What's Another Year?

It's hard to believe my first book was published way back in 2001. It doesn't seem that long! I've lost count of the ups and downs during that time, the successes and the not-so-goods. I won't say failure, because I've not had one of those, not completely. I've had books that have done really well, and books that haven't.
Looking back, yes, it's surprising. My first success was the Richard and Rose series. I planned it as a historical mystery series, with the hero and heroine as two quiet, unprepossessing minor aristocrats who solved country house mysteries.
It didn't quite turn out that way. Richard Strang turned out to be far from unprepossessing, and minor was not a description that suited him in any way at all! I wrote the series in the first person, with the same protagonists in each book, showing what happened before, and during their marriage. All those things were no-nos when I wrote the series, and yet they were a huge success for me.
And should I write paranormals? The prevailing wisdom was that you should stick to your genre, and yet the Department 57 series, about a group of Talents (vampires, shape-shifters, mermen) who worked as secret agents did so well I started a new series, STORM, which is being reissued next year.
Rock stars fighting for their women? Yup, Pure Wildfire and Nightstar.
Back to history, and I'm in the throes of writing two series. One is about the children of the Old Pretender (Bonnie Prince Charlie's father). They have a lot of history about them, with a big helping of romance. The first three books have all featured in the Amazon Top Ten.
I'm writing a series about the Roman gods and goddesses come back to life in the 18th century. That's another thing you're not supposed to do. Paranormal and historical aren't supposed to do well.
Now they tell me that vampires are dead. Darlings, vampires will never die. Not as long as I'm here to write about them!
I guess what I want to say is that new year resolutions and a structured career are good ideas, but phhht - who wants to do that when you can be having fun?
I did make an effort this year to structure my novels, but Things Happen and as I get to know my characters, it becomes clear that's not going to work out like I wanted it to. So yet again, I'm doing a plan, but I'm not counting on it happening.
Next year I'll probably look back and laugh. Just like I'm doing now.

What is romantic suspense?

When you write a novel, you’re always hearing about “conflict.” Although that doesn’t mean a knock-down fight, that’s what it often amounts to. Start your book with a bang, hook ‘em in.

But conflict doesn’t always mean fighting. It means the inner struggle and the outer. One of the biggest challenges is to balance all the conflicts, because too much and the reader will get breathless—not in a good way.

Although I haven’t written any “romantic suspense” recently, I do tend to write books where there are things that belong in romantic suspense. I really don’t know where the line is drawn, I mean, I won a major romantic suspense award for “Harley Street,” a historical story featuring Richard and Rose. True, there was a murder in chapter one, and the couple spend the book discovering the murderer, and thus, other things about Richard’s past, but it’s never to my knowledge been shelved in that section.

In "Brutally Beautiful," my hero is an ex-gang leader, and he has some serious things to accomplish before he can save his princess and have his happy ending. Definitely erotic, but the suspense element is high. The villain is fairly obvious, but will they catch him or her in time?

My newest release, coming next month, is “Sixth Sense,” and again, I’m not sure where it belongs. Romance, I guess. It’s part of the Symbiotics series, but can be read alone and it starts with a real life experience. Yes, I did lie in an isolation room in a hospital once, wondering if I was about to lose my leg. It seems strange to anyone who doesn’t write, but I can almost see the authors reading this saying, “Yep, it all goes in to the writing pot.”

I never forgot the experience, and the memories remained vivid. The emergency didn’t last long and I still have two legs, thanks to the doctors at my local hospital, whose prompt action and careful diagnosis made sure I got better. But for the two days of the emergency, I was scared, and then resigned. Because, after all, what could I do? If it happened, it happened, and I was in the best place.

In the room next to me was a sailor, in quarantine after suffering a tropical disease. He was perfectly well, but he had to stay there until they said he wasn’t infectious any more. I couldn’t talk to him, we just exchanged a couple of sympathetic smiles.

So I put my heroine, Poppy, in the same situation. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Her conflict is an internal one—how does she cope with this unexpected and terrifying thing? It happened to her as suddenly as it happened to me. Not an accident, an unexplained swelling of the leg, so much that it threatened to burst. Blood clot? Septic arthritis? I had no idea and neither did she.

Instead of a middle-aged sailor, I gave her a hot, wealthy geek to play with. One who has inner tensions of his own. He’s in the hospital recovering from cholera, contracted during an exotic holiday.

Oh, yes, and by chapter two, the plot has thickened. The external conflict appears. Her condition isn’t, like mine was, an unexplained occurrence. She’s being poisoned.

So there you have it. Is it romantic suspense? Some of the story is certainly spent hunting the perpetrator, but the majority is the love story between two unlikely people who meet by chance. Both are sexually naïve, being too busy and too shy to explore. They have satisfactory sex lives, but finally, together, they can play with the basket of toys that have been lying in Jim’s closet since he left his job in England.

So which is it, romantic suspense or erotic romance?

Richard and Rose and Romantic Suspense.

 A few years ago, I won the EPPIE for Romantic Suspense. I was proud and thrilled and shocked as all get-out.
Why? Because it was for a historical romance. That year I’d had a few releases, and when it came to the awards, I didn’t want to put my books in contention with each other and split the vote. So I decided to put the fourth Richard and Rose book, “Harley Street,” in the Romantic Suspense category. After all, it did have a murder and a mystery in it. But it was the fourth in an ongoing series and the focus of the series was firmly on romance.
I didn’t think I had a chance, especially considering the quality of the entries that year. And I had what I thought was a sitter in another category. After all, who would want part four?
It turned out that they did.
“Harley Street” starts with the central characters, Richard and Rose, Lord and Lady Strang, returning to London after their honeymoon in Venice. Rose makes a courtesy visit to her godmother who lives in Harley Street, which was then a new street of houses for the middling and well-to-do. But her visit is interrupted when they find a body of a maid in the attic. She’s been stabbed. Rose sends for Richard, who recognizes the dead maid as someone he had an affair with when he was fourteen.
In those days, the 1750’s, it was often a maid who introduced a man to the joys of sex, although we might consider the man a mere child. That was what happened here, and the act has consequences that will reach to the end of the series.
When I first thought up Richard and Rose, Richard was a mild-mannered minor aristocrat who solved mysteries in country houses. Then, you had to have the entrée to polite society to know what was going on there. An outsider, even a Bow Street Runner, would most likely be cold-shouldered. Only outcasts like Lord Ferrers, hanged for murdering his valet, would be given up to justice, but Ferrers had exhausted all his favors and all his friends by the time that happened.
But then, when I wrote the first book, “Yorkshire,” Richard appeared out of nowhere, right in the first chapter. I just wrote and wrote and there he was. He was blond, a pink of the ton, a leader of society, and he wasn’t a minor aristocrat, he was the son of a powerful earl, and held the courtesy title of viscount. Rich, arrogant and far from the shrinking violet I wanted to write.
I decided to let it ride, and Richard took over. He just worked in the book. The heroine and narrator, Rose, is a child of the gentry, the county, rather than the country. Although they were often related, county and country had their set places in society and they tended to have their own social circles that rarely mixed. Only at Christmas and other celebrations, and the men might meet in Parliament.
Into this society, the mismatched, but deeply in love Richard and Rose grow, develop and at the end of the series, have a mature, loving relationship. I wanted to show that first.
So the fact that every book has a violent death and Richard and Rose are usually involved in solving the mysteries is incidental! Or maybe not.
The series came to an end last June, with the release of “Lisbon,” the place I always wanted to end the series. I knew how it started, and I knew how it ended, and I knew the main antagonists. The rest just happened. There is a half written Richard and Rose book that I fear will never see the light of day now, but one day, I might be able to slot it in somewhere!

Is romantic suspense different?

Although I’m officially new to the romantic suspense genre with “Learning To Trust,” all my books seem to have an element of suspense or thriller. I just don’t seem to be able to help myself. I find the element of danger heightens and intensifies the romance.

When I started to write my historical “Richard and Rose” series, I originally meant to write a series of books set in a pre-police era (the police force in the UK was set up in 1832 in London). I wanted my hero to be a quiet, self effacing minor aristocrat, perhaps a baron, and the heroine equally self effacing. What I ended up with was a rip-roaring tour through mid eighteenth century English high society, with a hero who wouldn’t know self-effacing if it slapped him in the face, and a heroine who had to learn how to keep up with him, because he needed her more than life, and it frightened her to death. I still have hopes of writing the other series.

Then I started to write Pure Wildfire, about a rock band who happen to be shape-shifting firebirds. And a villain popped up who I couldn’t resist, a man who wanted it all, and would give the world to get it.

I can’t get away from it. I even won a major romantic suspense award for a Richard and Rose book.

But the first romantic suspense I set out to write, “Learning to Trust,” slipped under my radar. I had no idea it would turn out like that, but as I did more research, it became obvious to me where the book had to go. I just completed the second book, and now I have to wait and see. Keeping tabs on the plot proved a major challenge, and as a result, I’ve changed the way I write.

I’ve always written a plan for my books, but usually, they are one or two pages long, and outline the main events, internal (the emotional journey) and the external (all the stuff that happens to the hero and heroine along the way). Now I’m starting to do a more detailed plan, so that everything that happens works in order, and I don’t leave myself with plot holes I have to go back later to fill.

But what I really want to write is romance. Everything I write is about a developing relationship, how it starts, goes along and finishes, and since I write romances, the happy ending is guaranteed. It’s the journey that counts. And the romance is the centre of the story, always. It took me a few attempts to realise that the romance of the thing. So many delicious variations to write about, it’s so easy to let the setting and the situation overwhelm the romance. And I did, until I learned that when you write romance, it’s the romance the readers want, and not some rush around a wonderful city or a mysterious dungeon with a bit of sex thrown in for good measure.