by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
What: Nora Roberts Book Signing
When: November 9th @ 7pm
Where: Women’s Center at UNF
Nora Roberts has put her hands to the keyboard for over 150 novels, a staggering amount even in the twenty-five years she’s been writing. She began her career with Irish Thoroughbred, published in ’81. Before her writing career took off and the birth of her two sons, she worked as a legal secretary. She spends about eight hours a day writing, even working while on vacation. In the romance novel biz she’s become a legend, lightheartedly known as “the Nora.”
In 1995, she was so well known and prolific that her publicists convinced her to write under a different name, so she began the “In Death” series, starting with Naked in Death. This first book was under the name J.D. Robb, the J and the D coming from her sons’ first initials and the Robb as a shortening of Roberts. The premise of the futuristic series is this: it’s the mid-21st century and Lt. Eve Dallas is an NYPD cop trying to solve murders. Her books came out and started to rise on the best seller lists, but Nora Roberts remained incognito until 2001, for her 12th book in the series: Betrayal in Death. Her most recent book in the series, the 24th she’s written, is Born in Death. The steamy sex scenes are pure Roberts, as they are the coin of the romance novel realm, but the bulk of her stories in this series isn’t about perusing love (Eve Dallas finds it in the first book) but about solving mysteries. Consequently, you’ll find this book in the mystery section or in sci-fi (because of its futuristic setting). Fans of the series have been waiting for this book, because Eve’s best friend, Mavis, will finally be having her baby.
I wanted to do something a little different. Initially it started because I write quickly and my agent, editor and my publisher had the idea of taking a pseudonym, which I didn’t like. I didn’t want to write something under another name. My agent was talking to me one day (I’d dragged my heels on this for a couple of years)… she said “Nora, there’s Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and there’s caffeine-free Pepsi” and I got it the second [she said it]. It was marketing. Being two popular brands sounded interesting too. So I agreed to try that if I could do something different…I had had the idea for the character of Eve Dallas and the basic set up of New York in the near future, but I had tucked it away. When this came up, I thought “now’s my chance, let’s see what we can do with that.”… The books are darker and grittier…When most readers pick up a book under my name they’re probably not looking for something quite that violent and that dark. Plus, it’s a continuing series, open-ended with continuing characters. So there were a lot of elements that made it very appealing to do under another name and see if we can build a readership with that [name]. And we did.
When we started the series back in ’95, my name wasn’t on it anywhere, just J.D. Robb, so they could build on their own merit…The books started to make the major lists then we had a lot of fun with a big reveal. It was Betrayal in Death, I used that tag: You’ve been betrayed, J.D. Robb is actually…[Nora Roberts]…
I…come up with an idea, like wouldn’t it be interesting to have in that setting or a career element or a character type. Whatever gets the ball rolling and I build from there, until I have some sort of a very basic storyline in my head and I do research and I do a really bare bones first draft. I just get the story down, find out where it’s going, beginning middle and end. I don’t edit during that process, just get the story down and if I’ve made mistakes, I worry about that later. Then I go back to page one chapter one and I start to fix it, flesh out the characters I now know a lot more about than when I started. Expand, twist, tweak, whatever it takes…And then I’ll go back one more time for the third draft and polish, try to make sure the language is tight and everything works…then, I send it off to my editor.
I have no idea. I don’t count them. I don’t worry about that. The only one I’m worrying about is the one I’m writing. I learned years ago that writing doesn’t make you neurotic; neurotics become writers, and that you could be neurotic about any number of things and that was one of them. I could see myself becoming obsessed with [questions like] How long did this book take me to write? How many books have I done at this point in the year? Am I slowing down? Am I speeding up?...And I’d make myself crazy.
I think one of my ideas was, the more things change, the more they don’t. You have different technology, you certainly have advanced technology…but human nature remains the same: people love, people hate, people are heroic, people hurt each other, they kill each other in horrible ways. That’s never changed. There will always be people like Eve Dallas who will try to stop it.
Nora Roberts will be in Jacksonville on a book-signing tour on Thursday, November 9th at the Women’s Center at UNF at 7:00 pm. And is being presented by Books-A-Million.
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