| Harrison and Lola can find no way to allow Gage to participate in their love, until Harrison unlocks the pain from Gage's past, allowing him to emerge from his prison of cold restraint. Corrupt enforcer Fowler threatens the trio with seeming knowledge of their private vices, harassing Harrison with his unwanted attentions, and a night of riots forces them to make a stand.
Three lovers, one destiny.
Visit Karen Mercury's web site
Read an excerpt from Either Ore
About Karen Mercury Karen knew she wanted to be a writer when she was three. She sat on her bed gazing at her book, The Bee Man of Orn, thinking “What power there is in creating imaginary worlds! The reader is automatically transported into a reality that you created. She hears your characters talking, sees the vistas you painted with words.” Then she realized she had better learn to read.
When Karen was twelve, she had a dream of being in a village on the coast of Kenya, so at twenty three she bought a one-way plane ticket to Nairobi to find the village. She climbed the Mountains of the Moon in Rwanda to see mountain gorillas, hitchhiked overland through Egypt, Uganda, Zaire, and Zambia, lived with the Turkana in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, went down the Congo on a decrepit steamer, and sailed up the Nile on a leaky dhow.
Her first three novels were historical fiction involving precolonial African explorers. Since she was always either accused or praised (depending how you look at it) for writing overly steamy sex scenes, erotic romance was the natural next step. She is currently writing about the rough and tumble life of the California gold rush, and lives in Northern California with her Newfoundland dog.
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www.karenmercury.com
An Interview with Karen Mercury
By Holly Hewson for The Romance Studio
HH: Karen, thank you so much for talking with us. Your featured book is Either Ore and is the story of three lovers in the San Francisco of the past. Where did you get the idea for their steamy story?KM: I usually start with an actual historical event to use as a framework to hang the romance on -- in this case, "The Affair of the Hounds" in 1849. A bunch of thugs moved into San Francisco and started wreaking havoc. San Francisco was really very tiny back then -- most of the able-bodied men had "gone to the mines" to make their fortune in gold, and it had become a ghost town, overrun with these bullies.
HH: What do you like about Lola and why will readers relate to her? KM: Lola was based on Lola Montez, "The Spanish Dancer," a very scandalous creature! I actually had to downplay her disreputable background as concubine to various European nobles in order to streamline her for my story. Lola is a very tough woman. She has reached the age where she can no longer be a mistress for the royalty -- age 30 probably being the cutoff limit for that! -- and she's been dumped in San Francisco, so she has to swallow her pride and reinvent herself as a housekeeper, and later on, a journalist for the city's first newspaper. Haven't we all had to reinvent ourselves at least a few times in our lives?
HH: What do you think of Gage and Harrison and why do you think readers will pull for each of them? KM: For Gage I took the opposite approach to the usual romance hero trope. He was very betrayed by a wife in the past, so now he wants no congress with women at all. He barely talks to Lola, his housekeeper. He thinks he may be a full-blown homosexual, or "androphile" as they called it back then. He's never acted upon his "unnatural vice," but fantasizes about having to sneak around alleys doing sordid things to satisfy his whims. Because he's the Town Treasurer, this would put him at huge risk. He's incredibly attracted to Harrison, a very athletic outdoorsman and artist, but to get to Harrison he has to also deal with Lola, who is having an intense love affair with Harrison. Through this ménage, Gage comes to realize that Lola is not a thing like his ex-wife, and he doesn't dislike all women -- just that particular one who burned him.
I based Harrison on George Catlin, an incredibly intrepid American frontier artist who lived with Indian tribes, painting them and writing volumes of thorough notes about them. Catlin had no luck selling his entire collection, so the Harrison of my book is forced to build much-needed sidewalks in San Francisco. Everyone can relate to being forced to do something that isn't really their first choice, but during the gold rush, fortunes were made in many ways other than gold!
HH: What sort of research did you for this story? KM: I had 150,000 words of research notes for a historical fiction book I was going to write, which was then rejected. Well, I certainly didn't want to waste all that voluminous work, so I turned it into an erotic romance series. Now that I know the California gold rush so thoroughly, I can pretty much write full speed ahead without stopping to look anything up.
HH: What else do you have in the works? KM: I have already completed Book #3 in the Going for the Gold series entitled A Good Prospect. I will also return to a paranormal series that is historical -- I think things were so much more exotic and exciting back then!
HH: With the rising popularity of ebook readers and devices like the iPad, what changes do you see coming in the romance genre? KM: Oh, readers have already pushed the ebook romance genre into an unprecedented explosion. No one has to feel ashamed of the steamy covers anymore, since even your husband can't tell what you're reading. =) I just read a statistic that in five years everyone will be reading their books on the iPad, but I still can't see carrying that everywhere.
HH: As a romance reader, what sort of stories do you personally prefer?
KM: I really prefer to stick with historical ménages, MMF preferably. As a reader we put ourselves into the story, imagine ourselves as the heroine. In an MMF, the heroine doesn't need to worry so much about pleasing two men at once, if they can be taking things into their own hands, and giving her a break, a chance to relax. Not nearly as stressful.
HH: What are your favorite hobbies/activities these days?
KM: I usually take my Newfoundland dog and drive around to historical sites. It's always something writing-related. I'm also learning archery and re-learning how to shoot guns -- I like to hit targets. The next class is sporting clays.
HH: Any vacation or appearance plans this summer? KM: I really wanted to revisit Yosemite for my next book. Last year I took my dog to Yosemite, and everyone thought she was a bear (she's brown).
HH: Thank you!
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