The good call: Kris Fletcher’s A Better Father
Kris Fletcher
Last July, Kris Fletcher received a phone call at home that shook her into a tearful fit for the next half hour. No, it wasn’t a shaky voice screaming for help like Halle Berry’s “The Call”.
On the other end was Fletcher’s agent, Jessica Faust, who told her that Harlequin was going to publish her debut novel, A Better Father.
“I had been writing and submitting novels for 17 years at that point,” Fletcher said. “I was pregnant with my third kid when I started writing and he was 17 when I got the call. I called one of my critique partners and I was still crying so hard that she thought something horrible happened to my kids.”
Fletcher, a Syracuse, New York mother of five, said she has always had a certain inclination for romance novels, because it the basic value of people, home, and family and what most are looking for in life.
A Better Father (Harlequin Superromance, April 1) is a about a single father hockey star, Sam Catalano, who buys a childhood camp to give his son a good life. An old love, Libby Kovak, signs up as his assistant director and Sam does everything he can to fight the passion he still has for her.
Fletcher wrote A Better Father ten years ago as a mental escape, while she was at a Cub Scout camp with her sons in the Finger Lakes for a weekend.
A Better Father (Harlequin Superromance, $5.75)
“It came very close to selling when I first wrote it,” Fletcher said. She submitted it to Harlequin’s 2005 Golden Heart contest and was a finalist. An editor began working on revisions with Fletcher until Harlequin discontinued that division. Fletcher set it aside for nearly five years, until a couple of years ago. She reworked it many, many times and submitted it again to Harlequin.
“Even though their lines come and go, they are dependable and they have such amazing worldwide distribution that for a romance writer it’s a wonderful place to start,” Fletcher said. “Now that I’ve got the official validation from Harlequin, I feel more confident venturing into self-publishing.”
Also available in April is Fletcher’s first self-published novel, The Call of the Wilder. Gemini Wilder tries hard to be different from her family, except she will never be happy until she embraces that part of herself. “My mother never believed that anyone from our family could blush as heavily as I did. For a while I thought it meant I’d been given to the wrong family by a drunk nurse. Then my hippie mother told me I was born at home. Another hope bites the dust.”
Fletcher’s mother was born in a large, tight-knit family of 10 sisters—her inspiration for The Call of the Wilder. “When I was a kid there was always a feeling of kind of being an outsider, because they were so close and I wanted to be part of that relationship,” Fletcher said.
Later in life, Fletcher said her writing friends filled that void, to have a similar relationship that her mother had with her aunts.
Since Harlequin published A Better Father, the company has signed three more book contracts with Fletcher.
“I gave up many times but we (Faust and Fletcher) just kept coming back. It took so damn long,” she laughed. “The surprising part is how hard it is to believe that things have changed.”