Step Into The Story

Lovely news just as I am packing my bags for the Isle of Mull... The Heart of Christmas has hit the USA Today Bestseller List at #94! This anthology is a threesome (!) with a story from the incomparable Mary Balogh and a debut novella from Courtney Milan as well as my own story A Season for Suitors , which features characters from The Earl's Prize and Wayward Widow. Thank you to all those wonderful people who purchased a copy - and so early for Christmas too! I really appreciate your support.

I'm taking a break for a few weeks and my blog is too, so before I go I thought I would post a round up of what has been a very busy and exciting few months! The Brides of Fortune books are still on sale in the US and Kidnapped , my homage to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel, is in the UK shops. Also on sale in the UK is Loves Me, Loves Me Not , the Romantic Novelists' Association 50th anniversary anthology to which I was very proud to have contributed a Regency novella called " The Elopement ." LMLMN is a big fat romantic treat of a book with stories to suit all tastes and genres. I'm reading it myself at the moment and am loving all the stories! In terms of new releases I have novellas in two Christmas anthologies currently on sale: The Heart of Christmas with Mary Balogh and Courtney Milan, and Together By Christmas with Catherine George and Louise Allen. Yes, it is ridiculously early to be thinking of Christmas, isn't it! But evidently not if...

Today I went to Wantage to do some research for my current manuscript. The book is set in 1813 and has as its hero an Irish soldier of fortune held in England as a prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars. The story of the French prisoners of war in England has fascinated me since I came across a footnote about them in a book about the Battle of Trafalgar. I hadn't really thought about the fate of prisoners of war in that era; I didn't even know that there were any, let alone that they were shipped to Britain and held in some cases for the duration of the conflict. The rank and file were incarcerated in prison hulks moored in places like Chatham, or locked up in what we would now call maximum security jails. Dartmoor Prison was built specifically to house French POWs in the Napoleonic Wars. At the height of the war there were a staggering 60 000 French prisoners in Britain and several thousand officers. This seems like a huge number of enemy prisoners in the country and it is no wo...

This is the Craven State Carriage, a Victorian coach said to rival in magnificence Queen Victoria's royal carriage (she would not have been amused)! It is part of the carriage collection at Arlington Court, a National Trust property in Devon where you can not only go to view some wonderful horse-drawn coaches but you can try your hand at driving one as well. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to go to an illustrated talk about the history of carriages, given by Colin Henderson, who had been the Queen's Head Coachman. Not only did he have some wonderful anecdotes about the Golden Jubilee but he had also worked as a riding specialist and stuntman on a number of films and included the role of highwayman on his CV! He gave us a brisk trot through the early history and background of carriages - the word coach, for instance, comes from the Hungarian Kote - but it was when we got onto the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that my note-taking went into overdrive beca...

Yawn! That's the sound of the Sad Puppy waking up from a few month's happy snoozing in the sun to discover that as at least six months have passed it must be time for the UK broadsheets to have another go at romantic fiction. A few months ago The Guardian newspaper made a slight tactical error when they asked Julie Bindell to comment on Mills & Boon romances and it became clear in the course of her remarks that she hadn't read one for thirty years. So this time the Guardian had a Cunning Plan - get Tanya Gold to claim that she was a M&B junkie and that way the paper wouldn't be caught short fielding someone who hadn't picked up a romance book in decades. Why should we doubt Tanya's romance-reading credentials? Only because there were some odd discrepancies in the article. Oh, and also because most romance readers are very proud to support the genre whereas it seemed to make Tanya feel quite nauseous. It also seemed that every M&B book Tanya had rece...

Last weekend we did the wonderful "Smugglers' Run" at Martlesham in Suffolk. With a name like that this walk was always going to be fascinating - not only is it a walk around a particularly picturesque part of the county, it's packed full of interesting facts for history buffs! The walk starts in Woodbridge where there is the last remaining working tide mill in the UK. It dates from the 12th century, was working up until 1957 and was restored in 1982. The mill is situated on the River Deben, a waterway frequently used by the smuggling fraternity. One incident in Woodbridge Haven in 1739 records that a smuggler's cutter was stranded by the tide and the preventive officers were able to seize brandy and tea. The smugglers were clearly an audacious lot for they not only raised affidavits for the recovery of their goods, but also managed to have the master of the grounded cutter that they were using to ferry the goods in press-ganged into serving on HMS Boyne which pr...

Happy September, everyone! Whilst I have enjoyed the hot summer days we've occasionally had here in the UK this year, I do love autumn very much. Living out in the country I can feel the seasons turning. It's darker earlier in the evening when I take the dog for his bedtime walk and as we go round the fields I can feel the cool nip in the air. The young owls, born this year, are calling in the willows by the stream and the September full moon is waxing. The dew is heavier on the grass in the mornings. The swallows are starting to fly South and the leaves are starting to fall. It's beautiful! I've had an incredibly busy but exciting summer of work that focussed on my Brides of Fortune Trilogy and I am so happy and grateful to my readers for the lovely response the books have had. Not only did all three books hit the Bookscan bestseller charts in the US, The Scandals of an Innocent reached Number 10 in the Borders romance chart as well. I hope UK readers will be pleased ...

I'm a huge fan of the Happy Ever After. It doesn't matter which genre I'm reading, I still want to feel warm and satisfied and, yes reassured, when I get to the end of a book. Of course this doesn't work out well for me sometimes. My favourite reads include crime and thrillers and although the ending may satisfy in the sense that the mystery is solved and the bad guys caught, there's an unhappy ending for someone, usually the corpse. If the victim wasn't very pleasant then that's fine. That's why I enjoy watching Midsomer Murders. Maybe that's also why I don't read much gritty crime with random violence in it. I hear enough about that on the news. And then there's non-fiction. I love reading historical biographies but frankly I know that if I'm reading about Anne Boleyn, for example, then there's an appointment with the executioner waiting and history isn't going to change. So even as I read the book I'm preparing myself. Wh...

I have a thing about voices. I think they can be incredibly seductive. In the second of my trilogy books, The Scandals of an Innocent, Alice reflects on the fact that Miles was almost able to seduce her with his voice alone, he was so smooth! Discovering the Carte Noir coffee adverts online was always going to be a treat for me. This is the next best thing to watching Dominic West play Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and the perfect displacement activity for my Friday morning when I should be revising my Arctic manuscript. I don't drink much coffee, but that's beside the point. I love both Dominic West and Pride and Prejudice in just about equal measure so that's my tea break sorted. Here's the link: http://www.cartenoire.co.uk/pride-and-prejudice Oh, and you can also experience Greg Wise and Dan Stevens reading to you simply for your pleasure and gratification. Thank goodness I was sitting comfortably - I almost melted! Enjoy!

I'm just back from a research trip to England's smallest county, Rutland. It's an area of the country that I love but that I haven't visited in a very long time so it was great to re-acquaint myself with the beautiful stretch of Rutland Water, the historic town of Oakham and lots of tea shops along the way! My next couple of blogs are going to be all about the historic houses that I visited because I had such a lovely time that I want to share! I chose places that were smaller than stately home size, with different and unusual histories, because although I love grand houses, these other places so often get overlooked and they have so much fascinating history to offer. There wasn't a particular theme to the houses that I chose. They don't all date from the Georgian or Regency periods, for example. I picked them because they sounded interesting. But as it turned out, two of the houses were linked - by debt, ruin and ambitious owners living beyond their means. Al...

A couple of months ago on one of my writing loops we were discussing hot starts, those first lines of books that grab you and draw you in right from the off. I love hot starts; maybe it's because I can be an impatient reader, wanting something to happen, wanting to be swept away at the beginning of the book. There is a school of thought that says that modern life has trained people to have such a short attention span that if you don't grab them within 10 seconds you've lost them. I'd hate to think that I had the concentration of a gnat but maybe there is something in this. One of my favourite first lines is: "I picked four of them up at White Waltham in the new Cherokee Six 300 that never got a chance to grow old." This, from Dick Francis's book Rat Race , flags up the drama that is to come, creates a sense of expectation and already has me on the edge of my seat wanting to know what happens. It's short, sharp and direct with an element of danger. We...

Hello! I'm back from Washington DC where I had the most fantastic time at the RWA Conference! I loved the city and had a wonderful time at the book signings, parties and workshops, meeting new people and putting faces to those I've been chatting with over the email for months or even years. In a few days I'll be posting my impressions of the trip complete with some splendid photos taken by my dh who had an even better time in Washington DC than I did! First though, a small quiz. It's called "match the shoe to the blogger" and all you have to do is name the four Cinderellas whose shoes are in the photo above, taken after the Golden Heart and RITA ceremony on Saturday night. The prize for the first correct answer selected by Monty is a copy of my third Brides of Fortune book, The Undoing of a Lady! And here is a clue: There are two Word Wenches, one Romance Bandit and one Risky Regency blogger in the picture! Name that shoe in one! Good luck!

Yesterday I was guiding tour parties around Ashdown House on a lovely, hot and sunny summer's day. For the first time we had other events happening at the house and it was fabulous! First there was an early music ensemble playing in the gardens. When we were on the roof balcony we could hear "Greensleeves"wafting up to us on the breeze which was wonderfully evocative. Then there were the living history re-enactors. A horse and carriage was taking visitors around the estate and it was extraordinary to see a historic vehicle using the old Ashdown carriage drive and the road down to the stables. But for me the absolute best bit was having the living history re-enactors wandering about the house and gardens and chatting to us all. On the guided tour we talk about the reasons that the staircase at Ashdown is so wide and one of them is to accommodate the breadth of ladies' skirts. I'd never seen a lady in period dress trying to ascend the stairs until yesterday and now...

Congratulations to Beth, whom Monty has picked to win a copy of The Scandals of an Innocent in the rugged hero casting contest! Thank you so much to everyone who entered. I really enjoyed the debate and hope you did too. For those of you wondering how Monty chooses contest winners (and over the years I've had a few enquiries) I am indebted to my friend and writing colleague Kate Walker, who first gave me the idea. Kate's adorable cats feature heavily in her blog and I thought Monty should stir himself from deep Labrador torpor and do the same. So when a prize is drawn I put down numbered cards, one for each entry, each with an identical dog biscuit on it. Monty is then positioned equidistant from all the biscuits and the winner is the person whose card he goes to first. He particularly likes my website prize drawing with large numbers of entries because then it becomes a competition between us to see how many biscuits he can hoover up before I grab them back!

As you know, I'm all for blogging about hot-looking actors in period costume. Any excuse! So an article in the Observer newspaper at the weekend was a bit of a gift. Under the headline of "Farewell to the rugged look as new male beauties sweep all before them" it suggested that the leading men of film and TV are becoming interchangeable. Gone are the days of actors with such individual looks and charisma as Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and in there place are bland clones. Among the new breed of actors cited were Zac Efron, Edward Pattinson and Jonathan Rhys Myers, whose appealing baby eyes apparently sealed the role of Henry VIII in The Tudors (odd when you think about it, since of all the things that Henry was renowned for, his baby face wasn't one of them). Experts claim that these boy-men are chosen for their cherub cheeks and gentle jaws, and that women prefer them because they associate these softer looks with fidelity and warmth. So what is going on? What happen...

I can't believe that it is almost July! Where has the time gone? Probably on my last ditch, desperate attempts to complete my draft manuscript which is due in on 30th June! After that I'll be getting ready for the RWA Conference in Washington which I'm looking forward to very much indeed! I can't wait to meet old friends and make some new ones. I'll be offering a special conference giveaway for all readers who are going to be there and a special website contest for all readers who can't make it, so no one gets left out. Details will be coming out in my July newsletter! So it's an exciting month. July sees the publication of Book 2 in my Brides of Fortune trilogy, The Scandals of an Innocent. Scandals is Alice and Miles' story. What happens when a ruthless rake tries to blackmail a housemaid-turned-heiress into marriage? He gets a great deal more than he bargains for! I love this story because Miles really is very, very bad - he's a real rake, not a f...

The Muse. We writers refer to her a lot. She's a goddess. She's creative, inspiring, and when she's with you it's a fabulous feeling. Your ideas flow and your fingers fly over the keyboard. But sometimes she's elusive. She teases you; she's just out of reach. You struggle to grasp her and she slips from your fingers. You're left staring at a blank screen. Well, I've had a week of staring at a blank screen. Let me introduce you to the Muse's evil twin, the Demon. Demon. It's a great word, isn't it. The dictionary definition is fascinating (yes, you know I'm a word geek!) "An evil spirit or devil; cruel; skilful, possibly a genius..." Hmmm. If you are going to call your business "Demon" you are setting some high expectations. Hopefully you are going for the skilful and genius end of the definition - unless you're offering some pretty specialised services. Which brings me back to the blank screen. The blank screen is ...

In Saturday’s Guardian newspaper was the snippet that the private diaries of Alison Uttley, the children’s author, are published this month. I quote: “She was apparently jealous of Enid Blyton’s success, calling her “the Blyton” and describing her as boastful and a “vulgar, curled woman.” The columnist, Gwyn Headley, went on to recall the time that he had worked for Collins (the predecessor of Harper Collins) and was asked to escort Alison Uttley to the Children’s Book Fair at the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster. He found her to be a “sour little old woman, with no small talk” who treated him as a minion. At this point in reading the item I paused in horror because Alison Uttley was one of my childhood literary heroes. Her book A Traveller in Time , which I read and also saw adapted for television, was a book that not only fuelled my teenage love of history but also sparked in me a fascination with the genre of the time travel romance. I adored that book and it is still on my ...

I recently did an interview for the Single Titles website about my Fortune’s Folly trilogy and the interviewer, Julie Bonello, asked me a particularly interesting question. (All her questions were interesting and thought provoking but this one especially caught my attention.) It was this: “The trilogy is set in the fictional Yorkshire village of Fortune’s Folly. Regencies usually take place in London or Bath - what made you decide to create a fictional landscape in this particular British county?” I’ve set a number of books in Yorkshire. The first was “ The Chaperon Bride ”, of which I’m very fond, and which was set in the spa town of Harrogate. TCB featured the Welburn Men, a gang of radicals protesting against the establishment of tollhouses on the turnpike roads and the exploitation of travellers by unscrupulous local landowners. They were rick-burners and fence-breakers and I based their exploits on the real live Rebecca Riots. I picked up the theme of exploitation again in “ Unma...

In a fascinating post on the Romance Bandits blog last week Eloisa James commented on readers’ dislike of infidelity in historical romance and put up a great defence of why adultery need not be a deal-breaker. Hot on the heels of this came a review of my own book, The Confessions of A Duchess, which mentioned the fact that Dexter and Laura had committed adultery because when they first slept together four years before, Laura was still married to Charles. This made me think very hard because as a reader I don’t tend to like infidelity in stories myself. I shy away from them on instinct. Perhaps I’m missing some great books! And yet I went and knowingly placed this element in The Confessions of a Duchess, and I was surprised when someone didn’t like it. Inconsistent, huh?! Those people who have read Unmasked will know that Laura and Dexter were very attracted to one another from the start and that she steals a kiss from him in the persona of Glory the highwaywoman. From there it is a br...

Okay, I wasn’t going to blog about this today. I was going to say “Please join me later for my official launch at the Word Wenches Blog when the fabulous Anne Gracie will crack a bottle of champagne over my head and push me down the slipway to become an official wench.” But then something happened to me this morning and I am so spooked by it, paranormal fans, that I have to share this! So here’s a true story for ghost busters and ghost lovers alike! This morning I took Monty, my black Labrador, for a walk along the Ridgeway. It’s one of our favourite walks, an ancient chalk trackway up on the Downs. It’s a route used since prehistoric times by travellers, herdsmen and soldiers and it feels very, very old. (Thought I would get a bit of history in here - after all this is "a passion for history" blog!) Anyway, you can almost feel the years of history pressing down on you as you walk along the Ridgeway. “Our” stretch of the track passes Waylands Smith, one of the most impressive...

This blog post is adapted from one of the articles I have available on my website. It’s about writing “old flame” stories. Both my new book, The Confessions of a Duchess , and the e-book prequel The Secrets of a Courtesan, are old flame stories in their different ways, from which you can probably gather that I’m keen on writing them! (And I love reading them too). There’s something very seductive about the idea of unfinished business and what might have been, of characters learning to love and trust again. But old flame books are, in my experience, very difficult to write. Firstly you have to deal with the reason why your hero and heroine parted in the first place. If it was all down to a big misunderstanding and one blunt conversation will clear everything up, it’s hard to sustain the conflict convincingly for the whole of the book. Then there is the assumption that once everything is clear between the two of them they will fall in love again. Wrong. They need to find each other ag...