January is an exciting month as I make my first foray into e-publishing.
Within a few days of each other I've had Lady Farquhar’s Butterfly re-released by Hale as an e-book. This was followed by my first Total-e-Bound release, a much hotter, shorter Regency Romance about revenge and one-upmanship with a sting in its tail - Rake’s Honour.
You can read about both stories - and a bit about me - in my interview at http://downunderdivas.wordpress.com/
Rake’s Honour is my first erotic Regency Historical and its heroine, Fanny Brightwell, has always been close to my heart. She reminds me of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. No doubt many readers of the day abhorred this Regency “bad girl”.
Similarly, many of the editors to whom I sent the completed manuscript thought that desperate, designing Fanny Brightwell was too unsympathetic. So Fanny languished in a drawer, neglected but not forgotten.
Finally, I decided it was time to return to Fanny and make sure readers understood her perspective. After all, if your ambitious mama is all but forcing you to marry a loathsome old man covered in ulcerous sores to save the family from financial ruin, you’re going to take some big risks to snare a more desirable husband.
Unfortunately, Fanny’s plan backfires when Viscount Fenton, the man who turns her insides to jelly, wants her to be his mistress not his wife. This is when Fanny decides it’s time to take the reins and teach her viscount a lesson.
All in all,
Rake’s Honour is a viperish little story of love, revenge and one-upmanship with a sting in its tail.
So while Rake's Honour comes with lots of baggage, so does the heroine of
Lady Farquhar’s Butterfly Olivia, Lady Farquhar. Poor Olivia is no less desperate as she's been stripped of her son by her drink-sodden late husband in his will. Lucien, Lord Farquhar has falsely declared Olivia an unfaithful wife and sent the infant to live with a distant cousin. A lot of Olivia's former spirit has been worn down by the abusive Lucien and when she arrives under a false name to work her way into Max's affections in an attempt to win back her child, more problems arise than she could have imagined.
January has started well. TEB has also contracted two other books and I'm looking forward to a July 2 release and a date to be determined for an English Civil War tale of thwarted passion.
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| The postal service in 1916 - very dangerous across lion-infested territory. |
Now it's back to working on my dad's 80th birthday present: a book of his memoirs with photographs from his time as a district commissioner in Lesotho in the 1960s and youth in Botswana before that. There'll also be stories of his dad's trek throughout the Okavango around 1916-24 when he was a very young administrative officer and later DC, together with lots of pictures from his photo albums.
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Grampa on his mule travelling through
tsetse fly-infested territory. The flies caused sleeping sickness in domestic animals. |
I'm just trying out this new took - Blurb - which has proved fantastic - and time consuming as I have so many photographs and they're not ordered as well as they could be. I want to include the hundreds of ageing sepias taking from the 1916 - 24 albums, which dad has had scans, as well as his scanned slides from the ten years he spend in Lesotho, where I was born.
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Early travel in Botswana. I think it might have taken just as long as a
mule because of the sandy, rutted roads. |
These places will feature in upcoming stories and dad and I are collaborating on a 1960-set illicit diamond smuggling story set in Mokhotlong where was DC. I'm currently learning all about Colonial life in this tiny mountain outpost and it's fascinating.
I had very adventurous forebears.
too 'bitchy and unsympathetic'. I then rewrote it so that it won the same RWA competition the following year. It was requested by Avon, but...alas, Fanny Brightwell, my heroine, was still too bitchy. After publishing three books in the interim, I revised the story to become a novella in which Fanny prevails, coming up trumps in a feisty, sensual but moralising piece with a real sting in the tail.
