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Welcome to our New Faces column, where you can meet brand-new romance authors and find out about their books! This time we're visiting with Zoe Archer, whose first release is Lady X's Cowboy from Dorchester Publishing. Zoe, welcome to TRR! Tell us about yourself. I was born in New York and moved to Los Angeles when I was just a baby. I moved away to go to college, getting my B.A. in Pre and Early Modern Literature from UC Santa Cruz, then getting my M.A. in Literature from UC San Diego. After that, I went to Iowa and got my MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and then finally came back to L.A. I live with my husband and, of course, my cat (who always cameos in my books). When we're relaxing at home, we're either watching ESPN or HGTV or the Food Network. I love to bake and also try my hand at knitting. We both love to accost the cat. Somehow, my husband (who's also a writer) and I are lucky enough to be able to share an office and still get our work done. Don't ask me how that worked out-it just did. Are you coming to romance writing from another job? In addition to being an academic, I've had lots of other jobs, including teaching composition and literature to undergraduates, moderating book clubs and working in retail. Right now, I work at a law firm, but I get up early every morning and put time in on my latest work in progress. As somebody at the law firm said to me the other day, "You really have two jobs!" And I do-one I love, and one that pays the bills. I'll let you guess which is which! What led you to write romance? One of my earliest memories is my mom teaching me how to read. (The book was Arnold Lobel's Grasshopper On the Road.) And I haven't stopped reading since. I didn't start to read romance until the 9th grade, when my friend would bring me her mom's romance novels and we would read them under our desks in Physical Science class. It wasn't long after that I began to try and write them myself. After contemplating a career as a costume designer and then an academic specializing in literature and costume history, I finally decided to pursue writing as my career. Well, I say I decided, but I think that I was one of those people who always wrote, so it was either write or suffer the consequences! Although I love to read fiction of any genre, I find a good romance to be satisfying in a way other genres can't really achieve. I always tell people who ask, don't write romance unless you love romance. That's certainly true in my case. Tell us about your road to publication. I first tried my hand at writing romance around 10th grade, and then dabbled with it, on and off, for years until I finished graduate school. That's when I wrote my first complete manuscript. A friend of mine who is a published romance author read it, gave me tons of suggestions for revision, and once the revision was complete, I sent out queries to lots of agents. Finally, I got signed, but it wasn't until almost five years and four more books later that I had my first sale, LADY X'S COWBOY, to Dorchester. They've just purchased a second from me, which helped convince me that it wasn't a fluke! I was finally getting paid to write. Somebody other than a relative or significant other or friend actually wanted to read my writing. I'll be honest: those five years were long and difficult. It was extremely challenging to get up every morning and sit myself down in front of my computer, trying to have faith in myself when it felt like I was throwing my work into a deep, bottomless pit. But I had to believe that someday, someone would take a chance on a new writer. And so they did. I'm still amazed. What kind of research was involved for your first book? Here's my confession: I love to do research. Maybe it's the graduate student in me, but I love going to university libraries and hunting down obscure information, then integrating that information into my writing. And I knew that other romance readers are very savvy about history, so I couldn't fudge the details. For LADY X'S COWBOY, I did a lot of research about the American West-how cowboys talked, what life was really like on the cattle drive or in town, and also the way in which the Wild West was already being mythologized in popular fiction, even while it was really going on. That, to me, was just fascinating. I tracked down sources on dime novels, listened to period music, and printed up a gigantic street map off the Internet of London from the 1880s. It was tacked up on the wall of my office for months. It started to feel like I could walk the city itself and know exactly where I was. I also found books about the history and science of brewing beer. Plus, because I love costume history, I went into my own library of costume books for inspiration. Tell us about your debut book. LADY X'S COWBOY is about two people from completely different worlds who form an unusual alliance. Lady Olivia Xavier is not your typical Victorian widow. After her husband died, he left her the ownership of a small brewery as part of her inheritance. Instead of sitting at home like a polite, well-bred woman, Olivia decides to actively get involved with the running and management of the brewery. While she meets with some resistance from society, her biggest problem comes from the spoiled son of a nobleman, who wants to buy the brewery. After she refuses, the nobleman's son starts using some pretty strong and progressively more dangerous tactics to get her to give up her beloved and hard-won business. Enter Will Coffin, a Colorado cowboy who's come to England to track down the family he never knew. After helping her fend off the rival's hired thugs, Will finds himself joining forces with Olivia. She'll use her society connections to track down his family, and he'll help her hold out against an increasingly desperate adversary using the techniques he learned from a hardscrabble Western life. Everything and everyone around them tells Will and Olivia that they have nothing in common, but as they navigate the often treacherous world of London society-both high and low-they find themselves being drawn closer and closer together. Who are your influences as a writer? As my husband will attest from the number of bookcases he's had to build for our apartment, I'm a voracious reader. I'm never comfortable unless I have a stack of books waiting to be read. (In that, I suspect I'm not much different from most romance readers.) As far as romance is concerned, my biggest influence is Judith Ivory. I can't tell you how much I admire the psychological complexity of her characters. I also appreciate her unusual settings. When I first started getting serious about romance, I read all things Mary Jo Putney, and my earliest reads were the novels of Judith McNaught. Even though I don't usually read traditional Regencies, I make a point to track down Carla Kelly's work when it appears. She also writes the most three-dimensional characters I've read, both in romance and literary fiction. Some of my favorite non-romance titles include Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Gunter Grasse's The Tin Drum, Austen's Persuasion, and the short fiction of Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro. What does your family think of having a published romance author in their midst? Everyone has been amazingly supportive. Whenever anything happens with one of my books, my mom gets on what she calls her "Yenta Net," and emails everyone the latest news. Tell us about plans for future books. I just sold another novel to Dorchester, which is tentatively scheduled to come out in the Fall of 2006. It's called LOVE IN A BOTTLE and it's an 18th century-set story about a young lady who is a botanist. Our hero is what's known as a mountebank-basically, a snake oil salesman.
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