It was refreshing to sit down and speak with Niobia Bryant regarding her past ventures and her latest release, Message from a Mistress. Through witty repertoire and honest humility, this award-winning author gave me an enjoyable glimpse into her great mind in a very short period of time.

She excitedly invites her fans to find her on Facebook and Twitter as she does respond to all messages. I, for one, look forward to reading this release as well as future works of literature from Niobia Bryant.

Parlé Magazine: Do you have a particular message that you'd like to share with your readers through this new release, Message from a Mistress?
Niobia Bryant: Just that I'm really, really excited about it. It's getting a lot of buzz and attention. After ten years of writing, I'm really excited that it seems as though people are just as excited about this project as I am. I really want people to get into it, to enjoy it, and to give me their honest opinion. I am the type of writer that I don't mind a bad review as long as it's a critical one and not just one that says "Oh, I hated it"-okay, tell me why. I always feel like writing is a learning process and I'm continuously looking to better myself because I want to bring the readers the best that I can. So, I'm really excited and also the book is based on a movie that I really love, based in the 1940's, you know, one of those old black and white movies where everybody was dressed to nines all the time and the movie was called A Letter to Three Wives. The premise was these three friends that get this message from another friend saying basically I'm running away with your husband, he's my man now. But, she doesn't tell the three friends what husband it is that betrayed them. So, they have to put up with this all day, was it me, was it you, and there are a lot of flashbacks and there are a lot of secrets of the wives, you know, their own secrets are revealed as they sit there and try to figure out which one of us is about to lose our marriage? What's interesting is that all of their marriages are not worth keeping. So, it's a lot of different elements and I'm really, really excited about it.

Parlé: Like you said, there are a lot of flashbacks included, so much so that some may view it as excessive. What are your thoughts on that?
Niobia: Well, in kind of keeping to the original concept where everything happens in a day, it really was a technique that I had to use. And, I'll be honest, I've used flashbacks in previous books, but not as much as in this one. In taking the elements out of the movie that I loved, one of the things that was interesting to me and made it believable was that it all went down in a day. There's not too many times that a woman can't get in contact with her husband over a week. You know he may be, in this case they went deep sea fishing or whatever, and they couldn't reach them, so it was plausible. But if I had done it where the husbands were gone for a week, and didn't call home (laughs) it wouldn't have been believable at all. And one of the things that the reader has always told me over the years is that they like the realism.

Parlé: Your characters are very relateable and very well developed.
Niobia: Three Times a Lady was the book that taught me that that's what readers wanted. The fact that the heroine got up and washed...and it seemed simple, but I remember the readers emailing me like, "yeah-why do they act like, you know, you just laying up in it...and I don't mean to sound vulgar, but that's true. And that was my second book, back in 2001. So, I was like, you know what? They see what I see and they believe what I believe. Because I'm a reader, way before I was a writer. And I just want to make it as close to reality as I can. So, I had to do the flashbacks. And I know people are going to get me for it, but I had to use that technique to bring in the back story and bring in the history without sending these men away for a week and them not being able to reach them.

Parlé: So, we know that this book is loosely based on A Letter to Three Wives, and the Hoodwives series is loosely based on Desperate Housewives, but what other entities give you inspiration? And you can't use family!
Niobia: I'd like to say it comes from head (laughs), but that's not true. You have to keep it real, we all see things on the internet or reading the newspaper, some type of blog site and it can be something very minimal that makes me say, wow, what if this had happened? And one of the good things in being a writer and having an audience that listens to you, or some type of audience that cares to read what you write, I can take that and really develop a story around it. You are influenced to some degree by the things around you and it's exciting to take that and shape and mold it the way that you want to. And, really with Message from a Mistress, even though I love a Letter to Three Wives, basically I was saying, what if those were sisters? What if they had secrets of their own? It was fun.