story by Laurie McLaughlin
image by Jaime Pham
Holly Heckerling, the heroine in Brenda Scott Royce's novel "Monkey Love," is a stand-up comedienne in New York City who finds herself babysitting a mischievous monkey along with a string of other random odd jobs - a situation brought on by her need to pay the rent while pursuing her struggling comedy career.
Scott Royce's first fictional foray into literature, published in 2006, has a happy ending because the author didn't expect a demand from both fans and her publisher to continue Holly's day-to-day adventures. "I had to shake things up in the second book, and Holly flies to California and gets a job as an animal trainer," says Scott Royce of "Monkey Star," released in 2007.
After several years as an actress, author and book editor, Scott Royce earned a B.A. in anthropology with an emphasis in primatology in 2003 at CSUF. She has always had an interest in monkeys and worked at a wildlife sanctuary as a chimpanzee caretaker. Readers suggest that Holly's hijinx are taken from the author's life, but Scott Royce insists that's not true: "These aren't things that happened to me but more what I would do if they did."
Currently, Scott Royce is director of publications at the Los Angeles Zoo. She's also a wife and mother, and has written seven books - five of which are non-fiction tomes about pop culture, film and television - and finds time to write her blog for Huffington Post's Living Now section and book No. 3 of the "Monkey" series. "I love my job, writing and being a mom, and I don't want to give up any of it," she says. "So, I write through my lunch hour and think about plot development when I'm stuck in traffic."
Brenda Scott Royce