Interview with Carmen Shirkey on Examiner.com

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Excerpt:
Once again I’m thrilled to have the rare treat of featuring a brand new author. My new author find is recently published romance author, Carmen Shirkey, whose first novel, The List, a romantic comedy, debuted in January of 2009. The List recently won the Romance category of the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. You can buy it on Amazon at www.tinyurl.com/buythelist Here’s the teaser:

Candace Saunders is a 30-something woman with a list of 50-something qualities that she wants in her future husband. She meets two men – one earns check after check on her love itinerary, the other is her anti-list. As she falls for (which one?), she begins to wonder, can perfect be put on paper?

Q: Congratulations on publishing your first novel! That’s an exciting event. Talk about the First Sale experience. How long had you been writing and how many novels had you written before getting published? What other genres have you written and what would you consider writing in the future besides romantic comedy? What else do you have coming up for publication?

A: I think I was writing in the womb! Writing has always been something that I enjoy and also happened to be good at. (Let’s just say thank goodness for the verbal section of the SAT, or my UVA dreams would’ve been dashed.) Before THE LIST, I started to write many a novel, but was never inspired enough by the stories to finish any. So THE LIST is the first novel I finished, thanks to National Novel Writing Month ant the nanowrimo.org Web site. I needed the challenge that they provided – to write a novel in one month – to kick me into action. Yes, I wrote the book in one month – but don’t worry, I spent the next year editing it!
I’ve just started writing my next novel. I don’t think I’ll write it in a month, but it’s another great story, and I hope I finish it this year. It’s very different from the romantic comedy angle of THE LIST. It’s darker, more fantasy/paranormal, but still a romantic and humorous telling of the story. If someone would one day call it a mix of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets The Dresden Files meets a cute bunny, they’d probably be pretty accurate.