Lainey Bancroft has been writing all her life, but it was only a few years ago she decided to seriously pursue publication. She was fortunate to win several writing contests right out of the starting gate and hasn’t looked back since. Lainey’s stories run the gamut on the sensuality scale from sweetly sinful to sinfully sweet.

Muse: Lainey, first of all, Whispers of the Muse welcomes you to the site. Tell us a little about yourself. What part of the world do you live in? Tell us about your background?
Lainey: Thanks for the invitation to visit, Deborah. Great to be here.  I live in the gorgeous wine region surrounding Niagara Falls Ontario with my husband of twenty + years, our two teenagers and a small menagerie of pets. I’m pretty much a suburban soccer mom—except that both my kids inherited my lack of coordination in the sports department lol—my daughter is an artist, my son, a musician. Before I settled into domesticity, I had some interesting years. I was a rebel who had no real desire for post secondary education and a serious case of wanderlust. I worked for a while as a waitress and bartender in the ski resorts of the gorgeous Canadian Rockies. Hightailed it over to London, England where I spent a year working in a garden center and seeing as much of Europe as I could. Can’t beat those ten countries in ten days bus trips for a whirlwind taste of different cultures. I also spent one very memorable season in Holland packing flower bulbs for shipping. Hot itchy work, but a great place to be! I didn’t actually attend college until both my kids were in school full time. The experience was strange but fun and well worth it. The writing courses made me remember my love of words from my teenage angst, poetry days and once I’d tapped that vein I couldn’t stop!

Muse: Who are your favorite authors?
Lainey: Wow, that could be a lengthy list! Jennifer Weiner and Jennifer Crusie to make me laugh. Jodi Picoult to make me cry. Diana Gabaldon, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Sophie Kinsella, Nora Roberts, Susan Wiggs. Love Amy J Fetzer’s Dragon series. Ann Aguirre’s Corinne Solomen series, James Patterson, Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovich. Marilyn Brant is a fun new voice I think we’ll see much more. Stephen King, Jonathan Kellerman and I’m always blown away by Greg Iles’ novels.

Muse: Why do you write contemporary romance?
Lainey: I enjoy exploring the realities of the here and now through imaginary characters that can say or do things I’d never say or do myself. There are so many interesting contemporary situations and different ways to view them, and I think writing has given me the opportunity to immerse myself in different viewpoints and gain a better understanding of others and myself.

Muse: What is your writing regimen? How often do you work on a novel? Do you set daily time or word goals? What keeps you meeting your deadlines?
Lainey: The main thing that keeps me meeting deadlines is ambition. I don’t ever want to get stagnant. I want to learn and grow and continue to write bigger and better books.  I avoid the restriction of a daily word count, partly because some days it just isn’t feasible with running a home based business, but mainly because the minute I think I have to do something an evil little troll inside me goes into mutiny-mode. I devote a bit of time to writing every day, even if it’s only a few minutes of rereading to keep the story fresh in my mind. Often, I’ll go a week or two not producing new words, but the story continues to spin so when I do hit the keyboard I spend an obsessive amount of time letting the ideas flow from my fingers. To put it in clichéd terms, I suppose it is a feast or famine form of production but it works for me.

Muse: Does the way you personally look at life reflect in your writing style?
Lainey: I never begin a story with a particular point to prove or axe to grind but I don’t think it is possible to create a believable, organic character without a little of your own beliefs seeping in. When I look back at everything I’ve written, I can see a common thread of kindness, tolerance, acceptance of self and others, forgiveness. All things I believe very strongly in. So, yeah, I suppose the short answer would be: yes!

Muse: What are the creative jumping off points for you? Are you inspired by dreams? Music? Nature? The occasional black nightmare? What triggers your imagination?
Lainey: EVERYTHING triggers my imagination. Seriously. Every time I turn around a new idea flits through my brain—a snippet of dialogue from the people in line behind me at the grocery store, a portion of a song lyric, a newspaper headline. Right now I’m outlining a new story that popped into my head while I was walking the dog the other morning. I saw a single flip flop lying by the side of the road and thought, “What if…” If only I had more hours in the day. More keyboards. More fingers.

Muse: Tell us about The Trouble with Tessa. What was your inspiration?
Lainey: It’s difficult to explain the inspiration for The Trouble with Tessa without spoilers, but I’ll try. Erin, the main character, rambled around in my brain for some time before she found her place. She was proper, a little uptight and maybe even unforgiving and inflexible and I needed a way to turn her world on its head. I remembered a friend from high school who discovered on her eighteenth birthday that her family was not exactly the way she’d always believed it to be, then I tied portions of her story to a controversial news story from a number of years ago, and voila! Tessa was born.

Muse: What is your favorite scene from the book and why?
Lainey: Hmm. Another tough one. I’d have to say my favorite scene is probably right in the middle of the book when Tanner reveals the first big secret to Erin. I can’t share the secret, of course, that would be a total giveaway, but it impacts everyone. I enjoyed delving into the character emotions that shaped the scene—I actually still feel my throat tighten a bit just thinking about writing it. And I also think the scene is strong because it shows a pivotal moment for not one, but ALL the characters in the story and is the catalyst for the growth they achieve throughout the rest of the book.

Muse: Have you written other books?
Lainey: I’ve written many, many other books. Some I’m hard at work finding a home for. Others will probably never see the light of day…and that’s a good thing.

Muse: Tell us about your other books?
Lainey: I have a series of short stories—The 3-D Club Trilogy—available from The Wild Rose Press, Last Rose of Summer imprint, which is devoted to love the second time around because you don’t have to be twenty-five and a size five to deserve a happily ever after. All three of the stories have been very well received and I was honored to win Short Book of the Year from a popular review site. I have a novella in an anthology (Out of the Dark) from the same imprint that will be available September 24 2010, as well as three other contemporary romances now in paperback and several other novellas available digitally from All Romance eBooks.
I’m polishing up another contemporary with vigilante/urban fantasy overtones that I hope to work into a series and I’m currently shopping a humorous women’s fiction novel that I had a lot of fun writing.

Muse: How do you feel about the current publishing marketplace?