Love machine

Endless reserves of imagination aren’t all it takes to write 165 novels. It also requires the discipline of a drill sergeant.

Nora Roberts has arranged her life carefully, paring down the clutter and distractions that would threaten to dull her laserlike focus.

It’s hard to argue with the results.

Roberts’ new romantic suspense book, “Angels Fall,” sits on top of The New York Times’ fiction best-seller list.

Later this year will bring the release of a futuristic crime novel, written under the pseudonym J.D. Robb, and three romantic fantasy paperbacks, “The Circle Trilogy.” There’s also a new J.D. Robb novella published as part of an anthology.

How does she do it? Is she some kind of machine?

Roberts laughs.

“I often say I’m not a machine,” says the 55-year-old author, a trim, energetic redhead with a slight smoker’s rasp. “I think I have a really strong work ethic, plus I really love the work.

“I think if you love what you do, you do a lot of it. I have a lot of discipline … and I have a fast pace.”

A lifelong Maryland resident, Roberts was the youngest of five children, and the only girl. Her upbringing shaped her work ethic.

“I had nine years of Catholic school, and grew up in an Irish Catholic family, with parents who expected you to do what you were told and do your job,” she says. “And while I’m extremely lapsed, I still have the core of Catholic guilt. …

“If I just blew off a day and didn’t have a really good reason, I would feel guilty about that. I mean, it would just not be worth it to me.”

So Roberts treats writing like a regular job. She works Monday through Friday, eight hours a day – sometimes more. And she doesn’t sit around waiting to be inspired.

“You’re going to be unemployed if you really think you just have to sit around and wait for the muse to land on your shoulder,” she says.

While there are few signs of extravagance in her home in the mountains of western Maryland, she has clearly made a handsome living. Each book published under the Nora Roberts name since 1999 has been a best-seller.

“She’s amazing. She’s unstoppable,” says Karen Holt, deputy editor of Publishers Weekly, which gave a positive review to “Angels Fall” – although Holt says Roberts’ popularity makes reviews largely irrelevant.

“There are several other authors who are pretty prolific and do several books a year that sell really well, but Nora is really in a class by herself,” says Tommy Dreiling, chief romance buyer for Barnes & Noble Inc. “Nobody really hits the numbers that she hits.”

Roberts concedes that she has more female than male fans – a new TV ad features women reading “Angels Fall” poolside – but says she has signed books for people of all ages and backgrounds.

While she enjoys meeting fans and monitors their postings on message boards, she says she writes to please only one reader: herself.

Her process requires plenty of confidence and intuition. She doesn’t write outlines or map out her plots in advance. She comes up with a key incident, character or setting and works from there.

For “Angels Fall,” the idea was a woman who witnesses a murder but is too far away to intervene and too isolated to cry for help. She then finds that her claim is met with skepticism.

Roberts set the story in a small town in Wyoming, in the shadow of the Grand Tetons.

“That’s how I build,” she says. “What’s the situation? What is she doing there? Why did she come there? Did she live there? Did she move there? Is she visiting, passing through … and why doesn’t anybody believe her?

“Oh, well maybe nobody believes her because she’s not only new in town, but she’s a little bit crazy. Oh, that’s good!”

Once Roberts has answered some of those basic questions, she starts from page one and allows the plot, the characters and the texture to develop as she goes along. She writes a first draft, then a second, then a third. And she never works on more than one book at a time.

“This story and these characters, they deserve all my time and attention, my emotional connection,” she says. “Plus, I want to know what happens next.”

Roberts started writing during a blizzard in 1979, when she was trying to stave off boredom while snowed in with her two young sons. Her first novel, “Irish Thoroughbred,” was published in 1981. Since then, she’s never relaxed her pace, averaging more than six books a year.

She got her start writing short romance paperbacks, published exclusively by Silhouette. Now she hops from suspense to police procedural to science fiction to fantasy. But every Roberts book retains a romantic story line.

“I’m always going to write a relationship in it, because that’s what I like to read, too, plus that’s reader expectation,” she says. “But I can put anything around that I want, and there’s a place for it.”

For example, “The Circle Trilogy” dips more heavily into fantasy than any of her previous work.

“It was interesting to write something like that, where I had alternate universes and time travel and witches and shape-shifters and vampires,” Roberts says.

Some romance fans squirm at the violence in her J.D. Robb titles. The pseudonym was created at the publisher’s suggestion in 1995 to better distinguish her new series of hard-boiled, futuristic detective novels.

After the series gained popularity, Penguin revealed in 2001 that Robb was Roberts, and her real name has appeared on the Robb titles since then.

Roberts writes in a spacious, third-story office surrounded by windows and skylights that display a canopy of trees, one of several additions to their home built by her second husband, Bruce Wilder, a carpenter.

Her first husband’s family bought the property, on a wooded hillside off a winding country road, and when they divorced, Roberts remained. She met Wilder when she hired him to build bookshelves, and they were married in 1985.

Roberts’ favorite hobby – gardening – appeals to her meticulous, workaholic nature and keeps her close to home, which she prefers. She talks enthusiastically about weeding and warding off the deer that might want to munch on her lilies as she strolls through her multitiered garden.

She also keeps her family close by. She and Wilder, own a nearby bookstore, Turn the Page Books; Wilder runs it full time, and her daughter-in-law also works there.

Roberts has book signings at Turn the Page, but otherwise leads a low-key existence as the most famous resident of her small community.

“My day-to-day life is very everyday. I work and I let the dogs in, let the dogs out, cook dinner, work in the garden,” she says. “I don’t see people except my family for days – weeks, sometimes.”

“Angels Fall” spotlights her love of small-town life, of quiet and solitude. And the male love interest is a writer of crime thrillers who shares Roberts’ approach.

“If justice doesn’t triumph and love doesn’t make the circle in entertainment fiction, what’s the point?” he asks.

Roberts agrees.

“I’m writing commercial fiction,” she says. I’m writing something that’s supposed to give someone a good time.

“There may be horrible stuff that happens within it … but in the end, somebody will win.”