Born and raised in the San
Francisco Bay Area, Patricia attended St. Mary’s College, studied her junior
year at the University of Madrid, received a B.A. in Spanish at UC Santa
Barbara then went on to get a Master’s degree in Education at Oregon State
University. She lives with her husband and two teenage children in Alameda,
across the bay from San Francisco,
along with two very large chocolate labs, Annabella and Jack. Her Friesian
horse Maximus lives in the Oakland
hills in a stall with a million dollar view.
Her
latest book is the romantic women’s fiction, Moon Over Alcatraz.
For
More Information
- Visit Patricia Yager Delagrange’s website.
- Connect with Patricia on Facebook and Twitter.
- Find out more about Patricia’s books at Goodreads.
About the Book:
Brandy Chambers was looking forward
to the birth of her first child. She and Weston move from San
But when the baby dies after a
difficult birth, Brandy’s perfect life blows up in her face. Stricken with
grief, she and Weston pull apart. This new distance leads them both to
disaster. Not until a chance encounter with her high school friend, Edward
Barnes, does Brandy pull herself together. Brandy and Weston agree to recommit
to each other, striving to forgive infidelity and recreate their previous
existence.
Everything is once again going
according to plan—until Brandy discovers she’s pregnant. While she struggles to
cope with this new obstacle, Edward Barnes returns to town and discovers she’s
having a baby, while Weston is torn between his love for his wife and his anger
at her betrayal. Can Brandy manage to keep her marriage to Weston together?
Will Edward be a part of Brandy’s life if she and Weston separate?
For More Information
- Moon Over Alcatraz is available at Amazon.
- Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble.
- Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.
Thanks for this interview,
Patricia. Can we begin by having you tell us about yourself from a
writer’s standpoint?
My daughter came home from school
one day in 2009 and said her friend asked her why her mom didn’t have a job. I
had been a stay-at-home mom since my son was born in 1994 and I realized then
that, because they were both in grammar school and gone until three in the
afternoon, I had time to do something besides washing clothes and feeding the
dogs and ferrying the kids to and from sports activities. So I went to the
Apple store and bought a MacBook and sat down and wrote my first novel.
When not writing, what do you
like to do for relaxation?
I love to ride my big black
Friesian horse in the Oakland
hills. I started riding around the year 2000 and bought Maximus in 2004 when he
was four years old. He’d just come off the plane from the Netherlands
and he was so beautiful and kind, I just had to have him. I have a tattoo of
him on my left forearm.
Do you have a day job? Or a
night one?
For me, writing is a day and night
job. I can write when my husband and son are watching football and yelling and
I can write in the silence when everyone’s gone.
Would you say it’s been a rocky
road for you in regards to getting your book written and published or pretty
much smooth sailing? Can you tell us about your journey?
After I wrote my first novel I
submitted it to many contests because I’d read that was a good way of getting
critiques about your writing. Little did I know that I was not writing romance
but rather women’s fiction. The rules for writing romance in my opinion are
pretty strict, i.e. the girl meets the guy by a certain page and there always
has to be a happy every after. I write about a woman’s journey where she
overcomes her problems. There’s always a romantic element and the story has a
happy ending but there are hurdles to jump over and tragedies unfold. I gave up
looking for an agent to represent me and went directly to a small publisher to
get my books “out there”. It’s worked for me.
What is it about the women’s
fiction genre that appeals more than any other genre you would choose to write?
I like to put myself in the middle
of a personal problem and/or tragedy and think about how I’d feel about it and
how I’d work through it. Then I create a character who has to do just that. I
may never have actually experienced such a problem, but it’s all about feelings
and emotions and, hopefully, it’s the same for the reader.
If you had to summarize your
book in one sentence, what would that be?
Brandy Chambers is a young woman
full of hopes and dreams of a great life, until everything falls apart.
What makes your book stand out
from the rest?
Dealing with the death of a child
is not a topic I think most people want to read about. However, though that’s
how my book begins it certainly is not a depressing novel filled with sadness
and gloom. It goes “up” from there, showing how Brandy works through such a
tragedy. And she does it! And there IS a Happy Ever After.
Where do you get your
information or ideas for your books?
My ideas come from seeing and
hearing about something that has happened to someone else and wondering how I
would feel if it happened to me. Then I make it happen to a fictional character
and voila’ - out come my emotions and feelings onto the page. I hope to make
the reader feel something. That’s why I write.
Do you have any suggestions to
help me become a better writer? If so, what are they?
For a long time all I did was write
and I stopped reading books. That was not a good idea. An author should read
what she likes to write, in my humble opinion. My favorite authors are Debbie
Macomber, Richard Paul Evans, Joy Fielding, Nicholas Sparks, Mary Higgins
Clark, and many others.
What’s next for you?
I just had a long two-week bout with
the flu and I got so bored sitting on the couch, coughing, that I finally,
finally started my sixth novel. I’m half-way through it!
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