Sunday, May 20, 2012

Interview with Emma Calin @EmmaCalin

The Digital Ink Spot interviewed Emma Calin, an author and poet who resides between The U.K. and France with her sexy French lover, Gilles.

The Digital Ink Spot: Tell the readers a little something about Knockout!
Emma Calin: Knockout! is an unusual book in that it sits across several genres - on one hand it is a full-on passionate romance but equally, it is a suspense thriller dealing with police investigations into match fixing and corruption in professional sport. Anna Leyton has worked her way up to Detective Inspector and has been posted to Interpol. While investigating international Internet gambling and the attempts of mobsters to fix the results of sporting events, Anna unwittingly becomes passionately and romantically involved with Freddie LaSalle, one of the world's top class boxers who will be fighting for the cruiser weight championship. He is a suspect in the investigation. She knows she should walk away from their relationship. She knows it can mean nothing but trouble. but she can't leave him. Her heart refuses to go. For too long, she has needed love in her love, and, with Freddie, she has found it. However, neither Freddie nor Anna has told each other the whole truth and their lies and deception form shaky foundations which are doomed to collapse - can their love survive the cataclysmic events unfolding around them? It transpires that Freddie has been offered ten million dollars by the mob to lose the championship fight. It's a big payday, a once-in-a-lifetime payday. And Anna is caught in the tangled web of her own conscience. Freddie, she believes, is the key to helping her unravel the mob's illegal and sometimes deadly ties with boxing. But her love won't let Anna ruin his life. She is in a quandary, and the mafia begins to fear that Freddie may keep his side of the deal. They need leverage. They kidnap Anna, demand that Freddie throw the match to save her life, and she becomes the focal point of a frantic battle triggered by Interpol and the FBI to take down the mob.

The Digital Ink Spot: What inspired you to write your book?
Emma Calin: I was inspired to write Knockout! because although I love reading about passion and romance, I sometimes find the background stories, motivations and settings of traditional romances unbelievable and fantastical. I wanted to set the love interest in my novel in a real-life situation with believable characters whose actions are lead by their strengths and flaws and to introduce dilemmas to really challenge their relationship.

The Digital Ink Spot: Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?
Emma Calin: One of the things I learned from writing this book was how difficult (but stimulating!) it would be to write the intimate love scenes in the best way I could. It is very hard to find a balance between the out and out gynecological and the much reviled 'purple' prose. I wanted the sex to be passionate and romantic and set within the context of a loving relationship and for it be neither embarrassing nor comical. And I definitely wanted it to be beautiful and tender. So far I have had only positive feedback from readers, so I'm hoping that I struck the right tone.

The Digital Ink Spot: Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?
Emma Calin: I have always loved stories - as a child I was an avid reader and always had my nose in a book and would get hold of books any way I could. One of my earliest delights was going round second-hand book shops and picking up cheap books from the boxes outside on the pavement - the bargain books that were no longer fashionable. I would often buy one without knowing what it was about, it just felt so good to get something containing so many words for so little. I loved radio plays, cinema, the theatre, opera, poetry, TV soaps - any story about human relationships in any form. I have written numerous poems, short stories and articles which have been published over the years and I've won a few writing competitions. My work was often hard to categorize, I always tried to write the best stories I could - without trying to fit to a formula - which readers seemed to enjoy, but publishers often could not fit them in their standard 'genre' slots. The advent of the digital book and self-publishing has given me the opportunity to finally get my work out to the readers at large - and I have found that they love a good story and do not care if it contains crime, suspense, tension, love and romance in one package.

The Digital Ink Spot: What can readers expect from you in the future?
Emma Calin: I wrote Knockout! as a story for a big audience and I have learned a lot from it and very much want to stick with stories containing a large element of romance at their core. Love and relationships are what human life is about - particularly in a world that seems to totally focused on money, economics and the day to day drudge of work, Whatever you are in life, there will always be love and relationships in some form. Most readers of romantic fiction are looking for more passion than their day to day lives actually contain and it is a tremendous pleasure to me to bring sexual passion out of the closet and put it in the kitchen!

Visit the author's website: http://www.emmacalin.com/
The Author's blog: http://www.emmacalin.blogspot.co.uk
The Author's facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/Knockout.Romance.Novel
The Author's facebook friend page: http://www.facebook.com/emma.calin
The Author's twitter handle: @EmmaCalin

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