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URL:
www.barbranovac.com
CONTACT:
sirenbookstrand@barbranovac.com
ABOUT BARBRA
For Barbra Novac, life is a created
adventure. An existentialist at heart,
she believes life is your project and it
starts as a blank slate. You may look
like your parents, but you do NOT have
to be your parents, and you are not
destined to follow the path laid out by
your genes.
This, however, does not mean
circumstances don’t play a part in your
invention of yourself. Barbra would have
loved to be an archaeologist, but
somehow found her way to accounting(!),
a job she was good at, that paid her
well, but didn’t feed a deeper part of
her that yearned for the small trowel
and the large acres of dust buried
treasures.
Part of the pleasure of believing you
can invent yourself to be anything you
want meant she could write about the
thrill of archaeology and visit existing
archaeological sites. Out of documenting
information for others grew a passion
for writing, a pleasure not re-visited
since her school days. After writing
some successful articles, she turned her
hand to the fiction she loved most –
erotica – and found a fresh new passion,
and a possible new identity. The writer.
Erotica lends itself easily to romance,
and Barbra dug deep and uncovered a
wealth of mystery within herself, using
her accounting clients as fodder for
character creation and her love of
slowly uncovering the truth to find what
lies beneath the behaviours of people
and what might be revealed in those
behaviours. These thrills translate
easily to the complicated and exciting
work of examining couples and why they
get together, what makes them love each
other and how they are fulfilled when
they express that love physically.
We each are all the people we read
about. There is a piece of us in every
heroine and a man to fall in love with
in every hero. Each book is a little
journey the writer and the reader take
together, a little world created for a
brief moment in time that couldn’t exist
if the writer and the reader weren’t
partners for that moment. This mystery
beats anything that lies beneath the
sands of time, and feeds Barbra’s
writing.
INTERVIEW
Q: Do you love where you live?
A: I live in the Blue Mountains near
Sydney, Australia, and if you’ve ever
seen any pictures of the Blue Mountains
you would understand that -- yes! -- I
love where I live.
Q: If you could change your life,
how would you change it?
A: I would really like to write full
time, but with two children and a love
of books / travel / music / film I
really have to make some money. That’s
probably the only thing I would change.
Accounting feeds my passions, so it is a
necessary ‘day job’ for me. Plus, it’s a
great skill to have. A psychoanalyst
once told me people lie the most in
therapy about sex and money, so there is
a fair bit of mystery in writing erotic
romance and accounting.
Q: Do you think ‘rules’ are more
important than ‘fun’?
A: Mmmm... I would probably argue that
you can’t have a lot of fun without
breaking some rules, but you can’t break
the rules unless you really understand
and normally follow them. So I would say
they go hand in hand.
Q: Why choose eBooks rather than
print?
A: It’s not that I choose eBooks over
print, rather, I love indi publishing
houses. I think the internet and the
ebook phenomenon is hugely important and
will change publishing (in the same way
digital has affected music). Having said
that, I don’t think print will ever go
out of style. I really like being with a
publishing house that is working in
eBooks. I think it is exciting and
important for the future of the novel.
Q: Do you write anything other
than erotic romance?
A: Yes. I wrote industry publications
for some archaeology research and I
write main stream fiction under a
different name. But this is where my
heart and soul lie, because I love the
genre, and because I love working for an
independent publisher. I think they’re
very important.
Q: What is your normal day like?
A: I get up early; five am. I get the
kids up at five thirty. I have breakfast
and lunches done, and walk them to the
train at six thirty in the morning. They
go to school in Sydney, so they have to
travel quite a way to get there. Once I
have them on the train, I go home and
get myself ready for work. Hubby is up
and about by this stage, because he is
getting ready for work too. We are both
out of the house and on our way by seven
thirty. All of us are back at home by
four thirty in the afternoon, and that’s
when the action really starts. I get
dinner while hubby works with the kids
on homework, getting them to pack their
bags and clean up for the end of the
day. We eat early and together around
six thirty and then by seven thirty,
with chores done, we all retire to our
pleasures. My husband is a writer so he
and I get to our respective offices to
work, and the kids play happily on their
computers, or whatever they’re into at
the time. By eight thirty my husband
gets them ready for bed, while I keep
working. (I do the morning shift, he
does the night shift). I pop in for
goodnights, and then by nine at night
we’re both working really hard at our
writing. We don’t go to bed till around
midnight. We tend to sleep in on
weekends.
Q: Do you write every day?
A: Absolutely, even if it’s just a blog
post. Writers write; I’m not a writer if
I’m not writing.
Q: Have you made sacrifices for
your writing?
A: Definitely yes. I LOVE a clean house,
and my husband talked me into writing
instead of cleaning. He was the one who
said “Do you want a clean house or
published novels?” making me realise I
can’t have both – all the time. I clean
rarely, and I don’t like the mess, but
I’ve gotten used to it. I only clean now
if the writing is moving along well and
I can afford a night spent working on
the dust. My husband does a lot to help
out, but he writes too. So we all work
on the basics and I lose the need for
that Zen / OCD kind of cleanliness.
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