Hunting Season: A Love Story (5 page)

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Authors: Blake Crouch,Selena Kitt

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INTERVIEW WITH BLAKE CROUCH AND SELENA KITT

Blake: So, Selena, people are probably wondering how and why you and I hooked up to do a short story, particularly since we write in different genres.

Selena: Yeah, seems like a stretch doesn’t it? I feel like I’m the odd-one-out on a
Sesame Street
sketch: “One of these things is not like the other...” since I’m pretty well known almost exclusively for erotica writing...

Blake: And I’m known for writing thrillers, horror, and suspense.

Selena: But in my defense, I’m a big horror fan! And I actually do have an erotic horror collection out there called
Shivers
. I’ve been reading and writing horror since I was a kid. Little known fact about Selena Kitt. :)

Blake: I first came to know you through the ebook community. Even though I wasn’t an erotica writer or reader (I grew up in the Bible belt of North Carolina where SEX IS DIRTY AND BAD!) I was in awe of this ebook empire you were building.

Selena: I can sympathize. I have fundamentally religious folks in my family too. But I was already going to hell anyway. How much worse could it get? Anyway, in terms of ebooks, I got lucky. I was in the right time at the right place. I started
Excessica
(my little erotic ebook empire, so called) because back in the day (wayyyyy back in 2008, before Kindle rocked the ebook world) when the biggest ebook retailer was an outfit called
Fictionwise
, you couldn’t get your work on there unless you were a “publisher.”

Blake: Hard to imagine a world before Kindle and Nook.

Selena: Isn’t it? I’d been writing all sorts of things all along through the years, but I happened to have a glut of erotic material from a contest on
Literotica
called Survivor. I just wanted to see if I could put it all out there and make a little extra supplemental income, so I gathered a group of writers together and we all published under the Excessica moniker. The birth of the first publishing co-op. And before I knew it, things had snowballed, Kindle came along, and I was making $10,000 a month. I thought I’d been in a tornado and had woken up in Oz.

Blake: Do you remember how you met me?

Selena: Of course! How could I forget? I found you through
The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing
. I posted a lot on Konrath’s blog, and you, of course, were friends with Joe. I was kind of mad at him. I’d been doing this whole ebook thing for years, saying all the same things to people—but no one was listening to me! We erotica writers, we’re the red-headed stepchild of the publishing world.

Blake: I remember, you provided some really amazing feedback on a couple of my novels, and I could see through our exchanges that you were a helluva writer. One of my other co-writers, J.A. Konrath, and I have a monster series where four writers work together on a single book. It’s loads of fun. The first book was called
DRACULAS
(written with F. Paul Wilson and Jeff Strand). We were beginning to think about the follow-up, which will be about werewolves, and knew we wanted to work with some new writers. You came to mind instantly for a couple of reasons. First, you seemed really cool over email, and life’s too short not to work with cool people. Also, you’d written a lot, and of course, we thought it’d be fun to cross-pollinate with our respective fan bases. In other words, all of the straight horror/thriller crowd that reads Konrath and Crouch would be introduced to your work. And vice versa.

Selena: Very smart! And you say I’m the marketing guru? You know, it was Konrath who gave me the courage to actually post my sales numbers. And when I revealed the huge amount of books I was selling per month, he made an off-the-cuff joking comment: “If you ever want to collaborate, let me know!” I’d just read and reviewed
DRACULAS
, and I couldn’t resist emailing him to say, “If you’re not kidding, I’ll take you up on that!” I can’t tell you how glad I am that he did! I loved collaborating with you on Hunting Season and I’m so looking forward to our big project together.

Blake: Collaborating is a blast, but like lots of things, you want to do it with the right people. Compatibility and all that stuff. So before we all jumped in headfirst, we thought it be a good idea to take a test drive. To go on a date. Just to make sure you liked the way we work and we could work with you.

Selena: They should have a match.com for writers. “Mystery writer with procrastinating tendencies seeks organized collaborator...”

Blake: That would be a scary site. So I emailed and said let’s write a short story together. Got any ideas?

Selena: I did! I pitched you one about a butcher and a trophy wife... kind of a horror love story. I was a little nervous. I wasn’t sure what you were gonna think...

Blake: I loved it immediately.

Selena: And that’s when I knew, it was a match made in heaven!

Blake: Same here...You kindly gave me the option of which character to write.

Selena: So you wrote one opening section, while I wrote the other.

Blake: Which was all great, but there was still the issue of writing the third section in real time together in a Google doc. What were your thoughts on collaboration going in?

Selena: Oh my god. I was having panic attacks the night before. Talk about performance anxiety. Do they make Viagra for writers? I was wondering how in the heck I was going to write this thing with someone else. We’d done the first parts separately, and that was pretty easy. I guess it was the fear of the unknown. But you promised you’d be gentle with me, and that it would be fun... (where have I heard that before....?) But thankfully, it really was! Once we got started, I couldn’t believe how easy it was, how well things came together. It was exhilarating!

Blake: Collaboration is pretty thrilling, especially in a solitary profession like writing. You took to it amazingly fast.

Selena: Should we explain what a Google doc is for those who don’t know? I’d used them before, but I didn’t really understand how they worked for collaboration. It was quite an education!

Blake: Good idea...it’s like a Word doc., except you can have multiple cursors, which means that you and I can write at the same time in the same document. We can actually see what we’re writing. You’re a fast writer. You’re a fast, very good writer. The “very good” part is the important part.

Selena: Aww. Stop making me blush. Having had the privilege of reading your work—and now working with you—I can return the compliment with a great deal of enthusiasm! I think we actually worked really well together. Things seemed to click right away.

Blake: I’m really looking forward to writing WOLFMEN with you, Joe, and another writer yet to be disclosed. We have the general premise already outlined, and I think our fans are really going to love it. Might some of what you’re really known for make its way into WOLFMEN?

Selena: It’s a possibility. I doubt it will be as...um...descriptive, let’s say, as some of my really erotic work. But if the characters wanna go for it... who’m I to tell ’em no? You never know what people are going to do in survival situations!

ABOUT BLAKE CROUCH

BLAKE CROUCH
is the author of RUN, STIRRED, DESERT PLACES, and ABANDON, which was an IndieBound Notable Selection. His short fiction has appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
,
Cemetery Dance, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
,
Thriller 2
,
Shivers VI,
and other anthologies. In 2009, he co-wrote “Serial” with JA Konrath, which has been downloaded over 500,000 times and topped the Kindle bestseller list for 4 weeks. That story, DESERT PLACES, ABANDON, and RUN have also been optioned for film. Blake lives in Colorado.

His website is
www.blakecrouch.com
.

ABOUT SELENA KITT

SELENA KITT
is the bestselling and award-winning author of numerous erotic and erotic romance titles, selling half-a-million ebooks in 2011. She runs an innovative publishing company (
www.excessica.com
), which was the first author co-op of its kind. Her books
EcoErotica
(2009),
The Real Mother Goose
(2010) and
Heidi and the Kaiser
(2011) were all Epic Award Finalists.
Second Chance
won the Epic Award in Erotica in 2011. Her story,
Connections
, was one of the runners-up for the 2006 Rauxa Prize, given annually to an erotic short story of “exceptional literary quality,” out of over 1,000 nominees, where awards are judged by a select jury and all entries are read “blind” (without author’s name available).

In her spare time, she devotes herself to her family—a husband and four children—and her growing organic garden. She also loves bellydancing and photography.

She can be reached on her website at
www.selenakitt.com

BLAKE CROUCH’S OTHER WORKS

Andrew Z. Thomas Series

Desert Places

Locked Doors

Break You

Thicker Than Blood
(The Complete Series)

Stirred
(with J.A. Konrath)

Other Works

Run

Draculas
with JA Konrath, Jeff Strand and F. Paul Wilson

Famous