Jackie Collins marks 40 years of "guilty pleasures"

British author Jackie Collins is still inadvertently teaching teenage girls about sex through her steamy novels that have seen her regularly grace bestseller lists since her first book was published 40 years ago.

Collins -- who refuses to reveal how old she is, except to say that she is still several years shy of 70 -- released her 26th novel, "Married Lovers," in the United States on Tuesday.

"I get the 15-year-olds all the time going 'I read my mum's book under the covers and you taught me everything I know about sex,"' Collins said of e-mails she receives, adding married couples also thank her for spicing up their love lives.

While disliked by critics, the younger sister of Hollywood actress Joan Collins has sold more than 400 million books in more than 40 countries and all of her previous 25 novels remain in print, according to her publisher St. Martin's Press.

"I'm a storyteller. I'm not a literary writer and I never pretended to be," Collins said. Many of her novels have been made into hit television movies and mini-series.

During an interview in a luxury New York City hotel suite, she told Reuters she is "horrified" by the fact it has been four decades since her first novel, "The World is Full of Married Men," was published in the United States and Britain.

"It's ridiculous, time goes by so fast when you're having fun. I think I am the only writer still on the bestseller list all these years later," said Collins, who still handwrites her novels on yellow legal notepads.

Her debut novel, reportedly deemed "filthy and disgusting" by author Barbara Cartland and banned in Australia, she says, "was way before its time" with its tale of a woman who cheats on her husband and another who likes sex with married men.

The latest offering from the Beverly Hills-based author follows a story involving three high-powered Hollywood couples, two affairs, one underage Russian ex-prostitute and a murder.

A self-confessed pop-culture junkie, Collins said she pulls all her stories from "real life and it's toned down."

"All the characters I write about are really characters that I know, I've seen, I've observed," she said.

She began writing when she was just 8, picking up her talent for love scenes after secretly reading her father's copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," which Collins says was kept in a brown paper bag beside his bed.

"It's my passion, it's my hobby, it's my everything. I just love to write," Collins said. "I'll write 'til I'm like 100 and whatever and I will drop with a pen in my hand going 'And he looked into her eyes and it was..."'

Michelle Nichols for Reuters

06/28/08 9:33pm

Mary Higgins Clark

Hello there, it’s early in the morning and I am taking a small break from writing my query. There is a writer who I think about whenever I run into a rough spot in my writing; that successful novelist is named Mary Higgins Clark. She was a widow with 5 children and would get up at 5 am and write until 7 am because she had to get the kids up. She never allowed the fact that she became a widow and had to rear 5 children stop her from her dream of being a novelist. I figure if she can do it with her situation, I certainly can too. Here is some information from an interview.

Question: What is our ideal writing situation? Time, place, atmosphere, etc…?

Mary Higgins Clark: The 3rd floor of my house has a tower-like room that has sky lights in it, bookcases. It is painted a wonderful shade Cardinal Red. There is lots of oak, and my desk. There is a love seat in an oriental pattern in red; a state of the art computer. My idea is to come up here after an early light breakfast and get right to work. For me, the best thing to do is to work from 8 ‘til 2 and have a sandwich at the desk. And to stick as much as possible to that schedule. By the time I am getting to the end of a book, I work about 17 hours a day.

Question: What is your advice to the aspiring writer?

Mary Higgins Clark: “The first thing you have to do is write. So many people tell me, ‘I’m going to write a books as soon as…’ the three fatal words are as soon as…As soon as I learn to use the computer. As soon as I quit my job. As soon as the kids grow up. As soon as the dog dies. But trust me, as soon as the kids grow up and the dog dies, there will a new set of excuses not to write which will be equally valid.”

More Interesting Tidbits on Mary Higgins Clark:

Mary was left a young widow with five children by the death of her husband, Warren Clark, from a hart attack in 1964. She went to work writing radio scripts and, in addition, decided to write books.

Every morning, she got up at 5 am and wrote until 7 am, when she had to get the kids ready for school. Her fist book was biographical novel about the life of George Washington, Aspire to the Heaves. “It was remaindered as it came off the press,” she says of her first try. Next, she decided to write a suspense novel, Where are the Children?, which became a bestseller and marked a turning point in her life and career.

06/01/08 4:40am

Quote of the Day for the Writer

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”

- Cyril Connolly

The Bumpy Road of Writers -- Michele Bardsley

Click for Michele Bardsley's Website

I wrote my first book in college computer labs and at work after hours. It took me two years to finish it. I started sending it out to agents and editors, but the form-letter rejections poured in. The next book I wrote only took two months. It won first place in four romance-novel contests, but it, too, gathered more rejections. Then I won the Silhouette Yours Truly Hook, Line, and Sinker Contest with a one-page synopsis, only to have my finished novel rejected by the editor. Five years after I started writing and trying to sell, Hard Shell Word Factory published my second novel. It took another six years, and winning the Writer's Digest annual writing competition, to get a literary agent and to sell to New American Library.

The Bumpy Road of Writers -- Maya Banks

Click for Maya Banks Website

My best friend in the world, who is also a writer, once told me that the secret to selling was to hit rock bottom first. I didn’t necessarily believe it at the time, though it had certainly been true for her and a few other writers I knew. I had somehow hoped that maybe my path would be a little less rocky. That wasn’t to be.

My writing journey began in earnest when Amy Knupp and I made a pact. We’d met in an online expecting group for mothers due in Jan/Feb 2000. In 2002, we got to talking about our mutual love for romance novels and gradually the conversation shifted to our love of writing. I’d written stories since I was a very young child, all for my own enjoyment. I’m still not sure what prompted me to lay down the challenge, but there it was. I told her we should go for it. Try to become published authors. I think she thought I was a little nuts, but I doubt she took much convincing of that fact.

We had no idea what publication entailed. We just knew we loved to read and write. We knew what we wanted to write, just not how to sell it. We joined the RWA, weeded through countless internet informationals about publication, joined critique groups, yahoo groups, basically we dove in head first.

My first love was historicals and so this was my focus. My first, horrid as it was, garnered few requests. But I learned a lot in writing that novel. My second netted significantly more requests and a lengthy conversation with an agent who loved the book but wanted me to revise it. When it came time to write that third novel, I really wanted to create something different. It paid off when I got an offer from two agents in April of 2004.

The agent I chose shopped the historical. We got a few rejections and then she emailed me to say an editor really loved it but wanted to talk about revisions. I contacted the editor and we brainstormed solutions. I rewrote the book and sent it back to my agent.

During this time, I began having doubts about my relationship with the agent. I knew in my gut that this wasn’t a good fit for me, but it was really hard to act on that knowledge. When I finally severed the relationship, I emailed the editor who had my manuscript only for her to tell me she was leaving the publisher. She passed my manuscript on to another editor, who, you guessed it, also left.

This was a very difficult time for me. I’d fired my agent, came close with an editor only to have that opportunity completely disappear. Suddenly I was faced with having to start over. Completely over. I was so burned out on historicals that I couldn’t face writing another. It had taken six, agonizingly long months just to finish the last one and every word was spilled painfully onto the page. I was so ready to give up and throw in the towel.

I took a little time off, nursed my wounds. It was during this time that Amy sold and I was ecstatically happy for her even amidst my gloom and doom. I knew I wanted to do something different and that I wasn’t ready to jump back in the agent search again. I wanted to have fun again. I knew it wasn’t going to happen for me with historical. Not right this moment, so if I had any hope of publishing, I was going to have to reinvent myself.

I loved ebooks and erotic romance and read the genre voraciously. I began writing contemporary erotic romance with the intent of submitting to an epublisher. Once I took the pressure off myself, I began to enjoy writing again. Still, I wasn’t doing much in the way of building a career and was writing when I wanted or not at all if I didn’t feel like it.

I got an idea for a novella, and I’d never even attempted one. All of my work leaned toward ludicrously long. So I wasn’t even sure I could pull it off. When I finished it, I had every intention of submitting it to my editor at the epublisher who had bought my first erotic romance. I sent it to Amy because I thought it was good, but my perception was so skewed by my own funk that I had little confidence in my opinions. She read it then told me that this was the one. She told me to send it to agents and if I didn’t she was going to hurt me.

At this point, I figured I had nothing to lose, but still, I wasn’t really ready to go back to an exhaustive agent search. So I made a list of six agents who I knew were selling in the genre and I queried them. I got four rejections, never heard from the fifth and the sixth wanted to see the full. I wasn’t confident of my chances.

I sent off the full, and during this short period of time, EVERYONE around me started selling. And I do mean everyone. It was surreal. This was when I hit rock bottom. Everyone around me was moving forward and I was stuck in the mud. I was so very happy for authors I considered dear friends, but it only heightened my despair. When would it be me? Would it EVER be me?

I began seriously researching job options. My plan was to stick out the summer when the kids were home but in the fall when they went back to school, I was going to hang up writing, at least full time, and get a job that at least offered a paycheck.

If that wasn’t enough, I had a string of really horrible luck, health wise. I got a kidney stone. Had a procedure to remove it and then was hospitalized with complications. Found out during the course of the treatment for the kidney stone that I needed my gall bladder removed. I literally spent the entire summer in the hospital.

In between medical procedures, I went on vacation with the family. I brought my laptop but didn’t have internet. I had to drive to an art gallery that had wireless and sit out in the parking lot to check my email. The Tuesday after Memorial Day, I got an email from the agent who’d requested my manuscript asking if we could set up a time on the following Friday to talk on the phone. Still, I wasn’t expecting much.

Fast forward to Friday, she called, loved the story and wanted to represent me. I had a very frank conversation with her about what had not worked with my first agent. She allayed a lot of my fears, and we rang off with the agreement to work together. She said she’d see what interest she could drum up. I was a bit in shock and resigned myself to another long wait that may or may not result in a sale.

Two hours later, I went back up to the art gallery to send a few emails and I had an email from my new agent saying that Cindy Hwang was taking my manuscript home with her over the weekend and we might have an answer on Monday. MONDAY. Good grief. I was still in denial over signing with another agent. I couldn’t even wrap my brain around what this might mean.

Monday afternoon, my agent called with an offer from Berkley. Two book deal. I was stunned. In the space of two days, I’d gone from having no agent, no options, to a two book deal. And all I could think of was how right Amy had been, that the sale had come at my lowest point. In two days, things had completely and utterly turned around for me.

Quote of the Day for the Writer

“Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.”

- Evelyn Waugh, English novelist

Quote of the Day for the Writer

"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."

-- W. Somerset Maugham