This week's featured guest is New York Times best-selling author ( 24 times!!) JULIE GARWOOD!
She writes historicals and romantic suspense - over 36 million of her books are in print.
It's no surprise that Julie Garwood became a writer. Growing up in a large family of Irish heritage, she took to storytelling naturally. "The Irish relish getting all the details of every situation," she explains. "Add in the fact that I was the sixth of seven children. Early in life I learned that self-expression had to be forceful, imaginative, and quick."
Creating stories was always a passion for Julie, but she didn't focus on making it a career until the youngest of her three children entered school. After the publications of two young adult books, she turned her interests to historical fiction. Her first novel, GENTLE WARRIOR, was published in 1985, and there has been a steady parade of bestsellers ever since. Today more than 35 million copies of her books are in print, and they are translated in dozens of languages around the world. One of her most popular novels, FOR THE ROSES, was adapted for a HALLMARK HALL OF FAME production on CBS.
Whether the setting be medieval Scotland, Regency England, frontier Montana, or modern-day Louisiana, her themes are consistent: family, loyalty, and honor. Readers claim that it's the humor as well as poignancy of her novels that keep them coming back for more. Julie described her goals this way: "I want my readers to laugh and cry and fall in love. Basically, I want them to escape into another world for a little while and afterwards to feel as though they've been on a great adventure."
Julie lives in Leawood, Kansas, and is currently working on her next novel.
Interview: Julie Garwood, author of 'Sweet Talk'
By Joyce Lamb, USA TODAY
Hey, guess what? I got to talk to Julie Garwood on the phone. Theactual Julie Garwood. And I gotta tell you: She's my new BFF (please don't tell Nora). While I was interviewing Julie, she kept asking questions about my books and my writing methods, and it turned into more of a conversation than an interview. And that's just cool, in my humble opinion. So here you go, what Julie and I talked about (on the phone!), including her thoughts on today's new release, Sweet Talk; our mutual love for Gerard Butler and Clive Owen (sigh); and the frustration of the past few years of financial messes (grrr). (Edited for clarity and length.)
Joyce: I found it interesting that Olivia in Sweet Talk is a lawyer for the IRS. So many people hate the IRS.
Julie: When you hear "IRS" or receive an envelope with the emblem on it, you just get this dreaded feeling. But the reason she is is to learn all she can becuse she's determined to stop her dad from doing more harm with his Ponzi scheme of all Ponzi schemes. She's the only one who realizes what he's doing.
Joyce: I love the twist of having her dad be behind the Ponzi scheme rather than him being harmed by it and she's seeking revenge.
Julie: I know. Let's just take the mortgage mess and cut through why and all of that when it was going on. When you're in it and you're part of it, your outlook is different. But when you aren't and you just go over the history of it, it's stunning that people profited and destroyed so many, I won't say lives, because it's material, but still it's amazing that it happened, I think. It's very sad, too, that some of these banks and financial institutions knew exactly what was going to happen and profited while it was going up and knew when to sell so that they'd make more money when it crashed. That's, as you know, criminal and a lot of them got away with it.
And that's what I wanted (to accomplish with) Olivia. Even though he's her father, she thinks, "He can't get away with this. He's hurting too many people." So that's why I did it. I also made it personal with a guy who's in jail and is going to get something like 25 years for something he didn't do. The father manipulated that, and it was kind of a vindication to get him free and see how the heroine does that. That's the fun of being an author, where you can have things work out the way that you want them to.
(This is where Joyce agrees wholeheartedly and goes on a little too long about the billionaire CEO in her current book, who's going to get what's coming to him by the end.)
Julie: Oh, I know. And you know what's sad? They know, and they don't care. I just find that pretty amazing that there's no conscience. And when you watched all this stuff with Madoff, did you ever see any remorse?
Joyce: He just seemed sad that he lost all his money and had to go to jail.
Julie: Yeah, and the fact that the wife was loyal to him ... when you have kids — I have three — the kids become the priority. They come before everything else, including husband, as far as I'm concerned. For this man, I don't know ... he was hard to understand. I didn't start out using him as my example. It actually was the mortgage crisis and seeing what these institutions were doing. It's like you said, it's satisfying, even if it's only on paper, to get them. (Laughs.)
Joyce: Plus, you can kind of work out your frustration with what's happening, because you're providing a solution in your book and closure that you aren't getting in reality.
Julie: Exactly. I think I could write a really brutal thriller, but I don't want to. There are so many awful things going on. Not just the economy, but Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan and all of that. I just want to make people smile. I don't want to scare them.
Joyce: (Commiserates on the bad news and how awful people are to each other, especially families.)
Julie: At the opening of Sweet Talk, there are four girls and they become her family. They're in a chemo ward, and they're very young and they don't think they're going to survive. They're fatalists, all of them. But as you read the book, you see how close they are. They're her real family. I grew up in a family of six girls and one boy, so sisters and brothers are very important, and I like to write about that bond.
Joyce: Do you have any plans to write each of the women's romances?
Julie: Eventually, I will. But this book I'm writing now is supposed to be a trilogy about three sisters. The prologue (features) the oldest of three brothers, and I'm having so much fun, I don't know if if it's brothers I'm doing or sisters. I don't know. I have to do all of them. I love these characters. But I'll eventually get around to doing the other girls (fromSweet Talk). I like writing about friends. There was a book I wrote calledThe Secret about two girls who became friends "before they were old enough to know to hate each other." One is English, and one is Scottish. They stayed friends. I've got friends from grade school. Women bond differently, and I don't think men understand that. They bond in a different way than we do. I see that with my sons. No less or more, just different. So I like writing about that.
Joyce: I like reading about it. When I finish a book that's handled relationships really well, I feel good about my own relationships.
Julie: That makes me feel good.
Joyce: I love the cover of Sweet Talk, with the suit and the crisp lines. You see so many covers of romance novels today with the naked chests. Which is better than nearly naked boobage to me. The hero here just seems more normal, he's not all bulked up and huge.
Julie: I love these covers, too. I love for the strength to be in readers' minds.
Joyce: Did you have any influence on the cover or were you just lucky?
Julie: I loved the cover of The Ideal Man, and so did a lot of other people. So we wanted to stay with that sort of look. I just love this cover.
Joyce: The cover of Sweet Talk is very striking. I have it sitting here on my desk, and I keep looking at it and thinking, "I want that guy." (Laughs.)
Julie: (Laughs.) That's the standard. If you have the whole face, body and everything ... it's why I don't write, "He looked like George Clooney." Because there are a lot of people who don't like George Clooney. I want it to be in their imagination what he or she looks like, and that's why I don't give a lot of description.
Joyce: Suppose there was going to be a movie of Sweet Talk, like Hallmark did of For the Roses in 1997 (the movie was called Rose Hill). I know you don't want to overdescribe your characters, but who would you cast to play Olivia and Grayson?
Julie: I never thought about it. You read the book and then you tell me. (Laughs.)
Joyce: OK. (Laughs.) I have a tendency to cast the same guy when I'm reading a book. Gerard Butler is always the hero to me.
Julie: Oh, isn't he adorable? You know who else is really good-looking? Clive Owen.
Joyce: Oh, yeah.
Julie: I saw him in the movie King Arthur. You should rent that. It's really good. And he is great in it. But any of those guys would be swell.
Joyce: I wouldn't complain! My favorite of all your books is Murder List. Other than Sweet Talk, of course, do you have a favorite?
Julie: I've written the prologue of this new one (which doesn't yet have a title), and I love it. I'm always into the book I'm writing. I really loved Grayson in Sweet Talk, though.
Joyce: Do you have any plans to write more historicals?
Julie: I love historical romance, absolutely love it. I just feel at home there, too. Heartbreaker was my first contemporary, and it wasn't because Iwanted to do a contemporary. There's always one scene that determines the book for me and I couldn't get it to work in a historical setting. It had to be contemporary, and that led to a series called The Buchanans. Once I got to know this family, I had to write the next one and the next one. It kind of got away from me.
Joyce: I don't think anyone is complaining.
Julie: Eventually I want to do another historical. I've got a couple of stories I want to do.
Joyce: So what's next?
Julie: I don't have a title for this book — that's the hardest part for me. But it's going to be three sisters and then the three brothers, and I don't know who's going to win out in this case. But I like these sisters. But I love the boys, too. Who knows? Right now, I'm just writing it and figuring it out.
Joyce: Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me, Julie!
Julie: It was my pleasure.
To find out more about Julie and her books, you can visit her website, JulieGarwood.com. You can also connect with her on Facebook and Twitter (@JulieGarwood).
Overview
In the new contemporary romance from #1 New York Times bestselling author Julie Garwood, a detective and a lawyer are falling in love— and making a federal case out of it.
When FBI agent Grayson Kincaid first encounters Olivia MacKenzie, she makes quite an impression.
The beautiful, tough, young attorney has stumbled into the middle of an FBI sting operation and has reduced it to chaos. Months of surveillance and careful planning down the drain, Kincaid’s partner is furious and lets Olivia know that she’s ticked off the wrong guy. After all, he’s FBI.
Olivia isn’t intimidated by his partner’s bullying because she’s something even scarier . . . she’s IRS.
And working for the IRS isn’t for the faint of heart. She’s on the trail of an elaborate Ponzi scheme, one that threatens to ruin the lives of naive and unsuspecting victims, and one she has personal reasons to be angry about. But after she asks questions of the wrong people, her life is suddenly endangered. She’s accustomed to fighting for the underdog but being vulnerable herself is a very different story. Smart enough to know when to call for reinforcements, she contacts Grayson Kincaid.
Together they make an excellent team to fight corruption but Olivia is also fighting the immediate and intense attraction she feels for Agent Kincaid, and that may be a battle she is bound to lose.
Julie HI!!!!!
I'm so excited to be visiting with one of my all time favorite authors I love both your contemporary and your historical novels and Sweet Talk is next on my read pile, it was a special gift from a very special person (you know who you are 
)
I'll check back later after I plug this guest visit EVERYWHERE
