A good novel of any genre will almost certainly have a compelling plot. Of greater importance for a romance novel, however, is the development of a relationship between two people, very often from indifference or even hostility through liking and friendship and attraction to falling in love and, ultimately, to the fullness of total and unconditional love itself. For a love story to be truly satisfying, the ending should leave the reader sighing with contentment (and perhaps also with a little sadness that it is over), convinced that these two people share the sort of unbreakable love bond that will last a lifetime and even forever. It should give the satisfaction of happily-ever-after yet the conviction too that these two people are going to have to work on their love every day for the rest of their lives if they are to remain happy.

In order to come to this conviction, the reader has to be drawn into the world of the story and into the minds and hearts and very souls of the two lovers. Readers need to be emotionally engaged in the journey to love of these two, to the degree that in their imagination they almost become these lovers. It is the writer’s job to make all this happen.

But how?

The characters have to seem very real. Whether the hero is tall, dark, handsome and charismatic or something quite different, whether the heroine is charming and beautiful or something else entirely, they must seem like real people with whom the reader can relate and empathize. They cannot simply be cardboard characters with little depth beyond some life history and personality traits the writer has created for them. They must give the illusion of being living, breathing humans with strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and defeats and problems, as full of flaws and contradictions as real people. But no matter what, the reader has to want to root for them in their struggles and must fall in love with them in their vulnerabilities. The reader must passionately want the love story to work and to end happily.

In order to make characters real, the writer has to know them soul deep. It is possible to know a great deal about other people without really knowing them to their very core. Sometimes we do not even fully know ourselves. Do you ever find yourself saying or doing something that takes even you by surprise? Do you really know exactly how you would behave in some unexpected circumstance, a life-or-death emergency for example? When I am writing a story, I find over and over again that I have to stop, go back, find out just who this character is, and rewrite certain episodes because I have learned more about her or him and need to adjust the story accordingly. Certain things I wanted them to do can no longer happen because they are no longer the people I thought they were. And never tell me that as the writer I am in control of who my characters are. Not true!

This deeper knowledge of my characters comes to me, however, only as they speak and think and react to one another in the unfolding story. I find it impossible to know everything in advance. Crafting a whole story never comes easily to me because I am not satisfied until I feel I have the hero and heroine absolutely right. They are rarely willing to give up any of their secrets early or all of them at once. Sometimes, if all else fails and the story (and the romance) is stalling, I end up asking them, often aloud, where their deepest pain lies hidden. There is always something. Once I know that, then I can set about bringing the character healing so that he/she can reach the point of being able to give love and to accept it and settle to a lasting, meaningful love relationship. And this must happen for both main characters. They must both be involved in the revelations and the healing. They must somehow help bring each other to completeness and love and ultimate happiness.

Merely knowing the characters as they are at the start is not enough, then. There has to be growth in the author’s understanding of them, and there has to be growth in the characters if the reader is going to invest time and emotion in their story. This is not necessarily true of all genres of fiction. In some, very little emotional involvement with the main characters is necessary. But it is essential in a love story. If the hero, for example, is gorgeous and sexy and does nothing but macho things throughout the story—well, the reader might enjoy reading about him but there will be little emotional empathy with him. There can be very little conviction that he will be capable of a lifelong love commitment.

One way to delve deep into heroes and heroines and pull the reader in emotionally is through a careful use of point of view. Point of view is the eyes and mind through which a particular episode of the story is being told. It is possible to narrate the whole story in the first person, told by one of the lovers, though in that case the events can be experienced only through the mind and emotions of that one character (just as happens in our own lives). Or the whole story can be told by the author as narrator. She can tell the reader what happens and what her characters are thinking and feeling. I prefer to use what I call third person deep interior point of view. I alternate between the hero and heroine, telling one episode from his point of view and another from hers. The reader gets to experience the story through the minds and hearts and viewpoints of both main characters, but not at the same time. If you think about it, everything that happens in our lives has an emotional component. We are the ones who experience everything that happens to us and in the world around us, and everything that happens is colored by our own character and values and experiences and emotions. Especially our emotions. Very little happens to us that does not carry some emotion with it. The aim of the writer should be to duplicate this reality with fictional characters. They must come across as living, emotional beings as they experience the events of the plot. If their story is told from deep within them, then the reader will be there too, experiencing everything with them and feeling what they feel—living and loving with them.

Creating this emotional connection of writer, character, and reader is one of the greatest challenges in the writing of a love story. It is also, I believe, the key to its success—or failure. The author must be able to make the reader laugh with the characters and cry with them and feel the whole gamut of human emotions with them—and fall in love with them, as individuals and as a couple. The best and most memorable of love stories ought to be for everyone—not just the two fictional characters experiencing them, but also every reader living them vicariously with the lovers. It is the writer’s job to make sure this happens.

I would love to read your thoughts and opinions. To one person who leaves a comment below by Friday, February 19, I will send a signed copy of the two-in-one volume, THE TEMPORARY WIFE/A PROMISE OF SPRING.

 

[The winner is BRANDY HARTLEY. Congratulations to her! Thank you to everyone else who left a comment. As soon as I have Brandy’s postal address, I will put her signed book in the mail.]

One question I get asked during interviews almost more than any other, apart from “Where do you get your ideas?” (Answer: I really don’t know) and “How do you pronounce your last name?” (Answer: It sort of rhymes with Kellogg) is “What advice would you give writers just starting out?” I always give one of two answers to this one, often both: (1) Don’t listen to advice (2) Just write. Those answers may not sound at all helpful. They may even sound a bit abrupt and callous, as though I just couldn’t be bothered to give the question much thought or resented sharing any really helpful hints from my own experience. The contrary is true, however, and I do usually go on to explain what I mean. I will do that here.

One interesting discovery I have made from numerous encounters with other writers over the years, some of them of bestseller fame, is that we are all vastly different from one another in almost every imaginable way. Here is one perhaps fairly trivial example. I like to get up early in the morning and tackle my writing immediately after breakfast while my energy level is high and my brain fresh. I know at least one bestselling author who fritters away the day, finding any and all excuses to avoid her work-in-progress, until finally, in the mid to late evening, she sits down at her computer and writes well into the night. I am brain dead by then, while she is in a brain fog in the morning. Which of us is doing it right? We both are. I do it right for me and she does it right for her. There is no rule, you see, for when you should write—except that it should be some time. It would be wrong of me to tell a new writer that this is the time of day you must work if you wants to achieve any sort of success. All writers have to find what works for them.

Here is another example. I am a very organized and disciplined person. When I am working on a book, I write every day, seven days a week. I have a goal of two thousand words each day, except when I am revising or making adjustments to what I have already written. It takes me on average four months to complete a book. I allow myself lots of time to finish before the contract deadline date. I know another bestselling author who, despite all intentions to the contrary, just cannot meet her deadlines. When one passes and her editor is breathing down her neck for the finished manuscript, she is perhaps one-third of the way into the book and panicking. After fretting and procrastinating for another week or so, she finally writes the rest of the book in a frenzied burst of creative energy and does not come up for air night or day until she has finished. Which of us is doing it right? Well, we both are. I could not stand the pressure of a looming (and passing) deadline while she seems to need the stress of impending disaster in order to get motivated.

These are just two examples of many more. There are, in fact, innumerable ways of going about the writing process, all of them right if they suit the author who uses them. There are no hard and fast rules. If anyone tries to tell you there are, please don’t believe them! If you feel you must read some instructional books or attend how-to seminars and workshops, try to keep a wide open mind. Never feel that you must write a certain way merely because such-and-such a book or writing expert tells you so. Whenever I give a talk to writers, I preface it with the advice that my audience not believe a word I say just because I say it. Once, when I said that, an audience member raised her hand and assured me that that was fine. All she really hoped for from any talk, she told me, was one “ah-ha” moment, something that resonated with her and got her excited about her own writing. I loved that comment.

What concerns me more than anything else about all the instructions and advice that are forever on offer for would-be writers is that they can impede the natural flow of creativity that is the writer’s motivating force. All authors of fiction have stories to tell—otherwise they wouldn’t be writers. And all writers know how to tell a story—they have probably read thousands in the course of their lives and made up hundreds more in their heads. They just fear they don’t know enough (we writers are such insecure people) and so seek out help from the experts on how to create everything from plot to character to suspense to pacing. They constantly feel they must read one more book or attend one more writers’ workshop. It is very possible they will end up either not knowing how to write at all or else producing cookie-cutter stories with paint-by-the-number characters. I have one friend who attended a workshop given by a well-known authority and then tackled that same expert’s workbook on writing fiction. There were dozens of chapters and a written exercise at the end of each. She did it all diligently but was in deep distress by the time she had finished. She felt  she no longer had any idea how to write or who she was as a writer.

By far the writer’s most precious gift—but also the most fragile—is her or his voice. By voice I mean the writer’s unique view of life and way of expressing it. It is indeed unique and quite distinctive when you come across it in a well-written book. There are certain authors I can recognize as soon as I start reading even if I have a hard time explaining exactly what it is about the voice that is distinctive. It can be so very easily tampered with. I remember being at a conference with a woman who had two manuscripts on the go so that she could work on one while her critiquing group was going through the other. Then she would swap and work on their suggestions while they went through the other manuscript. This had been going on for a long time—this constant swap and rewrite. I really was aghast. I wondered how much of her story or vision or voice remained in either of those two manuscripts after a few go-arounds. I would guess very little. I told her that no one sees any of my books until they land in my editor’s computer after they are finished. However… Well, I do understand that some writers need the support and input of a trusted critiquing group. There really are no rules for everyone, you see. Perhaps that lady produced two masterpieces out of those manuscripts! Who am I to say do this or don’t do that? Do you see what I mean?

All I can say with any certainty is that in my opinion (to be ignored if you choose), if you are a writer, you must write. You don’t necessarily need to listen to the advice of either experts or amateurs–or Mary Balogh! You can do it yourself. Believe that and do it, then. I know some of you will disagree. I have one writer friend who tells me in some exasperation whenever I talk like this that it is all very well for me to tell writers simply to write. It comes naturally to me, she says. Other people need help. Some people need a lot of help. No doubt she is right. Even the very limited advice I am prepared to give may be wrong, after all! Or right for some and wrong for others. But please, please if you want to write, do it!

I wonder what you think on the topic. Do please let me know in the comment section below (which I fervently hope is working this week and not blocking you all as suspected bots! You may want to take the precaution of saving your comment before trying to post it). To one of you who leaves a comment here by Wednesday, February 10, I will send an autographed copy of either HEARTLESS or IRRESISTIBLE (winner’s choice).

 

[The winner is ALEXA SANTI. Congratulations to her and thank you to everyone else who left a comment. I always appreciate reading what you have to say.]

 

One question I get asked during interviews almost more than any other, apart from “Where do you get your ideas?” (Answer: I really don’t know) and “How do you pronounce your last name?” (Answer: It sort of rhymes with Kellogg) is “What advice would you give writers just starting out?” I always give one of two answers to this one, often both: (1) Don’t listen to advice (2) Just write. Those answers may not sound at all helpful. They may even sound a bit abrupt and callous, as though I just couldn’t be bothered to give the question much thought or resented sharing any really helpful hints from my own experience. The contrary is true, however, and I do usually go on to explain what I mean. I will do that here.

One interesting discovery I have made from numerous encounters with other writers over the years, some of them of bestseller fame, is that we are all vastly different from one another in almost every imaginable way. Here is one perhaps fairly trivial example. I like to get up early in the morning and tackle my writing immediately after breakfast while my energy level is high and my brain fresh. I know at least one bestselling author who fritters away the day, finding any and all excuses to avoid her work-in-progress, until finally, in the mid to late evening, she sits down at her computer and writes well into the night. I am brain dead by then, while she is in a brain fog in the morning. Which of us is doing it right? We both are. I do it right for me and she does it right for her. There is no rule, you see, for when you should write—except that it should be some time. It would be wrong of me to tell a new writer that this is the time of day you must work if you wants to achieve any sort of success. All writers have to find what works for them.

Here is another example. I am a very organized and disciplined person. When I am working on a book, I write every day, seven days a week. I have a goal of two thousand words each day, except when I am revising or making adjustments to what I have already written. It takes me on average four months to complete a book. I allow myself lots of time to finish before the contract deadline date. I know another bestselling author who, despite all intentions to the contrary, just cannot meet her deadlines. When one passes and her editor is breathing down her neck for the finished manuscript, she is perhaps one-third of the way into the book and panicking. After fretting and procrastinating for another week or so, she finally writes the rest of the book in a frenzied burst of creative energy and does not come up for air night or day until she has finished. Which of us is doing it right? Well, we both are. I could not stand the pressure of a looming (and passing) deadline while she seems to need the stress of impending disaster in order to get motivated.

These are just two examples of many more. There are, in fact, innumerable ways of going about the writing process, all of them right if they suit the author who uses them. There are no hard and fast rules. If anyone tries to tell you there are, please don’t believe them! If you feel you must read some instructional books or attend how-to seminars and workshops, try to keep a wide open mind. Never feel that you must write a certain way merely because such-and-such a book or writing expert tells you so. Whenever I give a talk to writers, I preface it with the advice that my audience not believe a word I say just because I say it. Once, when I said that, an audience member raised her hand and assured me that that was fine. All she really hoped for from any talk, she told me, was one “ah-ha” moment, something that resonated with her and got her excited about her own writing. I loved that comment.

What concerns me more than anything else about all the instructions and advice that are forever on offer for would-be writers is that they can impede the natural flow of creativity that is the writer’s motivating force. All authors of fiction have stories to tell—otherwise they wouldn’t be writers. And all writers know how to tell a story—they have probably read thousands in the course of their lives and made up hundreds more in their heads. They just fear they don’t know enough (we writers are such insecure people) and so seek out help from the experts on how to create everything from plot to character to suspense to pacing. They constantly feel they must read one more book or attend one more writers’ workshop. It is very possible they will end up either not knowing how to write at all or else producing cookie-cutter stories with paint-by-the-number characters. I have one friend who attended a workshop given by a well-known authority and then tackled that same expert’s workbook on writing fiction. There were dozens of chapters and a written exercise at the end of each. She did it all diligently but was in deep distress by the time she had finished. She felt  she no longer had any idea how to write or who she was as a writer.

By far the writer’s most precious gift—but also the most fragile—is her or his voice. By voice I mean the writer’s unique view of life and way of expressing it. It is indeed unique and quite distinctive when you come across it in a well-written book. There are certain authors I can recognize as soon as I start reading even if I have a hard time explaining exactly what it is about the voice that is distinctive. It can be so very easily tampered with. I remember being at a conference with a woman who had two manuscripts on the go so that she could work on one while her critiquing group was going through the other. Then she would swap and work on their suggestions while they went through the other manuscript. This had been going on for a long time—this constant swap and rewrite. I really was aghast. I wondered how much of her story or vision or voice remained in either of those two manuscripts after a few go-arounds. I would guess very little. I told her that no one sees any of my books until they land in my editor’s computer after they are finished. However… Well, I do understand that some writers need the support and input of a trusted critiquing group. There really are no rules for everyone, you see. Perhaps that lady produced two masterpieces out of those manuscripts! Who am I to say do this or don’t do that? Do you see what I mean?

All I can say with any certainty is that in my opinion (to be ignored if you choose), if you are a writer, you must write. You don’t necessarily need to listen to the advice of either experts or amateurs–or Mary Balogh! You can do it yourself. Believe that and do it, then. I know some of you will disagree. I have one writer friend who tells me in some exasperation whenever I talk like this that it is all very well for me to tell writers simply to write. It comes naturally to me, she says. Other people need help. Some people need a lot of help. No doubt she is right. Even the very limited advice I am prepared to give may be wrong, after all! Or right for some and wrong for others. But please, please if you want to write, do it!

I wonder what you think on the topic. Do please let me know in the comment section below (which I fervently hope is working this week and not blocking you all as suspected bots! You may want to take the precaution of saving your comment before trying to post it). To one of you who leaves a comment here by Wednesday, February 10, I will send an autographed copy of either HEARTLESS or IRRESISTIBLE (winner’s choice).

 

I am always deeply touched when people write to me to tell me how reading my books helped them through a troubling time–the illness or passing of a loved one, for example. It is lovely to read any sort of affirmative comments on my writing, but to know that I have brought comfort to someone experiencing great stress can reduce me to tears. If I can do that, I always think, then I have done at least something worthwhile with my life. Sometimes, though, we are all simultaneously confronted with a period of unprecedented distress. Although I was born in Wales during World War II and spent my early childhood in a city (Swansea, though it did not have city status at the time) that had been heavily bombed and largely reduced to rubble, I have no conscious memories of the mass suffering it caused. Now, however, I am living with everyone else in the world through the terrible pandemic of 2020, and it is not done with us yet. It affects us all and in every imaginable way. Because we are human and endlessly resilient, however, we have learned all sorts of coping mechanisms as we await mass vaccination and the return to a new version of normal life. Comfort reading is just one of those mechanisms. I have been so very thankful during the past year that I am a reader–and a writer.

 

If you had asked me a year ago what I liked to read, I would have told you that I read anything and everything, fiction and non-fiction alike, that could hold my attention through the first fifty pages or so. I would have added that I did have a particular partiality for mystery but that I read very little romance. Because I made my living by writing love stories, I looked for something different in my leisure reading. That all changed a year ago. I see when I look back on the list of books I read during 2020 that I finished the first Virgin River book by Robyn Carr in April. I had finished the whole series by October (22 books, I believe?). I read books by Pamela Morsi, Kristan Higgins, Georgette Heyer (rereads) and other romance authors. I read and laughed my way through the six books of the “Suds in Your Eye” series written by Mary Lasswell in the the 1940s. It took me a while to realize what was happening and why my reading choices had both changed and narrowed. I was looking for comfort. Normally I read for all sorts of reasons and purposes. In 2020 I wanted to relax with books. I wanted to lose myself in a world that was safe and attractive. I wanted to feel good about the world and life and love. And I did!

 

I have adored writing ever since I started it in earnest back in 1983. I loved it even more after I was able to quit my teaching job five years later to write full time. I thought there could be no better job in the world. During the past year I have thought so more than ever. For one thing, it worked with the solitude that was forced upon us. To continue doing my job I did not have to leave home or have company. There were adjustments to be made for the pandemic, of course–like so many of you, I have not seen my family for a year except on Zoom meetings. But the world of my writing continues without change–except that I have never before realized with quite such clarity how comforting it is. I create a world that is intended to transport readers into a somewhat glamorized version of history. I create characters who deal with their problems and their brokenness so that they can fall in love and establish lives in which there will be friendship and love and laughter and security. I write to entertain and to suggest that even in real life problems can be overcome and love can prevail–love in all its many manifestations. I did not fully understand until last year that I write to comfort and that one of the people I comfort is myself! In 2020 I finished a book I had started late in 2019 (SOMEONE TO CHERISH, Westcott series, Harry’s story, due out on June 29, 2021) and paused only long enough to catch my breath before diving into another book (SOMEONE PERFECT, a Westcott spinoff, Estelle Lamarr’s story, due out in November, 2021). My editor commented that it is perhaps my best book.

 

Has reading helped you in some way to cope with the pandemic? I would love to know. What have you been reading? How has it helped and comforted you? I look forward to reading your comments below. To one person who posts a comment by the end of Sunday, January 24, I will send a signed copy of SOMEONE TO CARE, a Westcott novel of a man and woman who met by chance when they were both stranded at a country inn and decided to run away together for a romantic fling as a temporary escape from the stresses of their lives which were threatening to overwhelm them. We cannot run away physically at the moment (at least, we ought not) but we can run away through our imagination and a good book.

 

[And the winner is KEVIN BOYER. Congratulations to him and thank you all for your comments. Unfortunately, most people who tried to comment were blocked as suspected bots! My web designer is working on fixing the problem so that I can post again and everyone will be free to comment]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I usually plan a series of books ahead of time–very vaguely, I might add. I decide what the binding idea will be–more often than not it is a family, though the Survivors’ Series concerned a group of men and one woman who had survived their involvement in the Napoleonic Wars and had become bonded by the years they spent together convalescing from their wounds. Until the Westcott family came along, each series ended up with the number of books I had planned from the start. Well, now that I have written that, I recall that there was one exception. The Horsemen Trilogy (INDISCREET, UNFORGIVEN, IRRESISTIBLE), which was to have been a quartet, was cut short for reasons I will not try to explain here, and the final two stories got melded into one. But the Westcott series just does not seem to want to end. It wants to keep going and going…

I planned eight books–though planned is a bit of a misleading word. I can’t plan a book ahead of time. I never really know my characters until they get going, speaking, thinking, doing, interacting, and holding a great deal of stuff inside them that I do not suspect when I start and have to pry out of them as I go along. But characters drive the plot. So, to try to claim that I can plan eight books ahead of time is to give me far more credit than is due me. Let it be said, then, that I got a vague image of the Westcott family and the opening situation that would get things going and be the basis for the whole series–the new young head of the family, Harry Westcott, Earl of Riverdale, is suddenly disinherited when it is discovered that his recently deceased father married his mother bigamously twenty-three years earlier while his secret first wife was still alive. I identified eight members of the family who would have their stories told, beginning with Anna, secret daughter of that first wife of the deceased earl, and his only legitimate child (SOMEONE TO LOVE).

All was going to plan until I was writing the sixth book, SOMEONE TO HONOR, Abigail’s story. She met and married Lieutenant-Colonel Gil Bennington, Harry’s friend and comrade. Gil started life as the bastard son of an impoverished village washerwoman, who would not allow him to have anything to do with his father, Charles, Viscount Dirkson–who turned out to have been a long-ago love interest of Lady Matilda Westcott, the eldest sister of the deceased earl, who had never married. Well, goodness–I could not possibly leave Matilda and Charles’s story untold, could I? Admittedly I told it in a novella, which I intended for private publication as an ebook until my editor expressed interest in it and then read it and decided to publish it in all formats (albeit a short entry!) as SOMEONE TO REMEMBER, part of the Westcott saga. Suddenly it became a nine-part series, though there is some confusion about whether Jessica’s story, SOMEONE TO ROMANCE, to be published at the end of August, 2020, is Book 7 or Book 8. It is actually Book 8. Book 9, SOMEONE TO CHERISH, Harry’s story, is written and scheduled for the latter half of 2021.

So that will be the end of the series? Er, not necessarily…

There are two characters who have been capturing my imagination more and more since their first appearance in Book 5, SOMEONE TO CARE, Viola’s story. They are not Westcotts. But their father, Marcel, Marquess of Dorchester, married Viola, former Countess of Riverdale, Harry’s mother, so they have been involved with Westcott characters and events for some time. They are twins, Lady Estelle Lamarr, and Bertrand Lamarr, Viscount Watley. They are in their mid-twenties, gorgeously good-looking and charming, very eligible–and deliberately living alone together, still working through the effects of a difficult childhood and youth. They are, of course, crying out for their own stories. Estelle’s is beginning to take (very vague) shape in my head.

And then there is Winifred Cunningham, daughter of Camille (nee Westcott) and Joel Cunningham (their story is told in Book 2, SOMEONE TO HOLD). In the first two books Winifred was a child in the orphanage in Bath where Anna and Joel grew up and Camille taught for a while. Winifred was not an attractive child in either looks or behavior. She was a bossy goody-good who liked to point out the faults of others. But Camille saw something of her former self in the child and could look beyond the unattractive externals. When she and Joel married, they adopted Winifred, before going on to adopt five other children and have three of their own. Winifred has been seen growing up through the series until in Harry’s book she is seventeen and an interesting person. I really, really want to give her a story of her own, though I will have to allow her to grow up a bit more.

There is also Louise (nee Westcott), Dowager Duchess of Netherby, Jessica’s mother, who has been widowed for many years. And there is Adrian Sawyer, who had to adjust to the discovery that his father, Viscount Dirkson, had another, older son, Gil Bennington. Adrian, a cheerful, laid-back sort of young man, made an effort to get to know his half-brother and to mingle with the Westcott family, into which both his father and Gil had married. But… Well, I have all sorts of questions about him…

Oh, and let’s not forget Edwin Goddard, the oh-so-efficient and long-suffering secretary of Avery, Duke of Netherby…

No. I don’t think the Westcott Saga is finished yet or will be done even after Jessica’s and Harry’s stories are published.

Please leave a comment below. Tell me, perhaps, which is your favorite Westcott story so far and why. To two of you (randomly chosen) I will send an autographed copy of a Westcott book of your choice. I’ll pick two names on Saturday, June 6.

[The winners of the contest are LINDSEY CARNEY and NOREEN RE. Congratulations to them! As soon as they have let me know which book they would like and have sent me their postal addresses, I will send their books on the way. Thank you to everyone else for your interesting comments and for reading the blog.]

 

 

 

With six of the Westcott books now out, I have been asked numerous times if the series is complete. Several people have asked why there is no story for Harry. All the questions have led me to realize that nowhere on my web site is there any explanation of how many books there will be altogether in the series and whose stories, if any, are left. Well, I aim to set that straight right now. There is one story–a novella rather than a full-length novel–coming out in November of 2019. You can read about it, sample an excerpt, and preorder a copy (or ten) on Home Page.  There are two more full-length books to come after that….and maybe two additional ones. Possibly three…

The original plan was to write an eight-part series. Six of those are published: SOMEONE TO…LOVE, HOLD, WED, CARE, TRUST, and HONO(U)R. According to the plan, the remaining two books are SOMEONE TO ROMANCE, Jessica’s story, already written and due out in November of 2020. Soon I’ll be starting to write SOMEONE TO CHERISH, Harry’s story, which will probably be out in 2021. However, last year I was going on a writing retreat with some writer friends but had nothing to write since I was not planning to start Jessica’s story until spring of this year. What a ghastly fate! I decided that I would start a novella for Matilda Westcott, whose story definitely needed to be told though she was not part of the original plan. I would get it published privately as an ebook, I thought. However, since it was a Westcott story, I decided I had better let my agent know. She thought we had better let my editor know! My editor wanted the novella, which she planned to publish as an ebook. After she had read it, however, she liked it so much that she decided to give it the full treatment and publish it in hardcover and paperback format as well as ebook. It is due out in November, 2019, as SOMEONE TO REMEMBER. Do be aware, however, that it is a novella, considerably shorter than the other books in the series. It has a lower price to reflect that fact, and an excerpt from each of the other six books at the back!

The series should be over after Harry’s story. However, inevitably some minor characters have grabbed my attention and are stepping up to have their stories told too. In particular, there are the twins, Estelle and Bertrand Lamarr, children of Marcel Lamarr, Marquess of Dorchester, Viola’s husband. And there is Winifred Cunningham, adopted daughter of Camille and Joel. I have no definite plans yet to write any of these three stories, but they are knocking on the door of my imagination. So stay tuned.

 

I do hope you will enjoy the upcoming novella for 56-year-old Matilda. I have an extra advance copy of SOMEONE TO REMEMBER that I will give away on Tuesday, September 24, to someone who leaves a comment below.

[Sept. 24th: The winner is JULIE SCHROEDET. Congratulations to her. I will send her signed book as soon as I have her postal address.]

 

W

“Write what you know!” will surely sound familiar to anyone who has ever taken a writing class, from school on up. It sounds like very restricting advice. Does it mean you can write only the sort of story that can be concocted from your own life experiences? What if you have lived all your life in the same place, maybe somewhere rural or otherwise far removed from any of the big centers of human activity? The range of possibilities for stories you can write would seem miniscule if that were indeed true, though many very successful and famous authors have done just that. Jane Austen, for example! 

Writing what you know need not be so restricting, however. For there are many ways of knowing and not all of them require personal experience. We can know by making the effort to learn, whether by travel or reading and other research or by empathy and the use of the imagination. If personal experience were the only way of knowing, I would not have been able to write a hundred and more novels and novellas, almost all of them set in Regency Britain with characters from the aristocratic classes. Although I grew up in Britain, I did it somewhat later than the early 19^thcentury and as a member of a working class family in Wales. 

When I wrote A MASKED DECEPTION, my first book, published in 1985, I had read all of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer and numerous other authors who wrote Regency-era romances—Edith Layton, Barbara Hazard, Joan Wolf, Catherine Coulter, to name just a few. I had read history books and had done my best to find out as much as I could about details like clothing and vehicles, food and manners, etiquette and gender roles and all the other details necessary for a novel but not so easy to find in history books. At least, it was not easy in those days, when there was no internet. Because I grew up in Wales, I still had a British “voice” and a feel for what it was like to live in Britain. When I believed that I could deal convincingly and accurately with the world I had chosen for my own stories, I started writing longhand at the kitchen table during the evenings after my school classes had been prepared and all my student papers had been corrected and graded. I was not at all sure I knew enough (I’m still not) but I did my best and kept on learning. I am still doing it! 

If one is going to write about something about which one has no direct experience, then one really ought to make every effort get it right, to make it as authentic as possible. Do the homework! Do the research. When I set BEYOND THE SUNRISE in Spain and Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars, for example, I read exhaustively about every maneuver and every battle that was fought there and every shot that was fired, or so it seemed. I ended up using only a fraction of what I had learned, but I have found that that is always the case. One rule of writing fiction is that one should never let one’s research show! One should never include a fascinating historical detail just because it is fascinating. It needs to serve a purpose in the plot. 

There is another type of knowing in addition to experience and research, and perhaps it is the most important of all. It is imaginative knowing, the ability to create a world that is all your own even if it must conform to historical fact (the exception to this is fantasy, but even fantasy must have a logic that makes it seem authentic). It is the imaginative ability to put yourself in a particular setting and know what it feels like to be there. It is, most importantly, the ability to identify and empathize with your characters. It is essential to good fiction to know (not just to understand) them to the very depths of their soul, to know how they think and speak and behave, to know their history, to know where their deepest pain lies. It is important to know their world, for they do not exist in a vacuum. They live in a particular place at a particular time, and that setting can make all the difference. If they go to Vauxhall Gardens in London for an evening of revelry, it is of course important to know as much as possible about the gardens. It is equally important to know imaginatively what it feels to be there at a particular time in history and on a particular occasion with a particular set of companions, all senses and emotions alive. It is essential to be able to convey all these levels of knowing to the reader. 

If a character is deaf or blind or maimed or is very shy or plain or unusually beautiful or any of a myriad other things, it is important to know what that feels like and to find a way of making sure the reader feels it too. Being deaf in the early 19th century, for example, meant something very different from what it means today. Most deaf mutes (as they were called then) ended up in insane asylums because it was assumed they were mentally defective. Showing a deaf mute from the inside in SILENT MELODY was a huge challenge but one I absolutely loved taking on. Much of this type of interior knowing has to come from the imagination, from an ability to identify with other people’s idiosyncrasies and joys and pains and, in this case, to know what it feels like to be deaf and unable to communicate with other people. Here is one question I had to consider: Was it debilitating for the deaf heroine, making her hopelessly dependent upon the pity and aid of her family? Or were there depths of experience that made her world a place of wonder unknown to all the people around her who were handicapped by their ability to hear and speak? Hint: she is the heroine, so there can be nothing abject about her.

There is still no better advice for any writer than to write what you know. However, it is not such confining advice as it first appears to be. Your knowledge can always be expanded. Always! You have to put effort into acquiring the knowledge, it is true, if you want to write with authority and credibility. But learning what you need to know is part of the fun. It does not mean just reading old tomes in the bowels of dusty libraries (though it can include that!). It can also mean travel or watching movies or reading novels. And of course these days there is the internet with its unlimited access to a wealth of knowledge upon any subject under the sun. And then there is the imagination, a writer’s most precious gift, to go to work upon all the variously acquired knowledge in order to produce a riveting and believable work of fiction that is uniquely your own. 

To one person who leaves a comment below by Thursday, January 10, I will send a signed copy of either BEYOND THE SUNRISE or SILENT MELODY—winner’s choice.

[The winner is JERICCA CROW. Congratulations to her and many thanks for all your comments. I really enjoyed reading them.]

 

“No one does a marriage of convenience like Balogh.”

 This is what Publishers Weekly said of ONLY A PROMISE back in 2015. I was a bit surprised at the time as I hadn’t realized I used the theme often enough to have earned such a comment. But actually I have! To name a few: I used it in THE TEMPORARY WIFE when the hero needed a wife to annoy his matchmaking father, with whom he had a bitter and longstanding feud, and the heroine desperately needed money to support her younger siblings. I used it in SLIGHTLY MARRIED, the first book of the Bedwyn series, when Aidan Bedwyn needed to fulfill a promise to a dying fellow officer to protect his sister and the sister needed a husband in a hurry so that she would not lose her inheritance and find herself unable to support her adopted children. I used it in FIRST COMES MARRIAGE, Book 1 of the Huxtable series, when the heroine dearly wanted to save her eldest sister from having to marry the hero and offered herself instead. I used it in THE ARRANGEMENT, Book 2 of the Survivors’ Club series, when the blind hero offered marriage to a young woman who was newly homeless and destitute aa a result of saving him from the matchmaking schemes of her aunt and cousin. There are more–my very first book, A MASKED DECEPTION, for example!

Once I realized that I did indeed write marriage of convenience stories with fair regularity, I asked myself why. There are actually a few  reasons.

For one, it is a way of getting the hero and heroine married early in the story so that the rest of the book can contain all the intimacies of their growing relationship without the restrictions that would otherwise be imposed upon them. I don’t have to contrive ways to bring them together in almost every scene. They live together! My books are almost all set in early 19^thcentury Regency Britain when young ladies in particular did not have the freedom of movement and the privacy we take for granted today. Finding realistic reasons for them to be alone with their heroes, especially in ways that give time and opportunity for intimacy (even if only a kiss!), can be challenging. If the couple is married, then they can be alone together as often as they like (or as often as I want them to be).

Another reason is that the marriage of convenience is by its very nature contracted for reasons other than love. The couple has agreed to marry, but they have low or at best restricted expectations of the marriage. The most they can hope for is mutual respect and maybe some affection, though they do not always expect even that much. Sometimes they do not even like each other particularly well when they agree to marry. Occasionally they actively dislike each other, as in A CHRISTMAS PROMISE, for example. In almost all instances they do not know each other at all well at the start and have no great expectation that that will change. However, there is sometimes the misunderstanding among readers that a marriage of convenience must also be a sexless marriage. That is rarely the case. I think it is safe to say that it is never so in my books (I could be wrong—that has happened a time or two in my life). It not realistic. Historically at least, marriage was for procreation, and procreation does not happen without sex. To wander off along a slight tanget, I’ll mention another common misconception here. The plot of some stories rests upon the erroneous belief that the non-consummation of a marriage constituted grounds for an annulment. It did not! I believed so myself until a lawyer set me right.

I began the last paragraph by saying that I write marriage of convenience stories because such marriages are contracted for reasons other than love. That may not sound too logical coming from someone who writes love stories. But it is super-logical to me! When I marry a couple off early and get them in close proximity to each other and in close conflict with each other, amazing things happen, and I get to orchestrate those things. I can show the hero and heroine gradually getting to know each other, to respect each other, to like each other, to fall in love, to love with their whole hearts and souls. I can show them healing their own deepest pain and each other’s. I can even show them arguing and fighting! The marriage of convenience gives me all the opportunity I need to delve deep into character and explore a love relationship as it grows, often messily, and eventually deepens.

I do indeed write love stories. I would not write any other kind. Marriages in my books may start off as a convenience, but they always end up as deep love matches.

To one person who leaves a comment below by Tuesday, November 27,  I will send a signed copy of the two-in-one edition of THE TEMPORARY WIFE/A PROMISE OF SPRING or ONLY  A PROMISE (winner’s choice), all of which are marriage of convenience stories. Goodness, I really have written  a lot of them.

[The winner is Beverly Holmes]

Creating heroines of historical romances is not an easy thing for an author. I often think of it as being a bit like a tightrope walk. On the one hand readers want to be able to admire and identify with the heroine of the book they are reading. They want a strong, assertive, independent woman who can stand alone if need be and does not have to cling to her man for either support or protection. On the other hand, they surely want heroines who are historically believable. Women of Regency England were very different in almost every respect from women of the 21^stcentury. Legally they weren’t even persons. They were chattel. Almost invariably they belonged to some man as his possession. They had very little freedom and very little opportunity to develop their full potential. Their education was for the most part severely restricted. Their choices when they grew up were even more so. How on earth can they be admired and identified with as heroines by readers today?

Well, fortunately we can see how writers of the time handled the problem. Jane Austen, who wrote in the Regency era, and Charlotte Bronte, who wrote in Victorian times, did not write historical novels. They wrote contemporaries. They knew first-hand what they were talking about. And both managed to create heroines who were true to the times but still admirable to us all these years later. Jane Austen gave us Elizabeth Bennett among others, and Charlotte Bronte gave us Jane Eyre, both of them fictional heroines who drew power to themselves by daring to stand alone when they might have chosen to be safe and dependent. Yet neither of them was a real rebel. Neither did anything that any other woman of their times might not have done. Theirs was a strength of character and a self-respect that transcended all else, even personal comfort and the prospect of happiness. Elizabeth refused marriage offers from both Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy even though the alternative seemed to be a future of dreary spinsterhood and near-poverty. Jane refused to be Mr. Rochester’s mistress when it was discovered—at the altar on their wedding day—that he already had a wife and could not marry her. She did it even though she knew he loved her passionately and would have been forever true to her. She walked away and risked destitution rather than compromise with her moral values. Austen and Bronte are like a beacon of hope to authors of historical romance, like me.

My reading suggests to me that a number of writers of  historical romance (though not all, I hasten to add!) try to suggest strength in their heroines by giving them characteristics that might be common and admirable now but make them stick out like a sore thumb in their historical setting. How many feisty (a word I hate) heroines do we meet in historicals? I have encountered a number of Regency misses who defy all the rules of genteel society by striding off alone to take on the world. It very rarely works (in my judgment anyway) because it is not remotely realistic. I remember once reading a story of two young women, one of them the daughter of an earl, who went to London alone together to find jobs, which they did. By day they worked. By night they attended all the most exclusive of the ton balls and parties, and of course each got her aristocratic man in the end. Parents, sponsors, chaperones, official presentations at court, invitations, etc. etc. Where were they? They certainly made no appearance in that story. I read another in which the heroine swore so foully and so unceasingly as she strode out into her own life that even if she had been a contemporary heroine I would have wanted to wash her mouth out with soap. Yet the hero was enchanted. He thought she was cute. Huh? When I read a story set in Regency England, I want to be swept off into that world, not straight back into my own. When I write one, I want to get it as accurate for its historical time as I can possibly make it—which does not mean, by the way, that I always get it right! I have been known to make an error or three of historical fact. But I do try.

My heroines run the gamut of human types. They can be quiet and dignified (Lauren Edgeworth in A SUMMER TO REMEMBER), talkative and klutzy (Cora Downes in THE FAMOUS HEROINE), reclusive and socially awkward (Wren Heyden in SOMEONE TO WED), fierce and bold (Freyja Bedwyn in SLIGHTLY SCANDALOUS) strait-laced and bookish (Mary Gregg in THE NOTORIOUS RAKE), widows determined to find love on their own terms (Hannah Reid in A SECRET AFFAIR),  prostitutes trying to find their way back to respectability (Viola Thornhill in NO MAN’S MISTRESS) women deeply wounded by sexual assault and a resulting single parenthood (Anne Jewell in SIMPLY LOVE), aging spinsters who live with an acceptance of loneliness and the dull circumstances in which they find themselves (Dora Debbins in ONLY BELOVED)….and so on. Nevertheless, I try very hard to do the same two things with all of my heroines. First, I try to make them into strong women who can deal with their own lives and who can, if necessary, stand alone at the end of their stories even though they are not called upon to do so—they are, after all, the heroines of love stories. The love in which they share at the end is never a dependent thing. It is a shared passion at which the hero and heroine arrive from a position of equal strength. Second, I try my best to make my heroines believable Regency types. I like to feel that they could find themselves in the pages of a Jane Austen novel without feeling as if they had been caught in a time warp.

Whether I succeed or not is up to the reader to decide, of course. Tightropes are not the easiest things to walk without teetering inelegantly and even toppling off at least once in a while.

To one person who leaves a comment below by Friday, November 16, I will send an autographed copy of either A SECRET AFFAIR or SOMEONE TO WED—winners’ choice.

 

[This week’s  winner is Lila Rives]

Most novels have a villain or two—those characters who oppose the hero and/or heroine, standing between them and happiness. Often they behave dishonestly and dishonorably. Sometimes they attempt to do real harm. They can be simply misguided and a little sad. They can be unkind, even vicious. They can be downright evil. They can, in fact, run the gamut of human misbehavior from simple antagonism to outright villainy. They can be redeemable—or not.

I have created my fair share of nasty villains, though I do try not to use what I think of as “silly” villains—those who are evil for the sake of being evil and slink around, cackling maniacally and enjoying their wickedness. Such characters generally fall into the cartoon villain category. I like to consider the whole complexities of the human condition when I create characters, whether they be heroes and heroines or minor characters or villains. And with a few possible exceptions (I am not going to touch upon any of those here) no one is purely evil. People may do evil without being evil. There are reasons for what people do, whether good or bad. Most of us, I think, can justify the wrong things we do even when we probably know deep down that they are wrong. If I am hungry and I steal, I can justify the theft even though I know it is not right. If I tell a deliberate lie, I can excuse it by calling it a “white” lie. Most of us are a bewildering mix of good and bad. Can any of us honestly say we have never lied or said or done shameful, even sometimes illegal things? Is there any driver who has never driven faster than the speed limit? There are few if any saints among us. We are human! At least I am even if you aren’t!

I like to create characters who are as human as they can possibly be considering the fact that they exist only in my imagination. Having said that, there are a few villains in my books that I regret. One of them is in HEARTLESS, a nasty character I did not develop into a believable human, though in my defense I will say that I decided this only years after writing the book. I left him as he is, however, when the book was republished a few years ago as I always think it is a bigger mistake to change aspects of an older book when one is coming at it from a wholly different place in one’s life.

I have a number of other rather nasty villains who are unredeemed at the end of their book and have never been redeemed since, though readers have sometimes asked that I make it happen. Some of you may remember Lionel, villain in both DARK ANGEL and LORD CAREW’S BRIDE. I have never redeemed him, though I think I could. He is very human, but he has allowed self absorption and a good bit of sadism to dominate his character and dictate his behavior. The fact that he looks like an angel does not help him. It gives him a sense of entitlement. Having created him and been inside his head, I can see that such a man is very unlikely to change unless he has to face some really cataclysmic event in his life.  The same applies to a number of other villains in my books. They must be allowed to live the life they have chosen—or rather the life I have chosen for them (funnily enough, it seems most of the time that my characters do the choosing, not me). Lady Hodges, the narcissistic, ruthlessly selfish mother of Wren in SOMEONE TO WED rides happily off into the sunset, so to speak, after she continues her villainy in the upcoming SOMEONE TO TRUST. But she is not redeemed.

Sometimes the villain cannot be redeemed at the end of one of my books because he is dead. Such is the case with the Earl of Eastham in ONLY BELOVED. He is not an inherently evil man despite the fact that he tries to push Dora off a cliff to her death. He is a deeply unhappy man, embittered by circumstances—no excuse for villainy, of course, but a twisted sort of reason nonetheless. One can perhaps pity him though one cannot excuse him.

And then there are the villains I have redeemed in books of their own, books in which they are transformed from villain to hero. Sometimes, as we know from real life, unwise or downright wrong choices can sink people into a place of deep darkness. It is often easier to remain in it, especially if there are addictions involved, than to climb out. Sometimes people, speaking and acting from such a place, do deliberately nasty things to cause other people to suffer too. To emerge from the darkness; to make some right choices and keep on making them; to build a will of iron to take one upward a step at a time without being discouraged by how many more steps need to be taken—all this is obviously incredibly difficult. All of us have probably known such people, some of whom have succeeded, some who sadly have not. But if they can do it—oh my goodness, what a triumph!

Freddie Sullivan was pretty nasty in COURTING JULIA, even going as far as to kidnap Julia so that she would have to marry him and solve his money woes. Even at the start of his own book, DANCING WITH CLARA, he is plotting marriage to a plain, crippled woman who is also rich, cynically using his looks and his charm to snare her. But when Clara accepts his offer, she does so because he is beautiful and there has been little beauty in her life. She is not deceived for one moment by his pretended ardor. Freddie has to suffer severe torment through much of the book before he can emerge at the end as a hero worthy of Clara. Even then, of course, nothing is guaranteed, for Freddie has an addiction—though the third book in the series, TEMPTING HARRIET, shows that he has continued to master it. I LOVE redeeming villains and bringing them from a dark place in their lives to the light of love. I love trying to convince readers that the transformation is believable. For it is. It does happen in real life as well as in romantic fiction.

To one person who leaves a comment below by Monday, November 5, I will send a copy of either HEARTLESS or ONLY BELOVED or the two-in-one DARK ANGEL/LORD CAREW’S BRIDE—winner’s choice.

 

[The winner is Cass. I do not know her last name yet!]

 

Way back in 1989 my editor at NAL asked me to be one of five contributors to the first Signet Regency Christmas anthology of novellas, a new venture that was so well received by readers that it became an annual event for years afterward. I contributed to ten of the collections. I adored writing those stories! Six of them are now available in two e-books, CHRISTMAS GIFTS and CHRISTMAS MIRACLES. The other four appear in UNDER THE MISTLETOE, together with a new novella I wrote specifically for that anthology. I have written a number of Christmas novels too. Even my new book, SOMEONE TO TRUST (November, 2018), begins with a boisterous Westcott family Christmas and the first unexpected spark of a romance between Elizabeth, Lady Overfield, and Colin, Lord Hodges.

One of my older novels, A CHRISTMAS BRIDE, features two characters from even older books, Edgar Downes, the solidly middle-class brother of Cora in THE FAMOUS HEROINE, and Helena, Lady Stapleton, who does not actually appear in A PRECIOUS JEWEL but nevertheless figures as a villain of the story. In October this year (2018) A CHRISTMAS BRIDE and UNDER THE MISTLETOE were re-published in a nice fat two-in-one print book entitled A VERY SPECIAL CHRISTMAS (not, unfortunately, available as an e-book).

Why have I written so many Christmas stories? I have always seen Christmas as the absolute best setting for romance. Even apart from the religious significance of the festival, it is a holiday for family and togetherness and feasting and dancing and children and joy. It is a time in which to dwell upon the hope of peace and goodwill. It is certainly tailor made for a love story. When writing about Christmas, I can be as sentimental as I want as I deal with love and healing, with second chances and an end to loneliness, with surrender to friendship and love, with commitment to marriage and parenthood and happily ever after. Most of my Christmas novels and novellas have a larger family beyond just the hero and heroine. Christmas stories needs to be filled with people. Most also feature children. Children can teach adults a great deal about love. Many of my stories have a couple with a troubled relationship—a marriage that teeters on the brink of failure,  or a former romance that ended bitterly but needs rekindling, or a marriage that has already fallen over the brink of failure. Or… The possibilities are endless. Some merely feature two lonely souls who have yet to discover each other. But it is always Christmas that brings the lovers together and shows them that they belong together, that there are love and joy to be shared during the season and maintained after it is over and built upon through the rest of their lives. Christmas is never incidental to my stories. It is never just a convenient setting that could be changed without in any way affecting the developing romance. Christmas becomes almost a character—a central, benevolent force for family and love and happiness and new beginnings. There is no more suitable time of year for a love story if one listens closely enough to hear what at its heart it is saying about the meaning of life—that love is forever present and that really love is all that matters. To someone who leaves a comment below by Tuesday, October 23, I will send my last advance reading copy of SOMEONE TO TRUST. [Last week’s winner was YVONNE JONES.]   [And this week’s winner is LINDA YANIGER. Congratulations to her, and thanks to all of you for your comments.]

Unlike that witch on her broomstick, I believe most us at least try to think before we speak. But I’m sure all of us have experienced the odd time when we did not do so but blurted out the first thing that came into our head—and ended up variously embarrassed, horrified, remorseful, and wishing fervently that we could rewind the clock a few seconds. The trouble with the spoken word, of course, is that it cannot be recalled once it is out there, not when there was someone to hear it anyway. Not one iota of what has been said can be changed, whether it happened five minutes ago or five centuries ago. Time is unforgiving that way. The written word can be just as fraught with danger for the impulsive and almost as unforgiving in an age of constant texting, twittering, and firing off unconsidered comments on social media sites. Sometimes it is possible to erase or edit something we wrote, even if it is only to correct a typo we notice the moment after we press that “post” button. And perhaps we are more likely when we write than when we speak to think through what we have to say and choose our words carefully before we write them down—though I know those twittering thumbs can be very itchy especially when tempers are running high. But what about the writer of stories and novels? The written word for us becomes very forgiving indeed. We can change anything—the last sentence we wrote or something that happened seven or twelve chapters ago. Anything we like, in fact. We get to play God. Time means nothing in the creation of a story. We can totally erase something that happened six weeks ago and eight chapters back. Poof! It never happened. We can change our characters’ appearance and name, their words and actions, even their thoughts, as often as we choose. If we don’t like something they say, we can simply erase it and get them to say what we want them to say. After all, we created them. They have no existence outside our imaginations. We are in control. Right? Hmm. Let’s call a pause right there. The answer is yes, of course. It is also no. I know I am not unique in this. I have spoken to numerous other writers who agree. We create our characters out of the stuff of our imagination. We provide enough detail to round them out and make them seem like real beings, and we set them loose into our stories. And then what happens? Pretty soon they become separate beings with a will of their own, and they decide what they are going to say and do in the course of their story. This is why I find it impossible to plan a book ahead of time. I never know what is going to come out of my characters’ mouths when they begin to talk. I can set a piece of dialogue in motion and often do so as I love writing it, but then I just sort of sit back and let them have at it. Often the conversation goes off in a direction I had not anticipated. And often what is said changes the course of the story and establishes a theme and a message I did not see coming. In the book ONLY ENCHANTING, for example (Book 4 of the Survivors’ Club series), I had vaguely planned a relationship between Agnes and Flavian in which seduction and a brief affair and its consequences would lead to a deeper relationship and ultimate marriage. However, when I got them into conversation several times early in the book, each time obligingly placing them in an attractive and very private setting, would they cooperate and get down to the business of having an affair? Not a bit of it! That whole segment of the book ended up with Flavian blurting out a marriage proposal that surprised both him and Agnes—and me. At that point I had to decide whether to erase his words and force him back into a more determined seduction or let him have his way. But letting him have his way totally negated everything I had half planned for the remaining two-thirds of the book. I let him have his way! Sometimes when words have been spoken aloud, even within the pages of a book, they just have to be allowed to stand. The story must be changed accordingly. In THE NOTORIOUS RAKE, a totally unimportant minor character, a friend of Mary Gregg, the heroine, was cautioning her against encouraging the advances of Lord Edmond Waite, the notorious rake of the title. As part of her argument she asked Mary if she realized he had killed his mother and brother. I swear those words just appeared on the screen before my eyes. I had NO idea she was about to speak them. The words alarmed me to no small degree. I think I felt as Pandora must have felt when she opened that forbidden box. Of course, I was more fortunate than Pandora—all I had to do to put matters right was delete the words and carry on with my story of a perfectly stereotypical rake who needed to be redeemed by the power of love. But I had the feeling that the friend must know something I didn’t, so I kept her words without any idea of how they were going to affect the story. They turned out to be the key to Edmond’s character and to the whole relationship that developed between him and Mary. Lord Edmond Waite is still one of my favorite heroes. Did he kill his mother and brother? Well, yes—and no… The spoken word, it seems, then, has a power of its own whether the speaker is a real person or a fictional character. When it is spoken in real time it cannot be recalled. When it is spoken in the pages of a book, it can be recalled by the author but perhaps ought not to be. Perhaps in either case we need to ponder where the words came from—and where they are likely to lead. Life is a dynamic, unpredictable, exciting process… But I won’t proceed down that road. To one person who leaves a comment below by next Monday, October 15,  I will send a signed copy of either the two-in-one edition of  A COUNTERFEIT BETROTHAL/ THE NOTORIOUS RAKE or ONLY ENCHANTING–winner’s choice. [This week’s winner is YVONNE JONES]

All little girls love the story of Cinderella. Well, there are probably exceptions, but they must be few. The discovery that a poor girl who is forced to wear rags as she drudges incessantly at all the most menial tasks set her by a wicked stepmother has a fairy godmother is breathtaking. So is the notion that with one wave of her wand the godmother can send the girl to a prince’s ball—the tall, handsome Prince Charming, no less—wearing a gorgeous ball gown and glass slippers (ouch!) to catch the eye of the prince himself and actually dance with him (it must have been a waltz, don’t you think?). The terrible letdown of midnight coming too soon and Cinderella’s coach turning into a pumpkin and her ball gown into rags is merely a temporary setback as the prince searches frantically for the wearer of the glass slipper left behind on the palace steps. Then the denouement—ah, sigh! For of course the slipper fits only Cinderella. Prince Charming has found her and marries her and thus makes her into a princess. And they lived happily ever after. One more sigh!

 

I think most women have a soft spot for the story too, and probably a few men. The basic story, with innumerable adaptations, has been recreated over and over again in stories and movies. The rags-to-riches theme combined with a love story is irresistible. There is a potential problem, however, especially in the 21^stcentury. Most adult readers demand more of a romantic hero and heroine than the original story provides. The hero must be more than just a handsome prince, and the heroine must be far more than just a poor downtrodden girl waiting for a prince to find her and marry her and give her identity, wealth, and security. Readers demand more of a love story than boy meets girl, falls in love with her, pursues her, and marries her. And of girl suffering in patient silence through a life of drudgery and bullying while she waits for some man to come to her rescue (preferably tall, dark, handsome and rich). Readers want more of a relationship than the simple romance of a first starry-eyed encounter followed immediately by love and marriage and happily ever after.

 

Don’t they need to know each other?

 

We expect a hero and a heroine with depth of character. We want equality in their relationship, even if their circumstances are quite different. We need to know that they can bring assets (not necessarily material) of equal value to the relationship. We want a story that shows the growth of their characters and a development of their knowledge and understanding of each other. We want to see them fall in love—not just with each other’s looks and surface charms, but with the person behind those attractions. And we want to know that it is real love, that it is based on a solid foundation and will last a lifetime. We don’t demand (at least I don’t) happily-ever-after because there is no such thing. But we do want to know at the end that these two people stand a very good chance of remaining happy together because they have already shown a willingness to work on valuing themselves and each other and of loving each other through thick and thin.

 

We want substance, in other words.

 

Actually, what I think we hope for in the romantic stories we read and movies we watch is everything.We want to have our cake and eat it. But surely we can have both a realistic story with the sort of hero and heroine we can relate to and believe in and at the same time have the sheer romance of a Cinderella story. Why not? Life isn’t always or even often an either/or proposition. Fiction doesn’t need to be one or the other either. By all means let us have both!

 

Sophia Fry, heroine of THE ARRANGEMENT, Book 2 of my Survivors’ Club series, is very much a Cinderella figure at the start of the book, and she faces total destitution when she is tossed out of her sorry home after being foolish enough to save Vincent Hunt, Viscount Darleigh, from the devious matchmaking schemes of her aunt, uncle, and cousin. Vincent, of course, comes to her rescue in true Cinderella story fashion. He marries her. But he is Prince Charming with a difference—he was blinded at the age of seventeen in the Napoleonic Wars. And this story does not end with the wedding. It really only begins there. But before it does begin, Sophia demands a sort of prenuptial agreement, something Cinderella did not do.

In my book LONGING, Siân Jones lives with her grandparents and her uncle in a small house in a Welsh coalmining valley. She works long hours in the mines, harnessed to a coal cart which she drags along low, poorly ventilated tunnels from the coal seam to the shaft. Yet she ends up married to Alexander Hyatt, Marquess of Craille, the blond, handsome and wealthy new English owner of the mine and its accompanying steelworks. There is a long and troublesome journey between the starting and ending points, however. Times are tough and the workers throughout the Welsh valleys are beginning to rebel against the owners. Siân is a strong-willed, high-principled Cinderella, devoted to her family and her community and her Welsh heritage. Alexander is a powerful man who nevertheless is willing to learn and show humility in face of the rich and ancient Welsh culture and a close-knit community he had not expected before he came from England to take up his inheritance.

To one person who leaves a comment below by Friday, October 5, I will send a signed copy of either LONGING or THE ARRANGEMENT (British edition with a different cover)–winner’s choice.

 

Last week’s winner of  a copy of ONLY BELOVED was Claire Gilless.

This week’s winner is BRENDA MATZEK. Congratulations to her! Thank you all for your comments.

I was asked a while ago who were some of my favorite tortured heroes in books other than my own. It was not easy to narrow down the possibilities, but I eventually came up with Mr. Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s JANE EYRE; Christian, Duke of Jervaulx from Laura Kinsale’s FLOWERS FROM THE STORM; Darius Lindsay from Grace Burrowes’s DARIUS; Reggie Davenport from Mary Jo Putney’s THE RAKE; Lord Ian Mackenzie from Jennifer Ashley’s THE MADNESS OF IAN MACKENZIE; and Holden Caulfield from THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. And that was just the heroes. The question did not ask about heroines. I have created my fair share of wounded heroes and heroines. Why do I do it? Why do I write so often about men and women who are wounded in body and/or tortured in spirit—especially in books that are billed as feel-good love stories? Why would you read them or other books like them? To a certain degree woundedness of body and brokenness of spirit are common to the human experience. We all suffer. No one is immune. Because I am an optimist, I am fond of saying that I have lived a blessed life, and indeed I have. Yet I have also known times of intense suffering, either in my own person or involving people near and dear to me—or concerning people worldwide whom I don’t know personally but only through media reports. Often the heart feels as if it must surely break. Sometimes  it is hard to hold off the self-pity and the “why me?” or “the world is doomed” reaction. Now these facts don’t mean we have to read about suffering in the books we choose for relaxation and pleasure. So why DO we do it? Why do I write about suffering? Why do you read about it? I think maybe it’s because we are all uplifted when we witness or hear of other people enduring pain and rising above it, conquering it, finding themselves capable of extraordinary achievements and acts of kindness and heroism and love, not despite their suffering, but because of it. Think of real life people such as Helen Keller, Stephen Hawking, Nelson Mandela, for example, and all the innumerable heroes and heroines, often nameless, who selflessly give of themselves and risk their lives and often lose them in the face of great calamities and tragedies. They are an inspiration to the rest of us. They can raise us above the sufferings that threaten to drag us down into despair. Such people are irresistible (to me, anyway) as the heroes and heroines of love stories, for love can help them accept what they cannot change and find healing for what they can. It can help bring them the peace of acceptance for what life offers them. The healing and wholeness they find can enable them to trust the love that is offered them and to give love in return. Great love stories are about more than just romance and sexual chemistry and happily-ever-after. They are about two people who have lived long enough to have picked up baggage and to have constructed layers of armor and masks behind which they hide. They are about two people who at the start of a story are not ready or whole enough in themselves to take on the great risk of loving their way through life regardless of what the future may have in store for them. As a writer I love taking two such characters and showing the healing process, which must be both personal and shared. I love to take them to the point at which they trust love—trust that they are good enough to give it and worthy enough to receive it. I like to run them through the mill so that the happy ending can be all the more satisfying and believable. And I want readers to feel that yes, love works and suffering for the most part can be overcome. In my book ONLY BELOVED, the final book in the Survivors’ Club series, George, Duke of Stanbrook, is a sad character. His only son was killed in the Napoleonic Wars and his wife committed suicide soon after. Since then he has devoted many years to helping severely wounded officers heal and recuperate on his large country estate. The stories of six of those people are told in the other books of the series. George is quiet and kindly and always ready to listen to other people’s sufferings. But deep inside is the raw wound of a far deeper torment than any of his friends suspect. Dora Debbins, whom he marries early in the book, saw the dreams of her young womanhood fade when her mother ran away from home with a lover, leaving Dora to bring up her much younger sister. After that sister married one of the other Survivors (in ONLY ENCHANTING), Dora was left alone, quiet and cheerful, seemingly content with her lot as an aging spinster giving music lessons in a country village but in reality deeply wounded. The marriage of the duke and Dora promises a placid sort of contentment to both. But the real suffering they hold deep and try to hide from each other must be confronted and dealt with if they are to know the full glory of love. In the course of the book I give them no choice, poor things!     As a reader, which would you prefer? To read about the placid contentment or to tackle the woundedness and the healing and the real, passionate love story to which it gives rise? To one person who leaves a comment below by Thursday, September 27, I will send a signed copy of ONLY BELOVED.   [The winner is CLAIRE GILLESS. Congratulations to her!]

I’m sure all writers will recognize this as the question readers ask more often than any other. I wonder if other writers find it as nearly impossible to answer as I do. Most of the time I really don’t know where my ideas come from. I often look back on a finished book, or even one in progress, and wonder how on earth I came up with a particular plot idea. Perhaps that is partly because I really can’t plan a story ahead of time. I usually start with two characters (and I don’t even know them particularly well at the start!) and a situation. But I have no story apart from a few vague notions of where it may be headed and the certain knowledge that it will end happily. The story takes shape gradually after I have got the characters into that situation, acting and reacting and interacting, though even then there are many false starts and restarts. Often I have to go back and rewrite as new ideas pop out of the ether. It is not a comfortable way to write. Nor is it for the faint of heart. But it is challenging and exhilarating and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Somehow everything always seems to work out for me. After more than a hundred novels and novellas that is reassuring—especially when I am deep in despair after having painted my characters into a corner with no discernible way out.   I do know, however, what sort of thing might inspire me to write—and it is almost always something that stirs some deep emotion in me and inspires me to write a story from that emotional place. It doesn’t have to be a romantic emotion. It can be a scene of extraordinary beauty—the mountains and lakes of British Columbia, a sunset reflected across the ocean, or a picture of giant trees in a rain forest. It can be a work of art. I remember once sitting and staring at a picture of Michelangelo’s Pieta for well over an hour. Or it can be a piece of music. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto can do it to me every time. So can Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World or Bette Midler’s The Rose. And definitely it can happen with any music sung by a Welsh male voice choir—Hiraeth(Longing) or Myfanwy, for example, or the Welsh national anthem, Mae Hen Wlad fy Nhadau (the land of my fathers). Or sometimes it is a quotation or a short poem, like William Butler Yeats’s Had I the Heavens’ Embroidered Cloths. I always want to capture these soul-deep emotions in words of my own and in a love story. Just occasionally I know exactly where a story idea comes from because I have chosen to set a book within a definite historical event. It doesn’t happen often, but I can think of three of my books that came into being that way. I wanted to set a love story in my native Wales, and chose to set it in one of the coal mining valleys of South Wales during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, when the resources and the workers of Wales were terribly exploited for the profit of wealthy mine and steelwork owners, mostly Englishmen. I had to do a great deal of research for LONGING and make sure that my story was woven about authentic events. Nevertheless, my passionate identification with the Welsh (even though my hero was one of the English owners) helped me keep the story on track as an intense love story, I believe—and hope. My use of Welsh music in the book helped with that! Then there was another Welsh book, TRULY, (I hate the title, was assigned to it when I was away from home for a few weeks and had no input). The third book based heavily upon actual historical events is BEYOND THE SUNRISE, my most action-packed book, set in Spain and Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars. My hero and heroine helped shape those events, so I had to make them accurate. And then there are the stories I can’t account for in any rational way. They come from an inner place that is virtually impossible to describe in words. I have often complained that I find it impossible to think. When I sit down to try to work something out in my head, my mind either turns blank or it wanders off on a thousand tangents—or I fall asleep. At school whenever I had a paper or essay to write I could—and did—do exhaustive research, but then I could never think through what I was going to write. If a teacher demanded a detailed outline, I always wrote it after I was done with the paper. The only way I could write that essay was to sit down with paper and pen (yes, I am that antique) and write. Then ideas I did not know I had flowed with no trouble at all. The same thing happens when I write a book. Every morning (EVERY morning) when I sit down to write, I have no idea what is going to happen. I could easily plead permanent writer’s block. I have to take a few minutes (sometimes more than a few) to focus in and then just start. My daughter, who is a trained hynoptist, tells me that what I am doing is hypnotizing myself. However it is, the act of writing enables me to by-pass the mind and put myself into some other dimension—the sub-conscious, consciousness itself, call it what you will. But it works for me. Do you wonder that when people ask me where I get my ideas I find it almost impossible to answer? To one person who leaves a comment below before the end of next Wednesday, September 19, I will send a signed copy of LONGING, the Welsh historical mentioned above. The winners of the two tote bags last week were MELISSA  RENNER and MARTHA JUDITH DURICK.   [UPDATE: The winner of a signed edition of LONGING is KATHERINE RIVERA. Congratulations to her. Thank you for your comments. I always enjoy reading them]

 

As far back as I can remember I wanted to be a writer. When I was a child I used to fill notebooks with long stories, all about the hair-raising adventures of super-hero children. When I grew up, however, I did not immediately proceed to becoming a writer. There were two main reasons. First, life intervened. I moved from Wales to Canada and started a career as a high-school English teacher; and I married and had three children. There was no time for anything else. Second, and perhaps more important, I didn’t know what I wanted to write. Fiction, yes. But what kind of fiction? Literary fiction, probably, but my mind always turned blank when it came to plot ideas. Genre fiction, then? I had always loved mysteries. I still do. But my mind didn’t seem to work in the right way to enable me to create one. I imagine that writing a mystery takes a great deal of planning and plotting, something that again turns my mind blank. I am what is known as a seat-of-the-pants writer. Romance, then?

What? Romance?

That was way beneath my dignity, surely. It is strange how an academic education can give one that attitude even though it is usually based upon just the opposite of what an education is supposed to teach—that is, that an opinion ought to be based upon facts and personal research. I had never read a romance.

Or had I?

I was a voracious reader as a child and as a teenager. I read almost all the  British, American, and Russian classics as well as some from other nations. My feelings about them varied. I loved books like ANNA KARENINA, TESS OF THE D’URBAVILLES, and A TALE OF TWO CITIES even though I found the endings excruciatingly painful. I knew something about those books, though. I would never read them again—because I would not be able to take those endings again or enjoy the book itself knowing how it would end. On the other hand I adored books like JANE EYRE, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and PERSUASION and knew I would read them over and over again. The reason? They had lovely, happy endings, and they were love stories. They left me feeling happy and uplifted. They were  romances.It took me a while to work that out!

I discovered the actual romance genre when I opened a Corn Flakes box one day and pulled out a Harlequin romance (NO GENTLE POSSESSION by Anne Mather). I almost tossed it in the garbage can (such is the power of an academic education) but read it instead. I was enchanted. I proceeded to read every romance I could lay my hands on, like a person who had been starved for most of her life. I found the books patchy. Many I loved; many were all right as light entertainment; many were disappointing. I found this last group shallow, with improbable plots, cardboard characters of no depth, love that did not have to be worked for and therefore did not convince me that it was love, and endings that left me unmoved. Some books failed (for me) in all of the above.

The lesson for me as a potential writer was obvious. I loved reading a good romance. And much of what I read was good or better. But much was not. I found myself wanting to rewrite parts of some books, particularly the endings. But—something I still strongly believe in—one ought never to try rewriting or adding to someone else’s book. And there was no point in grumbling and complaining (to myself) that I could have done so much better myself.

Prove it! Write your own romance,an inner voice said.

So I did.

I write what I love to read. I believe in love. Not just romantic love, but love in all its many manifestations. I believe it is powerful, unconditional, enduring, life-changing. I believe it is the basis of all goodness and happiness. But it is something that has to be worked for, especially if it is romantic love and involves a relationship with another person that will last a lifetime without turning to indifference or hatred. Love does not come on a wave of lust, though lust can be a healthy part of it. I want a love story to have substance, to seem very much like real life, to show two people who have considerable baggage, who are in some way broken by past experiences and need to face up to that baggage and find healing. I want to bring them in the course of a book to the point at which they can give love and receive it consciously, with a firm commitment to work on it for the rest of their lives. I want them to be involved in each other’s growth and healing. And I want the reader to have warm, sympathetic feelings about these characters, to fall in love with them, to root for them–and to enjoy the journey from the first page to the last.

I don’t believe in happily-ever-after either in real life or in fiction. I want my readers to be confident that there is real happiness awaiting the couple who are so joyful and deeply in love on the last page. But I want that confidence to come from an understanding of those characters, not just from my say-so. I want readers to trust them and believe in them as though they were real people.

Most of all, perhaps, I write romance because it is my way of sharing the love that is within me. I am a bit of a shy introvert in person, but never in my writing. There are outlets for love available to all of us.

Please leave a comment below by Wednesday, September 12, 2018, for a chance to win one of two Mary Balogh tote bags shown below.

[September 12: The winners of the two tote bags are MELISSA RENNER and MARTHA JUDITH DURICK. Congratulations to them, and thank you everyone who left a comment. I always enjoy reading what you have to say.]

2019 will be a busy year for Mary Balogh books–one new edition to the Westcott family series and six e-book republications of old, out-of-print books. I have no new covers to show here yet, but at least I can give you advance notice of what you can look forward to–and show you a few old covers. Note that publication months may change–it often happens for one reason or another.

The new book, Book 6 of the Westcott series, will be SOMEONE TO HONOR in November. It is Abigail’s story and begins three years after Elizabeth’s story, told in SOMEONE TO TRUST–due out in November, 2018. At the age of twenty-four, Abigail is still unmarried and not even looking. The family is worried about her and doing what they do best, They are plotting and planning on her behalf. But Abby will have none of it and, as it turns out, she does not need anyone’s help. I am within a couple of weeks or so of finishing her story. I still have two more books planned for the series. Jessica (Lady Jessica Archer, sister of the Duke of Netherby) still needs her story told and so does Harry (Major Harry Westcott, formerly the Earl of Riverdale).

The e-book republications will begin with SECOND CHANCES on February 5, an anthology of four novellas:

The Treasure Hunt

The Forbidden Daffodils

The Betrothal Ball

Another Dream

The last-named of these novellas, “Another Dream,” first appeared a couple or so years ago in a novella duo with a story by friend Grace Burrowes. We have just taken it off the market after it had a good run of success. My story is one that might especially interest you if you did not discover that duo. It is the story of Eleanor Thompson, sister of Christine in SLIGHTLY DANGEROUS. Christine, of course, married Wulfric, Duke of Bewcastle, who seems to be everyone’s favorite hero of mine. He makes a significant appearance in his sister-in-law’s novella, as do all the Bedwyns, I believe. I did not intend giving Eleanor her own story. I had left her as the happy owner and headmistress of the school in Bath that figured in all the SIMPLY books. However, a number of readers wanted her to have her own happily-ever-after, so I decided to oblige.

The other five e-book republications are all full-length novels:

AN UNACCEPTABLE OFFER, originally published as a Signet Regency romance, will be out on April 2.

DECEIVED will be published in on March 5. It was originally published as a longer-length historical (even longer than the books I am currently writing) back in the ’90s

THE UNGRATEFUL GOVERNESS, to be out on May 7, is also an old Signet Regency

THE FIRST SNOWDROP will be published on June 4.

CHRISTMAS BELLE will be out on September 3. These last two books have linked characters. Both were Signet Regencies.

Readers often ask with some dismay why these republications are available only as e-books and not also in print. I can understand the disappointment. However, publishers have full publication schedules of new books and limited budgets and cannot be expected to take on old books in huge numbers as well. Also, bookstore shelves would be clogged with all the old stuff and not have enough room for the new (or the other way around). Modern technology has given us the wonderful opportunity to publish and to read books that have been long out of print. I am certainly not too old to remember the frustration of discovering a new author and being eager to read everything he or she had ever written only to find that the treasure of that author’s backlist was forever lost to me except sometimes through used bookstores. I know many people do not enjoy reading books in electronic form, but at least they are there for anyone who really wants to read them. So forgive me, please, if you are disappointed at the lack of a physical book. But commenting as a reader, I must say that I find it wonderful indeed to be able to access the backlists of almost all my favorite authors, especially the recently discovered ones–Patricia Wentworth, for example.

Happy reading for the rest of this year and throughout 2019.