|
FOLLOWING HER DREAMS Karen Marie Moning Follows Her Characters Down the Road Less Traveled—And Takes Readers Along for the Ride
By Elissa Petruzzi WE'VE ALL HAD nightmares that are hard to shake the next day. Karen Marie Moning's bad dream shook her up so much, she quit her day job in insurance litigation and started writing novels. "Right after I turned 30... I had a dream that I died. And in my dream, when I was dying, this huge voice said, 'Who lived the last 10 years of your life? Because you sure as hell didn't.' " she remembers. "I had all these things I wanted to do, and all these dreams I used to have, and here I was at 30 and I hadn't chased any of them. Within a matter of weeks I quit my job... and wrote every day." Four failed drafts later—which she burned after deciding "I never wanted them to see the light of day"—Moning wrote Beyond the Highland Mist , creating her much-beloved Highlanders and hitting upon a series franchise that has catapulted her onto the New York Times bestseller's list.
Still following that road less traveled, this month Moning branches out in yet another different direction with her new novel Darkfever (Delacorte), which begins the Chronicles of MacKayla Lane a first-person series that will follow the adventures of heroine MacKayla Lane. As the genre-shifting series begins, modern-day 22-year-old bartender Mac spends her days at the pool, pondering her next career move while awaiting her sister Alina's return from a semester abroad. Suddenly, Mac finds herself traveling from her Georgia home to Dublin to search for answers to Alina's brutal murder. While in Ireland, Mac teams up with mysterious stranger Jericho Barrons, and discovers a dangerous fantasy otherworld of which she—and possibly Jericho—play an integral part. Darkfever is not a traditional romance: there are no true love scenes, nor is a happy ending for Mac in sight anytime soon. "As a stand-alone book Darkfever is not a romance," Moning says. "As part of a series, it absolutely is a romance. I love romance... . I want more story, though." A lot more story, as it turns out. Mac's total story is 2,000 pages long, and as Moning now envisions things, the series will be broken into five separate books, with some steamy off-shoot novellas planned as well. By breaking free of the traditional romance novel confines—particularly the 400-page limit—Moning feels she can better develop emotionally and sexually satisfying relationships for her characters, and her readers.
Hearing Mac's voice was what convinced Moning to take this latest leap of faith. "Mac had a voice that was keeping me awake at night. And she was saying, "I want to tell my story, and I know it's not a romance, and are you too chicken to take a chance on me?' "Moning remembers. Acknowledging the difficulty of moving away from her well-known and bestselling Highlander series, she says, "It's a risk, to do something like this. My Highlander stories, they work, they sell.... I know they do. So to take a chance on Mac when she's saying... 'You're not going to get to have sex in the first book, you're not going to get to do the things that you know are selling in the market.' And yet her voice was so insistent I said, 'OK, I'm game. I'm going to try this.' " Fans of the Highlanders need not despair, however, because not only is Moning open to the possibility of returning to those time-traveling Scots at some point—Mac and company will provide their own view into the world of the Highlanders. "What you'll see, as the series unfolds... is that it's a separate series but at the same time it is a side, and a very different perspective, into the world that I've already created," Moning says. "I've established this romance hero world, and now I'm establishing this kind of parallel world that runs alongside it from a much more nitty-gritty perspective." In fact, Moning hints, "Mac will meet a young MacKeltar in the next book.... The worlds are going to collide." Real worlds collided as nature descended upon Moning's rural Georgian home one day when she and her husband Neil discovered a large bear on their deck, drinking out of a hummingbird feeder. "How do you get a bear off the deck?" laughs the author, who now carries bear mace with her, just in case. "If it had wanted to, it could have just come right through the screens to us. Fortunately we scared it, and it took off—hitched its fat bear butt over the side and left." Perhaps inspiring the feeling of danger stalking Mac in Darkfever . Despite the occasional run-in with wildlife, Moning enjoys the country setting."It's just heaven to me," she says of her home at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, which she relocated to after spending years living in Cincinnati. "Its wonderful, it's warm... the landscape is beautiful. It's much more peaceful [than Cincinnati]. I get more writing done," she says. And write she has, with pieces of Mac's 2,000-page story already committed to paper and other novellas planned, Moning has been busy working, something which must please her publisher, Delacorte. In fact, Delacorte supported Moning's new literary adventure from the beginning. "It translates well from the Highlanders into this great new series," says Shauna Summers, a senior editor at Bantam Dell who works with Moning. "I'm a fan of the Highlander books and I love Darkfever . I think this is her best book." Summers, who worked with Laurell K. Hamilton, sees similarities between the two first-person series that follow a heroine through a sometimes supernatural landscape. Aware that some of Moning's fans won't be pleased with the transition, Summers reasons, "You can't please everyone." For Moning, her gamble to enter the writing world worked out, and the author plans to continue following her heart, even if it takes her in surprising directions. She says, "You absolutely have to write the story that you have to tell."
|
|||||
Mac will find love along the way, and Moning promises, "it is some of the hottest stuff I have ever written,"—though readers will have to wait until later books in the series for romance to blossom. "I looked for romance to happen in this book. I had my eyes and ears open. I was like, 'Hmm, could there be romance here?' and Mac said, 'Nope. Don't think so.'... It doesn't belong in the first two weeks after her sister's been murdered," Moning recalls.
