Author Interview with P.R. Mason

The Books

• Entanglements – Read my review HERE
• Fated Hearts

The Interview

Thank you for taking the time to answer these interview questions!

Thank you so much for having me on your excellent blog. I appreciate the opportunity to connect with readers.

1. When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

One of my earliest memories is of regaling a group of my childhood friends with a story I’d created. I believe it featured an excessive number of dragons. My love of story telling continued through my teens. However, my teenage writings were much too angsty and featured characters who whined a lot. I finished my first novel about five years ago, A GIRL, A GUY and a GHOST written under the name Patricia Mason. That book does not feature any dragons, but does have a somewhat whiny, discrimination-obsessed, vampire. Now I write steamy romance as Patricia Mason and YA urban fantasy and paranormal romance as P.R. Mason

2. How long does it take you to write a book?

Every book is different but, if I can get the beginning “right”, it takes about three months for me to write the first draft and about a month to revise. For Entanglements, I must have written the first thirty pages at least five times before arriving at a beginning that felt right. The basic plot points of the story were set but I just couldn’t open the novel in an exciting way. Once I found the right beginning, the whole story flowed and was written quickly. However, there were a few plot points that changed and were added along the way as the characters took over and decided what they wanted to do and not to do.

3. What would you say is your most interesting writing quirk?

Probably the fact that I usually need to leave my house and go to a coffee shop in order to write. If I stay at home, my cat overlords, or at least one of them, lies on the keyboard, sits on my lap, meows for treats, demands caressing…. you get the picture.

4. Where did you get the idea/inspiration for your main character, Kizzy Taylor?

Some stories start with the character and some start with the plot. With Entanglements, the idea for the plot came first and then I had to decide what sort of heroine would be caught up in what I’d envisioned. As I said earlier, I wrote the first thirty pages a number of times. The heroine of Entanglements, Kizzy, started out with brown hair but she was too whiney and not bold enough.

She didn’t fully form into a real person for me until I decided she had extremely curly red hair, which she straightened when trying to conform to societal expectations. Her personality soon followed and became as fiery as her hair.

Also, since the novel is an urban fantasy/paranormal romance, I wanted Kizzy, to be engaged in a hobby that reflected the feisty but reckless aspects of her personality. The hobby also had to lead her into a setting that would serve the plot, which by that time I knew would involve Kizzy’s accidentally opening a vortex to a dangerous alternate dimension. The hobby also had to fit with my hero, Rom, an athletic alpha male who is soldier-tough and bent on doing his duty.

The idea for the specific hobby that would fit my needs ultimately came from an anonymous Facebook posting on a page devoted to urban spelunking in NYC: “If you’re interested in going on a spelunk ask yourself these questions: (1) Am I okay with getting arrested? (2) Am I afraid of getting tuberculosis, inhaling intoxicants, etc? (3) Am I okay with getting cut up? (4) Do I know how incredibly dangerous and stupid this is?”

Since Savannah, Georgia—the setting—has a number of tunnels connected to nefarious activity or tragic circumstances, I knew I’d found the perfect hobby for my heroine. I’d found the hobby that would lead Kizzy into an abandoned building, through a reportedly haunted tunnel, and ultimately, into another world.

5. How did you come up with the idea for Entanglements?

I saw something on string theory on the Discovery channel. When I googled the concepts, I came across a quote from Einstein about the quantum mechanics theory of entanglements where he referred to it as “spooky action at a distance.” Scientists had discovered that a particle could be tweaked miles away from another and still cause the second particle to react even though there was no discernable connection between them. The scientists theorized that the two were “entangled” in an alternate dimension or universe of which they believed there are at least seven. Interestingly also, in the world of quantum physics, effect does not always follow cause. Sometimes they are reversed. I began to wonder what would happen if people or beings were entangled in alternate universes? And from this, ENTANGLEMENTS was born.

6. Who would you consider your favorite author and why?

I have so many favorite authors some of whom are: Jane Austen, J.R. Ward, J.K. Rowling…Wow I just figured out I have a thing about J names. But I think what they all have in common is that they are able to create a world and transport the reader inside to experience a way of life that is very different from their own.

7. Are you working on something right now? If so, what?

A sequel to Entanglements is in the works. RESISTANCE takes up the story of a fighter in the human resistance who, along with her alchemist/vampire hero, must defeat an army of soul sucking golems. I expect to release the sequel in March of 2012.

Right in the middle of working on the sequel, however, I became obsessed with the concept of predestination and the line between fate and free will. My father always came down on the side of 100% predetestination because he often had vivid dreams that foretold future events in his life. Some of these occurred years after the dream. So he thought every event in his life was “fated” to happen and his choices made no difference. I argued that choices had to matter. I always thought that his dreams were precognitive of an event that would happen if he continued on the path on which he was traveling at the time. And those dreams of events that never happened were forgotten because he changed paths. Anyway, these issues came to the forefront of my mind in relation to two characters and so I felt driven to write their story. The 11000-word paranormal romance novella FATED HEARTS is the result. It was just released. Here’s the blurb:

EVE has always played by the rules, afraid to take chances. HOLDEN wants to change that. She’s certain they’ve never met before…or have they? Holden seems so familiar, but who is he? What is he? Yesterday her biggest challenge was trying not to bomb on her SATs. Today, paranormal forces have transformed an ordinary high school dance into a test of fate vs. free will and loving Holden could be Eve’s end.

It’s available exclusively at Amazon. As a promotion, it will be FREE on January 24th and 25th. I hope you’ll check it out.

I definitely will check it out! Thank you for answering my interview questions!

The Author

P.R. Mason writes steamy contemporary and paranormal romance under the name Patricia Mason and young adult paranormal romance and urban fantasy as P.R. Mason. She escaped from the snowy Midwest winters of her youth by moving in 2001 to the strange and wonderful city of Savannah, Georgia to pursue her dream of being a novelist. Pat’s background is eclectic. She was an Assistant District Attorney and for a number of years was the owner of an antique shop which was home to a number of ghosts. Her home is ruled by two black cats, one of whom was rescued from the most haunted cemetery in the southeast.

Please visit www.prmason.net. You can also follow the author @prmason on Twitter.