Charlotte Boyette-Compo
http://windlegends.org
Charlotte Boyette-Compo’s fans know she’s got a thing for wind. Most of her 40-some books feature it in their titles. Her website features this wish: “May the wind always be at your back and peace dwell in your heart.” And the wind figures very prominently in her otherworldly stories. She says it’s because she’s a Gemini, which is an air sign, but her husband of 39 years jokes it’s because she’s an airhead.
“I love the wind,” she says. “I love to feel it and hear it. In Iowa, you hear it a lot.” Charlotte’s husband was a weatherman in the military, so they moved around a lot—27 times in 25 years, to be precise—and experienced plenty of weather, not all of it pleasant. She’s seen windstorms with speeds up 70 miles per hour—and tornadoes. “The first one I saw scared me to death.” She and her husband were driving in Oklahoma when it loomed up just across the highway. She screamed when she saw it. “I don’t like tornadoes—or hurricanes.”
She says she prefers gentler winds and breezes, but you get the feeling in talking to her that she still really enjoys a good scream. She and her mom used to watch horror movies together, especially the ones with an occult or paranormal angle. “I loved The Sixth Sense,” she says. And there’s no denying that she has created some truly scream-worthy creatures in her dark fantasy fiction. Terrifying and creepy revenant worms invade human bodies and turn them into bloodthirsty beasts called Reapers. “My dreams are very strange,” she admits.
But stranger still is the way Charlotte’s books come to her.
“The books come when my ears start ringing,” she says. “Within an hour, I have a full book.” The longer the ringing goes on, the longer the book. A short ring signals a short story. “My husband says my aliens are zapping me.”
Charlotte didn’t start writing novels until the oldest of her two sons went off to college, but she showed an early aptitude for making stuff up. “I told lies left and right,” she says of her childhood. “It was a habit with me.” She says her penchant for fabrication equipped her well for a career in fiction-writing.
Little did she know at the time, that she wasn’t the only one lying. Shortly before her mother died nine years ago, Charlotte made a devastating discovery.
The woman who raised her had adopted Charlotte from her biological mother and never told her. She discovered that her friends and family all knew and had kept the secret from her for her entire life. She doesn’t know much about her birth parents, but she has a feeling they may be of Celtic descent. “I have an affinity for Celtic music and history and drawings. I can’t help but think there’s a bond there.”
Like a lot of writers, Charlee (as friends call her) worked at a wide variety of jobs before she started writing books in earnest. “I was a parish secretary, a dental assistant, I sold shoes.” She also did a lot of non-fiction writing, including newspaper columns and reviews of movies, books and plays.
Charlotte has published four books with Cerridwen, one suspense, one historical and two paranormal romances featuring her famous Reapers.
These days, with her sons grown, her husband partially retired and more than 40 books to her credit, Charlotte’s life is a lot more settled, though her fiction continues to be filled with adventure. She’s lived in the same place for 15 years now, and has been married her high school sweetheart for 39 years. He reads everything she writes and for Christmas two years ago, he gave her a dream present for a writer: her own cozy office outside the house overlooking rolling hills. “I’m in there from 9 to 6 seven days a week,” she says. “No phone, no music. I’m content when I’m writing.”
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Linda Bleser
www.lindableser.com
www.lbmilano.com
Romance readers might be puzzled by a romance author who also writes horror. After all, there isn’t a whole lot of overlap in the two audiences. But, says Linda Bleser, they aren’t as far apart as you’d think. “They actually have a lot in common,” she says. “They both have conflict. In a romance, it’s between the heroine and the hero; in horror, it’s between good and evil. They both end happily ever after.”
Linda, who writes horror under the name of L.B. Milano, likes the variety of writing in different genres. “It’s fun because after I finish writing a romance, I need to do something different. … I guess you could call my horror novels my pms books,” she jokes. “Sometimes, you just have to kill someone.”
Whatever she writes, she says, there’s sure to be some sort of supernatural element in it. For example, her most recent book with Cerridwen, East of Easy, is a pretty straight-ahead romance about a woman who returns to the hometown and the man she ran away from after high school. But it does feature one off-beat element: “It has a haunted teacup.”
Her other Cerridwen book, Rage, falls into the horror category, but Linda thinks of it more as suspense, and it does have a very tender love story at its center. Rage also has a strong mystery angle, which will keep readers turning the pages far into the night to find out just exactly how and why a popular horror writer’s books are predicting or—maybe
controlling—terrifying events in people’s lives.
Linda reads books in a wide variety of genres and is meticulous in her craft, which she approaches almost like a composer. “I want to make my writing sing,” she says. “I’m always looking for that perfect word to make a sentence pop.”
Linda’s early love of fairytales is evident in her writing too and will soon be even more evident. She’s working on a series of stories based on some of her favorite fairytales, including a variation on Little Red Riding Hood in which the Big Bad Wolf is a werewolf. “I’m always searching for the magic and mystery in life,” she says. “If my real life were more interesting, I probably wouldn’t be a writer.” |
