Step Into The Story

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...

The last couple of weeks have been a blitz of preparation for the launch of my new Brides of Fortune series so I thought I would stop, draw breath, and post all the exciting developments here! So first to reviews and a really, really lovely surprise! There was a wonderful review of Unmasked on The Good, The Bad and The Unread which made my day! Those of you who have read my books before will know that Unmasked is a prequel to the Brides of Fortune series and features some of the same characters. Sandy at TGTBTU said: "Nicola Cornick is a new author for me. And after this book, I'm going to definitely be reading more of her books. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Loved the characters, the story, the emotion, everything about it." You can't get a review nicer than that! Meanwhile, The Confessions of a Duchess has been garnering some very nice reviews of its own which are on my website . Chris at RomanceJunkies said: "Nicola Cornick gives stellar pen with the first i...

This is the book cover for my new HQN e-book, The Secrets of a Courtesan, which is coming out next month from e-harlequin. It's the short story prequel to my new Brides of Fortune series and introduces the village of Fortune's Folly and some of the characters. And once again I think the cover goddess has been smiling on me because I think it's beautiful! I've been lucky in more ways than one because this is the short story that seemed destined to crash and burn. I love writing short stories and particularly enjoyed my recent one for Harlequin Historical Undone, The Unmasking of Lady Loveless. So I set out on this one with the same cheerful intent to create something that was fun, witty and sexy (of course!). I wrote the story at the start of the year. I had a tight deadline of my own making because I was going on holiday and it simply had to be finished before I left so that I could press on with a new book on my return. And I had what I thought was a good story idea, ...