Next Sunday our guest author is none other than NYT Bestseller and RITA winner, Mary Jo Putney! What a treat!

I can credit Mary Jo Putney with helping me forge my love of Regency Romance. The Rake and the Reformer (re-released as The Rake), recommended to me by my friend Helen, was the very first traditional regency I read. I loved that book! (How many times does The Rake and The Reformer appear on lists of favorite historicals?) The Rake and the Reformer began my love affair with the Regency era and sparked my voracious reading of traditional regencies and as many of Mary Jo’s books I could get my hands on.

Mary Jo gave me many wonderful reading experiences. I fell for her Fallen Angel series. Shattered Rainbows first got me interested in Waterloo. And Thunder and Roses had a perfect level of sensuality. I loved the premise of The Bargain and greatly admired The Bride Series, especially The China Bride with its rich recreation of Regency era China.

I could go on and on…

But I was also lucky enough to get to know Mary Jo through Washington Romance Writers. One of my first WRW meetings was a synopsis workshop given by Mary Jo. Mary Jo had invited members to read her latest book (can’t remember which one it was now) ahead of time and to write a synopsis of it for the workshop. Being highly motivated, I came to the meeting with my synopsis, only to discover I was one of two people who had done so.

We were invited to read our synopses to the crowded room. The other member read hers, which turned out to be merely chapter summaries. I read mine and was applauded. Wow. I’d done it right!

(By the way, the member who had done the synopsis all wrong was Catherine Asaro. Catherine, of course, went on to become a super-mega star author of sci fi and fantasy and a Nebula winner.)

Also about this time, I read Mary Jo’s essay “Welcome to the Dark Side” in Dangerous Men Adventurous Women, an early (1992) defense of the Romance genre, another “Aha!” moment about how to craft a Romance hero.

It took me awhile to gain the courage to write a Regency Historical, to aspire to join the likes of Mary Jo. Gasp! But try I did. I had a chance to discuss an early draft with Mary Jo at a Washington Romance Writers Retreat. I remember it so clearly, standing in the lobby of Hilltop House with Mary Jo and then editor Gail Fortune, explaining my story. Mary Jo gave me some excellent advice, which I took wholeheartedly, but mostly her interest helped me to persevere with the book—which eventually became The Mysterious Miss M.

Recently, of course, Mary Jo invited us to discuss The Diamonds of Welbourne Manor on the Word Wenches Blog, which was great exposure for the book.

And yesterday Mary Jo let me know that The Diamonds of Welbourne Manor was reviewed in The Baltimore Sun.

So, really, look what it has done for my writing life to have a Mary Jo Putney in it!

I’m delighted we at Risky Regencies can help get out the word about Mary Jo’s latest book, Loving a Lost Lord, her return to the Regency era (Yay!). Come back next Sunday July 13 to read her interview and comment for a chance to win a copy of Loving a Lost Lord.

What is your favorite Mary Jo Putney book?
Do you have a favorite Mary Jo Putney moment?

Risky Regencies is thrilled to welcome back Nicola Cornick, to tell us all about her new trilogy from HQN! (Out May, June, and July) For more information on these and upcoming stories, you can check out her website here–and be sure and comment on today’s post for a chance to win a copy of The Scandals of an Innocent!

Thank you so much for inviting me to visit the Riskies today. It’s always such a pleasure to visit this blog! Amanda very kindly invited me along to talk about my new Regency series, The Brides of Fortune, the first two books of which are currently in the shops. And as this is Risky Regencies I thought I should focus on what is risky and different in these stories!

The idea for the overall Brides of Fortune trilogy was sparked by something I read in the newspapers. Even though I write historical fiction I get a lot of my ideas from contemporary papers and magazines. That in itself is a risky if rewarding approach because you have to make sure that in taking a modern idea and adapting it to a Regency context you aren’t doing anything anachronistic. But the more I research, the more I realize that there are so many themes and ideas that are fundamentally the same now as they were in the Regency period and perhaps throughout history. One of these was the idea of the rights and laws associated with the title of Lord of the Manor. This sparked the Brides of Fortune series. A couple of years ago I read about a village in England where someone had bought the title of Lord of the Manor and then discovered that he could impose lots of ancient taxes on the villagers. He started to charge them for walking their dogs on the village green and for parking their cars when they went shopping. Naturally there was uproar with the villagers rebelling. I thought this would be great idea to explore in a Regency series and so the Brides of Fortune trilogy was born! Sir Montague Fortune imposes an ancient tax on the villagers that means that every lady has to marry or lose half of her dowry. Penniless gentlemen come flocking to the village and so Fortune’s Folly becomes the marriage mart of England!

The first book in the series is called The Confessions of a Duchess and it tells the story of Laura, Dowager Duchess of Cole, who featured in my previous book for HQN, Unmasked. After Unmasked came out I had so many emails from readers asking for Laura’s story that I couldn’t resist. Confessions of a Duchess is set four years after Unmasked and Laura has retired to live quietly in the country with her young daughter Hattie. Then her former lover, Dexter Anstruther, comes back into Laura’s life and turns everything upside down. Dexter and Laura parted on bad terms and now he has to marry a rich heiress to save his family but despite knowing that he has to marry for duty, Dexter finds it hard to resist his attraction to Laura. There are so many secrets keeping them apart and so many reasons why they cannot be together, not least that Laura is eight years Dexter’s senior and she thinks that to have a toy boy lover is totally scandalous! I absolutely loved writing a book with an age difference between the hero and heroine. Laura is quite a risky heroine – she’s a former highwaywoman for a start and as Dexter works for the government to keep law and order, he’s not that thrilled when he finds out!

This month the second book is out and it is called The Scandals of an Innocent. The trilogy heroines are all friends and this is Alice’s story. Alice is a former housemaid who inherited her late employer’s money so she is struggling with the snobbish attitudes of some members of society towards her – they look down on her socially even though they’d quite like to have her fortune! One of Fortune Folly’s penniless adventurers, Miles Vickery, decides to blackmail Alice into marriage and sets out to seduce her. Miles is an out and out rake, a real scoundrel, but Alice is determined to reform him so it is a battle of hearts. I have to confess that Miles is probably my favorite of the trilogy heroes! Although I love heroes who have integrity and a strong code of honor, I am a total sucker for rake heroes and Miles is a very, very bad boy indeed. He totally does not want to reform and fights really hard against it but Alice is no pampered society miss, she’s got a tough background, and she’s not going to just let Miles walk in and take what he wants! The risky thing about this book… Alice’s rose tattoo! Tattoos for women were rare during the Regency period and not at all the done thing for a respectable female. In her fabulous series about Mrs. Merlin’s Academy for Select Young Ladies my fellow Word Wench Andrea Pickens also has heroines with tattoos, which perfectly fits the racy ambiance of her lady spies! In Alice’s case it’s yet another thing that marks her out as deeply unrespectable!

And for book 3, The Undoing of a Lady, the risk I took, I think, was to create a heroine, Lizzie Scarlet, who is so outrageous that I suspect some readers may feel she goes too far. Lizzie starts the book off by exercising her droit de seigneur over the hero and goes on from there! It can be difficult to write a young heroine who is a bad girl and yet who still commands a reader’s sympathy. My editor described Lizzie’s characterization as “brave” which made me very nervous! Hopefully to understand Lizzie and her background will be to love her. She is right on the edge of control – just when you think she couldn’t possibly behave in a worse fashion she goes off and does something even more shocking. But I loved Lizzie to bits and felt enormous compassion for her (after all, being the half sister of the wicked village squire and his even more appalling brother is no picnic!) So I hope that readers will love her too. And she does have a very, very strong man as her hero – he needs to be!

I hope that in Fortune’s Folly I have created a “Regency world” that readers can step into. There is an e-book prequel to the series, The Secrets of a Courtesan, which is available to download from e-harlequin. It sets the scene and introduces some of the characters and is also a steamy love story! And I deliberately left a few story threads loose at the end of The Undoing of a Lady because I don’t think I wanted to let go of the Fortune’s Folly trilogy completely. I have a sneaking feeling I will want to go back there sometime and find out what has happened to a few of the characters! In the meantime I’m working on a new series for HQN. The first book is set in London and the Arctic. Now that really is risky!

If you’re going to the RWA conference in Washington DC (only about 10 days away now!) be sure and join the Riskies (Diane, Amanda, Carolyn, Janet, and Megan) for a drink and a “coze” before the awards ceremony on Saturday! 4:00 in Harry’s Pub at the Marriott Wardman hotel. Hope we see you there!!!

Congratulations, Mari!

You are the winner of Louise’s signed copy of The Disgraceful Mr Ravenhurst.

Email us at riskies@yahoo.com with your mailing address!

I always love reading biographies of independent-minded women writers in history! (Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, George Sand, Emily Dickinson, etc–it’s very inspirational). This weekend I read Brad Gooch’s new biography of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor was one of my favorite writers in high school, but aside from a class called “The American Short Story” in college I haven’t re-read her as much as Austen and the Brontes (which I re-read almost constantly!). This biography, though almost strictly about her life and with very little literary commentary, was fascinating and inspired me to take my volume of her short stories off the shelf again.

Flannery O’Connor, like almost all those other favorite authors I listed, was something of an eccentric, solitary soul, deeply devoted to her work and her own strange interior world. She had a relatively short life, dying at 39 of lupus in 1964, and the last 14 years of her life were spent mostly on the remote family farm in Georgia, but she was a writer of immense genius and originality. She wrote 2 novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and 2 short story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories and Everything That Rises Must Converge (which won a posthumous National Book Award). My college textbook says “(the) texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters.” They could loosely be called “Southern Gothic,” in the vein of her contemporaries Faulkner and Welty, but they are unique and deeply flavored with O’Connor’s own devout Catholicism and struggles with illness.

For a writer of historical romance fiction like myself, O’Connor isn’t such a direct influence as Austen and the Brontes. Though she declared “Hawthorne said he didn’t write novels, he wrote romances; I am one of his descendants,” they are ‘romances’ in a very different sense (more in the grotesque, fantastical way of Frankenstein). But as I re-read her most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” I realized O’Connor is a great teacher of craft. Nothing could be added or subtracted from this story; the visual details and rhythm of the dialogue paint a whole world. And the sense of sustained foreboding is equaled only (maybe) in James’s Turn of the Screw. It never falters. The same can be said of stories like “Good Country People” and the gorgeous “Revelation” (written partially from her deathbed. Determined to finish her Everything Rises… collection even as her body failed her, she set up a typewriter on a table by her bed, and would sleep for an hour and write for an hour until it was done. A lesson in artistic determination!).

There’s a great website on O’Connor’s work here, and her home at Andalusia is open to visitors, and I would love to visit there someday! (I would also love to visit Haworth Parsonage and Chawton, in hopes of soaking in some inspiration. Maybe we need to get together an international writers’ tour…)

Who are some of your unexpected influences and favorite writers? Whose life story do you find intriguing?

(BTW, on my own blog yesterday’s “Hottie Monday” was a Mr. Darcy edition! Be sure and stop in to vote for your favorite Darcy…)