Who do your main characters confide in? Their confidantes and confederates hear their plans, their worries, and perhaps even the secrets of their hearts. Some give excellent advice. Some slouch off to grumble to their fellows. But we couldn’t do without them. This week, I’m opening the comment stream to extracts about those secondary characters. […]
I’ve just sent A Raging Madness off for proofreading, which clears my mental space for the other stories that are simmering on the back of the stove or still spread out across the kitchen table as raw ingredients. Over the past three years, since I first began Farewell to Kindness, I’ve discovered I’m neither a […]
The servant showed David Wakefield onto the terrace, where Eleanor Haverford waited. The visit to the child in the nursery upstairs had calmed him, somewhat; his anger was banked though the duchess had no doubt it still burned under the controlled exterior. “How did you find Antonia?” she asked, indicating that he should take the […]
Today’s post is an excerpt from my latest novel, Revealed in Mist. (Click on the link to read the blurb and find buy links.) Prue hesitated in the street outside her next destination. Callers needed to present their card at the gate, be escorted to the front door and delivered to the butler, then wait […]
I like to give my hero and heroine something to do together, and in my novels, at least, the problem they have to solve tends to be as intractable as possible. In Farewell to Kindness, both hero and heroine have their own missions, and each has to choose between their goal and the feelings between […]
Dear 2017 No point in beating about the bush. Your predecessor’s performance left a good deal to be desired. In fairness, I need to acknowledge that I didn’t follow the fundamental rule of performance management. I didn’t make my expectations clear, so 2016 had no idea what would get it booted out the door with a […]
(This is a repeat of an article I wrote for Caroline Warfield’s blog in June.) Crime was a personal affair Before 1829, our modern idea of a police force, and of one law for all, simply didn’t exist. In the pre 19th Century world, crime was a private matter, an offence against the victim. Doing […]
Charity Smith waited in the beautiful parlour to which she had been shown. Built to a more human scale than the gargantuan halls and stairways along which the butler had whisked her, the parlour was still rich and elegant, but she sensed that the paintings had been chosen to suit the pleasure of the room’s […]
A romance novel, by definition, is about the developing love between the two main protagonists. But the story is often given strength and substance through relationships with other characters: family members, friends, even enemies. In particular, we grow to know our main characters through their actions towards those they love but with whom they are […]
A sub-theme of my Revealed in Mist is illegitimacy, and the way that illegitimate children were regarded in Georgian and Regency England. I’m conscious that we see that period through the lens of the Victorian era, as I’ve comment in the article on rakehells I wrote for Dirty Sexy History. I figured I’d better do some […]