Adrienne Giordano
AKA: Anne Dano
Crash Course & The Money Shot
An award-winning talk show host famous for saving marriages puts her own under the spotlight. What she finds in the harsh glare will change everything.
The Writer’s Dossier – The Adrienne Giordano interview
DOSSIER: A lot of Dossier followers have writing experience in one way or another and are looking for ways to transition their life experience into writing a book. You started out writing novellas and short stories in high school and ended up working in the newspaper industry as an advertiser. How did your professional work help prepare you to jump into novel writing and produce as many books as you have? You’re up to forty now, right?
GIORDANO: Somewhere around forty. I stopped counting! People ask me all the time why I stopped counting and I wish I knew. Lame answer, I know, but that’s what I’m going with! After leaving the newspaper industry, I worked for an ad agency for ten years. That job? Chaos all day. Missing ads and volatile clients made every day a fresh new adventure. At one point, I was managing a forty-million-dollar account with a client who may have been insane. He’d call me darlin’ (he was from Texas) and when he’d get annoyed, he’d call and yell “That dog don’t hunt!” into the phone. I laugh now, but the drama taught me to hit deadlines and the consequences when we didn’t. I think working in such a high-speed environment helped sharpen my organizational and time management skills. So much of publishing now involves marketing our own books and that (at least for me) can be a full-time job. I get sucked in. For that reason, I’ve learned to set aside writing time and actually put it on my calendar. If I don’t schedule it, it’ll never get done.
DOSSIER: You’ve worked with Tracey Devlyn (a Dossier stand out!) for a long time, and the two of you have done a lot of things along the way to develop your craft and engage with readers. Nicely done! Please explain the process you two shared in writing each book in the Blackwells series. These novels are not co-written, so how much did you coordinate with each other while you were writing CRASH COURSE and Tracey was writing END GAME?
GIORDANO: Constant coordination! Particularly on settings. When we’re co-writing a book (rather than each of us writing separate stories in the series), we can make real-time corrections to settings, character descriptions, etc. With Steele Ridge, we’re writing stand-alone books in a shared world. As much as we tried to create maps and spreadsheets (oh, the spreadsheets!) containing setting and character descriptions, there were still mix-ups.
When Tracey finished Flash Point (book 1), I was halfway through Smoke Screen. She sent me the draft of her book and I realized the interior of the home the Blackwell brothers share was very different from what I had in Smoke Screen. How about that kitchen door I needed leading to the yard? Whoopsie! Tracey’s book didn’t have that and since her book was done and closer to deadline, I re-wrote some scenes (the door stayed!), but it taught us a valuable lesson about being extremely detailed with our notes. You’d have thought we’d learned our lesson, but something came up in End Game (book 5!) for Tracey and I had to go back and revise Crash Course (book 4). You just don’t know what might organically pop up as you’re writing, so we’ve learned to roll with it. We also had a rule that we each “owned” certain characters. That helped with continuity from book to book. We’d read each other’s books and tweak dialogue for our characters. It avoided the dreaded “Cruz would NEVER say that” statement!
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Absolute silence/music playing/your hotel room at ThrillerFest?)
GIORDANO: These days, my process seems to vary from book to book. I feel like I instinctively know what I need on any day. Typically, I’m in my office, but if it’s nice outside, I’ll sit on my front porch or in the backyard. When I’m in my office, I write in the oversized armchair I bought a couple of years ago. I love it because I have room to move around in it. I often sit sideways so I can look out the window. Sometimes I need quiet and others I put headphones in and listen to music from one of my meditation apps. I love BrainFM. It has a focus mode, and the music is fantastic. No matter where I’m working, I have one ritual I do before each writing session. I have an aromatherapy diffuser in my office that I’ll put Neroli oil in. I feel like the scent cues my brain that it’s writing time. Whether I’m writing outside or in, I always spend a few minutes in my office with the diffuser going.
DOSSIER: Novellas seem to be making a surge today, and you even wrote one. What do you like most about novellas, and how do you approach writing one compared to a traditional full-length novel?
GIORDANO: Novellas are great fun to write because they’re so short and there’s not a lot of room for subplots. I write in three-act structure, so my approach is exactly the same with each project no matter the length. I figure out my beginning, middle and end and then let the rest develop as I’m writing. Since novellas are short, it’s a fun challenge for me to see how tight I can get the plot. Novellas also give me a chance to revisit my favorite characters and let readers know what’s going on with them. In one novella, I had a hungover Reid Steele’s fiancé get kidnapped on their wedding day.
DOSSIER: Now that the Blackwells series is done, the Dossier has discovered that you’ve got some new things planned. Care to share a little about what’s next for everyone?
GIORDANO: Yes!!! Over the last few years, I had a story rolling around in my brain. The only problem? It wasn’t romantic suspense or mystery, and that was totally new. What the heck? When the main character wouldn’t leave me alone (some of them are rude that way), I went for it with a women’s fiction book. As scary as it was to try something new, it felt like my pre-published days where I had the freedom to let the plot develop and not worry about a deadline. I jotted notes for months. The lack of pressure led me to a wildly creative mindset. Finally, I had a few months between scheduled books and started drafting the women’s fiction. All that preparation paid off because the book poured out of me. The title is The Money Shot, and it’s written under the pen name Anne Dano. Fun fact: Anne Dano is Adrienne Giordano minus a bunch of letters. I couldn’t come up with a name I liked, so I sat down one day, wrote my name on a piece of paper a dozen times and started crossing out letters. By the time I reached the bottom of the page, I had Adrienne Giordano. I’ll still write romantic suspense and mystery, but I love having another genre to experiment with. That’s the fun of being an author. We get to play with our imaginary friends every day and no one thinks we’re weird. Or maybe they do. Who knows?
Discover more about Adrienne at: Adrienne Giordano | Anne Dano | Amazon Page