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Recently, I sat down with best-selling author Joyce Lamb to talk about her exciting new column with USA TODAY, her career as a journalist and her terrific new suspense series.
MK:TRUE VISION won the Daphne Du Maurier award in Single Title Romantic Mystery Suspense. You've been compared to Iris Johansen and Tami Hoag. Heady stuff for a novelist?
JL:Yes, it is! When I saw that the review on one of my earlier titles, Found Wanting, mentioned Tami Hoag and Iris Johansen – that was probably an even cooler moment than when I made my first book sale. I mean, those two are my idols. Amazing. Found Wanting, incidentally, is a 99-cent e-book now. Just in case you want to see for yourself. : )
The True Vision win was a total shock. It was up against books by Cindy Gerard, Laura Griffin and Brenda Novak, so I thought, “No way.” I was truly just thrilled to be in such great company. The night of the awards, all the finalists were asked up onto the stage, and so I was standing there with Cindy, Brenda and Laura and thinking, “Don’t look stupid, don’t look stupid.” I was so starstruck that I didn’t even really hear it when True Vision was named the winner. So I probably ended up looking stupid anyway, because I couldn’t believe it. So, yeah, that was pretty heady stuff.
MK: You've interviewed everyone from Nora Roberts to Brenda Novak for your USA TODAY "Happy Ever After" column. How did the column come about? You're creating a lot of buzz for so many wonderful authors.
JL: Thanks, Mary! It’s been a lot of fun. How it came about: I’m a copy editor at USA Today, and part of my job is to copy edit the paper’s video game blog. I was reading it one day and thought, “Romance novels are to women what video games are to men and boys.” So I pitched the idea for Happy Ever After to the PTBs. USA Today already has great brand recognition with readers (lots of romances say “USA Today best-selling author of …”). And I pointed out that my experience as a romance novelist would add an element that no one else on the USA Today staff or at other major media outlets could provide. Plus, no other major media organization caters to the genre that supports the publishing industry, so the opportunity to have a big impact is there. Luckily, I work with some very smart people, and they saw the opportunity, too.
MK: Your father was in the newspaper business and you were a news editor for the Rockford Register. Charlie Trudeau in TRUE VISION is a newspaper reporter. Is art imitating life here?
JL: A little. My dad and I worked together at the Rockford newspaper in Illinois. Because of my dad, I grew up in that newsroom before I started working there. This is fun: I ended up supervising at least one person who’d sat with me on her lap at her desk when I was a kid. By the time I left the Rockford paper to go to USA Today, I outranked my dad. It was kinda cool – and he loved it. In True Vision, Charlie is a super frustrated reporter, which does reflect some of my frustration with the newspaper business at the community level. Some advertisers try to manipulate news coverage, which is super unethical, yet they seem to think they can do that because the newspaper needs their money to survive. That’s happening at Charlie’s community newspaper in True Vision, and she does something to counter that that gets her and the newspaper into some deep doo-doo. It was fun to write – I got to work out some of my own issues. : )
MK: You mentioned that you read Sidney Sheldon. How did he influence your writing?
JL: Sidney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels set me on the path to being a novelist. I was only 17 when I read that book. It didn’t have a happy ending, but it really made me feel a lot: happy, sad, angry. And I thought, “I want to make people feel like this. I’m going to write books.” I started right away, too. I was only 17, though, and kinda sucked as a writer. Plus, there was the whole going to college thing and getting a job to pay the bills before I could really focus on writing novels. It was pretty much a hobby until many years later, when I
