Island Authors
Kaua'i romance novelist finds success in Old West

By Ann M. Sato

LANDIS: Aimed to be on New York Times best-seller list

She knows what sells in her genre (character-driven historical romances set in the American West, England or Scotland) and what doesn't (stories set in locales readers consider too "foreign" — which includes Hawai'i).

So, although the part-time Kaua'i resident would love to write another romance set in the Islands, after disappointing numbers from her 1998 Jove Press release, "Glass Beach," she's sticking to the tried and true. In her case, that's a long string of successful books — 16 so far — built around the lives of tough but tender pioneer women and their equally tough but tender men, set in the American West.

Landis' latest book, and her first in hardback, "Summer Moon," is about a Texas Ranger and his mail-order bride. Released earlier this year, it's on local best-seller lists.

If you haven't looked into the romance genre in a while, "Summer Moon" and its literary sisters might surprise you. "Summer Moon," for example, weaves in prostitution, child abuse and abandonment and the harsh treatment of Native Americans in the Old West; the characters argue and agonize over these political and social issues as much as over each other.

"I think many people don't realize how much the romance genre has changed and developed over the past few years. There is a very fine line, if there is one at all, between single-title release romances and what the publishing world is now calling 'Women's Fiction,' " said Landis. "Although in a romance the elements of the relationship are still the central core of the book, there is a much broader scope to the plot and the layers of the characters, their interior and exterior motivations."

Oh, and there's some pretty good sex, too — tasteful, but realistic, even if Landis has to shut her eyes and just type to get through writing the erotic stuff. (She has a tendency, she says," to stick a Post-It note on the first draft with a scribbled "insert love scene here," putting off the inevitable.)

"Summer Moon," a down-priced hardback (Ballantine, $15.95), is a deliberate experiment. A while back, Landis realized her sales had stabilized and that she wasn't likely, at this rate, to reach the next goal she had set for herself: the published portion of the New York Times bestseller list. (Getting published was her first goal, followed by doing well enough to quit teaching.)

So she said a tearful goodbye to her longtime agent in California, got a New York agent with a reputation for chewing contracts into confetti, and switched publishers. She and her new publisher, Ballantine, wanted to see if a hardback, perceived as having more literary weight, might draw new readers, but they kept the price down so as not to scare off the faithful.

This kind of business-like thinking is what it takes to make a living as a writer, Landis told a meeting of the Aloha Chapter of Romance Writers of America in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago.

Warm and quick with a giggle, possessed of the easygoing exterior you'd expect from a former kindergarten teacher, Landis is no-nonsense and concise when she talks about her work.

"Learn the craft. Take classes," she told the small group, several of whom have brought copies of "Summer Moon," or even earlier, tattered works, for her to sign. "Know what you want to write and know what you want to sell. You better damn well know the genre, know who's selling and why. Learn to take criticism and use it. Learn to love rewriting. The important things are: talent, quality, speed and discipline, publisher support and luck."

She recalled her entry into the writing field, accomplished, she cheerfully admits, in all the wrong ways and with a lot of luck. Having traded bags full of romances with other teachers in the school lunchroom, Landis was pretty sure she could write one herself.

One winter, on sabbatical in the high Sierras with her ski-loving husband, the cold-hating Landis decided to stay indoors and prove what she could do. Then, with just "30 pages of something," she began to pitch her book to editors. She got some nibbles, but they wanted to see the book first.

"So," she said, "I hung up the phone and just kept typing." Eventually, she began sending out three chapters and an outline, found an editor who seemed really interested, rewrote the book for that editor and ... never actually sold that book. ("Don't fix it until you see the money," she says now, wryly, adding that that first book is still under the bed.)

She joined a fiction-writing workshop, found an agent and kept writing. In 1986, she won an award from the Romance Writers of America for work that would eventually become her first published work, "Sunflower" (1988). It involved an immigrant woman who is raped in an Indian raid and brings her fatherless child to a town that doesn't want her. "Everybody said you can't do that in a romance," Landis said." But she was actually at the forefront of a more lifelike form of the genre, and readers still name "Sunflower" as among their favorites.

Landis is on Kaua'i now, where she and her husband spend at least four months a year. She finds it easy to write there, away from her large family back in Long Beach, Calif. There, she said, "people call you in the middle of the day and because you're home, they think you're not working."

But working she is, beginning to think about No. 18. (No. 17 is at the publishers). For, despite her necessary focus on the business side, Landis is always writing, if only mentally.

"When you're a real writer, you become a mercenary," she said. "You're at a funeral or listening to your girlfriend or wherever but in the back of your mind you're thinking, 'How am I going to write this down, how am I going to use this?' You can't help it."