January 14 2008,
The Book Bitches http://thebookbitches.blogspot.com
Paullina, my friends, playmates, strangers in the streets, everyone I’ve badgered to read your books know how much I love your novels and how deeply your characters and stories affected me. So you can imagine I almost died of delight when you agreed to let me interview you! SQUEEEEE!!!
Er, *ahem* thank you so much; this is an honor, truly truly.
Now, you’ve become a popular author in the romance genre. I’d like to shamelessly take credit on some of it seeing as I’m a self-involved maniac who constantly pimps your books. Eheh. What I’m trying to say is that you write such beautiful, BEEYOOTIFUL stories with characters romance lovers like me dream about. Just look at Tatiana and Alexander; every time they touch, oh my… *sigh* I feel it, and it feels so real. I feel like a perv—well, I am one but, y’know—like I’m spying on a couple whose passion for each other is so immense the air vibrates with it. Did you believe you had to write their story with such strong sensuality, and yep, with blinding orgasms? (Verra important that.)
Thank you for your kind words, your unfaint praise. I do like to make it real, keep it real, so you can feel it, believe it. If it’s right for the characters, that’s what I write. I don’t like to shy away or pretend I’m shy or am not writing for adults. My books are adult books and the things in them—about love, human relationships, betrayal, death, war, deep conflict—are not for children. Other stories I have told had other elements in them that Tatiana and Alexander didn’t have because that’s what seemed right to me at the time for the time, the place, the story. Same with Tania and Shura. I wrote about things that pertained to them, that made them what they were, that were important for me, the writer, to show, for you, the reader, to know.
The Bronze Horseman has excellent characterization and superb dialogue. It’s epic and overwhelming in every sense; reading it felt like being shagged hard while ridding a roller coaster—not that I’m confessing I’ve done that (verra dangerous, uh-mm…). What did your grandparents, parents, hubby, friends and harem (if you have one) think of TBH (and its sequels, for that matter)?
Hubby loved it. Said it was not just his favorite book of mine, but one of his favorite books of all time. Parents didn’t read. Grandparents didn’t read. Friends read, loved, wept.
What are your fondest memories of Russia? And since TBH made me want to visit your Motherland, please do tell, which specific bench under a tree should I sit on while waiting for the bus, where a very yummy studmuffin will cross the street to lick ice cream with me? *dreamy sigh*
My fondest memories are spending my summers at my grandparents’ dacha in a small fishing village called Shepelevo on the Gulf of Finland.
And for your purposes, any summer tree will do while sitting on the summer bench in a summer dress, humming and eating an ice cream cone not a cup.
I forgot the humming part! Note to self: Summer tree, summer dress, ice cream and hum, “Someday we’ll meet in Lvov, my love and I…”
Speaking of ice cream, I know Tatiana loves crème brûlée. What is Alexander’s favorite ice cream flavor and what is yours?
Chocolate. Chocolate.
I knew it. Shura is my kind of man. *g*
The last chapters of TBH gave me heart palpitations. I kept thinking “don’t leave, don’t die” and I was praying “Santa, they better end up together OR ELSE!” *grrr* I sobbed and I sobbed my mom thought I’d finally lost it! Actually, I almost did. :/ I was reading and then I was like, “wait, wha… what happened?!?!?” At the time poor me didn’t know there was a sequel. (Thank God there ARE sequels or I’d have spent a lot of time complaining about the lack of a HEA with a shrink!) Did you always intend for TBH to end like that, very “light at the end of the tunnel” yet in a tragic manner? Did you ever consider concluding Tatiana and Alexander’s story with TBH, no sequels whatsoever?
That was always the ending of TBH, that was what I was writing to—a tragedy at the end of which Alexander sacrifices his life for Tatiana and because of that monumental sacrifice, she has life, and Anthony has life. Originally, TBH had an epilogue, where Tatiana in 1991 returns to Russia to find Alexander, and does, fifty years after they first met. In the original version they were separated for half a century. He was in prison and in exile, and she was in Arizona, married to Edward. Nice, huh?
*GASP* Oh, my heart, my heart! *clutch*clutch* Jesus, let me breathe!!!
Paullina, that’s vicious. *sniff* I don’t think I could’ve taken it if Tatiana had ended up with Edward while Alexander pined for her. THAT’S NOT RIGHT! It’s too… ye gods. :S Okay, I don’t even want to think about it, hmph.
This reminds me of the Orbeli thing—I LOVE it. “Got to have a little more faith, my wife…” It’s PERFECT. I was wondering, how did you come up with that? Have you done an Orbeli and made an unselfish sacrifice? Was there a time when you had to send away your “life’s sole passion” because it’s the right thing to do?
No, Orbeli was an Alexander and Tatiana thing, not a Paullina thing. The part that was the Paullina thing was the thinking it all up part. The feeling it all up. How heroes conduct themselves in love, in life, in war, and in peacetime. That’s them, not me. I’ve never been in a war.
I’m not gonna lie, Alexander made me very mad in The Summer Garden I wanted to beat him with Trollop’s wooden dildo! I couldn’t believe it; how could my beloved Shura do such a thing?! Why, Shura, WHY??? *sniffles* Why did you include adultery in TSG, risking the outrage of your readers? What did you hope your readers would take away from “experiencing” that with Tatiana and Alexander?
It wasn’t adultery I wanted to include in The Summer Garden, it was the Soviet Union. Their past continued to live unhealed with them in their little “izba” in Scottsdale, in their little trailer, and until they had a baby, they could not heal it and could not break free. It was really a spiral of bad upon bad that happened to them, and the reason I included it, is once again because I wanted to show how these two larger than life characters handled this commonplace awful thing that sometimes happens in marriages. I showed them in all ways handing the day to day. And the hateful Carmen was part of their journey. How do they handle betrayal? My hope is that my readers would take away from the episode how to forgive the unforgivable, how to show mercy, how to continue to love.