Catherine Friend and her partner Melissa raise sheep, ducks, and goats on their southeastern Minnesota farm. Her memoir, Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn, was an Insightout Bookclub bestseller, and a 2007 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and a Golden Crown Award. Friend has also written six books for children, including her latest, The Perfect Nest.
Friend's interests range from writing, to reading about writing, to talking about writing, all the way to worrying about not writing. She has a B.A. in Economics and Spanish, and a M.S. in Economics, neither of which she has used for years. Her first novel, The Spanish Pearl, comes out from Bold Strokes Books in May 2007, to be following by the sequel, The Crown of Valencia, in November. For more information, visit www.catherinefriend.com

Is writing something you’ve always wanted to do?
Nope. I used to make up stories as a kid, but I was pretty sure no one was going to pay me to do that, so I got my B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics and thought I’d be an economist and make loads of money. Turns out it was more fun to study econ than to actually use it in the real world, so luckily my desire to write eventually bubbled through, and now I’m a fulltime writer, which of course means I’m not making loads of money.

The Spanish Pearl is your first book forthcoming from Bold Strokes Books. I believe it involves time travel and harems… Can you tell us a bit about the book?
When Kate Vincent visits Spain with her partner, she is accidentally transported back to 11th century Spain. I wouldn’t have a clue how to survive in this time period, and Kate is no different.

Let’s just say things don't go well. She’s captured by a band of mercenary soldiers and becomes an unwitting pawn in some nasty business between a Catholic king and a Moorish emir. In her struggle to stay alive and return to the future, Kate finds herself, at various times, stuck in a harem, trapped in a filthy Moorish dungeon, or at the mercy of a creepy Christian soldier. Then, as if her life wasn’t complicated enough, she falls—and falls hard—for a woman in this time period. She thought she’d been living the life she wanted, with the woman she wanted, and then this happens. What the heck does a person do?

I was intrigued every day when I sat down to write because even though I sort of knew where the novel was going, I constantly wondered how Kate was going to resolve her dilemma.

I must also confess that the harem scenes were terribly fun to write.

The follow up to Pearl, The Crown of Valencia, follows in November 2007. Did you write the two books back to back?
When I finished The Spanish Pearl, I didn’t feel done with the characters, even though the book has what I hope readers will feel is a satisfying ending. I wasn’t done complicating Kate’s life and throwing lots of bad stuff in her path. That she survives my torture is a miracle!

How much research did you have to do for the books, both in terms of time-periods and the scientific aspects of time-travel?
Who knew researching 11th century Spain could actually be fun? I discovered lots of real people who made great characters, so I almost feel like I cheated a little bit. For instance, Walladah al-Mustakfi was a feisty bisexual woman poet living in 11th century Spain, and historians say that whole ‘camel-loads’ of correspondence between Walladah and her female lover still survive. Walladah just had to be a character in The Spanish Pearl.

As for time travel, that plays a very minor role in the book, and because it’s not scientifically possible (yet), the important thing is just to be consistent. You can’t have people popping in and out of time willy-nilly. (Although Audrey Niffenegger does this beautifully in The Time Traveler’s Wife.) I do desperately wish, however, that time travel was actually possible.

You’ve also written books for children; which have you found harder – writing for adults or a younger audience?
Writing for children is much harder. If you pick up an adult novel, how many pages will you give that author before you decide to stop—or keep—reading? 50 pages? 100? A child picking up a book will give it one or two paragraphs, a page if you’re lucky, then she puts the book down and finds something more interesting to do. A writer has no time to mess around.

Writing picture books is especially tricky since the book must succeed on two levels. It must be fun enough the child asks to hear it night after night, but it must also be smart enough the adult can stand to read it night after night!

Do you write from a structured outline, or do you prefer to tackle a story more intuitively?
I need to know where I’m going. When I wrote The Spanish Pearl, it was my first novel and I was often overwhelmed, so I scribbled a few words for each scene on pale yellow Post-it notes and stuck them to the back of my office door. As I wrote, I’d often realize that what I’d planned wouldn’t work, so I’d run to my door, take off some scenes, add new ones, and rearrange the Post-it notes until the story seemed to make sense again.

This worked great until the humid summer day when the Post-it glue gave up the ghost and my well-planned novel became a pile of little yellow bits of paper on my office floor. Crap.

Who are some of your favourite authors?
I know this is going to make me sound geeky, but I find all the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen great reading for sexual tension (or is that sexual repression?)

I read Chris Moore, Janet Evanovich, Carl Hiaasen and anyone else that can pull me out of my life for a few hours’ of escape. I read to forget how difficult life can be, so I avoid novels of anguish or pain or shattering life events. I am a tragedy wimp. I need happy books, exciting books, books with happy endings.

What are you currently working on, writing-wise?
I’m working on another non-fiction book for the same company that published my memoir, and it’s really, really hard work. The carrot I dangle in front of myself is my next romantic adventure for Bold Strokes—when I finish the non-fiction book I can start working on A Pirate’s Heart and get lost in the 1715 world of pirate captain Thomasina (Tommy) Farris.

What are the most important things that you personally look for in a publisher?
I’ve been so lucky to have wonderful publishers—all the editors and marketing people are willing to listen to me, say they love my books (of course they don’t say that to their other authors, right?), and most importantly, they are honest in their feedback. While no one is going to like every book I write, I need to believe that book is the best it can be, and I couldn’t do that without hands-on publishers.

What's the most demanding part for you personally about being a writer?
Focus, focus, focus. I’m so easily distracted I feel like a little kid sometimes. I start out the day writing non-fiction, then the sheep get out and I must be a farmer. Back inside to my non-fiction and a reporter calls about my children’s book. Back to my non-fiction and it’s hard work so I remember there’s a Fudgesicle in the freezer screaming my name. Back to my non-fiction and a customer calls to order lamb chops. Back to my non-fiction and I suddenly see a fun plot twist to my current novel and I scribble that down. Back to my non-fiction and I realize I haven’t written anything new for my Farm Tales blog and I’d better get to that.

By the end of the day I’m so far away from that non-fiction manuscript I can barely remember the title. My life has exploded in about five different directions this last year, and I am nowhere near being in control of any of them.

So focus is definitely my personal challenge…What was the question again?

What do you consider to be your best and worst attributes?
Ugh. Worst---I procrastinate terribly. Best attribute might be my love of solving problems, which comes in handy both as a writer and a farmer.

If you were a book, what would its title be?
Any of these memoirs: Enslaved By Ducks, or Shepherdess, or Fifty Acres and a Poodle (although since our poodle died last year, I’d change it to Fifty-Three Acres and a half-Great Dane.)

What's the one thing you always have in your fridge?
Apples, milk, hazelnut-flavored yogurt, and cheese and tortillas for quesadillas.

Oops, that’s five things.

Your computer starts having a meltdown three-quarter through your new manuscript. What do you do? And have you made back-ups??
Been there, actually. While I haven’t lost ¾ of a manuscript, I’ve lost entire chapters, sometimes from computer error, sometimes from operator stupidity, and have been unable to recover them, even though I do back up (but not as obsessively as I should, I’m afraid.)

When this happens, the first thing you do is put your head down on your desk and cry. Then you get something to eat and play with your cat/dog/goat. Then you return to that computer (or buy a new one), open a new document, type “Chapter One,” and begin again.

Because our stories are lodged somewhere in our bones, a computer crash can’t erase them entirely, so I try to remember that my lost words weren’t the only way to tell the story. What I retype is often better than what I lost.

Tell us something about Catherine Friend no one else knows…
I published a memoir last year that was loaded with details, including my underwear size, so there’s not much people don’t know about me…except maybe that I don’t like cooked fruit. Could there be a more boring detail about a person than this?

How do you think you are still improving yourself as a writer?
I like learning new things, so writing will always be a challenge. Just when I think I understand what I’m doing, I learn something more that tells me I am basically clueless.

What do you consider the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects of the lesbian publishing industry?
My experience has been extremely positive. Smaller publishers pay more attention to your books, get more excited about them, and do a better job of keeping them in print. And since authors must market their work regardless of the publisher’s size, going with a big publisher isn’t always the best experience.

What advice would you offer to aspiring writers trying to get their break in publishing?
When I taught writing, I used to tell my students to “Be persistent.” I told them over and over again that if they hung in there, they’d eventually get published. I was unrelenting—Be persistent! Be persistent! Meanwhile I was accumulating a gazillion rejection letters and really struggling to keep going, so I pretty much decided that the advice I was giving out was a total pile of crap.

Turns out it’s not.

What are some of your favorite books from 2006?
I think I read too many to have favorites, but I’ve been having great fun reading all the new Bold Strokes Books. I really enjoyed Lori Lake’s Snow Moon Rising. I discovered Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. I’ve happily rediscovered Ellen Hart, and recently enjoyed Val McDermid’s A Grave Tattoo.

A happy writer is…
…me, swaying in my hammock in the shade of our curly willow tree with a Diet Coke, a bag of Cheetos, the notebook for my current novel, and our two cats, Oliver and Pumpkin, who are brave enough to jump up onto a moving hammock and risk seasickness just to be with me.