As husband and wife, Ed and Anne Kolaczyk share housework, cooking and childrearing.
And as Andrea Edwards, their pseudonym when they write romances about businesswomen, they share the plotting, the descriptions and the dialogue. They`re very different, but complementary.
”I develop the ideas,” said Ed, who is technologically oriented, gregarious and quick with a wisecrack.
”Anne calls it sitting around and reading the newspaper, and I call it research. I start out with a very broad story idea, then we work together on the plot and subplots, character and character development.”
”We toss it back and forth, and we work individually, too,” said Anne, who is introverted and sensitive to emotions.
”I tend to emphasize different things than Ed does. I tend to skim over the business situation and descriptions, and he tends to skim over the emotional relationships.”
In a bantering conversation, the Kolaczyks, who live in Kildeer, Ill., would have you believe they`re a Tarzan and Jane act. But seriously, they believe their differences allow them to strike a realistic balance in their books between their female protagonists` professional and personal lives, between business and pleasure.
Ed Kolaczyk, 48, spent 23 years in the employ of IBM as a marketing specialist working with large-scale computers and telecommunications systems. He quit on Sept. 17, 1982 (Anne recalls the exact date), because he had his fill of computers.
”I wasn`t doing anything new, and it just wasn`t fun anymore,” he said. ”You might read about them more now, but computers have been around for 30 years.”
Anne Kolaczyk, 35, a former elementary school teacher, turned to writing historical romance novels in 1976 out of boredom with her role as wife and mother. She published eight of them, including ”Hearts in Hiding” and
”Love`s Gentle Smile.”
By the time Ed left the corporate world the market for romance novels was flattening out and Anne`s editor asked her to work on a book with a contemporary setting. Ed suggested that they collaborate on books about professional women, capitalizing on his knowledge of the business world.
Their latest effort, ”All Too Soon,” just published in paperback by Avon Books, tells the tale of Jaylene Sable, a beautiful, warm-hearted, 38-year-old MBA and the youngest executive vice president of Miami-based Transworld International Enterprises (TIE) and leading candidate for president of a new division.
Jaylene begins a ”no strings” affair with a handsome consultant. Meanwhile, a vicious corporate power struggle erupts with enough dirty tricks to do J.R. Ewing proud and a ghost from the past comes back to haunt her. Jaylene also must deal with a bundle of emotions she thought she had sublimated to her fast-track career.
We won`t reveal all the details–and certainly not the ending–here, but as Ed Kolaczyk sardonically puts it, the heroines in Andrea Edwards` novels aren`t ”checking the front lawn for hoof prints” like the women in historical romances.
”Our heroines are competent,” he said. ”They have a business (role)
and a life of their own. They accept a man in their life because they want him, not because they need him.”
”We are portraying a very large segment of the population that has not had its problems and hopes explored in fiction,” Anne said. ”Too many women dealt with in books are either the villainous type or the typical romance heroine who is dependent upon a man. The stories we write reflect a more realistic view of how women see their lives.”
In ”Power Play,” the book that preceded ”All Too Soon” and really began their cycle of books with a business setting, the heroine is a partner in a Chicago CPA firm who has a romance with the son of the owner and other adventures, including getting mixed up with some mobsters. In the end, the hero and heroine help save each other`s lives.
”We don`t want the scenario of the heroine waiting to be rescued,” Anne said emphatically.
”We put our characters in situations as a result of circumstances, rather than stupid decisions, and they solve their problems through the union of their talents,” Ed said.
”That reflects our own relationship. We don`t get hung up on male-female roles. My mother died when I was 6 and my Dad and I did all the cooking and housework. I later went to live with my aunts, an all-female household. They ran the household and they also worked.
”In 23 years with IBM, I had 15 to 18 different managers of which about one-fourth were women, and I visited a lot of companies. I didn`t necessarily find the women more empathetic. Some of (my managers) were enjoyable; some I couldn`t relate to. It just depends on the person.”
Still, the view of the business world in ”All Too Soon” is a bit jaded, if not occasionally brutal.
Early on in ”All Too Soon,” Jaylene`s boss defends the company`s meddling in her private life, telling her: ”Employees are consumable resources, Jaylene. As an executive, you`re a capital resource. If you remember Economics 101, it`s important for us to take good care of you.”
And as Jaylene`s rival is privately gloating over his plan to derail her career, he thinks: ”It would be so easy because she wasn`t clever enough to recognize him as a threat. She still ved that working hard and playing by the rules were all she needed to be successful.”
Anne Kolaczyk said her husband ”puts reality into our books. I didn`t disbelieve (this view of tend to think of nice things like trust and loyalty. ”You also have to realize some of the reaction we got when we originally proposed writing novels about business. People think the bried. We wanted to show that there`s drama and excitement in all these people working in offices all day long.”
Or as Ed Kolaczyk put it, ”A book with a historical setting, for examplime to a country. We try to show an organization as a country with dukes and duchesses and all that. We make the corporation a psiness and technology and the progress and hopes of working women to keep abreast of issues, innovations and power plays. They sometimes draw on these files when they begin plotting a novel, tfantasy.
”We try to convey a feeling of accuracy about the corporate world,” Ed said. ”If we didn`t do that, people in the corporate world would not want to read them.”
Whenthey divide up their outline into chapters then divide the chapters into scenes. For the first draft they divvy up the scenes and share the writing. Then comes the hard work of reorganizing an.
Ed tends to save Anne from coming up with easy, albeit unrealistic, solutions to the characters` problems, and she in turn softens his dialogue, which he describes as ”harsher.”
the male point of view,” Anne said. ”I did okay in my earlier books, but you could always tell it was a woman trying to give a man`s point of view. When Ed does it, even the words he choose be too flowery and he`ll cut it down to more appropriate language.”
But they can`t coauthor a book without some disagreements, right?
”Oh, yeah,” Anne said.
”Oh,
”When we started we were very businesslike,” Anne explained. ”We were trying to be polite. Then he said somebody`s got to be the boss, so whenever there`s a disagreement I put my foss.”
”And I handle it maturely,” noted Ed. ”I sniffle and I pout and I won`t talk to her for days.”
”Actually, because they have different strengths, there are times when hshould be stronger and we have to battle it out,” Anne said.
”Usually we work out a compromise. We don`t ever submit something that either of us feels strongly against.”
Addeds judgment because it`s essentially a product for a feminine market. The final judgment has got to be a gut feeling from the one who best can feel feminine.”
The Kolaczyks consider is producing books for women. In addition to the Andrea Edwards` cycle of books, they also write shorter books for Bantam Booksugh they`re making a good living as authors, they still consider themselves as ”struggling” for ”brand-name recognition” in the
marketplace.
On balance, they say their first two yehip has been very enjoyable. Ed likes the newness and challenge, and Anne likes the chance she has had to grow as a writer by dealing with more complex characters.
They generally workmes on separate books, meeting at lunch and after dinner to discuss their progress. Being at home together all day required a major adjustment, but it drew them closer, too.
They maintaivities. They also made a rule not to discuss business at dinner with their four children, Eric, 16; Brian, 14; Kari, 10; and Megan, 9, to keep from shortchanging their family life.
Thhe Kolaczyk home share the cooking and cleaning, laundry and ironing, although Anne does the grocery shopping.
”We`re teaching the kids to be self-sufficient,” she said, ”so that wg`s nice to be home together.”
The Kolaczyks have two more business-oriented novels in the works. One involves a single mother rearing a 10-year-old son and dealing with some industrial espionage on the job; the other treats a father who took his son into the family business when his brainy daughter would have ete moxie and her feminine instincts. Tribune photos by Ron Bailey.
