Leigh Michaels Gets Hot and Spicy with the Mistress' House

Since the mid-1980s Leigh Michaels (www.leighmichaels.com) has been one of those rarities among fiction writers - she is able to make a living from her writing income. If you look at the volume of her work - initially "just" 80 sweet traditional romances - you get a sense for her writing.

But all your senses would be jolted when you open The Mistress' House, the spicy Regency that features three women who cajole men to their beds on Upper Seymour Street in London. Gone are the 20th century heroines with busy careers, replaced by three seductive women who enjoy hot sex with the men they take into their lives and beds. The only question is how long the men will stay or if they will need to find other suitors.

Michaels' three Regency Romances that Sourcebooks Casablanca (www.sourcebooks.com) will produce in 2011 are a far cry from the traditional romances of her past, but the strong women and subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) humor she is known for remain. Readers who pick up The Mistress' House and the next two books (Just One Season in London and The Wedding Affair) should be aware - these are not your mother's romance novels.

How did an Iowa farm girl come to write hot, sexy novels? Growing up outside of Coon Rapids, Iowa, Michaels had her chores on the family farm and excelled in school. What most of her friends did not know was that she was already writing her first books, her learning books, as she calls them. She did less fiction writing during her years as a journalism major at Drake University, then went back to romance more seriously in the early 1980s.

By 2006 Leigh and Harlequin Romance parted ways - 35 million books in 25 languages seemed sufficient at that point and she admits to being more than a bit burned out. But, what next? For several years, Michaels continued to teach writing at venues such as the University of Iowa's Summer Writing Festival and Gotham Writers' Workshop (www.writingclasses.com). "When my students get The Call that a book has sold, I feel like a proud grandma," Michaels says. "I didn't have to do any of the hard work but I can be just as proud of the 'baby' as the author is."

Not content to watch others write, no matter how great the satisfaction, Michaels turned to nonfiction. She had done some before; her self-published Writing the Romance Novel and Creating Romantic Characters had sold well in stores and via the Internet. An almost chance encounter with and editor from Writers Digest Books [web site] led to a year-long project that culminated in On Writing Romance. With her husband, photographer Michael Lemberger, she also published their books that deal with local history in the Midwest and served as simply a publisher for others (www.pbllimited.com).

So, why come back to romance, why the Regency period and what's with all this sex? At a book signing at O'Town Books she gave some insights. "I think I had written to a schedule for so many years that I needed to recharge my batteries and my imagination. I wrote some short stories, and I decided that when I wrote longer fiction it would be work, yes, but it had to be fun at some level." And is writing hot and sexy fun? She laughs, "You bet it is."