Acting And Writing

Tina Sloan is best known for her twenty-six-year role on CBS’s soap The Guiding Light and as the author of Changing Shoes: Getting Older – Not Old – with Style, Humor and Grace based on her autobiographical one-woman show. The Changing Shoes book release coincided with the launch of the show in New York, which went on to grace stages across the U.S. and in London. Her debut novel Chasing Cleopatra, a suspenseful romantic thriller features an irresistible heroine.

Tina has appeared on Law & Order: SVU, Third Watch and in numerous films including Woody Allen’s Celebrity and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, The Brave One with Jodi Foster, Changing Lanes with Ben Affleck, The Guru with Marisa Tomei, People I Know with Al Pacino and Black Swan with Natalie Portman. Her latest projects include being part of an all-star cast on the soap web series Beacon Hill and Venice, and she continues to be a sought after speaker.

Beyond her professional accomplishments, Tina has achieved significant milestones in her personal life, which include climbing 20,000-foot peaks in Africa and Nepal and finishing eight marathons. She lives in Florida, with her husband of 44 years and Maryland, where they enjoy time with their son, his wife and 2 grandchildren.

We asked Tina if she could tell us the story behind CHASING CLEOPATRA and we are delighted to feature her on WWWB!

My inspiration for CHASING CLEOPATRA was a very interesting romantic dream I had many years ago. I woke up and wrote the idea down and then proceeded to put it under my bed (ha! Good place for Romance). I was very busy at the time with a young child, a husband and a job acting on a soap opera every day.

Therefore, I forgot it for years till one day I was looking under my bed for something else and I found the dream plot. I read it over and I decided to show it to a famous editor (Nan Talese who edits Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan etc). She’s a great friend of mine  and helped me with a play I wrote years ago.

She would come over and  plop down in my living room and I would do the play. It was a one woman show called CHANGING SHOES which went all over America and was done in London as well. Nan would say, “ No that doesn’t work as you are too spoiled or too entitled” or whatever she felt was wrong. Then I would begin the rewrites until I got it right. This time, I gave her my dream plot.  She said “Oh I love it, Tina but it needs great danger.” Well that was a huge change! I had a charming romance plot which now needed a huge ingredient of danger.

My son had been in the Marines after graduating from Harvard and went into Intelligence and was sent to Iraq where he dealt with Al Quaeda so guess where I decided to find my danger? In a terrorist- in AQ.  CHASING CLEOPATRA is set in Hawaii which meant I went to the Philippines not to Iraq to find my terrorist. My son had friends in black ops and CIA covert life whom I called to get ideas and it started to come together but it took many rewrites to make it work.

I have 4 women in CHASING CLEOPATRA. Cleopatra is 46, Julia is 24, Miranda is 55 and Sandrine is 77. They are all fabulous and totally motivated in very different ways- and as an actress I have played them all and understood their motivations. I wrote the book as I did the play where I would stand up and say things out loud to see if they were authentic for each of the characters. As an actress the most important thing is that you have to need something so much it hurts. This motivated me as a writer to make my characters have great needs. Although what they needed might seem unimportant to others, it had to be important to them.

An example of what I mean– I was in a movie with Jodie Foster where all I was doing was selling her some stationery for her wedding, but to make it work I told myself as the saleswoman that I would lose my job if I didn’t sell her this particular stationery. That made the moment more exciting and when I saw it in the movie it came to life. I needed to sell her that stationery! And the women in my book need love or revenge or sex or understanding or attention and I as an actress needed to see that need and believe it.

I used this technique throughout CHASING CLEOPATRA and people tell me they can’t stop reading and stay up all night to see what will happen as each chapter ends with a cliff hanger. I am told a lot that it is like a film which is how I wrote it. I saw the scene unravel. I was on a soap opera for 35 years – the last 26 on Guiding Light. Therefore, I know all about cliff hangars and romance and danger.

CHASING CLEOPATRA takes place in Hawaii for 5 days before Xmas in 2011. I had been in Hawaii at Christmas time one year and had run the Honolulu Marathon so added two characters running part of the Honolulu Marathon to the story. I also had Cleo on a tv show and as I had been on a tv show for 35 years I knew all the ins and outs of hair and makeup and was able to make that very real- obviously-  it gave an insight into what goes on in tv day after day. I had also climbed Mt Kilimanjaro to 19,700 feet so incorporated that climb into the book as well. That climb is a very important part of the book

But I think the betrayals in CHASING CLEOPATRA are the most fascinating part of the book and they come as total surprises. The love story and there is more than one and more than two and more than three love stories which all merge in unexpected ways.

And that danger Nan suggested I had to add really made the book come to life. The danger gives such suspense to it and is again a total surprise. The book is truly a novel of love, betrayal and suspense.

As I say on the back cover (and by the way what one writes on the back cover takes as long as the whole book to write!!)

To the untrained eye, Cleopatra Gallier appears to lead a charmed life in Honolulu’s paradise. She is impossibly beautiful, clever, wealthy and … trained to kill.

When she enters into a love affair with the much younger, irresistibly handsome rogue, Jake Regan, she finds herself colliding with an intricate terrorist plot. Her secret past, like Hawaii’s smoldering volcano, is ready to erupt. In the four days leading up to Christmas, two stunning betrayals and a terrorist attack threaten to reduce her and the island she loves to ashes.

As Cleopatra’s deadly skills are put to the test, she must first untangle the devastating secrets of her past.

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Follow Tina on Twitter https://twitter.com/tinasloan

Find out more about Tina on her website https://www.tinasloan.com/

Buy Chasing Cleopatra HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing