in the day, and after work, I’m supposed to hit the gym. (Emphasis on “supposed to.”) 

Do you have ways to set yourself into the mood for your writing?  What are they? 

Placing my posterior in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard. Honestly, that’s about it. I find it difficult to write with sounds around me, so there’s no mood music or anything like that. I had a friend who once told me she liked to play I Love Lucy reruns while she was writing. Uh... not for me, thanks. If I have to write in an environment with noise, I use ear plugs. 

It seems to me, if you want to be a working writer, it’s dangerous to worry too much about “mood,” setting it or otherwise. If you have a deadline from a publisher—or, for that matter, want to have a deadline from a publisher—you really just have to sit down and write every day, even if you can only spare half an hour. If you wait for the right mood, or your “muse,” or some other kind of inspiration, you’re pretty much sunk. 

On the bright side, writing produces endorphins. It creates a good mood, so if you can just get that butt in that chair, you’re halfway there! 

Please share something that would surprise readers to know about you. 

I guess it’s not so surprising if you’ve been reading this interview carefully, but I have a twin sister, an identical twin, in fact, Pamela Burford. Pam is also a published novelist. She wrote a whole slew of books for Harlequin, and has just finished an absolutely fantastic comic suspense novel that she’s starting to shop around. 

You write romance novels under the name Patricia Ryan, mystery novels under P.B. Ryan, and “epic erotic fiction” under Louisa Burton.  Are there any other genres or subgenres for which you would like to try your hand? 

Wow, that’s an interesting question. (You’ve been asking some good ones.) I find that when someone’s reading taste is eclectic, as mine is, you do become interested in writing in those other genres that you like to read. The only genres I don’t actually read are SF, classic fantasy, and westerns. I love big, gritty hard-boiled suspense novels, but I don’t know if I have the personality to write one of those. Sometimes I think I should try my hand at chick lit or something else that’s nice and light and snappy, as a refresher from the heaviosity of my erotica. I do actually have a big historical suspense novel that’s half written, and I’m aching to get back to that.  

How do you like to spend your free time? 

What free time? That’s almost not a joke, because I’m coming off a couple of years of being way, way, way overextended. Never again. I like to read, of course, but I read as much nonfiction as fiction. I like to travel. I like to hike and kayak in warm weather, although I’ve done plenty of hiking in the bitter cold. Love the movies. And cooking is one of my greatest pleasures, which I’m starting to get back into. Something else I want to start doing again is sewing. I used to design and sew some of my own clothes, and that was a really fun, creative way to spend my free time. There’s a sewing machine in the basement that I’ve never even taken out of the box. This year, I will! 

What is in your to be read pile? 

This is the short pile: 

WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE by Jon Kabat-Zinn (as an audio book)

THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL by Mary Rogers

WATER FOR GOTHAM by Gerard T. Koeppel

SIN IN THE SECOND CITY by Karen Abbott

GOD IS NOT GREAT by Christopher Hitchens (You think I should recommend this one to my church reading group?) 

I’m half-finished with HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION by Thomas Cahill. Wonderful stuff. 

Is there a question you wish an interviewer would ask you?  And what would be your reply? 

The question I most want to be asked is, “How did it feel to make #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list?” My reply: an idiot grin. 

Any final thoughts, motto, favourite recipe, or other information you would like the reader to have? 

My favourite quote about writing: “There are three rules to writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” W. Somerset Maugham 

Since I’m a kitchen slut of Texas extraction, I’ll also leave you with a recipe for the best barbecue sauce in the universe:

LOUISA BURTON’S SOUL-WARMING BARBECUE SAUCE

2 cups good-quality ketchup

1/3 cup malt or cider vinegar

2/3 cup dark brown sugar, packed

1 Tbsp. Dijon or other spicy mustard

1 tsp. or more of Liquid Smoke, to taste (you might want a good deal more)

1/2 Tbsp. chili powder

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1 tsp. celery salt

Put all the ingredients in a pot and bring to a boil. Turn down and simmer for about five minutes. You could put this on a brick, and your guests would come back for seconds.

Thank you Ms Burton for taking time out of your busy schedule to give us an inside view of you and your Hidden Grotto series.