Tomorrow, I begin to go through the editor’s comments on Jackie’s Climb and sometime this week I will reach the midpoint of The Secret Word. These are the next two novels in A Twist Upon a Regency Tale, so I thought it might be timely to remember what has come before!

The concept was to take inspiration from traditional fairy tales but reinterpret the elements into a Regency romance, with no magic, the fairy tale elements reinterpreted into natural happenstance, and the roles of hero and heroine reversed. As the series name says, A Twist Upon a Regency Tale.

So far, the following are published (story title then the folk tale that inspired the story):

• Lady Beast’s Bridegroom – Beauty and the Beast
• One Perfect Dance – Cinderella
• Snowy and the Seven Doves – Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
• Perchance to Dream – Sleeping Beauty
• Weave Me a Rope – Rapunzel
• The Sincerest Flattery – The Goose Girl
• Inviting the Wild – Little Red Riding Hood
• The Worth of an Earl (in Hot Duke Summer) – Aladdin
• Hold Me Fast – The Ballad of Tam Lin
• The Trials of Alaric – The Princess and the Pea

Also, in the Lyon’s Den Collected World, I’ve got:

• The Talons of a Lyon – The Frog Prince
• Crossing the Lyon (in Night of Lyons) – Rose Red and Snow White
• Hook, Lyon and Sinker – The Little Mermaid
• Thrown to the Lyon – The Tinder Box

Here’s what I can tell you so far about 2025. (And it is early days for all except Jackie’s Climb, The Secret Word, and The Lyon’s Dilemma. Everything is else up for grabs.)

• Jackie’s Climb — Jack and the Beanstalk
  When Jackie overreaches herself while trying to make enough money for the rent, is it a disaster? Or the start of a new and better life?
• The Secret Word — Rumplestiltskin
  He has fallen in love with an heiress, but mortgages his future to a gambling den owner in order to win her. And now the debts has come due.
•  A Gift to the Heart — Tatterhood
  This is a Swedish folk tale about twins, one ugly, one beautiful. I’m not far into plotting yet, but my twins will be brothers.
• The Night Dancers — Twelve Dancing Princesses (with a nod to Ten Lords S-leaping)
  This involves Christmas and the Twelve Nights of Christmas song, a secret tunnel, a fairly tame hell-fire club, and an unexpected love match or two or seven or eight.

The novelette in a Dragonblade Collection has the title No Time for a Scoundrel. It might be my riff on The Nightingale, and might involve the gambling den owner that appears as the villain in The Secret Word. Or not. We’ll see.

And as for the fourth Lyon’s Den book, it is called The Lyon’s Dilemma, and involves half sisters who look alike but are opposites in morality and temperament. It is based on the Arabian tale The False Prince, but there are many dark twin stories in the history of all cultures (so another couple of siblings, but this time one good and one bad). The hero of The Lyon’s Dilemma is Dorcas’s brother in law, Kempbury.

And here, dear readers, is an early preview of the covers for the novels.