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Susan:  I was wondering Tracy, what are Tim Tams? Or will you keep LRP readers in suspense?

Tracy: I’ve been getting this one a lot – especially since I won the RomantiCon Superstar Award for the “Most Erotic Use of a Chocolate Chip Cookie” – because the scene in question didn’t actually feature a chocolate chip cookie at all. It was a Tim Tam. And Tim Tams are an Australian institution. They’re a chocolate praline centre sandwiched between two chocolate biscuits, and the whole lot is coated in a thick layer of real milk chocolate – not the compound cooking stuff, but real honest to goodness milk chocolate. I was trying to explain to someone at the conference last weekend that Australian women use Tim Tams the way American women use icecream: for treats, to go with coffee, for when they get dumped, when they’re down, for that time of the month, for any excuse they can think of at all.

The original Tim Tams I’ve described above. There’s about fifteen different varieties in Australia now, including caramel and mint chip, and so forth. Arnott’s, who make them, export only a few of the varieties. I can get original, dark and caramel in my local grocery store — sometimes.

Readers at the convention told me there are some stores in the States that also carry them. You have to hunt around though.

Wikipedia has a (mildly inaccurate) page about them – they’re that notorious! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_tams

Keira: What or who inspired you to start writing?

Tracy: George Lucas inspired me to write romance, which sounds bizarre, I know. I fell in love with Star Wars (the original movie), and wrote the sequel. I didn’t realize that what I was doing was called fanfic – they didn’t have a name for it then, and I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I was too embarrassed. But I had Han Solo and Leia falling in love long before George Lucas got around to it in the second movie.

But nothing I wrote ever topped Han Solo’s damned near perfect “I know” in response to Leia’s confession of love in the second movie — or Harrison Ford’s desperate expression as they put him into the carbon freezer. That moment, and the lesson in romantic conflict, character, emotional intensity and the art of not saying everything has stayed with me and I’ve been striving to deliver the impact of that moment in my romance novels ever since.

Susan:  In Ningaloo Nights you describe the weather & Ningaloo as if you were an Australian native. Have you ever visited, lived or dreamt about Australia?

Tracy: I am an Australian native. I was born and grew up in Australia, very near Ningaloo, in fact, in Geraldton. I toured around Ningaloo with my parents when I was a teenager. I moved to Canada in 1996 when I met my husband on-line.

Keira: What’s your favorite aspect of erotica romance?

Tracy: Surprisingly, it’s not the sex, although that’s certainly an appealing part of it. The greatest part of writing for Ellora’s Cave in particular is the complete freedom in story-telling. Along with the sexual freedom comes an ability to slip the leash and tell any story I want. There’s very few taboos in erotic romance and readers are usually self-aware, accepting, open-minded and more than happy to try new experiences, so an author can write stories that are very different from what traditional New York publishers are able to offer. I’m always grateful for Ellora’s Cave readers’ abilities to go with the flow in that regard. They’re happy to try anything!

Keira: Sex – what makes it great in a story?

Tracy: In two words: Sexual tension. You can have pages of description about the deed itself, but they pale in comparison to a page about the possibility of what might happen. To quote Tim Curry from Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Antici......pation!” In plain vanilla romances like Harlequin/Silhouette, you have the hero just panting lustfully at the heroine – that’s sexual tension -- but in erotic romance, the reader wouldn’t sit still for that. She wants sex, and lots of it, and she wants it really early in the book...not a tasteful closed door scene at the end. But you can still use sexual tension to make sex in erotic romances hum like a barber shop quartet, too.

For instance, I adore some of the classic Lora Leigh books in the cave...who doesn’t? But if you actually break down the hot, hot, hot sex in them, you’ll notice that she never actually gets around to consummating the sex for pages and pages. It’s all about the tension, the teasing, the promise of what’s to come. And phew, does Lora Leigh sell, or what?

Susan:  I understand you write under a few pen names, how many do you have?

Tracy: I write under my own name, Tracy Cooper-Posey (which really is my own name, although lots of people have expressed disbelief over that), and under Anastasia Black. Anastasia Black came about because Julia Templeton and I co-wrote a couple of erotic historical romances together for Ellora’s cave, and we didn’t want to put both our names on the cover. We both have really long names and it would have left no room for the title and image. And as we were both writing outside our usual genres (at that time), we created the pen name.

I have one other pen name that I use for a sub-genre that is totally different to anything I write for Ellora’s Cave as Tracy Cooper-Posey. I use the pen name so that readers that read my novels that I write as Tracy Cooper-Posey don’t get confused by my suddenly producing something outside that genre. I’ve done this in the past and it makes for depressed sales and confused readers, who drift away and never come back. For that reason, I won’t share the pen name here.

If I was to begin writing in yet another totally unrelated genre – although that’s very hard to imagine as I’m having trouble keeping up with the marketing and writing of just those I already have! – then I would start yet another pen name. But for now, that’s all I have.

Susan:  Does writing with different pen names cause you to forget who you really are? (LOL)

Tracy: Sometimes it does get confusing! I’ve had the occasional slip with email accounts and blog comments <grin> But the pen name is really just me with a bigger mouth and louder opinions, so it’s not like I totally lose my personality under her shadow! <grin> She’s just me with the volume turned up.

Keira: How do you define love?

Tracy: Good question! Never had that one before. I love plotting romance novels so that the romantic conflict is sharpest right toward the end of the novel where the hero or heroine really face a crisis point where they genuinely risk losing the wo/man they’ve fallen in love with over the course of the novel. They’re facing a choice. Often that choice is the harshest choice of all: Everything they’ve always wanted, or the person they love. Pick one. And they pick the person they love for no better reason than they love them, and that’s more important than everything they’ve always wanted. That’s love defined, in my mind.

I tripped over City of Angels on video-on-demand last night, and haven’t seen it since it first came out in the late 1998 so on a whim I rented it. I’m not a huge Nicholas Cage fan, but I loved him in that. He was perfect for Seth. At the very end of the movie, he’s crying over the loss of Meg Ryan, and the other angel asks him if he’d known he was going to lose her, would he have done it – taken the leap and given up immortality for the single night he got to spend with her as a human. And he says yes.

That’s love.

Keira: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Tracy: I’d like to thank LRP for hanging in there and entertaining us despite your tribulations and trials lately, and for giving me the opportunity these last couple of weeks to introduce readers to me and my work, and to Ningaloo Nights in particular.

1. Buy page for Ningaloo Nights http://tinyurl.com/yg4nhud
2. My website:  http://www.TracyCooperPosey.com
3. My blog:  http://www.TracyCooperPosey.com/blog (There are pics of the conference there if you’d like to see them, including me in neon pink go-go boots.)
4. Follow me on Twitter:  http://www.twitter.com/TracyCP

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Categories:

Australia/New Zealand, Author Interviews, Erotica, P-R

Tags:

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