Dana Littlejohn's Blog

Ladies and Gents let's welcome Dana Littlejohn:

Hello followers of the fabulous Raven Starr!
I want to thank Raven for having me on her blog and thank you guys for taking the time to read my contribution. Today Raven and decided I would talk about what makes me tick (well, sort of). She had a few questions for me and then a few more came from those and in the end I hope you have an idea of why I do what I do…and still want to read my stuff after you know. LOL Let’s get started, shall we?
Q: Where do you get your ideas to write inter racial romance? Let me first say that when the ideas for my stories form in my brain it does not distinguish between races or color. In fact, when I begin the journey to build the main male character for a story I go people watching. Living in a major city is really good for that because we have a major airport, a large Greyhound Station, the largest library in the state and lots of college campuses. I go to different places until I see ‘him’ and then I take a mental picture of him and go home to finish building him from the inside out. I appreciate the beauty and differences in men of all races so my male characters end up from all races.
Q: Do you find that writing this genre is hard to get agent attention or build up a real following? I didn’t even know ‘inter racial’ romance was a genre. LOL I just write what my brain sees. I have several books that are not inter racial (WCP-Torrid Teasers:55, Behind the Wings and The House, Red Rose Publishing-The god’s Silver Connection, Phaze- Christmas with Holly, and Take Over Publications- Blaze’s Black Widows). As far as getting an agent goes, in the beginning most of my stories were too short to go into print so I didn’t really think about one. Now that I have 3 full length novels under my belt I don’t know if I need one, I find that I want an agent. Finding one has proving to be extremely difficult. I don’t know if it’s the competition, the genre that I write (mostly erotic romance, mostly interracial) or they just think that I suck. But never-the-less, I just keep on trying!
Q: When you ‘build’ your characters, do you start on the inside out? Yes, my characters have a life and a personality before they have a face. The circumstances they are put through while growing up and personal taste determine what their significant others will look like.
Q: How do you come up with your female leads?
Usually my female leads are usually African American (or a mixed race) women who are spunky, feisty women with some kind of issue to overcome so they can be happy with themselves and whoever they choose to be with.
Q: Once you have your characters, how does the story form? Do you know what happen from start to finish? In the forming stage my story is usually a mess. It comes to me in spurts, but by the time I piece it together I have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Q: You have written several sub-genres, how do you choose which one you will do next? Nope, no template, no chart, no pre planned ideas. LOL I am truly a fly by the seat of my pants writer. I can see a story happening before my eyes and I write what I see. I choose which story to write by who speaks the loudest to me. I just finished a short story called The Foot has Spoken (it is a foot fetish story) and have already started the next, I call it Ming Bling (it’s about a married couple who have hit a slump and what the wife does to get them out of it)
Well, I hope this little look inside my head will still have you turning the pages of my books and not running away from me screaming at the top of your lings. I had a great time, Raven, thanks again for having me.
Dana~
www.danalittlejohn.net
www.liljohndana.webs.com
www.myspace.com/liljohndana