Elaine Levine Interview & Giveaway

Hi Danielle!  Thank you for letting me stop by today and give your site a small detour into historical western romance!  

Glad to have you here!  Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure.  I’m a poser.  Pure and simple.  I fake being a human--all of my thought processes focus on my fiction until those characters and distant eras seem more real than daily life.  Thank heavens for my husband who cooks and makes sure I have clean clothes and provides chocolate and caffeine at the appropriate times.

Your latest release in the Men of Defiance series is LEAH AND THE BOUNTY HUNTER.  What’s it about?  Hunky men, vampire cowboys, hot monkey sex?

Mmm.  My Men of Defiance stories are hot, but I’m not sure they’re hot-monkey-sex hot...  They’re about the hard-edged men who settle in the frontier town of Defiance--and the women who tame them!  The latest release, the 3^rd in the series, is about a vigilante who comes to clear the corrupt sheriff and his gang of thieves out of town.  Jace Gage has been on a mission since the close of the Civil War to put an end to the thugs and corruption prevalent in the lawless towns of the American West.  It’s a death wish, really, one that’s ridden him hard since his first wife tried to have him hanged during the war.  There wasn’t a woman alive who could tempt him into making a permanent commitment again...until he met Leah Morgan, a blue-eyed, violence-hating tomboy living in Defiance.

You have a recurring theme in your work.  What is it and why is it important to you?

I do have a theme that seems to pop-up in each of my stories.  It’s that feeling of coming home, of finding where you belong.  My characters don’t always return to their roots, but in connecting with their soul mates they discover themselves.  This is one of the best elements of almost any romance story--that sense of everything’s right with the world.  By the time a reader turns the last page, that feeling of well-being spills out of the fictional world and into their real lives.

So, given that this is a historical, would you typically define your male characters as beta?  Omega?

Oh no.  My books are about edgy, unneutered male heroes, in all their raw, masculine glory.  They like life the way they like it.  Women confound them.  And they would turn the world inside-out, upside-down, and back again if it would make the women they love happy.

Sounds interesting.  We may have to venture over to the dark side and pick up one of your historical westerns!  How many books do you plan on writing for this series?  Is it a trilogy?

I hope you do give it a try!  This is an open-ended series.  I’m having too much fun writing these stories to see an end to the series yet.  It seems every new book introduces new characters desperately in need of their own stories.  I suppose, when I get to the end of the interesting characters, I’ll be at the end of the series!  LOGAN’S OUTLAW comes out next March.  That book was full of surprises for me, but I guess they all are.  I loved getting to know Logan and Sarah--I was sad to finish writing that book! 

You also mentioned a new series to look forward to.  Can you tell us a little about it?

Gladly!  It’s a contemporary western series called Wolf Creek Bend--a little more in keeping with your site.  The first one, TANNER, is about a soldier returning from the war in Afghanistan to a small town in Wyoming.  He’s suffering from a severe case of PTSD.  At the urging of a friend and fellow soldier, he takes a job as a foreman for a gal who is running a therapeutic riding center.  It’s funny, and poignant, and a bit of a dark exploration into a broken mind.  It will be released later this year.

Thanks for the detour, Elaine!  We’re happy to be giving away the 3 books in Elaine’s Men of Defiance series to one lucky commenter (the first book, RACHEL AND THE HIRED GUN, is only available to be given as a Kindle book).