Jove Belle was born and raised against a backdrop of orchards and potato fields. The youngest of four children, she was raised in a conservative, Christian home and began asking “why” at a very young age, much to the consternation of her mother and grandmother. At the customary age of eighteen, she fled southern Idaho in pursuit of broader minds and fewer traffic jams involving the local livestock. The road didn’t end in Portland, Oregon, but there were many confusing freeway interchanges that a girl from the sticks was ill-prepared to deal with. As a result, she has lived in the Portland metro area for over fifteen years and still can’t figure out how she manages to spend so much time in traffic when there’s not a stray sheep or cow in sight.

She lives with her partner of twelve years. Between them they share three children, two dogs, two cats, two mortgage payments, one sedan, and one requisite dyke pickup truck. One day she hopes to live in a house that doesn’t generate a never ending honey-do list.

Incidentally, she never stopped asking “why,” but did expand her arsenal of questions to include “who, what, when, where” and, most important of all, “how.” In those questions, a story is born.

Who would you count among the authors who have inspired and influenced you?
The list of writers that influenced me as a reader is innumerable. John Steinbeck, first and foremost, challenges me to be a better person. The list here would be much the same as the one delineating who I most want to chat with. In the interest of not being redundant, I won’t repeat them. Even so, I only listed a few that had dramatic impact. The reality is, every book that I read has some level of influence and provides some degree of inspiration. Words are amazing that way.

As a writer, though, the list is considerably smaller. Some have had an indirect influence, while others have had a very direct, in my face kind of influence.

First, the indirect. Until about two years ago, give or take, I had absolutely no idea that lesbian fiction even existed. Insane, yes, I know. Seriously, it just never occurred to me to look for it. Most of my time was spent reading the classics. I didn’t even look for anything written within the last fifty years. No appeal. One day I was browsing through the gay and lesbian section of Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, looking for a specific title on parenting. I am a mom, after all. That’s when I found it. You know that classic epiphany where the light flips on and an angelic chorus sings out “Aaaahhhh.” I had that moment standing in the aisle in the purple room at Powell’s. The first lesfic book I read was by Karin Kallmaker. I fell in love...couldn’t get enough (still can’t). Then came Radclyffe. Oh, the delicious things women do together and there it was, in print and in my hands.

That’s when I knew I HAD to write. No more thinking about possibly writing something someday. I just sat down and started typing with a big, stupid grin on my face.

Then there are a couple of writers who’ve had a very direct, and sometimes painful, influence over my writing. It would be totally remiss of me not to mention them here. First, Tara Wentz. She pushed, poked, and tortured me through my first book. When she should have been working on her own writing, she was babysitting me through mine. I also have to thank Andi Marquette who has been infinitely patient with me and my determination to screw up the basics. She constantly reminds me of everything I don’t know about writing.

Currently, Jennifer Knight has the most influence. She’s the one assigned the unhappy task of editing my manuscript. I’m waiting for Hallmark to come out with an “I’m sorry my characters are inconsistent and contradictory. I will get better at this. I promise.” card. Haven’t seen one yet. When I do, I’m snatching it up and sending it to her.

Bold Strokes Books will release your first book, Edge of Darkness, in 2008. Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind the story?
It started as a three paragraph blurb for a writing challenge. The topic was the weather and I couldn’t shake the image of this woman holding a sword with a dead body at her feet. She was in the middle of the street during those fleeting moments of quiet after the bars shut down and before the morning commute starts. Sun’s down, moon’s out, but obscured by clouds, and she lifts her face to the sky as the unrelenting rain pours over her. We’re not talking a light spring shower. It’s the heavy, angry rain that pushes you off the street and into the safety of your home. And yet she’s standing there, dead body at her feet, sword in her hand, looking for guidance in the night sky.

So, I wrote the three paragraphs, turned ’em in and thought I was done with it. Months later she was still calling to me. I mean, seriously, what in the hell was she doing in the rain in the middle of the night with a dead guy? That’s not a normal activity. After that I think I about bored my poor wife to death talking about her, trying to figure out who she was.

Any unforeseen hurdles, technical or otherwise, pop up during your writing of the book?
Hurdles? I suppose, with few exceptions, we all have our hurdles to jump over when writing. For me it’s trying to find the right balance between work (As much as I’d like to give that up, I’m rather fond of living in a house and my children have grown accustomed to eating.), writing, and my family. We have three children. The oldest is eighteen and lives in her own apartment. But a few years ago we got this wild idea that we really needed to have a few more, so we also have a three-year-old and a five-month-old baby. I do most of my writing with at least one of my kids on my lap. That works okay for edits, but it’s very difficult to do anything creative while bouncing a baby on my knee or while a three-year-old is using me for a jungle gym. Erotica? Forget about it. That has to wait until naptime or bedtime.

As for the technical hurdles, god knows I have much to learn in terms of craft. But I have some wonderfully patient mentors who simply smile and point me back on track. Thankfully I’ve improved in terms of consistent point of view and active sentence construction. Those were two major hurdles for me. I typically stay very strictly in one point of view simply because I am unable to skilfully and successfully transition. Edge of Darkness is a bit of a departure for me because it has two distinct voices. To keep myself organized and facing forward, I use very clear scene breaks and there’s an obvious pattern in the shifts of POV.

Do you plot significantly before you start writing?
I spend a LOT of time with the characters, getting to know them, figuring out what they want to do and the story that is wrapped around that. Then I put together a rough outline of how to get from A to Z. I’m trying to be a little more disciplined and produce an actual chapter outline before starting now. We’ll see how successful I am.

How do you decide what to name your characters?
Some characters just tell me their names. Others I could literally pull it out of a hat. It just isn’t that important. My wife is accustomed to me randomly saying give me a woman’s name. She doesn’t even think about it anymore, she just spits out whatever is on her mind at the time. Nine times out of ten, I use it. In Edge of Darkness there are two main characters. The one told me her name and there’s no way I could picture her any differently. The other one my wife gave me. If my editor told me tomorrow that she needs a different name, I wouldn’t even ask why. I’d just change it.

Did you experience any ‘problem characters’ – ones that bumped heads with you because of what you wanted them to do/not do?
Absolutely. Eventually, after trying to beat her into submission, I simply gave up and let her be herself. That seems to have worked out okay so far. We’ll see how well she holds together during editing.

What about editing; do you rewrite as you go or do you prefer to finish a first draft first before returning for the second?
Both. I edit as I go and, as much as I wish that was enough, I go back through at the end and edit some more. And then I’ll do that again. And again. By the end of it, I’m rightly and truly sick of the characters. In order to maintain some shred of objectivity, which is, in my opinion, inherently impossible, sometimes I’ll step away from a project for several days, weeks, months, whatever is appropriate. That definitely helps.

What is your writing environment like?
I have an office where I very much like to go to write. However, I don’t like being that disconnected from my family. As a result, the bulk of my writing is done on my laptop at the kitchen table. It’s a poorly choreographed zoo at my house most of the time. It’s not so much a writing environment as it is a hazard zone.

What was the last book you read? Did you like it?
Red Light by JD Glass. I love the way JD builds sentences. Her use of language is very raw, almost brutal. I have a question I’ve been dying to ask her about the ending, but beyond that, I very much enjoyed it. She’s moving onto the list of authors whose books I will buy sight unseen simply because her name is on the cover.

If you could sit down with any writer for a chat, living or dead, who would you pick?
Wowza! Do I have to pick just one? The list is long. And a chat just wouldn’t be long enough. I’m thinking more like barbeque/potluck with everyone sipping frozen margaritas with little paper umbrellas while we lounge by the pool. Not that I have a pool, but I’m not likely to have a potluck with a bunch of dead writers either, so in my fantasy get-together, I have a pool.

The guest list? That was, after all, the whole point of the question. Willa Cather, Frank McCourt, JD Salinger, John Steinbeck, Mary Shelley, and, to round out the festivities, I’d invite along Anais Nin. I want to ask her what was going on in her head because, wow, she makes me dizzy.

Also, I’d really like to have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul show up. I’d love to hear what they had in mind when they wrote the New Testament. That alone would keep me entertained for days.

What’s your view of fan fiction?
That’s a tricky question. I’ve read some really great über that I enjoy a lot. And I think that a lot of people who wouldn’t write otherwise will write fan fiction. Anything that inspires a person to write is inherently good, in my opinion. That said, I don’t write it. Character development is intrinsic to my story development. If the character already exists, that takes away all my fun. Some day I might write some fan fic just as an exercise. With fan fic, readers will know immediately if you get the characterization wrong, so that could be challenging.

Tell us something about Jove Bell no-one else knows…
Oh, this is kind of tragic. I’m not interesting enough to have developed any juicy secrets. Crap. Now I need to go and rethink my life…figure out a way to be more interesting. The problem is, anytime I do anything even remotely interesting, I announce it to the population at large.

When you're not writing, how do you like to pass the time?
The answer to this question has changed drastically over the past few years. We used to go out a lot more. Concerts, plays, comedy shows, even the occasional sporting event (Who doesn’t love a good hockey game?). We used to own motorcycles and take day trips. Now, however, I’m terribly domesticated. I hang out with my family, do projects around the house, work in the yard. Every few weeks we get together with our friends and eat insane amounts of really good food. Let’s see, what else? Ummm…yeah, that’s about it.

What do you always have in your fridge?
Water, yogurt, soy milk, and baby food.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about ‘being a writer’?
I can’t speak for most people, but I will say the biggest myth busted for me was about image. I always imagined a writer living like Emily Dickenson or Virginia Woolf. Picture it, a writer bent over her desk for days, weeks, months, even years at a time. Simply writing. And, while I can understand the compulsion to do just that, it’s not my reality. Writing is more like the guilty pleasure that I have to sneak in around everything else that screams at me on a daily basis. I’m like a small child hiding in the corner with a bit of chocolate that my mom won’t discover until it’s smeared across my grinning face. Or the hot and heavy teenager in the back of the car hoping to go all the way and in a mad rush to get there. Some day, perhaps, I will develop a mature relationship with my writing and I’ll be able to savour it like the perfect pair of worn-in jeans. Until then, I snatch up whatever bits and pieces of time I have to do it and I cherish them as I rush through the rest of my life.

What inspires you to write?
God, what doesn’t inspire me to write? Seriously. There’s fodder for fiction in every moment of every day. The writer’s job is to extrapolate the moment and make the mundane captivating. That’s a powerful thing.

What’s next for you after finishing Edge of Darkness?
When I’m not working on edits for Edge of Darkness, I’ve been reworking a romance novel that I wrote last year. It’s really over-written and terribly adverb-laden. It needs a major overhaul. Since I don’t want to start on anything new until we have tied a ribbon on Edge of Darkness, but can’t stand to not be working on something, this is the perfect solution. It desperately needs the attention and I already know the women involved so it’s easy to switch back and forth. After that’s done, I’ve got a couple of different manuscripts started with rough outlines. It remains to be seen which one will demand to be written first.

What do you feel makes your books unique or stand out from others in your specific genre?
Instead of having two protagonists for main characters, one of them is very much an antagonist. Seriously. It’s not nice to run around with a sword killing people. Yet I very much want the reader to relate to her and sympathize. So a good portion of the book is from her perspective. I think it’s much harder to vilify someone if you understand her motivations. Doesn’t change the fact that she’s crazy and should be locked up. But instead of calling for a mob-level lynching, you want to see her get help. Or at least that’s my goal. Whether it works or not is up to the reader to decide.

What do you consider your best and worst attributes?
I tend to think about things differently than most people. Or at least the people I know. Remember the buzz phrase “think outside the box?” Most of the time, I’m so far removed from the box I don’t even know where the damn thing is. That can be good and it can be bad.

As for straight-up good qualities, I work hard, I play hard, I tell the truth, even when it’s painful. For all that, I have to thank my mom. Everything that I think is good about me, I learned from her.

Worst? This is by far and easier question to answer. I am quick-tempered, swear too much, drive like an ass, and I have a tendency to ramble. Oh, and I’ve developed an obsessive relationship with chocolate. It’s not healthy. We’re considering couple’s counselling, chocolate and I.

A happy writer is...
The answer is in the question. A happy writer is writing. Simple. ’Nuff said.