Fame & Fortune: Author Tami Hoag Thriller writer loves to horse around with her money
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Bankrate: Did you go on to college?

Hoag: I did not. I got married out of high school. I can't believe I did that now. My husband had about a year left of college, and the deal was that I would go to work and support us while he finished school and then we would switch roles. Then he took a job in a city where there was no four-year college, so I just kind of got the short end of the stick with that.

Bankrate: Were you writing through this time?

Hoag: Yeah, I was, although I was kind of frustrated through that period because I didn't know what I wanted to write about and I had a lot of false starts. I think I hadn't lived enough or something. Maybe I hadn't found the right genre.

Bankrate: You discovered the romance genre quite by accident, right?

Hoag: Yeah, we were on vacation, our car had broken down and I was kind of a captive audience and I started reading a romance and found there was more to it than I thought there would be. It really wasn't anything like I thought it would be. I was the perfect book snob,  having never read one, which is often the case.

Bankrate: Was it easy for you to break into publishing romances?

Hoag: It was for me. I did it very methodically: I had a plan, I knew which publisher I wanted to go to, I knew that my best chance of breaking in was to write comedy because not very many people can pull that off and I knew that I could. And I targeted a particular line of books and wrote to that line of books and shipped it off to an agent, and it sold like immediately.

Bankrate: The step from romance to crime would not seem natural.

Hoag: Well, the intensity of the emotion is very similar. If you're writing a romance, you want a high level of emotional tension and to take people on a roller-coaster ride through that relationship, and of course that's what you want to do in crime fiction as well, but just putting that energy more to the aspect of the case or the crime that is taking place.

Bankrate: You were quite prolific in romances.

Hoag: I did 15 of the short ones and then started doing longer ones that were sort of hybrids; depending on who you asked, they were romantic suspense, suspense with romance. They were kind of a 50/50 hybrid. I did a number of those before I really went straight for suspense.

Bankrate: Every budding romance writer wonders if they can make a living at it. Did you?

Hoag: Oh yeah. I was still married then, but by my second or third year, I was making a very nice living. You can. When I was doing the short romances, there you have to be very prolific in order to make a living at it; you have to be very disciplined and very prolific.