Romance and ride-sharing
Fares often fuel inspiration for Uber driver
You never know who your Uber driver is going to be — or how what you say inside the car will live on.
Rita Clay Estrada spends her days zipping around Spring in her SUV. In the mornings, she picks up children who have missed the bus, greeting parents grateful to find a grandmother behind the steering wheel. From there, she’ll flick her phone’s Uber app, usually catching a businessman or -woman dropping a car off for service and hailing a ride to work. Maybe after, she’ll find herself at the airport (cha-ching) or around the Galleria. She’s never sure what the day
“When people know they’re not going to see you again, it’s amazing what they’ll say.” Rita Clay Estrada, romance novelist
will bring, but she likes that uncertainty.
When someone hops in her back seat, she reads him. Then she starts asking questions.
How are you? How’s your day going? Is your homework done? What do you do for a living?
She gets doctors, lawyers, waiters, oil and gas executives — you name it. And when those people ask about her, they’re always fascinated by her response. “I write romance,” she says. With 52 books published, she isn’t just any romance writer. She’s the woman for whom the genre’s most prestigious award, The RITA, is named. She’s the co-founder and first president of Romance Writers of America. And when she’s not tapping away at her computer, she’s one of the tiny black-car icons
on your Uber app, circling the Houston area’s streets.
The 75-year-old (don’t tell her boyfriend; he thinks she’s in her 60s) started work with the ride-sharing service about nine months ago, when she realized she needed a job. Royalties in our digital world aren’t what they used to be. And this gig gives her flexibility to sign off and scribble in the notebook she keeps on her passenger seat when she gets an idea and needs to capture it on paper before it escapes.
It also provides her with a revolving door of muses.
“Talking to other people always gives you inspiration. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. Do you know, some of the best lines I’ve ever come up with have always been from talking to guys or girls, and it’s amazing how people talk. When people know they’re not going to see you again, it’s amazing what they’ll say,” Estrada says.
It’s one of her mornings off, and she’s sitting at the kitchen table in her Spring home. She works about four or five days a week. Some days, she’ll clock only a few hours, if an idea pops up or she wants to meet her friends for a bridge game; other days, she’ll go as long as six hours, soaking up details about strangers’ lives.
“And when they find out that you write romance, men open up like you’ve never thought,” she continues. “Because they know you don’t know who they are — I might know where they live, but I only know their first name. I don’t know anything about them. So they’ll say, ‘What do you think women want? So what do you think? So what do you think causes divorce?’ ” Her eyes bulge in disbelief.
Currently, she’s working on a book about a young woman who walks into her Venetian hotel room to find her much older husband having an affair. The story has been in Estrada’s brain for years, and she knows the setting well. Her bestknown book, “The Ivory Key,” a story about a woman who falls in love with a ghost, garnered attention all over the country and world.
Strangely, it was a big hit among Italian men, she says, laughing. So her publisher flew her to Venice to promote the book.
That was in the good old days, Estrada says. Earlier this year, Nielsen, which measures media audiences, reported that “the romance genre accounted for nearly 20 percent of all e-book sales in the U.S. in 2015, making it the most digitally driven literary genre.”
That’s good and bad. Digital romance titles sell for only about $5 on average, which doesn’t leave much money for promotion or writers’ royalties. Estrada isn’t the only one feeling that crunch.
“I think our members would say it’s harder to make a living these days,” says Allison Kelley, executive director of Romance Writers of America. There are plenty more romance books out there than there used to be. Most — 89 percent, according to data presented to the RWA earlier this year — are digital.
Romance connoisseurs are often “power readers,” digesting two or three books a week, Kelley says. Supply has grown to meet the demand. Some novels are self-published; others, like Estrada’s, come through more traditional routes.
“You know, with more availability, people don’t want to pay cover price,” she says. “We all shop at Amazon because whatever we buy, we think we can get it as cheap or cheaper, and we can get it delivered to our house.”
Hence, Uber. Estrada says she can pack in about $500 of rides a week without affecting her writing schedule — enough to keep her from having to dip into the royalties she’s set aside over the years.
While driving, Estrada pays close attention to what people say. But in romance writing, feeling and emotion move a book along, not dialogue. So she’s more interested in how people say things than the actual words they use.
“I pick up on laughs; I don’t know why,” she says. “And on sincerity — that tone of voice when he or she is speaking from the heart is amazing. And there’s a sentiment that goes behind the words, even, that’s so crucial.”
After a ride, she’ll pull out her trusty notebook and jot down details she wants to remember.
She keeps a tablet in the car, too, in case she has time to do some real writing. She’s hightech these days, all tablets and apps — a far cry from when she began writing romance in the 1970s, storing her documents on diskettes tucked away into notebooks. Her drafts are on the cloud, so she can work from anywhere, plugging in details and observations.
She’s almost finished with her current project, she says. And yes, it will have extra Houston inspiration.