Booksquare

As mentioned, debut author Gena Showalter is spending the week with us, and has fearlessly (if one can consider terror to be fearless — we do) agreed to answer any and all questions. No really, she said (and we’ll paraphrase in the interest of space), “I’ll talk about anything. Consider me an open book.”

We won’t say we knew her when, but we sort of did. In addition to her unflagging generosity (as evidenced by her critical reads of our work when we’re feeling particularly insecure, and this happens more often than we’d like to admit), she’s a rising star for both HQN and Pocket Books. While her debut novel, The Stone Prince hits shelves this week, six others are due in short order. Which leads us to our first question for Gena — but don’t make us probe her psyche alone; use the comments section to put her to the test (or email us — we’ll post on your behalf with only the smallest, in our estimation, hint of your true identity).

So, Gena, seven books. Wow. What were you thinking? How do you manage it all? How does the whole thing work — how many books were finished before you sold, how many were in the kind-of-written stage, and how many are in the wings? What advice would you give us, should we ever be fortunate (or is it unfortunate?) enough to find ourself in this situation?