A love story is not just a book with a compelling plot. It also shows the growth of a relationship between two people, very often through indifference or even definite hostility to liking and friendship to being in love to the ultimate fullness of total and unconditional love itself. To be truly satisfying, the ending of a love story should leave the reader sighing with contentment, convinced that these two people share the unbreakable bond of a love that will last forever and even beyond. It should give the impression of happily-ever-after yet the conviction too that these people are real and not just figures in a romantic fairy tale.  In order to come to this feeling, the reader has to be drawn into the world of the story and into the minds and emotions and the very souls of the two lovers. The reader needs to feel these people, to be emotionally involved in their journey, almost to become them in imagination.

It is the writer’s job to make this happen.

But how is it done?

First, the characters have to seem real. Whether the hero is tall, dark, handsome and charismatic or something quite different, whether the heroine is cover model gorgeous or something else, they must feel like real people with whom the reader can relate and identify. They cannot be cardboard characters with little depth beyond some personality traits and background details the writer jotted down when creating them. They have to be living, breathing humans with strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and failures 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, to end happily.

In order to make characters real, the writer has to know them inside and out—soul deep in fact. It is possible to know a great deal about other people without really knowing them at all. Sometimes we do not even fully know ourselves. Do you ever find yourself saying or doing something that takes you by surprise? Do you really know exactly how you would behave in unexpected circumstances, a life-and-death emergency for example? When I am writing a book, I stop and go back and rewrite time and again before I come to the end and usually it is because I need to adjust the story as I get to know the main characters better. Creating a whole story is never easy because I am not satisfied until I feel I have the lovers right. They are rarely willing to give up all their secrets early or at once. Sometimes—very often, in fact—I end up asking them where their deepest pain lies. There is always something. Once I know it, then I can set about bringing that character to healing so that he/she can get to the point of being able to love and accept love and settle to a lasting, meaningful love relationship. This must happen for both main characters, and they must both be involved in the revelations and the healing. They bring each other to healing and love and ultimate happiness. It is both an individual and a shared journey they are on.

Well, no one said writing a love story is easy. At least, no one who has ever tried it has ever made that claim!

There must be growth in the characters if the reader is going to invest time and emotion in their love story. Admittedly there are action stories in which very little growth of character or emotional involvement with them is necessary, but this is not often so with a love story. If the hero, for example, is just gorgeous and sexy and does nothing but macho things throughout—well the reader might enjoy reading about his exploits but there will be very little emotional empathy with him. He will be a basically lifeless figure.  And there will be very little trust in him as the hero of a lifelong romance.

The best way I have found of getting depth of character and pulling the reader in emotionally is by making careful use of point of view. Point of view is the person through whose eyes and viewpoint the story is being told. It can be first person though then the action of the story can be seen only through the mind of one character (just as our own lives are viewed). I use what I call third person deep interior point of view. I usually alternate between the hero and heroine, telling one episode from the hero’s point of view and then one from the heroine’s. That way the reader gets to experience the story through the mind and emotions of the character experiencing that particular episode of the story. If you think about it, everything that happens in our lives has an emotional component. We are the ones who experience everything that happens in our own lives, and everything that happens is colored by our own experiences and character and values and background and emotions—mostly 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 with fictional characters. They must be living, emotional beings, and if their story is told from deep within them, then the reader will be there too, experiencing everything with them and feeling with them—living and loving with them. Creating this emotional connection among writer, character, and reader is one of the greatest challenges of writing a love story, but it is, I think, the key to its success. The author needs to make the reader laugh with the characters and cry with them—and fall in love with them. It should be hard to let them go at the end.

A great love story ought to be for everyone—not just the two fictional characters experiencing it. That is the whole point of writing it—and reading it.

To one person who leaves a comment below by Friday, March 29, I will send a signed copy of either SOMEONE TO TRUST, Book 5 of the Westcott series, or ONLY A KISS, Book 6 of the Survivors’ Club series—winner’s choice.

One question I am asked almost more than any other, apart from where I get my ideas and how my last name is pronounced, is what advice I would give to writers just starting out. I always give one of two answers, often both: (1) don’t listen to advice (2) just write. Both may sound a bit abrupt and callous, as though I just can’t be bothered to ponder the question or share any meaningful hints from my experience. The contrary is true, and I usually go on to explain what I mean—as I will do here.

I could just show the cartoon above, I suppose, and rest my case, but the burning question is—how does the book come out? One thing I have discovered through my encounters with numerous other writers down the years, some of them very successful, is that we are all different in almost every imaginable way. I like to get up early in the morning, for example, and tackle my writing immediately after breakfast while my energy level is high. I know at least one bestselling author who fritters away her time all day, finding any and all excuses to avoid her work in progress until finally, in the mid to late evening she sits down and writes well into the night. I am brain dead by then. She is in a brain fog in the morning. Which of us is right? We both are, of course, but I am right for me and she is right for her. There is no rule. It would be wrong to tell a new writer that this is the time of day when you must work if you want to achieve any sort of success. That could cause real and unnecessary frustration. Each writer has to find what works for her/him.

Here is another example. I am very organized and very disciplined. I write every day when I am working on a book, and I write two thousand words each day, except when I am doing revisions. I know another successful author who, despite all her intentions to the contrary, just cannot meet her deadlines. When one comes and goes and her editor is breathing down her neck, she is perhaps one-third of the way into the book. 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 right? Well, we both are. And there are numerous other ways to go about the writing process too, all of them right if they suit the author who uses them.

I know writers who plot out a book with meticulous care before they start writing it. It is important to them to have a story packed with action and suspense and those other ingredients that propel a story forward. I can’t plot to save my life. If I try it before I start a book, I contemplate an absolutely blank mind from somewhere outside it. Nothing, nada, no use. I can plot only as I am writing. It is because I write from deep within the point of view of my main characters, I think. They live in the present. They do not know the future. They create it as they go along. I create it along with them! Which type of plotter is right? Well, we both are. Each writer has to create in the way that comes naturally and not according to rules or a formula dictated by someone else, no matter how experienced or knowledgeable that someone else is.

There are no rules, in other words. No one can tell you how or when or how much to write. And if anyone tries, don’t listen! Avoid how-to books and how-to talks and seminars. All right, sorry—I am slipping into giving advice, aren’t I? So don’t listen to me. Read as many books as you like. But also WRITE!

What concerns me more than anything else about all the writing advice that is forever on offer for would-be writers is that it can impede the natural flow of creativity that is the writer’s motivating force. All writers of fiction have stories inside them—otherwise they wouldn’t be writers. And all writers knows how to tell a story—they have probably read thousands in the course of their lives and made up a hundred more in their heads. They just think they don’t know (we writers are such insecure people) and so seek out help on how to create everything from plot to character to suspense to pacing. 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 famous expert, and then she tackled the workbook he had written on how to write fiction. There were something like thirty-six chapters, for each of which there was a writing exercise. She did it all quite conscientiously and was in deep distress by the time she finished. She admitted that she no longer had any idea how to write.

By far the writer’s most precious gift, and also the most fragile, is her/his voice. By voice I mean the writer’s unique view of life and way of expressing it. It is quite distinctive when you come across it in a well-written book. There are certain authors (and they tend to be my favorites) whom I can recognize by the way they tell a story 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 lady who had two manuscripts on the go so that she could work on the second one while her critiquing group was going through the first. Then she would swap and work on their suggestions for the first while they had the second manuscript. This had been going on for a long time—this constant swap and revise. I was aghast. I wondered how much of her story or vision or voice remained in either of the constantly new-and-improved books she was working on? I would guess very little. I believe I told her that no one sees any of my books until they land on my editor’s desk after they are finished. I advised her, a bit hyperbolically, to shut herself into a room without phone or internet and not come out until she had finished her book.

If you are a writer, write. You don’t need to listen to the well-meaning advice of either experts or amateurs. You can do it yourself. Do it, then. I would expect that some of you will disagree. I have one writer friend who tells me with some exasperation every time I talk like this that it is all very well for me to tell writers simply to write. It comes naturally to me, she tells me. Other people need help. Perhaps. Even the very limited advice I am prepared to give may be the wrong advice! If it feels wrong for you, ignore it. I look forward to reading your comments, pro and con. Life would be very bland if we all agreed on every subject, wouldn’t it?

To one person who leaves a comment below by Monday, February 18, I will send an autographed copy of either IRRESISTIBLE or HEARTLESS (winner’s choice).

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).

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.

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.