ROMANTIC SUSPENSE OR HISTORICAL ROMANCE? by Kat Martin

Please welcome NYT best selling author KAT MARTIN to the WF blog today as our very first guest. Please give her a warm welcome!

For most of my writing career, I wrote historical romance, more than forty novels. Being a history buff and particularly loving the old West, I started out writing western romance. MAGNIFICENT PASSAGE was my first--a true bodice ripper and a far different book than I would write today. The old West was a natural fit since my relatives were western people--covered wagons across the plains, rodeo cowboys, ranchers, the whole bit. I loved packing horseback into the high Sierras, loved just about anything western, and still do.

But changing what you write keeps a writer fresh, and little by little I was drawn to the Regency time period, lords and ladies, members of the British aristocracy, books set in England. GYPSY LORD was my first, and it changed my writing forever. For years after that, I wrote Regency, then slid into the Victorian period. The Brides’ Trilogy was my last foray into that realm.

But almost from the start, I had been dabbling in romantic suspense, starting with THE SILENT ROSE, a ghost story based on a true experience. Mostly I just wanted to challenge myself, see if I could actually write a novel in a contemporary setting. Could I get the voice right? Would my audience approve?

By the time I had written the first ten, I realized contemporary fiction was my strong suit.

An idea for a series about three brothers started niggling at the back of my mind. Jackson Raines, AGAINST THE WIND, was the first. His brothers, Gabe and Devlin, appeared in the book then got their own stories, AGAINST THE FIRE and AGAINST THE LAW. All of the books hit the New York Times Bestseller List, a exciting accomplishment for me.

From there I wrote friends of the brothers, AGAINST THE STORM, AGAINST THE NIGHT, and AGAINST THE SUN. Again, the books hit the N.Y.T.

I was loving the change of pace and I couldn’t seem to stop. In my latest effort, AGAINST THE ODDS, book #7 in the series, just released this month, Sabrina Eckhart receives an inheritance from her uncle--an abandoned silver mine in the West Texas desert. Running out of money, Rina is determined to find the mine and make it productive, even if it means putting up with the cocky jet jockey she is determined to dislike but finds irresistibly attractive.

G.Q. handsome and obscenely rich, Alex Justice is a private investigator and an ex-Navy pilot, just the man Sabrina needs to fly her safely into the desert in search of her late uncle’s property. It’s a sexy tale of survival, murder, betrayal, and intrigue that kept me writing long after I should have been done for the day.
So my thinking is that a writer should write whatever stories the muse whispers. My only advice is to try those new ideas on your own time. Keep writing what you’re known for until you see if you can handle the change. See if that’s really what you want to do.

And see if your audience is ready to go along with you when you do it.
If you haven’t tried my AGAINST books, I hope you will. Very best wishes and happy reading, Kat