Andrea Downing is a New Yorker and fellow member of Women Writing the West, she’s a finalist, twice, in the RONE Awards for Best American Historical Romance. She placed in the International Digital Awards twice and won ‘Favorite Hero’ along with Honorable Mentions for: Favorite Heroin, Short Story, and Novel in the Maple Leaf Awards. And her book, Dearest Darling, won The Golden Quill Award for Best Novella.
Today I’m interviewing multi-award-winning author, Andrea Downing, about her new book Shot Through the Heart due to be released later this month.
Welcome, Author Andrea Downing…
“Thank you, Betsy. It's good to be here.”
(I'm not sure why I was surprised by her decidedly English accent. But I love it!)
Andrea, according to your website, it says you spent most of your life in the United Kingdom where you, “Developed a penchant for tea drinking, a tolerance for rainy days, and a deep knowledge of the London Underground system.” That just cracked me up. I knew I wanted to interview you after I read that.
“I'm glad it had that effect, Betsy. Yeah, it's all true. It does rain quite a bit in London and England. And I never really considered myself a tea drinker. I don’t know what I was drinking when I went. But now, I drink tea pretty constantly through the day.”
Q: So what's your favorite tea?
A: “It used to be Earl grey. I've now moved on to green tea. I drink herbal in the evening because it's caffeine free.”
Q: What originally took you to England? Work? School?
A: “It was confusion (laughing). I graduated from a college at a very young age. I was literally 20, very undirected. I didn't know what I wanted to do and at the same time England was very much in the news. It was, you know, the swinging 60s—the end of the swinging 60’s. There were the Beatles, and I was a great Beatles fan and so on. So I decided that the best thing was to continue my education and do a master’s degree. I applied to several universities in the UK. Oxford wanted me to do a BA again to get a second second undergraduate degree. They didn't recognize US undergraduate degrees at that time. I don't know what would happen if you came from Harvard or someplace but they certainly didn't recognize my undergraduate degree. So I ended up at Keele. There was a professor there who had published one of my professors, who was a poet. So that was an attraction. I studied and got a master’s degree in English. It was actually American studies…but I tell people I took a wrong turn. I really should have gone west.”
Q: Did you have any family in the UK at the time?
A: “No. I didn’t have family there. I grew up with an English aunt who lived a block away from us. I just had a fascination with England.”
Q: What did you like most and what did you like least about living in England?
A: “That’s very difficult to answer. England changed radically in the 40 years I was there, as you can imagine. When I first went over, in late ’68, believe it or not, they were still coming out of the war. It was only 20 years since World War II. And they had been on rations and everything right into the 50s, so the most exotic vegetable that you could get in an English market was probably a zucchini called a “courgette.” Or an eggplant, which they (the British) call, “Aubergine.” It was very basic living. People still had out houses in certain areas of the country. Very basic. I remember asking to use somebody's telephone and they didn't have one. In 1968, my family had two (telephone) lines. So it wasn't that I didn't like things, it’s just that everything was very very different. As time went on, I moved a great deal within the UK, and during this time, the world got smaller and television got bigger—so to speak. It was a totally different world. You might as well have been in New York for all that.
My favorite thing was learning about different cultures and different people. That, and the close proximity to Europe. The ability to be in Paris, for instance, in two hours. Just the ability to travelaround Europe so easily. I like the people. It was just a much more laid-back way of life than being in New York. Also, I was involved with a lot of writers. I was editing a poetry magazine for a while so that was an attraction.”
Q: You mentioned you're a native New Yorker. One who writes western romance. Tell us how you discovered the genre?
A: (More laughing), "I don’t think I discovered the genre, the genre discovered me. (Still laughing.) Consider that I lived in the states to the age of 20 and I was brought up on a diet of westerns on television. I always loved the west. While we were living in the UK, we started having all our Holidays here in the west. In the summer, we used to go to ranches in Wyoming, Montana…you know, the northwest. Then we would go at Easter to ranches in Arizona. The whole thing about the west revitalized me. My daughter and I are both riders, anyway. She grew up with ponies. So the whole western thing was very much embedded in me.
When I got back, I never really set off to write romance. I never woke up one morning and said, “Gee, I think I’m going to be a romance writer.” That never happened. In fact, I read very little western romance. I read literary fiction much more than I read romance. Which is not putting it down, it's just what you want to read at the moment. Anyway, when I moved back to the US, I happened to be reading a biography of the Jerome sisters. Jenny Jerome was Winston Churchill's mother, which was why I was reading it. It was just a matter of interest about these people. But she had a sister, Clara, who married a man by the name of Morton Frewen, who ran one of those very large British cattle companies in Wyoming. That put an idea in my head about a British girl being transplanted into old west Wyoming and so I wrote this book. I never thought of it as a romance but that is what it sold as. Then the subsequent stories that I thought up just turned out to be romances…so that was it. That’s why I say the genre discovered me. I didn't really discover the (western romance) genre.”
Q: Have you always written or did you write from a young age? Obviously, you pursued it in school. And is there something that compels you to write?
A: "I think if you’re a writer, you’re compelled to write. I've been writing since I was very young. I had one of those little black notebooks and wrote little stories in that and then took every creative writing class, even in high school and college, everything I could do to learn the craft. Then I ended up teaching English language and creative writing. So you know, that whole idea of being involved with words, certainly that’s in me. But I do think if you're writing you're just totally compelled to write. Every time I get fed up with the whole promotion thing: Facebook, Instagram, and God knows what else, and want to stop (writing), you know I can't stop. Then another story just comes to me. Like Shot Through the Heart basically came from someone's name on the calendar."
Q: A yearly calendar?
A: "A cowboy, western themed calendar, where every month had a different cowboy. One is roping, one is branding, (laughing)…anyway, I got to this page and there’s this guy’s name, Shiloh Coltrane, and I thought, what a fantastic name! He has to have a story really. He had to be a hero! The same thing happened in another book of mine. We were staying in a ranch in Nevada, my daughter and I. It was a working cattle ranch, there was a young cowboy there we were talking with and he said, “Can you make me a hero in one of your books,” and I said, “Okay.” Lawless Love came out of that. His name was Dylan Kane, I didn't really think that was a very good cowboy name myself. But he became a marshal and was in the book."
Q: When you ride a horse, do you ride English or western style?
A: "Both! In England, obviously, we rode English. But like I said, we rode western on all our holidays in the west. These were a combination of dude ranches, some were working cattle ranches, some were ranch resorts. So yeah, they (the ranches) are all different but obviously, they're all in the west so I was riding western. I prefer riding western, although I prefer the shorter leg with an English saddle.”
Q: Have you ever set any of your books in a location where you visited?A: "I try to visit the locations, if I haven't already been there. For instance, Dances of the Heart is set partially in New York but mostly in Texas Hill Country. I hadn’t been so I went down there, which made a very nice vacation in the Fredericksburg, Texas, area. When I was writing Loveland, my daughter and I went out to Loveland and we went out to the Prairie National Grasslands just to see what the area would look like at the time when the book was set. We also went up to Cheyenne, Wyoming, because part of the book discusses the cattlemen's club, The Cheyenne Club. Then Ibought this place outside of Jackson—I have a home outsideof Jackson, Wyoming—Wilson. That is my great love, that area is, really. The area in the Tetons. So I now set a lot of stories there. Shot Through the Heart is set there. It doesn’t mention the Tetons, but it implies that it's up there. Part of the book is in Philadelphia. The heroine goes back to Philadelphia for a bit and Shiloh Coltrane goes on the search for the killers through Estes Park—whereI’ve been several times and into Brown’s Park. Well, I've only skirted Brown’s Park, I have to admit. Most of the research for that was on-line. Brown’s Park is really quite difficult terrain. They tell you to make sure you have plenty of water; you won't have a cell phone. But that’s an area the outlaws really did hide out in."
Q: I know that you love all things western, as do I, but what do you think makes someone a cowgirl and would you, Andrea Downing, consider yourself one?
A: “Absolutely not (laughing). I have no pretentions to be, either."
Q: But it sounds like you do a lot of horseback riding, though?
A: “Yes, I do. I've actually even roped stationary dummies.”
Q: Really? Wow! So if you aren’t a cowgirl, what makes a cowgirl?
A: "I think working women on ranches do not consider themselves cowgirls anymore. They call themselves cowboys. They do the same amount of work that a man does. So that’s one thing. I think cowgirl now has a slightly…I don't know, it’s a feminine, let's say, “showy thing.” But if you’re working on a ranch, “cowboy” is what you’re called. I mean, I don't consider myself a westerner. I have no pretensions of being so. I would like to be one but I'm not one. And you know, having a home in Wyoming and wearing a cowboy hat doesn't make me a westerner.”
Q: When you wrote your book Shot Through the Heart were you thinking about a theme? Do themes pop into your head along with the titles? Or do they just kind of come to you as you start writing?
A: “The story pretty much comes to me before I start writing. But I am a pantser. You know, someone who writes by the seat of their pants. You're either a plotter or a pantser. I generally know the ending but if you're writing romance, it's gonna be a happily-ever-after so that's not too difficult. I also know the actual last scene before I start writing. It's a matter of getting from A to B.
Shot Through the Heart was fairly easy to write. My books are definitely character driven and there’s always opposing characters. For instance, in Shot Through the Heart he’s a hired gun, trying to hang up his guns but he comes home to the family ranch only to discover that his sister has been murdered. So he's got to go after the killers. Whereas the heroine is a doctor. So she's used to healing people and he's used to killing people. I like that interplay between the opposites. Same thing as in Lawless Love. He is a marshal and she's an outlaw. But the characters develop the scene.I like to think.”
Q: Shot Through the Heart comes out when?
A: "August 31st, it will be available at all good bookstores. Of course, as an eBook and paperback. You can order it through libraries and through your bookstore. I hope people enjoy it. We need those escapes at the moment."
Q: Last question. You (or someone) categorizes your writing as historical and contemporary western romance. But do you see yourself writing any other genres? Memoir? Nonfiction?
A: "Well, memoir—no. Nonfiction—possibly. Because when you do research for a book, I always get sidetracked. I also write posts for a group called “Cowboy Kisses.” We write about historical western items. I've written a number of short biographies there and other things that have led me to think, you know, she's very interesting or he's very interesting. Maybe I could do a book about that. I do have ideas for books that are more literary or women’s fiction or whatever. So as I said, I never set out to be a romance writer. I mean, it's only the stories that seem to come crawling in the night. So yes, I can see myself writing other genres.”
Andrea Downing, thank you so much for visiting with us today. We're excited about your new book Shot Through the Heart. We congratulate you on its release August 31st.
“Thank you, for having me, Betsy. It's been lovely.”—Andrea Downing.
You can find Andrea’s books at your favorite bookstores, on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BookBub, to name a few. Read more about author Andrea Downing and read excerpts of her books at www.andreadowning.com
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