I’m delighted to say that The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen is out! It feels like it’s been a while…. Secret Lives is the first of my Doomsday Books duology. It stars Joss Doomsday, a professional smuggler on Romney Marsh, a remote part of Kent, and Sir Gareth Inglis, law clerk unexpectedly promoted to baronet. […]
This is a post about…something. Not sure what yet. But in my grandfather’s wise words, “How do I know what I think till I hear what I say?” Let’s start with a haiku. Years ago—I mean years, more than two decades now, I was reading a book of haiku from a British Museum exhibition, just […]
Oh God I’ve earwormed myself for a week, and probably you too. Sorry about that. I was spurred to write this by a) my MS starting to runneth over, and b) a thread on Twitter where someone commented on the need to cut her 140K romance novel (gaaak). The advice given included: Don’t cut it! […]
On one of my regular forays onto Twitter begging for blog post ideas, Sarah Drew asked “How do you subtly suggest what a non POV character is thinking?” That is an excellent question, and one that looms large in the minds of anyone writing single POV romance: how do we ensure we know what the […]
Inexplicably, we’re once again trundling towards the end of the year so it’s time for my annual books post. Goodreads tells me I’ve read 248 books, although that omits the rereads: the Agatha Christies and Georgette Heyers that were all I could manage during the worst weeks of Covid, the Murderbot and Kate Griffin reread […]
So I wrote a surprise book, as you do. (I didn’t announce it because I wasn’t sure I’d have time to do it. Then I realised I absolutely didn’t have time to do it. So I did it. Huge thanks to Kanaxa, who created the lovely cover in an afternoon to make this possible!) Masters […]
I was overjoyed this week when I got the Japanese cover of The Magpie Lord. This is my most-translated book and one of my chat group commented it would be a good idea to do a gallery. Which, clearly, it is. Herewith the various incarnations of the Charm of Magpies series: six full versions plus […]
So, as is now my habit, I was soliciting on Twitter for blog post ideas and the following question was raised by @podcastled: Do you have to learn the rules (“rules”) to break them? I think a post about resisting being super rule-bound would be interesting. This is extremely interesting, especially to me because I […]
I have a release day, for the first time in a very long while. (This is basically because I’ve started going with publishers instead of self publishing. When you finish a book that you’re doing yourself you can get it out in a very short time: I had Subtle Blood out in less than a […]
Sex scenes tend to loom large in romance. So let me first note that they don’t have to. Romances can be closed-door (sex happens off page) or entirely sex-free (asexual romances, books that lead up to a marriage with no shenanigans in advance) and work brilliantly. Don’t believe anyone who says you have to have […]