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Author Archives: diane

About diane

Diane Gaston is the RITA award-winning author of Historical Romance for Harlequin Historical and Mills and Boon, with books that feature the darker side of the Regency. Formerly a mental health social worker, she is happiest now when deep in the psyches of soldiers, rakes and women who don’t always act like ladies.

Emily Bryan talks about A Christmas Ball

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Hang your mistletoe and stir your pudding. Today we welcome Leisure author Emily Bryan who will tell us about the Christmas Anthology she shares with fellow authors, Jennifer Ashley and Alissa Johnson. Emily is also offering to give away one of her backlist books. Read on and welcome Emily.

“Great writing and research skills, as well as her ability to weave a good old-fashioned story with heft, make her an author to watch.”~Michelle Buonfiglio, RomanceBuyTheBook

1) Tell us about A Christmas Ball and your story in it!

Thanks so much for having me here at Risky Regencies!

A Christmas Ball is a collection of three Regency-set Christmas stories from USA Today Bestseller Jennifer Ashley, Alissa Johnson and me. Since I never like to do the expected, my heroine in My Lady Below Stairs is a scullery maid. Jane Tate is a dead ringer for her well-born half-sister, so when Lady Sybil runs off with an Italian portrait painter, Jane is called in to pose as Sybil long enough to accept an arranged marriage proposal at the Christmas Ball. Needless to say, Ian Michael, the well-muscled head groom who loves Jane, makes plans to crash the party himself. It was great fun to write!

2) How do the three stories fit together? How did this anthology come about? How are the tales connected?

A Christmas Ball is the brain-child of our fabulous editor, Leah Hultenschmidt, at Dorchester Publishing. She conceived a holiday anthology where the stories are united solely by setting and time. The date is December 19, 1822 (not technically Regency for you purists out there, since Prinny has been on the throne for two years, but it’s before the Victorian era kicks off in 1837.) The characters in all three of our novellas attend the same Christmas ball at Lord and Lady Hartwell’s elegant London home. We had to agree on the floor plan of the mansion and certain details about the ball, but otherwise, we were given complete autonomy in writing our stories. Jennifer used her novella as a chance to revisit her Nvengaria paranormal Regency world and Alissa penned a delightful Darcy-esque hero in hers.

3) Did you come across any interesting research on historical Christmases?

Oh, yes! First of all, most of the way we celebrate Christmas now is directly linked to Victorian traditions. For example, there were no Christmas trees in England in 1822. That custom was imported from Germany after Queen Victoria married her German cousin. But greenery was used for decoration, most specifically a “kissing bough.” This was an arrangement of ivy (to symbolize women), holly (whose prickly leaves remind us of men!) and of course mistletoe (still used to steal kisses.) During the Regency era, mistletoe was a limited time offer. For each kiss, the man was supposed to pluck one of the berries. When the berries were all gone, so were the free kisses.

4) What are your own favorite holiday traditions?

Being with family is the most important tradition for us, which means we’ve spent more Christmases in airports and on the road than I care to count. But once we’re all together, before we open our presents, my dad always reads the Christmas story from the Bible, the Luke 2 passage. Any time I read that scripture to myself, I hear my dad’s voice in my head.

5) What is next for you?

I just finished Stroke of Genius (coming June 2010). I adore Crispin Hawke, my hero for this story. He’s a brilliant, but cynical artist who’s so handsome my heroine compares him to a total eclipse. Dangerous to look upon.

Crispin is engaged to sculpt Grace’s hands and decides to help Grace bag a titled husband. But when he starts falling for her himself, the games are just beginning.

I’m in that limbo-land of being between books at present. Just listening to my mental cast of characters and deciding whose story needs telling next. It’s really pretty exciting when a new book starts taking shape.

Another thing I’m excited about now is my MERRY CHRISTMAS BALL CONTEST. Readers who subscribe to my newsletter and enter this contest may win a $100 B & N gift card! So please pop over and enter today. And I’d like to give away a choice from my backlist to someone who leaves a comment or question here today.

To get the conversation started: What’s your favorite Christmas tradition? It can be historic or contemporary.

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13th Vendémiaire An IV or Oct 5 1795

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13th Vendémiaire An IV (look here to see how the French Revolutionists counted time)  or October 5 1795 was known as the Day of the Sections, an important day in Napoleon Bonaparte’s life. 

Before Oct 5, Napoleon’s future did not look promising. He’d been imprisoned for a while after the coup d’état of 9 Thermidor, because he was a friend of Robespierre’s brother. After that he was unemployed and was thinking of leaving France.

But then rich Parisian royalists try to take over the National Convention by force and the Convention hires Compte de Barras to defend it. Barras enlists Napoleon’s help. (He also passes on his mistress to Napoleon; the mistress eventually became his Empress Josephine). Napoleon drives the mob away with a “whiff of grapeshot,” killing about 200 (or 1400, as another site said) and successfully saving the Palace of the Tuileries. 

Napoleon is rewarded with fame, wealth and the patronage of the Directory. He soon is appointed commander of the Army of Italy, thus beginning a long series of victorious campaigns. 

Five years after 13th Vendémiaire An  IV, Napoleon launches his own coup d’etat and makes himself First Consul of France. 

I’m used to thinking of Napoleon as “the enemy,” but he really did a bunch of great things, besides winning battles:
1. Established the Code of Napoleon
2. Established a public school system
3. Reconciled with the Catholic Church
4. Created the Bank of France, stabilizing the currency

5. Restored the Gregorian Calendar and did away with the Revolutionists’ way of counting time 

What else? 
What’s your opinion of Napoleon?

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Margo Maguire Interview

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Today we welcome Avon author Margo Maguire, who has written Medievals, Victorians, Saxons, Celts, Sorcerers, and Regencies, you name it. Today she’s talking about her latest book, in bookstores now, Taken By The Laird.


…There’s something for everyone in this book — romance, sex, ghosts, adventure and mystery….–Linda Roberts, RT Book Reviews

Margo will be giving away two signed books. See the details at the end of the interview.

Welcome, Margo! Tell us about Taken By The Laird.
First of all, thank you for having me on Risky Regencies! I love your site.

Taken by the Laird is the story of Brianna Munro, who flees London rather than staying and marrying the man chosen for her by her callous guardian. She’s impulsive and determined, and when she arrives in Scotland, the weather is brutal. She takes refuge in Castle Glenloch, much of which is in ruins, never expecting to find its laird, Hugh Christie, in residence. Hugh is known in London as a rake and a scoundrel, and all the single young ladies are cautioned against him. Hugh is at Castle Glenloch for the purpose of trying to determine who is sabotaging his smuggling operation. The castle holds terrible memories for Hugh, whose wife committed suicide there some years before. He is now a dedicated bachelor, with absolutely no intention of marrying again. Though he is fairly certain Brianna is lying about her identity – Hugh does not guess that she is the daughter of a viscount, or else he’d get her away from Glenloch immediately.

Taken By The Laird features characters from Wild. Tell us about that book and whether readers should read it first.
No need to read Wild first. Hugh is merely introduced as a friend of Wild’s hero, Anthony Maddox, who was lost in Africa as a child. Here’s the one-line “high concept” that I gave my editor when I proposed this book: The young, female companion to an elderly dowager must become tutor to the woman’s grandson, a young man who was lost while on safari with his father at a young age – who now returns to London to become civilized and take his place in society.was a lot of fun to write. Anthony isn’t exactly a “wild child,” because he’s kept some English artifacts that remind him of home (which also helped to keep the English language alive for him). But he would prefer to return to his perfect environment in Africa. Grace Hawthorne is the starched young companion to Anthony’s grandmother, who finds herself in an untenable situation with a man who has no concept of propriety or decorum. Worse, he doesn’t seem to care that he will hurt his grandmother if he leaves.

We re Risky Regencies. What is “risky” about Taken By The Laird?
For me, the riskiest part of Taken By The Laird was in the writing: balancing the romance with the plot. Smuggling is the reason Hugh is in Scotland in the first place, and someone is obviously stealing from him. There’s a murder, and it has a great deal to do with Hugh’s smuggling operation. I have Brianna, who lies about her identity in order to keep herself concealed from her guardian and bridegroom, and she’s a rather impetuous, unpredictable character. Even I wondered what she was going to do next, and I had a detailed synopsis to work from!

And then there was the ghost. The castle is haunted, but Hugh has never seen the ghost, so he’s always believed the legend was just a ruse to keep people away from the castle … away from the smuggling. But Brianna actually sees it …I had to be relentless in keeping Brianna and Hugh together, and making them irresistible to each other, in spite of everything going on around them. This is a very sexy book!

You set the book in 1829, post-Regency. What drew you to this time period?
This sort of happened by default. Hugh is introduced in Wild, which I’d intended to make a Victorian story, but my editor asked me to move it back, make it earlier. The only problem was that I needed to have the hero, Anthony, lost in Africa some twenty-ish years before, but Englishmen were not going on safari until the late 1700s. They were definitely exploring before then (I think there was a recent Risky blog about Scottish explorer Mungo Park), but I couldn’t imagine Anthony’s father taking him on one of those early expeditions. So I decided he might have brought the boy along on safari in about 1807-08, by which time there’d been a lot of exploration already done, and he could be reasonably sure of the conditions where they were going. Which meant that Wild couldn’t have taken place before about 1829 or so. And since Hugh was introduced in Wild, I had to keep the same time frame for Taken by the Laird.

Did you come across any interesting research while writing the book?
LOL! There is always so much, all the little details, that seem inconsequential. But they’re crucial to a story. For this one, I had to research smuggling (known as free-trading): where it was done, what products were smuggled, how it was financed, who the customs agents were, what kind of ships were used, how the contraband would be stored – and I wanted to know how it would take place in Scotland. Not that all of this information is laid out in Taken by the Laird, but I always have to . Because other factors that do turn up in the book might depend upon the background information that will forever lie hidden in my notes.

What’s next for you?
My next book from Avon is a Regency that will be out in May, 2010, called The Rogue Prince. It’s set in 1817, and was an absolute treat to write. The hero, Thomas Thorne, is a man who was wrongly convicted of a crime and spent years in an Australian penal colony. By a twist of fate, he becomes incredibly wealthy. But when he returns to London to take revenge against the two boys (now men) who accused him, he falls for the woman who is the widow of one, and stepsister of the other.

I also contributed a couple of short stories, one coming out in December in The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance and the other in January in The Mammoth Book of Irish Romance. Both were departures from my usual fare, so they were a lot of fun to write!

In honor of my visit here to Risky Regencies AND my birthday, which is this Tuesday, I’d love to give away a copy of Wild, and one of Taken by the Laird.

Thanks for hosting me today, ladies!

Thanks for coming, Margo! Winners will be chosen at random from our commenters, so be sure to ask Margo a question, or tell her what you think about these intriguing books!

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