A Conversation With Lisa Mondello
Author of the DAKOTA HEARTS SERIES
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| Featured Author Lisa Mondello |
What is the inspiration behind the DAKOTA HEARTS series?
Three years ago my small Massachusetts town was hit by an F3 tornado. Massachusetts isn’t really known for tornados so it was a bit of a shock to see the devastation. I had friends who were in the direct path of the storm. Some lost their homes or had them severely damaged. What struck me so profoundly was how the community came together to help rebuild the town and how other groups from all over the country came to help. That type of humanity was what I wanted to capture when I wrote the Dakota Hearts series. This small South Dakota town called Rudolph was devastated by ice storms and floods. The series follows the McKinnon family, starting with Logan McKinnon. As they repair the town, they also repair their lives and find love along the way.
Where do you get your ideas?
From everywhere. Sometimes I read about something in the newspaper and it starts me thinking about a situation. Sometimes, like with the Dakota Hearts series, it’s personal. Another book that was very personal to me was The More I See, book 3 of my Texas Hearts series. The hero in The More I See is blind and needs to be trained to use a guide dog. A dear friend of mine was blind for about eight years and used a guide dog named Otis. The guide dog in The More I See is modeled after the original Otis because he was such an extraordinary creature. Some stories, like The Marriage Contract, came directly from my own experiences. Like many college kids, I made a marriage pact with a male friend of mine that if we weren’t married by the time we were 30 years old, we’d marry each other. I married at 27 and now we’re both married to other people, but as I approached 30 years old, I’d remembered the pact we’d made and the idea for The Marriage Contract came to me.
Do you ever experience writer’s block and how do you overcome it?
I don’t get blocked that way. If anything, I have way too many ideas in my head and I have to constantly take a step back and organize my time to write them all. I’m a puzzle writer, so when I am working on a scene and it’s not coming out right, I just move to another scene and write that. Usually by the time I’m done I’ve worked out whatever was giving me trouble with the other scene. So I have very little writing down time.
What advice would you give aspiring writers?
Write and then make sure you finish writing it, even if you know it’s awful. You can always go back and fix something. But you need to get a whole story down. Too many writers start a story, get stuck and then abandon that project for another idea that sounds more exciting. They never figure out how to get through a whole manuscript because they’re always starting something new. So you need to finish what you start and then take a look at it and change whatever needs to be changed. The first three chapters of a story might be amazing. But if that’s all you write and revise, you’ll never finish and you’ll never get published.
How do you market your work? Are some avenues more effective than others?
I do a mix of social media, advertising and sending my new releases out to my newsletter readers. But I think the best thing that works is releasing new books. If a reader likes your storytelling, they’ll want to buy your next book. So you need to be more than a one-hit-wonder.
If your book was made into a movie, who would play each role?
Oh, that’s a hard one. First, I have over 20 books in publication right now. Each one would have a different hero and heroine. So it’s hard to say. A reader once told me she thought Matthew McConaughey was who she saw when she was reading Devon Michaels in The Marriage Contract. Another reader thought Charlize Theron would make a great Poppy Ericksen except for the fact that Poppy has auburn hair. I think readers see what’s familiar to them when they’re reading a story.
More About the Author:
New York Times and USA TODAY Bestselling Author, Lisa Mondello, has held many jobs in her life but being a published author is the last job she'll ever have. She's not retiring! She blames the creation of the personal computer for her leap into writing novels. Otherwise, she'd still be penning stories with paper and pen. In 2012 she reissued the first 3 books of her popular Western Romance Series TEXAS HEARTS including Her Heart for the Asking, His Heart for the Trusting and The More I See. The series now has two more books, Gypsy Hearts and Leaving Liberty. Book 6 of Texas Hearts, His Texas Heart, will be available July 2014. Writing as LA Mondello, her romantic suspense, MATERIAL WITNESS, was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Books of 2012.
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