Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: Bestselling author Layla Wolfe likes to bring you alpha males–sometimes two at a time–and the kick-ass women who love them. Her BARE BONES MC series explores the dark, disturbing life of the biker club in Arizona. Her spinoff series THE BENT ZEALOTS MC is a gritty MM saga. THE ASSASSINS OF YOUTH tells the tale of bikers up against fanatics in Utah. She is currently at work on the next installment of THE BENT ZEALOTS MC. She also writes MMF and MM for Siren Publishing as Karen Mercury. Her books have been translated into Italian, French, and Spanish, writing as Clair Voyant.
You can find her at:
https://www.bookbub.com/authors/layla-wolfe
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8072579.Layla_Wolfe
Thanks so much, Layla, for joining me!
J. Scott Coatsworth: When did you know you wanted to write, and when did you discover that you were good at it?
LW: I must’ve been 4, because I was sitting on my lower bunk bed in San Rafael, California. My mother had just read aloud to me “The Bee Man of Orn” by Maurice Sendak and I held it in my hands. I thought something along the lines of “What power there is in words! You write words, and someone on the other side of the world reads them. In that moment, they are transported into your head!”
That’s when I knew I’d better learn to read.
JSC: If you could sit down with one other writer, living or dead, who would you choose, and what would you ask them?
LW: Oh, man! It’d have to be Henry Miller, “Just A Brooklyn Boy.” I used to pull his books off my mother’s shelves, to read the sex scenes of course. (I’m sure that’s how I got my very graphic style.) Shortly I realized “hey, this is really good writing,” so I’d read a little after the sex and a bit before it. Soon I was like “fuck it, just read the whole book.”
I knew he had zero regrets because talk about a guy who lived life to the fullest. I guess I’d ask him what his favorite movie is. 😊
JSC: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in the name of research?
LW: I was writing a book set in Zanzibar. A lot of opium was involved. I ordered some opium poppy seeds off Ebay, planted them in my yard, waited for them to flower, dried the seed pods, and smoked them. Just so I could say “they smelled like old library books.”
JSC: Are there underrepresented groups or ideas featured if your book? If so, discuss them.
LW: I write a lot about the Navajo Nation. Many years ago a plot involved how girls were being murdered on the Rez and nothing was done about it. Just a few years ago I told the story of some Navajo boys being used as drug mules. They leave them in the desert to die when they’re done with them. Some were cooking meth in a trailer, but they outwitted the Bad Guys by blowing up the trailer and escaping. They always outsmart them. A lot have gone on to work in Bent Zealots MC ventures, like the weed dispensary.
JSC: What’s the funniest or creepiest thing you’ve come across while researching for one of your stories?
LW: Going over a waterfall in a kayak. If you don’t hit the rocks perfectly, you don’t slow down until the first foot of water. Your rib cage shatters under the g-load, firing pointed spikes of bones at your organs. Your skull would wind up crunched into your feet.
JSC: What book is currently on your bedside table?
LW: Riding the Elephant by Craig Ferguson.
JSC: What question do you wish that someone would ask about your book, but nobody has? Write it out here, then answer it.
LW: Who inspired the hero Huntington Mountjoy in A Sexy Thing?
Thanks for asking! My real last name is Mercury, believe it or not, and I never knew much about Freddie Mercury until long after I got married. Just a few years ago I started watching them on Youtube and became very smitten with Brian May. He’s also an astrophysicist. He was a natural to inhabit the character of Hunt, a closeted married man who comes out late in life after being catfished by his future husband, a former meth dealer turned truck driver. Both were originally from The Holler of S. Carolina and both took completely different paths to wind up together.
JSC: Who has been your favorite character to write and why?
LW: Definitely Wolf Glaser. He pops up in every book, the reliable, goofy sidekick. Once you know he’s “played” by Andy Samberg in my head, he just writes himself. He clanks around with his utility belt holding a taser, pepper spray, bottled water, Swiss army knife, and something resembling a dildo. I literally just picture Andy Samberg, listen to him talk, and type it down.
Wolf gave the impression of a good boy playing at life on the wrong side of the tracks. Wolf could be talking about eating dead, burnt bodies with that idealistic grin on his face, causing Roman to wonder if he was two drummers short of The Doobie Brothers.
“I’m telling you,” said Wolf, semi-serious for once, “surprise is the way to go. How big is the house, twelve hundred square feet? How long can it take to hold them all at gunpoint while you run in and snatch Slushy’s daughter?”
Roman actually had to agree with him. If by “surprise” Wolf didn’t mean come in through the chimney naked in order to shock the drug runners into a comatose state.
JSC: What pets are currently on your keyboard, and what are their names? Pictures?
LW: Almost every book of mine has a dog in it. For A Sexy Thing I decided for once to go with cats! But yeah, as if everyone can’t tell, I’m a giant fluffy dog person, Newfoundlands in particular. I have two brown females right now, Myshkin (named after Prince Myshkin in The Idiot) and Arrow (named after Me and My Arrow by Harry Nilsson).
JSC: We know what you like to write, but what do you like to read in your free time, and why?
LW: I actually stopped reading fiction several years ago. Ssssh! I couldn’t turn off my brain editor, which doesn’t happen to me with nonfiction. My favorite genres are biographies, science, history, dogs of course, disasters like when every mountain climber freezes to death, and what I call “books about people with a worse childhood than me.” When someone grows up in a closet, it reassures me my childhood was a little bit better.
JSC: If you could choose three authors to invite for a dinner party, who would they be, and why?
LW: As you know, Henry Miller, or HM as I fondly call him. Sir Richard Burton (the explorer not the actor) who knew thirty languages. We could round it out with Arthur Rimbaud, the brilliant prose poet who split to Africa at age twenty and never wrote again.
JSC: What’s your favorite line from any movie?
LW: “Saigon. Shit.” That’s Martin Sheen’s first line in Apocalypse Now, when he’s massively drunk in a hotel room waiting for a mission. “And for my sins, I was given one.”
JSC: What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next? Tell us about it!
LW: The Bitch is Bad. It’s taking me for-fucking-ever to write due to my sick puppy. I also translated a lot of books into European languages last summer. Bitch is about a Silicon Valley guy who goes to Bare Bones MC territory to open a winery. A Bad Guy played by Bill Hader is…no spoilers!
And now for Layla’s latest book: A Sexy Thing:
They do not apologize for a damned thing.
VAN. Revenge for the death of my lover led me west, out of the Appalachian holler where meth-making defined me. I was not that backwoods addict but a clean member of a motorcycle club where violence and mayhem prevailed. My only outlet was cruising the dating apps, and yes, catfishing juicy hunks under a fake profile. Some sleazery just never vanishes. But I was trying.
HUNT. As an astrophysicist and family man, I was seemingly living the good life. But the persona I’d kept hidden for decades insisted on bursting forth. I needed to handle the crazy, so I came out to my wife and children. A heart attack showed me the path, and it led directly to the loving arms of Van Rossi, a down-to-earth fellow hillbilly. His rustic persona brought out the lusty, experimental side of me, and I’d follow him to any jackoff club at the end of the earth.
VAN. Dr. Mountjoy is beyond my redneck reach. I loathe myself for scamming such an upstanding academic—with such upstanding equipment. My stunning archangel has dropped from heaven just for me, and I don’t deserve him. And when the Society’s Baggers come to blast the Bent Zealots MC, Hunt will see the real me. I’m not even brave enough to follow through on my revenge. How can this beautiful saint see anything in me at all? I have my whole life to apologize for, but he doesn’t need to apologize for a fucking thing.
Publisher’s Note: This book is not for the faint of heart. It contains scenes of graphic gay sex, illegal doings, consensual bondage and discipline, forced seduction, catfishing, rimming, teabagging, jackoff clubs, themes of Daddy dominance, and violence in general. It’s a full-length novel of 60,000 words. There is no cheating or cliffhangers, and there are HEAs for all.
Bestselling author Layla Wolfe likes to bring you alpha males–sometimes two at a time–and the kick-ass women who love them. Her BARE BONES MC series explores the dark, disturbing life of the biker club in Arizona. Her spinoff series THE BENT ZEALOTS MC is a gritty MM saga. THE ASSASSINS OF YOUTH tells the tale of bikers up against fanatics in Utah. She is currently at work on the next installment of THE BENT ZEALOTS MC. She also writes MMF and MM for Siren Publishing as Karen Mercury. Her books have been translated into Italian, French, and Spanish, writing as Clair Voyant.
To get a FREE COPY of THE BARE BONES MC #1, sign up for Layla’s newsletter at (cut & paste):