Sunny

 

Bestselling author Sunny gained nationwide fame with Mona Lisa Awakening, the debut novel in her “Children of the Moon” series, which won the Award of Excellence for “Best Erotic Romance.” Lucinda, Darkly, the first in her Demon Princess series, was a national bestseller and received a 2007 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award nomination for “Best Paranormal/Fantasy/Sci-Fi Erotic Romance.”

 

 

 

Michelle Lauren: According to the mini-biography in the back of your books, you were a family practice physician before you started writing professionally. What inspired the change?

 

Sunny: My children did, actually. After my husband sold his first book, I became a stay-at-home mom. My daughter was four and my son was one at the time. I had a happy time helping edit my husband’s books and developing my children’s talents. Alas, I did so well [that] soon everyone surpassed me. My son’s comment one day, listing my best talent as, “Mom drives really well,” finally motivated me to try and develop my own talent. Fear of losing my children’s respect overcame my fear of trying and failing once more.

 

ML: How did you come up with the concept behind the Mona Lisa series and the Monère universe?

 

Sunny: It was during one of those long two hour drives from New York to Connecticut for my children’s kung fu lessons, which we did for a year and are once again taking up. We did lots of crazy things like that for our kids. My husband and I came up with the concept of these supernatural beings, a species originally descended from the moon, able to draw down the moon’s light and use that energy to prolong their life during one of these long drives Originally it was supposed to be a children’s book for my husband to write. We came up with lots of other great story lines and concepts during those times, one or the other of us coming up with an idea and the other jumping in and building on it, but he never got a chance to write them.

 

The concept and idea, though—supernatural creatures descended from the moon—continued to fascinate and haunt my imagination. When I was finally motivated to try and write a book, this was what I used.

ML: Can you explain the journey to publication for Mona Lisa Awakening?

 

Sunny: The journey to publication might seem relatively short but really isn’t. I began writing Mona Lisa Awakening in October of 2004, finished the manuscript in two and a half months, and sold to Kensington in April of 2005, seven months after first picking up my pen. I actually didn’t sell my novel but rather another novella, which I wrote specifically with the Kensington Brava line in mind. But that sale led to getting an agent, which led a month or two later to a two-book deal with Berkley for my Mona Lisa series. As to difficulties pitching to agents, one rejected me a week before I got “the call” or rather “the email.” Another editor also rejected Mona Lisa Awakening, submitted through my agent after I sold my novella to Kensington. Berkley’s publication offer several days later, though, helped me quickly get over the sting of that.

 

However, my writing journey [actually] began over twenty years before. I’ve always been an avid reader, and later, in school, showed a knack with the written word. I first tried to write a short story, a romance, at the age of seventeen, as a freshman in college for my English 101 course. I procrastinated, as I often tended to do then, and wrote a thirty page story in one day, just before the deadline. It was quite horrible. Shudderingly so.

 

The next time I seriously tried to write was ten years later, after I was married. My husband, inspired by our courtship correspondence, believed I had writing talent—the first one to ever really say so. No one in my family was a reader—I was the only one—and the thought of being a writer was never an inkling in our mind, either with them or myself. My brother became a dentist and I became a doctor, and that was my family’s sole aspiration for us.

 

My husband, though, saw more possibility in me, and with his encouragement I tried my hand at writing a story based upon the Golden Venture, a ship carrying hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants to America, that ran aground in New York City in 1993. I wrote the first chapter, then got stuck at “what next?” My husband was the imaginative one, I believed, not I.

 

Finally, after I got nowhere, my husband, a banker and lawyer by trade and training, decided to try his hand at writing. I remembered when he asked me one day if I thought he could be an author—a man to whom English was a second language (he immigrated from China to America at the age of 23). On top of that, he had the horrendous disfavor law school had done to his writing (his sentences were peppered and filled with legalese jargon). Despite that, I knew that he was creative and had true verbal story-telling skills—he frequently kept me entertained with many funny and interesting stories about the people he worked with on Wall Street. I told him that between his talent for story-telling and my writing skills, that he probably could write a book good enough to be publishable.

 

It took several years for that prophecy to come true, but Da, my husband, never faltered in his determination. He tried writing several stories, all fiction, spending weekends and evenings writing, with me editing and polishing up all that he wrote. But it wasn’t until I suggested he try writing about his childhood growing up in China, which he’d told me many fascinating stories about, that things clicked, finally, writing-wise. Writing his memoir taught him how to write. And helping him accomplish his dream taught me discipline. Editing his writing also helped hone my own writing skill to a much finer degree.

 

When he sold his book in an auction several years later to Random House, his success inspired me to try my own hand at writing again. I wrote several chapters about my own poor childhood, growing up in the Bronx, and brought it to the local writer’s group that my husband had been a part of. Instead of praising me, as they had done with my husband’s work, they tore my writing apart. They were unnecessarily harsh, I believe, looking back, especially to a first-timer. The writing really wasn’t that bad; it was decent, above average writing, actually. But they trashed it. Part of it may have been jealousy at my husband’s quick (in their eyes) success. Another part was as they said: my low-middle class childhood in New York could not compare to my husband’s pathetic childhood growing up persecuted in China during the Cultural Revolution. Don’t even try was their message. And I didn’t. I didn’t pick up a pen again for six years. Not until my son’s prodding words to me.

ML: What inspires you to keep writing?

 

Sunny: You have to understand that until I actually wrote my first book, I utterly believed that I lacked whatever creative imagination it took to write a publishable story. I’d tried and failed several times. The turning point for me took several different elements all coming together. First, I was strongly motivated for the first time in my life. Up till then, all my ambition had been for others. Second, my husband took me to a 3-day screenwriting seminar by Robert McKee, thinking that I might not have the discipline to write a lengthy book, but that I could probably do a screenplay. The seminar was about “The Art of the Story.” Mr. McKee went over the basic structure of creating a story. I came out of that seminar thinking, not that I could write a screenplay, but that I knew now how to finally write a book!

 

My mistake before was in poor planning. I’d try to just sit down and knock out a story with not much thought put in beforehand about the characters, world, setting, etc. At the seminar, which principals you can also glean from his book “Story,” I learned to do my prep work first. Nail everything down; don’t leave it open and vague. Once I did that with my “Children of the Moon” concept, the opening scene came to my mind and I sat down and wrote that, and while doing so, the next scene after that came to me, and so on and so forth. Once you’ve fleshed out your characters (and world), it’s much easier to know how they will respond in a situation. And that’s what you do: throw them into one situation after another until you come to the end of the book.

 

The final element that allowed me to succeed was the mistaken belief that my author husband could fix whatever I wrote afterward, like what I did for him—an untrue belief. But it allowed me to dash out words freely, writing 1,500 to 4,000 words a day, building up momentum and getting a wonderful high from it, until I finished the story two and a half months later. That’s another thing I’d advise some—not all—people: finish your story first before you show it to anyone.

 

Just finishing the book was the most euphoric feeling of accomplishment I’d ever had. I’d done it! Actually done something I’d never thought I could ever do. And I’d done it fairly well, I believed. My husband thought otherwise. He wanted me to salvage only the love scenes and scrap everything else. I tried to do that for several months, and the momentum and enthusiasm I’d built up died during that time, while I tried unsuccessfully to do what he wanted me to do. Nothing was as good as what I’d originally written, in my opinion if not my husband’s. In my husband’s favor, he was a memoir and literary fiction author, definitely not a romance reader. He’d also never had to try and do what I’d been doing for many years—clean up someone else’s writing.

 

But having finished a book, I’d come too far to just give up then. Whereas I’d crumbled before under others’ criticism, that sense of accomplishment—I’d written a book! Actually written one!—bolstered me now. I determined to try and see it through—to try and get published. That led me, eventually, to finding a notice on the Internet about an upcoming Boston-area RWA chapter conference (my first acquaintance with RWA) where you could pitch a manuscript that you’ve written to attending editors, one of which was Hilary Sares from Kensington. I knew and loved the Brava line well, and dashed off a novella in two weeks, specifically for that line. I went to the conference, pitched the novella, and was contacted by Hilary Sares several weeks later with an offer to buy.

 

Writing since then has gotten much harder. My first draft used to be about 90% done with just 10% time needed for minor clean-up. Now, writing my sixth novel, it’s shifted more to a 65% and 35% ratio—a lot more time and effort spent on clean-up during my 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th revisions. It also takes me longer to write each story now, around five months instead of that initial blissful two months (Mona Lisa Blossoming took me six weeks). But still, hard work (and increasingly harder work with each ensuing manuscript) notwithstanding, being an author gives me the most wonderful sense of accomplishment, more than being a family practice physician ever did, maybe—probably—because I never thought that would be possible: me as an author, a teller of stories. And definitely not one in fantasy and romance—the hot kind.

 

ML: Please tell us about some of your upcoming projects.

 

Sunny: My Mona Lisa novels are coming out in mass market paperback in October, November, and December 2008. Reissues of Mona Lisa Awakening, Mona Lisa Blossoming, and Mona Lisa Craving, respectively. An original release, Mona Lisa Darkening, will come out in January 2009, which I’m very excited about. Berkley gave me a new cover look for Darkening even more gorgeous than the others, which I invite you to view on my website at www.sunnyauthor.com.

 

Book two in my Demon Princess Chronicles—Lucinda, Dangerously—will be released August, 2009, also as a mass market paperback original. I’m in the process of writing that now. After that’s complete, I’d like to turn my hand to a new paranormal series idea I have. An idea for a women’s fiction has also been tickling my fancy. That’s the exciting thing about this business—coming up with new story concepts and trying to turn them into tangible written word!

 

ML: A special thanks to Sunny for agreeing to fit this interview in her busy schedule. I hope you all enjoyed it.