Special Valentine’s Day Guest Chat with Jodi Thomas

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Jodi, what is your take on emerging Texas/Western romance writers?

I’m excited about it because, like every romance reader, I love cowboys. I also love the western way of life and am very glad to see that in many Texas romance novels there is much more to the hero than the hat. There is a way of living, a way of thinking, that runs deep in contemporary Western romance. It is the world I live in here in the Panhandle of Texas. Interviewers sometimes ask me where my hero’s values come from, and I have to say they come from the men and women I’ve seen all my life. I move around these strong, stubborn men and women all the time.

Last spring I was out at a ranch watching roundup. The cowboys had been working since dawn. I was simply watching and taking notes. When we stopped for lunch, I was late getting to the bunkhouse for the meal. When I walked in, thirty men, dusty and sweaty from riding all morning, were standing waiting.

I said, “You guys need to eat. You must be starving.”

One shy cowboy stepped forward, “No, ma’am, we’re waiting for you.”

I was so touched. That’s the cowboy way.

When I began writing Rustler’s Moon I wanted to show not only the way of life on ranches but also in small towns. My hero is a strong, honest man who has lost his dream. He’s drifting. When he bumps into a woman who is in real trouble, he has no choice but to help.

My stories often have mystery as well as love stories running through them. The people surrounding the main characters are as important in the story as the slices of real history that always weave throughout the book.

Who are the Texas romance writers whom you currently admire?

I have so many favorite authors from Texas that it would be impossible for me to recommend just a few. Some writers think that we have so many great romance writers here because Houston, Texas, was the birth place of the first Romance Writers of America National Convention. I think we had to strong writers here to put it together and take the gamble that writers would come from all over the country.

And because this will run on Sunday, February 14— Valentine's Day, could you tell us one of the most romantic scenes you’ve ever written in one of your books?

In Tall, Dark and Texan I wrote a scene in which my hero walks in while his wife is dressing. He stands behind her really seeing this woman he’s married to in name only, and realizes how much he loves and admires her.

She stares in the mirror and sees the truth about how he feels that he’d never let show.

I’ve gotten a hundred letters about how tender the scene was. A few even said it was the best sex scene they’d ever read. There was no sex scene. It was just one glance at a full-out, knock-your-socks-off, forever kind of love that we all search for.

In more than fifty stories, I’ve always had a love story woven into each book. I love a story with a happy ending. Maybe it’s just me, but when I finish the last page of a book I want to smile and remember those characters for a while.

I want to know that they found that forever love just like I did one day in senior English class years ago when I looked over and saw Tommie. He was six-one, had wire-rimmed glasses, a crew cut, and braces on his teeth. I figured if lightning didn’t strike him, I was going to marry that boy.

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