(I've decided to learn Latin. *g* Over half my characters read it--so should I!)
Check out below for details about a $100 gift certificate
drawing!
My fourth book, Voices of the Night , is now on sale, and I
think is has the most wonderful cover yet!
Isn’t it incredible? The blurb
this time is much better, too.
This book has actually been with me a long time. It was my first Victorian-set romance, in a
version incredibly different from this one and before I’d found my romance
niche writing dark and intense books. The
first version was, in many ways, a fairly typical Pygmalion / My Fair Lady type
of story, with a bit less sweetness and a bit more social angst.
In that version, Maggie really was from the streets, but she
was too good, her ragtag orphan “family” too nice. Yes, it is true that Sally (the heroine in The Music of the Night ) had been a prostitute. And it is true that Frankie (book pending!)
was a rough, dangerous sort of fellow who ran with the wrong crowd. But her family was just too good at pulling
themselves up by their bootstraps. It
simply wasn’t very likely. They
overcame, and overcame, and were relatively happy, well-adjusted individuals,
and Maggie herself was just plain too nice and good. She had still shot Johnny, but she’d overcome
it and moved on.
For his part, Charles, my hero, was too good, as well. He was conscientious. He was nice, and he was kind. He was rather mild, for the most part, and he
thought his sister slightly silly but got along quite well with her, and while
he disagreed with his mother, they were incredibly close as well. He had no angst and almost no edge, if you
forget the few class assumptions he made at the beginning.
The story of this Maggie and this Charles was primarily one
of understanding across class barriers, confusion about reasons for attraction—were
they right or were they merely some sort of twisted slumming/social-climbing
thing?—and about overcoming one’s past.
The book was almost bought by two different publishers, and
in those and other rejection letters, I got the same message: Great writing. The story just isn’t special enough.
So I wrote The Veil of Night. Part of my motivation was to play off a cliché
that *I* personally had seen in far too many books being published recently
that I thought “wasn’t special enough.” *g* I
wanted to take a cliché that I knew publishers were still gobbling up by the
dozen, and I wanted to subvert it into a very different kind of story—one that
I wanted to tell and to read. (In
addition, it had much more sex. That
helped its appeal to editors no small amount!)
The result was a rich atmosphere, complicated and dangerous characters,
and a heroine with a bite not often found in romance. It was a Gothic without a monster or an ingénue,
and it worked at a level my previous manuscripts had not.
So I wrote two more books before returning to the core story
that had been Voices of the Night. I had to prove
myself a bit first because the Pygmalion theme—and its original execution—made
my first editor a little nervous about how dark and atmospheric the result *could* be. Needless to say, this one is very different
from the original!
I decided to take this far more toward the edge. There are probably one thousand romances in
which the heroine is from the “seamy side” of town—one hundred in which she is
attached to a group of orphans. I wanted
to make this different. I wanted to make
it far more real.
So I kept all the gritty elements I’d had in place from the beginning,
and I read interviews of street people, from Henry Mayhew’s contemporary
interviews to photographic essays done about ten years later. And I took those elements and infused them
into the story at a basic level, and I ended up with a “family” for Maggie with
many flaws, often self-destructive, but with an overall yearning that is
fundamentally sympathetic. Maggie,
herself, partook of many of them. No
longer was she an incredible singer and an inhumanly selfless person. Now she was a remarkable but flawed singer, a
deeply angry yet weary person who has been subjected to so many of the
vagaries of life on the edge that she has lost all faith. She is still passionate—incredibly so—but she
is more willing to do wrong things to protect the people she loves. Her weakness is in fact that strength of
protectiveness, for she will even court self-destruction or commit terrible
acts to save the people she treasures most. And these flaws and virtues, bundled together,
make a very potent force to write about.
Charles is actually even more different than Maggie was. No longer the easygoing peer, his isn’t a
story of a normal world shaken but of a person who has, at the beginning of the
story, lost his way. He knows he has
lost his soul, somehow, and he doesn’t know how to regain it, though he isn’t
ready to cast aside the life he’s known. He loves his mother and sister, but his mother’s
hypocrisy and obsession with her dead husband’s infidelities strain their
relationship, while his sister’s shallowness and manipulativeness cause him
deep pain. He was hard to write to get
just so—much harder than Maggie!
I’ve been so out of it that I missed getting a copy of
Romantic Times, but I was once again a Top Pick! (Whispers of the Night is up for a Reviewer’s
Choice Award, by the way, too!)
I’ve updated my website again, but it’s temporary because I’ve
decided that it is far too much of a pain to keep updated, and so I’m in the
midst of switching over to something more streamlined. You can read an excerpt of VOICES here. I also put up, for comparison, the first
chapter of the original version in the Extra Scenes section. Amazingly
different!
My contest entry form is broken (don’t ask—another thing I need
to fix), but have updated it and you can email me to enter either the standard contest or the
contest that you’ll have to read the book to enter! For the second contest, there will be a $100
Amazon.com gift certificate. I expect to
have relatively few entrants in this one--fewer than 20--so if you read the book, you’ll
probably have a pretty good chance to win!
Once again, if you have questions, you may leave them as comments. And again, I will not post again until another book comes out, so if you just want to know when a book comes out, you may subscribe to my blog without fear that I will annoy you with constant posts that you don't care anything about.
Valete!
based on 3 reviews