Who’s up for some
“fun facts” about my newest Regency Historical?
Pride and Promises was written in 2006. It was the first book I wrote on a laptop,
which Mr. Lucky gave to me the previous Christmas.
I saved my work in a
folder marked “UR5” for “Unpublished Regency No. 5.” I was about a third of the
way through the book when I decided the story wasn’t working at all, so I
dumped the whole thing and started over.
But before I started
over, I wrote a 5-page (approx. 1,400 words) synopsis for the story as part of a Tampa Area Romance Authors (TARA) critique workshop.
Usually I can’t write a synopsis till after the book is written, but in
this case, I forced myself. It took me
all of one day, about eight hours, to write it. To this day it
remains the only book where I wrote a complete synopsis of the story before
the book itself was written. I really need to
make that a regular habit!
In submitting the
synopsis to the aforementioned workshop, I had to come up with a working title
besides “UR5” so I called it Malcolm in
the Midden. While there was never a
scene where he found himself stuck in a dungheap, he does find himself tangled
in quite a mess, figuratively speaking.
A fellow writer critiquing the synopsis suggested Malcolm in a Muddle, which I had to admit was a slight improvement.
I underwent some
stressful life events while writing this book:
Mr. Lucky was deployed to the Middle East ,
while our firstborn moved away from home, leaving just me and Baby Bear. And there was other doo-doo flung by doo-doo
flingers who didn’t think I had enough doo-doo already. Yet all of this was nothing compared to what I endured while writing PR1, or Published Regency No. 1.
Several years later,
the book, now titled Pride and Promises, was
a finalist in the 2009 TARA Contest.
Three years later,
it’s finally published!
Malcolm has to be one of my favorite heroes. He first appeared as a secondary character in Confessions of a Lady Ruined, in which he was shot and wounded by a bungling sniper who mistook him for the hero of that book. He played a larger role in The Truth About Georgiana as the title heroine’s older brother who was abducted and briefly held captive, only to observe afterward, brandy in hand, that if misfortunes happen in threes, then all that remained for him after being shot and abducted was marriage.
That finally got him
the starring role in Pride and Promises.
