Interview with Laurie Alice Eakes

Award-winning author Laurie Alice Eakes wanted to be a writer since knowing what one was. Her first book won the National Readers Choice Award in 2007, and her third book was a Carol Award finalist in 2010. Between December of 2008 and January of 2010, she sold thirteen books to Barbour Publishing, Avalon Books, and Baker/Revell, making her total sales fifteen. Recently, she added a novella to that collection, as well as having her first book with Baker/Revell, Lady in the Mist, picked up by Crossings Book Club, and three of her books chosen for large print editions by Thorndike Press. She has been a public speaker for as long as she can remember; thus, only suffers enough stage fright to keep her sharp. In 2002, while in graduate school for writing fiction, she began to teach fiction in person and online. She lives in Texas with her husband, two dogs, and too many cats even for her. http://www.lauriealiceeakes.com

[Anne] When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer, Laurie?

[Laurie] I think I was about ten or eleven. I was a poet then, but starting to dabble in fiction.

[Anne] Will you tell us about your latest book.

[Laurie] Lady in the Mist is the first book in The Midwives series. On her way home from a disastrous lying-in, midwife Tabitha Eckles encounters an Englishman in the early morning mist where no Englishman should be in 1809, as England and America rush toward another war. Consequences of the lying-in she’s just left and the charming, but possibly deadly, stranger, and the young men disappearing from the village on the Virginia shoreline, plunge Tabitha into a world of intrigue and danger, where she has hard lessons to learn about love and self-forgiveness.

[Anne] What inspired you to write this story?

[Laurie] Would you believe a project I wrote in graduate school for history? It was on midwives in history, and the more I researched, the more I realized how fascinating these women were. “Women of Power” is what I called my paper. You can read more about that journey on the Romantic Times blog on Feb. 8, and even more detail on my own blog from the January 3 posting. www.seizethechance.blogspot.com

[Anne] How did you go about researching your book?

[Laurie] I read books, diaries, obituaries, books published from as long ago as the 1670s. . . an overwhelming cornucopia of materials from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Being at a university, I had access to a rich assortment not open to the general public, as a rule.

[Anne] Do you have anything new in the works?

[Laurie] Oh, yes. From December, 2008 and Jan. 2010, I signed contracts for thirteen novels. In January, I sold two novellas. Right now, I’m writing the second of my career ladies series for Avalon Books, then will start my second Regency for Baker/Revell (the first one, A Necessary Deception is out in October of this year), and I just turned in my second book in the Midwives series, also from Baker/Revell.

[Anne] Wow! Congratulations on your wonderful success! What is your writing process like? Are you a plotter or a pantser?

[Laurie] I am a definite plotter. When I started getting methodical about this, I started selling books. With my schedule—three novels and two novellas to write in 2011—outlining first makes the process go much faster.

[Anne] If you could be anyone of your characters, which one would you choose to be and why?

[Laurie] Oh, Tabitha, because she gets Dominick. LOL

[Anne] Say your publisher has offered to fly you anywhere in the world to do research on an upcoming book, where would you most likely want to go?

[Laurie] Great Britain—all of it—England, Scotland, Wales. I’ve been to continental Europe three times, but have never gotten to Great Britain.

[Anne] Oh, I’d love to go to England, too. What type of books do you like to read when you’re not writing?

[Laurie] I read a lot of mysteries and young adult because I don’t write those, so I’m not constantly second-guessing the author; however, I do read in my own historical romance genre and wish more had suspense, as my books do. I love a good suspense plot.

[Anne] Name three things you can’t live without (excluding spouses and family because that’s a given).

[Laurie] Books, pets, . . . hmm. . . It’s a toss-up between coffee and chocolate.

[Anne] Great choices, but I’d have to go with the chocolate :-). What advice would you give to any aspiring writers out there?

[Laurie] Finish something. It’s the best advice I ever got and I pass it along.

[Anne] Where can we find you on the web?

[Laurie] http://www.lauriealiceeakes.com

[Anne] Where can we purchase your books?

[Laurie] Anywhere you purchase books—cbd.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, your local bookstore.

[Anne] Is there anything else you’d like to add?

[Laurie] If you drop by my web site, I have excerpts from all my books up there. As soon as I get the final edition of my next book cover, I’ll be updating and changing things a bit, too, so do come and enjoy.

Thank you, Laurie!  I want to wish you continued success in your writing career.

Getting Your Facts Straight by Laurie Alice Eakes

Although I don’t know everything, of course, I’ve gotten a bit of a reputation for being a know-it-all when it comes to research. The truth is, I don’t know that much; I simply learned in studying history in grad school, how to find the answers.

The Internet seems to make this easy. Unfortunately, a great deal of false information lurks on the billions of pages available to us. Here are a handful of tips for getting your facts straight.

When possible, go to the original source. If you want to know about police procedure, find a few policemen to talk to. Most police departments have a public relations office that will help with this.

When original sources like the professionals aren’t available—a problem I have in writing historical fiction—get a minimum of three sources. If you can get ahold of diaries or newspapers from the time and place about which you’re writing, you’ve struck gold. In this, I recommend the advanced search options under Google Books.

Careful thinking that, because you’re writing about your own city, that you know everything already. One of my favorite examples is a mystery in which a blind character in California said he and his wife picked out his guide dog. Well, actually, in California, this isn’t possible. All guide dogs have to be trained by a licensed instructor and one can’t just pick one out. The author lived in the city where many guide dogs are around, so she thought she knew how the system worked.

To make a reader truly feel involved in the story, getting details in the setting right helps. For this, you need to know more than who would collect the body in Colorado. You need to find out what trees, flowers, grasses are around. What is the weather like in October? Does the air smell like wood smoke or pine trees? Some resources for this, in the event you don’t know people from the region, are Facebook pages dedicated to an area, and Yahoo Groups dedicated to an area. A woman I know wrote about Ireland using resources like this, and even Irish people thought she’d been there.

When writing, we need to tell a good story and part of that telling is getting even the tiniest facts right.

Award-winning author Laurie Alice Eakes does not remember a time when books did not play a part in her life; thus, no one was surprised when she decided to be a writer. Her first hardcover was an October, 2006 Regency historical from Avalon Books and won the National Readers Choice Award for Best Regency, as well as being a finalist for Best First Book. She is also a finalist for the ACFW Carol award in the short historical category (winners to be announced in September). After selling her first book in the inspirational market, she also wrote articles and essays for Christian publications. A brief hiatus in publishing climaxed with her selling thirteen books in thirteen months, to publishers such as Barbour, Avalon, and Baker/Revell.


She is an active member of RWA and ACFW, and started the Avalon Authors group blog. A graduate of the Seton Hill University Master of Arts Degree in Writing Popular Fiction, And a Bachelor of Arts graduate in English and French from Asbury College, she is an experienced speaker, and has made presentations at local and national RWA conferences, as well as local universities and libraries.

Until recently, she lived in Northern Virginia, then her husband’s law career took them and their dogs and cats, to southern Texas, where she writes full-time and enjoys the beach whenever possible.

You can find her web site at: http://www.lauriealiceeakes.com