Karen Mercury
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2 Ratings Avg - 4.0
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7 Ratings Avg - 4.1
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7 Ratings Avg - 4.7
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11 Ratings Avg - 3.8
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Author's Bio
Karen knew she wanted to be a writer when she was three. She sat on her bed gazing at her book, The Bee Man of Orn, thinking “What power there is in creating imaginary worlds! The reader is automatically transported into a reality that you created. She hears your characters talking, sees the vistas you painted with words.” Then she realized she had better learn to read.
When Karen was 12, she had a dream of being in a village on the coast of Kenya, so at 23 she bought a one-way plane ticket to Nairobi to find the village. She climbed the Mountains of the Moon in Rwanda to see mountain gorillas, hitchhiked overland through Egypt, Uganda, Zaire, and Zambia, lived with the Turkana in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, went down the Congo on a decrepit steamer, and sailed up the Nile on a leaky dhow.
Her first three novels were historical fiction involving pre-colonial African explorers. Since she was always either accused or praised (depending how you look at it) for writing overly steamy sex scenes, erotic romance was the natural next step. She is currently writing about the rough and tumble life of the California gold rush, and lives in Northern California with her Newfoundland dog.
Author's Profile
Q: Do you “write to the market” and select a popular genre, or do you throw caution to the wind and write what is important to you?
A: Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to write to the market. My first three novels were set in sub-Saharan Africa, which isn’t the most popular setting. And I couldn’t write a vampire or werewolf novel if you paid me in gold. I figure there are already so many writers who are experts at it, and I should do something different. I really admire those writers who can switch between genres.
Q: Do you make up your story as you go along, or do you plot out the scenes beforehand?
A: I’m definitely a plotter. I would be very scared and insecure sitting down with a blank page and no plan of action. Every day when I wind things up, I write a few sentences for the next day, so I know where I’m heading. Plotting allows me to get the pacing down. I think “This scene needs to happen by about the 75% complete mark.”
Q: What limitations do you find in writing historicals?
A: Oh, the swear words! Imagine the limitations in going back even farther in time! I’m constantly referring to my “Historical Dictionary of American Slang” to make sure no terms are anachronistic. I recently came up against a roadblock. In 1849 it took mail three months to get from “the States” to San Francisco. If President Polk gave a speech in December ’48, how were my characters reading about it in a paper in February ’49?
Q: Do you take liberties in describing actual historical events, in order to make the story more exciting?
A: I try not to mess with timelines, dates, and the actions of real historical people. If you have to change the actions and timeline of a real historical person so radically, it’s best to just invent a new name. But “making it more exciting” is the name of the game, and since we can’t really know what individual people said or did during a given historical event, there’s no reason not to, say, have someone blow up a pirate ship off St. Croix. Who knows, maybe it happened, but no one chronicled it. As long as you use the correct sort of dynamite for the year you’re writing about, why not? I used to be so anal retentive that, if I wanted to depict Ramadan where they are waiting for the moon, I’d spend an hour looking for a moon table for that exact date in history, to find out when it rose. That’s getting a bit extreme!
Q: What is the best hero moment you’ve seen in film?
A: Definitely the scene in “Last of the Mohicans” where Hawkeye is racing through that battle to find Cora. Your heart stops and you’re literally on the edge of your seat.
Q: What are you currently reading?
A: I am into biographies lately. For some reason I can read nonfiction much faster, maybe because I’m not stopping to think as much. I recently finished a tome on Liz Taylor, and now I’m reading John Lennon. Also, I don’t like to read other authors while I’m writing a book (i.e., almost always), because their writing style might accidentally influence me.
Q: What do you think is so attractive about M/M/F ménages?
A: I’ve always written M/M/F, before I knew it was an actual genre. Then when it came time to ship the manuscript to the publisher, I’d delete or massively tone down all the homoerotic stuff, leaving it up to the reader to wonder if anything “untoward” had happened. I didn’t know such activity was acceptable—and maybe it wasn’t, back then. We’ve come a long way. I think the attraction for women is the rationalization: If one man is exciting, wouldn’t two men be doubly as exciting? Then the woman can take a break and kick back when the men pleasure each other. And that’s definitely an attractive image. There’s not much for the woman to be jealous of if her “rival” is another man. There’s simply no comparison, so why would she feel the need to compete? She wouldn’t—she would just feel doubly safe and protected.
Q: Where do you get inspiration for your heroes?
A: This is always a huge difficulty for me. Obviously, you can’t base the hero on anyone you currently know, or you’d be married to that guy right now (you hope). So, I turn to movie actors that I find inspirational. That’s a good trick because it’s simple to study them walking, talking, moving. You can find tons of inspirational photos, so as to better describe them. My difficulty comes in finding enough hero-worthy men. It isn’t often a Daniel Day-Lewis comes along, and I’m afraid I’ll be stuck with a Ben Stiller. Is Robert Downey Jr. hero-worthy, or is he only good enough to be a sidekick? I recently discovered Alex O’Loughlin, and hoo doggie, is he hero-worthy. I tape all these shirtless photos to my closet door, so I can be inspired round the clock.
Q: What are some books that have inspired you?
A: Even when I wrote mainstream historical fiction, my sex scenes were very hot, which isn’t often seen in the world of hist-fic. So although they say “sex sells,” I got a lot of flak for that. I loved the historical details, describing battle scenes, pirate ships, African tribal customs, architecture, Victorian science. But my characters demanded to have graphic, passionate sex. I realized where I learned this sexy skill. As a teen I’d pull all the Henry Miller novels down from my mother’s bookshelf. At first, of course, I only read the x-rated scenes, the reason Miller’s novels had to be shipped in plain brown paper, and were banned for a long time. But soon I realized “Hey, this guy is a pretty good writer,” and I read each novel all the way through.
Q: What made you choose to write historicals over contemporaries?
A: Being sort of a cynic in matters of love, it is much easier for me to imagine these grand, dramatic, death-defying romances taking place in a former era. It’s easy to imagine an adventurer slogging across the Ruwenzoris or the Sierras for the love of a woman. The 19th century landscapes, vistas, the flora and fauna—it’s all so conducive to a breathtaking powerful romance. Besides, in the frontiers where I usually set my novels, the ratio of women to men was about one to ten. Much easier to find a happily ever after with those odds.
Past 14 days
