Literary Spotlight: Megan Chance

Megan Chance is an award-winning author who has been the recipient of the Romance Writers of America (RITA) Award. A former television news photographer, her latest release is The Spiritualist.

Q: Your new novel combines a Victorian setting and the paranormal and is strongly atmospheric. How did you choose New York City circa 1850 as the setting, and how important is the setting to any plot?

A: I chose New York City for two reasons: New York’s culture at the time had a strongly rational and materialistic heritage, and because society ruled it. Spiritualism was gaining sway in the mid 1850s, but it was still new enough that Knickerbocker society found it intensely disconcerting. Anyone involved in it was thought to be on the fringe and not quite respectable, which served my story purposes very well.

Because my research dictates so much of the plot, I tend to create a story that can only exist in a certain place or time, and I believe the best stories couldn’t be ripped from their settings without changing how the tale is told.

Q: Your book has been described as an erotically charged chiller. What is your response?

A: I meant for it to have a distinctly erotic element. I believe that for women, especially, sex can be a transforming experience. For upper class women of that period who were brought up to believe that good women did not enjoy sex, that they were supposed to be passionless and spiritually elevated “angels of the house,” and who were so uneducated about physiology that their own bodies were mysteries to them, sexual passion would have been very threatening, especially the first time it was experienced.

I felt that a woman like Evelyn would feel particularly vulnerable and off-balanced by eroticism, and that perhaps it was the one thing that could force her to look deeper into herself, and to accept aspects of her character that she would rather deny.

Q: What are the differences and similarities of portraying characters through the lens of a photographer vs. the pen of a writer?

A: In photography, you only have a few moments to try to capture the truth of someone’s character. In writing, you have the luxury of time to really explore a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. What photography taught me, however, was how to distill character, how to capture someone’s essence in a few strokes – after all, it isn’t what a person says or thinks that tells who they are, but what they do, which is not a bad lesson for a fiction writer to learn.

Q: Why do you suppose the romance genre lacks male writer representation?

A: I don’t know that it does. There are men who write romance, just as there are those who read it. There was a time when conventional wisdom stated that readers wouldn’t buy a thriller or mystery by a woman author, and I think that same wisdom exists in the romance world – editors think women won’t buy a romance if they know it’s written by a man, I’m also not sure that, in the end, romance wants or needs male representation. It is women’s fantasy after all, and frankly, why the hell shouldn’t women have something of their own?

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact and Touching The Dead, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

Carlotta Holton has just received her second award for Touching the Dead from the National Federation of Press Women Communications Contest. Click here to purchase the book.