Isis Sousa's Blog: Tragic Books' news - Posts Tagged "tiffany-roberts"

It’s been a while since I have posted any interviews on this blog. The last one was with indie author Anthony Avina , which you can read here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

Today I am sharing with you guys a very special interview, done with a writing duo, Tiffany AND Robert, a married couple who write under the pen name Tiffany Roberts.

I have made the covers for 3 of their books so far, and am currently making the third of Isle of The Forgotten, a Fantasy Romance trilogy. I share them here as well with you.


Make Me Burn

Let’s begin with the beginning. Who is Tiffany Roberts and how did the writing of Make Me Burn (Isle of The Forgotten 1) take place?

Tiffany: Well, I’m Tiffany.

Robert: And I’m Robert.

Tiffany: We didn’t want a pseudonym, but we knew in the romance community, female authors are more likely to be read as the majority of readers are female. We also wanted a way to incorporate both of us as authors because we are a team. So we decided to take both of our first names and put them together.

Robert: This really is a team effort, and it falls apart if either of us is absent. Using our first names to create the pseudonym gave it more meaning to us. We can look at one of our books and know that we are both represented in the name on the cover. We complement each other and balance out our individual weaknesses rather well in our mutual writing, and the end product is always something unique that couldn’t have been produced by either of us alone.

For Make Me Burn, we had actually roleplayed out the whole thing in text back in 2012, which left us with a very rough rough draft.

Tiffany: It wasn’t until 2015, after we wrote Ice Bound, that we decided to take on a larger project. As we went through our various logs, we settled on Morthanion and Aria.

Robert: We printed the logs, wrote up an outline, and started writing. It took about two months to write the first draft, and we went through about three rounds of revisions as we waited to get it off to our editor, Lora Gasway. A lot of the process, actually, was waiting. We don’t have that luxury anymore, now that we’re creating stricter deadlines for ourselves…

What’s your writing process like? Do you write every day?

Tiffany: We have kids, so there is no way writing is getting done during the daylight hours, when everything is loud and chaotic. Far too many disturbances. However, as soon as their little heads hit their pillows, I start cracking the whip. Rob would call me a slave driver, and it’s true. Without my drive, nothing would get done. I make sure we write every night when possible.

Robert: Tiffany really is the driving force behind anything getting done. One of my weaknesses as a writer is lack of motivation, so she props that up rather well. Once we get going, however, it’s a full-blown team effort. We keep two keyboards hooked up to one computer so we can directly work together (our floor didn’t like chairs rolling back and forth constantly), and even though it’s usually just one of us as the main writer of any given scene, the other is always heavily involved with suggestions, comments, and help when things get difficult. We can flow rather seamlessly, jumping in when necessary and adding things the other wouldn’t necessarily think about.


Make Me Hunger - coming this Autumn/Winter

What inspired you for the characters and environment of this series?

Tiffany: I honestly can’t remember what my inspiration was for Aria, only that she needed to be the opposite of Morthanion. Someone to gentle him and give him the love he never had, but also outsmart him. Ithoriel was only supposed to be a side-kick. It wasn’t until we were over halfway through our roleplay that we decided he would be the true surprise villain. I liked Baltherus too much by then, despite what he’d done, and wanted him to have his own story.

Robert: Tiffany had to remind me of this, but Morthanion was inspired heavily by a character from the Twilight series, of all things. Before anyone flips out, I’ll get a little more specific: Michael Sheen’s depiction of Aro, the leader of the Volturi, stuck with me. The crazed gleam in his eyes, his delightfully insane laughter; I enjoyed his performance quite a bit. Certainly some of that carried over into Morthanion, who is on the edge of insanity himself and reveling in every moment of it. We already had something of a history fleshed out for demons in our world, so it was only natural to take advantage of some of it.

Tiffany: Rob and I used to be big time text-based role players (it was how we met). We played in a few games on mIRC, until we finally decided to create our own. Talikar was a very small setting I used for my writing when I was younger, but we both expanded upon it and came up with what we have today. The Isle of the Forgotten (originally Isle of the Lost) was added in 2012 when we came up the idea and the characters to go along with it.

Robert: What we certainly weren’t inspired by was the television show Lost. Neither of us have seen even a single episode, but the similarities — at least in the higher levels of our concept — were pointed out to us during our early blurb-writing struggles. The Island of the Lost was just a location Tiffany had in her early map of Talikar, and when we really started to build the setting in a more serious fashion, it naturally evolved into the mage-prison it is in Make Me Burn, the Isle of the Forgotten.

What genres and authors you like to read? Print or E-book?

Tiffany: I might get long-winded with this one. I’ll start with how I hated reading in school. The books we were forced to read in English class never held my interest. Of course I enjoyed To Kill a Mocking Bird and Lord of the Flies, but nothing else really clicked with me. My mother ended up taking me to our small town library. The first book that caught my interest was IT by Stephen King. I’m a huge horror movie fanatic, so of course it would be my first choice. With Stephen, I found my love for reading.

We were finally given a choice in one of my English classes in high school — 1984 by George Orwell or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Of course I chose Frankenstein. While dark, the elements of romance immediately snagged my attention. During a trip to the store, I stood in the book aisle staring at the romance and selected my first romance book — Gentle Rogue by Johanna Lindsey. My love for romance was born. I literally gobbled that up and couldn’t wait to check out more from the library. I read anything and everything if it had a romantic element to it, learning which subgenres were my favorite and which I didn’t care for. But the one genre I loved the most was Fantasy Romance. Back then, it was so hard to find, and some of what I found was short on the romantic element and left me disappointed. Thankfully, the genre is growing and it’s so much easier to find!

So to finally answer your question: Romance. I enjoyed Horror, but Romance is where it’s at for me. With Amazon and Indie publishing, it’s allowed me to easily discover new authors. I’ve joined the ebook/kindle club despite my love for paperbacks, but I still continue to purchase paperbacks for the books/authors I love. There are two authors who are auto-buys for me — Fantasy Romance writer Grace Draven and Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Romance Writer R. Lee Smith. I also love everything from Kresley Cole and Karen Marie Moning, and recently discovered Sarah J. Maas.

Robert: I really got into reading around seventh or eighth grade. My memory isn’t great, so I can’t recall the particulars, but it was around that point I was introduced to Lord of the Rings. It ate it up, read it and reread it, even devoured the entirety of The Silmarillion. I realize now that I’m older that I probably didn’t understand much of the latter, but it led to my love of fantasy literature. Over the years, I’ve branched out a little more and delved into science fiction and — with Tiffany’s influence — romance, and on the cusp of twenty years old finally discovered the joys of Stephen King. I’ll have to echo Tiffany a little here though, and second R. Lee Smith. She has an undeniable talent for storytelling and once I start reading one of her books, no matter how dark and depressing it gets, I can’t put it down.

Why did you take the indie path and what are the biggest challenges on self-publishing?

Tiffany: Freedom. By publishing as an independent author, we’re allowed to go at our own pace and write what we want. The biggest challenge is getting our name out there. We’re still new and not many people know who we are, but I believe we’re off to a good start.

Robert: Definitely the freedom. We met as teenagers, and back then we both wrote all the time and talked about writing constantly. It was our dream. Real life has a way of holding dreams down and trying to suffocate them, but we clung to it through all the difficulties and discouragement, always telling ourselves that we’d get to it when the kids were a little older, when we had a little more time to ourselves. In 2014, we took part in a small independent anthology, authoring a romance story together, Ice Bound. The experience opened our eyes. It was around that same time that Tiffany began to discover many amazing indie authors, and we knew then that we needed to take the plunge and follow our dream without any more hesitation.

It’s a lot of work, and we’ve invested time and money into it, but we’ve met a lot of amazing people (Tiffany: Looking at you, Isis!) in the process and it has proven to be more rewarding than we could have imagined.


Dustwalker - coming 2017

What are your plans for the future?

Tiffany: Our goal is for both of us to be full-time writers. I’m lucky to be able to be a stay at home mom, but would love for Rob to be able to quit his day job to stay at home and do what he loves.

Robert: That really is the main goal. In the short-term, we plan to have new books finished and released in fall of this year, and then in spring and summer of next year. We hope that our writing will speak for itself and that eventually this will become a career. Either way, we’re sticking to it.

What do you think about social media and platforms like GoodReads? (And which one is your favorite and why?)

Tiffany: I’m still very new to Goodreads, but I love how it works in creating your own virtual library. It’s allowed me to discover new books and authors, to see who is reading what, and what people think. As an indie author, social media is incredibly important and plays a big role when interacting with friends and readers. I would have to say Facebook is my favorite.

Robert: I have to admit that I don’t do much with social media. I scroll through Facebook occasionally, but it’s mostly to check on family and friends. It’s handy for that sort of thing. I’m only a little familiar with Goodreads, but I think it is a valuable tool for readers, especially for finding new authors. The vast majority of Tiffany Roberts’s online interactions are all Tiffany and no Robert.

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Connect with Tiffany Roberts on GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Visit their website: https://authortiffanyroberts.wordpres...
Visit their Amazon Page: http://www.amazon.com/Tiffany-Roberts...
Add them on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorTiffan...

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And here are other interviews I have shared in this blog, including the one with my lovely (and much recommended) copyeditor, Clare Diston: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

Ben Starling: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

K. J. Nessly: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

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And there is more on the way, so stay tuned :)
That’s all folks!