Angela Knight is the USA Today bestselling author of books for Berkley, Red Sage, Changeling Press, Loose Id and Ellora's Cave.

Her first book was written in pencil and illustrated in crayon; she was nine years old at the time.  A few years later, she read The Wolf and the Dove and fell in love with romance.

Besides her fiction work, Angela's  publishing career includes a stint as a comic book writer and ten years as a newspaper reporter.  Several of her stories won South Carolina Press Association awards under her real name.

In 1996, she discovered the small press publisher Red Sage, and realized her dream of romance publication in the company's Secrets 2 anthology. She went on to publish several more novellas in Secrets before  editor Cindy Hwang discovered her work there and asked her if she'd be interested in writing for Berkley. Not being an idiot, Angela said yes.

Whatever success she has enjoyed, she attributes to the  marvelous editors she's had over the years.  David Anthony Kraft and Dwight Zimmerman at Comics Interview taught her the nuts and bolts of fiction writing.  Alexandria Kendall of Red Sage discovered her talent for romance writing and encouraged her to believe in herself.  And she will be forever grateful to Berkley editor Cindy Hwang, who has been unfailingly supportive.

Angela lives in South Carolina with her husband, Michael, a polygraph examiner and hostage negotiator for the county's Sheriff's Office. The couple have a grown son, Anthony.

An Interview with Angela Knight

PNR: How long have you been writing? What inspired you to choose writing as a career?

Angela K.: I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was nine years old, and I’ve been pursuing that goal ever since.  Ack - 36 years now.  Jeez.  Anyway, I was first published by Red Sage in 1996, so that was my first erotic romance work.  Then Berkley Sensation published my first book in July, 2004.  So it’s been a long road.

PNR: Do you have a strict writing schedule? How do you balance your personal and writing time? 

Angela K.: My goal is to write 2,000 words - about nine pages - every day.  That takes about three or four hours, so it leaves me plenty of time to do other things.

PNR: Most writers are avid readers, who is your favorite author(s)? What books would we see in your TBR pile?   

Angela K.: Oh, I have a huge list of favorites.  J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts, Lois McMaster Bujold, Linda Howard, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, JR Ward, MaryJanice Davidson, Diane Whiteside - I could go on and on.  My current TBR pile includes Crimson Moon by Rebecca York.  There's a bunch of other stuff in there too, but I'm on deadline and I don't know when I'll get to read any of it.

PNR: What do you consider to be the key elements of a great story? 

Angela K.: Strong, heroic characters with a great sense of humor in a plot in which absolutely EVERYTHING is going straight to hell.  Works every time.

PNR: Let’s talk about Mageverse, you have taken the well known and much loved legend of King Arthur and his Knights and added supernatural elements and its own universe; where did the idea for this world begin?  

Angela K.: Cindy Hwang at Berkley wanted me to write a vampire series, but I didn't want to do the same thing with vamps that everybody else was doing.  So, since I've always loved Arthurian legend, I thought, 'What if King Arthur was a vampire'?  Oh, THAT was different…

PNR: Readers are enthralled with your world building. Tell us about the challenges you face in world building and making it work with the ideas you have in mind for the progression of your characters? Do you write your characters to fit the world you have created or vice versa?   

Angela K.: My world tends to grow organically, as I consider new implications and come up with new plots.  I'll get an idea for a character, and I start thinking through the implications.  For example, in MASTER OF THE NIGHT, the heroine looks out the window and sees a tiny fairy on a rose.  This tells her she's not on earth.  But when I thought about that fairy, I started wondering where were the rest of the fairy people?  Before long, Llyr Galatyn, king of the Sidhe, strode onstage and proceeded to try to take over the book. 

PNR: I find your approach to the King Arthur legend fascinating; can you tell us how you expanded this idea in Mageverse? 

Angela K.: As I said, I just wanted to do something nobody else had done. I had done science based vampires for Red Sage - they became vamps because they catch a virus that gives them these powers.  So for Berkley, I needed to do magical vampires who had magical powers.  I had never really played with magic before, so I knew it would be challenging and fun.

PNR: The vampires you have created in Mageverse are quite unique, what inspired your premise on this vampire species? And your witches?  

Angela K.: Actually, '’m not the first person to toy with the idea of Arthur and his knights as vampires.  What nobody else had done was the idea of his court ladies as all being witches, and there being a symbiotic relationship between the vampires and the witches.  Originally, I had the idea that only men would be vampires, and they needed a sexual relationship with the women to live. But that made the women permanently in the category of food or sex.  So I decided the girls had magical powers that were even greater than the guys'. That gave the women the advantage, and built in a lot of tension and resentment on the guys' part.  Anytime you can engineer a built-in conflict, you’ve always got a good thing going.

PNR: Your Merlin is 'a dimension hopping alien trying to save mankind'. Can you tell us about the development of this Arthurian favorite?

Angela K.: When I come up with an idea, I just wander around with it for a few days, trying to decide WHY that particular element would have happened, and what the implications of it are.  Given the idea that Arthur's knights and ladies are vampires and witches, who made them that way?  Well, the obvious answer was Merlin, since they’re magical creatures and he was the chief magician. But making people into vampires and witches isn’t your average magic trick.  This would have taken somebody with almost godlike powers.  So obviously, he’s not human, but I didn’t want to make him an actual god.  He therefore has to be an alien from another magical dimension, because I figured that was the only way he'd have that kind of power. 

PNR: Could you tell us about your plans for the Mageverse series; will we be seeing more of these knightly heroes?

Angela K.: I intend to continue with the Mageverse series for as long as I can come up with good ideas for them.  Right now, I’m writing MASTER OF DRAGONS, in which my hero is Kel, a shapeshifting dragon warrior, and my heroine is a Sidhe princess living on Earth.  It’s going to be a very fun book. 

PNR: You have written in the vampire, futuristic, and fantasy genres, to name a few; what is your favorite paranormal genre to write?  Is there any style or genre of book that you would like to try but haven’t yet?

Angela K.: I love writing vampires; they're just so much fun to do.  What I'd really like to write is a full-on futuristic.  That would be a blast.  I've done it in novellas, but never in a novel form, mostly because readers don't get into Futuristics.  And it's too bad, because I love science fiction.

PNR: THE FOREVER KISS won the 2004 PEARL Award for best erotic, and was extremely popular with readers. Why do you feel vampires are such popular characters in the paranormal romance genre?

Angela K.: Vampires are a kind of perfect male archetype.  They’re sensual, powerful, predatory, and you're not really sure you’re safe with them.  So basically, they’re everything your mother ever warned you about: they're the embodiment of dangerous sex.  At the same time, though, they can confer immortality by making you a vampire too. 

Thus vampires embody death and immortality in the same deliciously handsome package.  Which is it going to be?  Is he going to kill you, or is he going to give you eternal life?  And since he does that with the SAME ACTION 'biting you' you can't know which one he's going to do until it's too late. You have to trust him – and he may not be trustworthy.  It's the perfect erotic conflict.

PNR: In September, Berkley is reissuing CAPTIVE DREAMS under their Sensation imprint, a project done with Diane Whiteside. Can you tell us about your contribution to this dual story release?

Angela K.: In Captive Dreams, novelist sisters Celeste and Corinne Carson are shocked when their fictional heroes turn out to be real. After years of abuse at the hands of their beautiful creators, Jarred and Mykhayl are hungry for revenge. A revenge Celeste and Corinne enjoy just as much as they do.

I got to write the futuristic portion of that story, with Jarred and Celeste.  Jarred is a genetically engineered cyborg warrior who is carrying a huge grudge; he blames Celeste for the death of his partner and for his own torture at the hands of his enemies.  He takes that revenge by all these deliciously sensual torments.  It's a very kinky kind of story, and I enjoyed writing it a lot! 

PNR: The intensity of the sexual scenes is quite hot in your books; do you find it challenging to write love/sex scenes?

Angela K.: I adore writing love scenes.  I think it's a great way to explore characters with all the masks stripped away.  You get to see him or her in purest form.  Plus, sex is just plain fun. 

PNR: Paranormal romance has recently become the 'romance du jour'. What do you feel accounts for the genre’s recent recognition?

Angela K.: I think 9/11 made all of us really conscious of the uncertainty of life.  Here these people went to work, just like on every other day previous to Sept. 11, and their lives were horrifically ripped away by lunatics for no good reason.  So the rest of us have started thinking about our own lives and deaths, which leads to thoughts of spirituality and life after death. 

Plus, things have been getting steadily more high-tech and super-rational.  I think our current love of the paranormal is a rebellion against that scientific rigidity.  The same thing happened in the Victorian age.  As you had steam engines and telegraphs, people started channeling ghosts.

PNR: How do you feel the sensual/erotic genre has affected the paranormal romance genre? In your opinion, how far can you go with erotic content and have it still be considered romance?

Angela K.: Paranormal and erotic elements go together like peanut butter and jelly.  They're the perfect compliment.  For one thing, many of us have a hard-wired sexual reaction to fear and the possibility of death.  So paranormal plotlines, with their built-in fear, are very sexy.

As to your second question, I think you can take eroticism just as far as you want, so long as there’s love.  If the characters fall in love and end up in a committed relationship, it’s a romance.

PNR: Until recently erotic romance was offered primarily through electronic publishers; now print companies such as Berkley, Kensington and Avon have created erotic romance lines?  What do you feel accounts for the shift in attitude toward erotic romance?

Angela K.: Younger readers don't have the same hang-ups about sex, and they are skilled in using the Internet to find what they want.  So they turned to the Internet to find the sexy content they wanted.  Print publishers have been looking for a way to woo those same younger readers the 'twenty-something crowd' who haven't been big readers. After seeing the way Ellora's Cave and other e-pubs took off, it dawned on the big print houses that here was a market they'd ignored.  So they're all rushing to get on the band wagon.

PNR: You have been successful publishing in both print and e-format.  How does being contracted with a print publisher differ from ePublishing? Will you continue to e-publish in the future?

Angela K.: You get paid more at big print publishers, but you don't get paid as fast.  (It can take three months to get an advance, and a year or more after a book is published to get royalties).  And it takes soooo much longer to go through the publication process.  I can turn in an e-book and have in published a month later.  In print, it’s going to take at least a year for the book to work through the process after I finish it.  And yes, I see myself as continuing to do some e-pubbing, mostly to help out my friends who run those houses.

PNR: Please tell us about the projects you are currently working on; what can readers expect to see in the coming months?

Angela K.: First there's Captive Dreams with Diane Whiteside; that's in September.  Next in October, there's MASTER OF SWORDS, the story of Gawain, knight of the Round Table and his enchanted sword, Kel, who is actually a trapped dragon. His heroine is Lark, a witch, who is dealing with Post Traumatic Stress from a vampire attack.

In February, 2007, there’s OVER THE MOON, an anthology featuring my story,

'Moondance', which deals with my Direkind werewolves.

Then in April, 2007 there’s MASTER OF DRAGONS, which is Kel's story.  (I got him out of the sword.)  His heroine is a Sidhe princess. 

After that, I'm going to be writing a story similar to Jane's Warlord in which a warrior from the future comes to modern day Earth.  I've been writing Mageverse stories for five books now, and I need to do something different.  But I'll be returning to the Mageverse after that. 

PNR: Thank you, Angela, for taking time out to speak with us. Where can readers find out what's new and how can they contact you? 

Angela K.: My website is www.angelasknights.com, and you can e-mail me at angelanight2002@bellsouth.net.  Thank you so much for interviewing me!

Angela Knight

Website

 Books

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Coming Soon

Berkley Pub Group
October 3, 2006
ISBN #0425209210
Paperback

MASTER OF SWORDS - Witch Lark McClure has survived a vicious vampire attack that shook her confidence and left her struggling with feelings of helplessness and fear. The last thing she needs is a partnership with Gawain, a handsome vampire knight who means to seduce her every chance he gets.

CAPTIVE DREAMS

Bound by the Dream
by Angela Knight

Bound by the Dragon
by Diane Whiteside.

Writers Celeste and Corinne Carson have each created an ultra-alpha hero who stars in each sister's highly successful series of novels. Celeste writes of the future and her hero Jarred. Corinne writes of the barbarian Mykhayl. Both heroes are adventurers in their respective times, hot sexy lovers, and, as it turns out...quite real and very angry about everything their creators have forced them to do.

Jarred and Mykhayl are about to exact hot, sweet revenge upon their respective creators; a little payback for the angst and the peril these women have placed them in time after time. Kidnapped and taken to the worlds they write of, Jarred and Mykhayl begin Celeste's and Corinne's punishment...

KICK @$$ - They're sexy. They're smart. And they aren't afraid of a little danger—not even when it comes to matters of the heart...

Four of today's hottest authors present a quartet of stories about bold women who take no prisoners—either in a fight or in love. Whether it's in the bedroom, in the outer limits of the galaxy, or out on the mean streets, they kick heart-stopping action to the next level. These are women who can hold their own with anyone, and they aren't to be trifled with. The men in their lives know that—and they love it...

Available Now

Berkley Pub Group
(Sensation)
April 4, 2006
ISBN #0425207439
320 pages
Paperback

Read the Reviews!

MASTER OF WOLVES - When Jim London's best friend is murdered, Jim vows to catch the killer. Leaving it for the local police to solve is out of the question, because he suspects they're are involved.

Jim is more than capable of taking action if they are -- he's a werewolf. Realizing the only way to investigate the department is from the inside, he decides to go undercover - - as a police K-9.

His "handler" is lovely Faith Weston, the only person on the Clarkston Police Department who isn't up to her neck in murder . But Faith has no idea her "dog" Rambo is a werewolf, or that the department she serves is rotten with corruption.

But it doesn't take her long to figure it out.

Red Sage Publishing
December 30, 2005
ISBN #0975451642
316 pages
Trade Size

Read the Reviews!

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