Thumbelinda, you are the winner from Elizabeth Cole’s visit. I have just emailed you both. Enjoy!
Posts in which we or our guests offer a giveaway.
Thumbelinda, you are the winner from Elizabeth Cole’s visit. I have just emailed you both. Enjoy!
First of all, Gail would like to thank everyone who participated in the fantastic discussion of epilogues last week. She also asked me to announce the winners of her giveaway. Congratulations to Beth Elliott and Linda, who have won Kindle or Nook versions of The Captain’s Dilemma, the Regency romance which Gail has recently reissued with a lovely new epilogue.
This week I’m celebrating the reissue of my Regency, Lord Langdon’s Kiss, which unlike The Captain’s Dilemma, needed a lot more work than the addition of an epilogue. Lord Langdon’s Kiss was my first book, and although I’m proud that it sold, I’ve learned a lot in the fifteen years that have passed since I wrote it. In this version, I tackled an issue I’d shied away from the first time around and found that it helped me torture the hero a little more. That’s always a good thing. I also pruned out a lot of redundant introspection, cutting about 17,000 words. Maybe I can make a novella out of the chopped bits.
Anyway, I feel very happy about the revisions and I’m pretty sure I kept everything that people enjoyed about it the first time around. I’m hoping my favorite review is still true.
“Lord Langdon’s Kiss is a fine Regency romp that will satisfy lovers of the genre like ice-cold lemonade on a hot afternoon. This is what Regency romance is all about.” (Four hearts) — The Romance Reader
I think the digital revolution has been a wonderful boon to the traditional Regency genre. It’s helped make many previously published Regencies available to new readers, and also opened up a market for new traditional Regencies, filling the void left when the major publishers ended their Regency lines.
Have you discovered or rediscovered any good traditional Regencies lately? Please share, for the chance to win a copy of Lord Langdon’s Kiss on Nook or Kindle.
Elena
How do you feel about epilogues? Does it seem to anyone else that there’s a “current trend” going on to include them at the end of every story? I think every recent book I’ve picked up lately has had one. Is it a fad, or a change in readers’ tastes and expectations? Or is having that extra glimpse into the characters’ happy-ever-after ending something readers have always wanted all along? Do romances always need to have one?
I have been noticing and thinking about this, because I decided to add an epilogue to The Captain’s Dilemma while re-editing that book for reissue. TCD (my third book, published in 1995) is out now, I’m excited to report, on Amazon for Kindle and B&N for Nook, and also for Kobo and other formats through Smashwords. This is my “prisoner-of-war” romance. Read on below for details on the giveaway!
Meanwhile, back to our topic. I used to feel that a good romance that ended properly shouldn’t need an epilogue. If all the obstacles were overcome, the loose ends were tied up, and the hero and heroine finally figured out they were in love, admitted it to each other, and committed to a future together, that certainly seemed very satisfying to me! “Trail off into the sunset” endings were considered bad form.
Yet I think we all enjoy thinking of the characters we come to know and love during a good story as continuing on with lives that last beyond the pages of the book. So the question becomes, do you want the author’s view of it, or would you rather imagine it for yourself? And has this changed over time?
I used to call the lovely but inaccurate Allan Kass cover for my second book, The Persistent Earl, a “visual epilogue”, explaining that it showed the artist’s vision of the hero and heroine together after the story was over. (The heroine, a young widow, wears half-mourning throughout the book, but as you see here, on the cover she is in a beautiful gold satin gown.) Readers always thought that made perfect sense! Can you imagine the rest of this scene without having the words? I consider reading a collaborative process, and even though as an author I give the reader the specifics of my story, each reader brings some of her own imagination into the mix as she reads. I think that’s one of the great pleasures of reading, and one of the (many) reasons movie adaptations of our favorite books don’t always succeed –one director’s view of the story may not match up well with the personal version we have envisioned in our own heads. Ah, but that’s another entire topic.
My decision to write the Captain’s Dilemma epilogue was fairly easy –I never felt the book quite ended with all the loose ends tied up. More information about how the future was going to work for my French hero and English heroine was needed, but for the old Signet Regencies we had some strict length restrictions, and I had no room to add more back then. It has been great fun revisiting my characters and adding the extra scene they so deserved!
So what do you think? Are we seeing a “trend” for epilogues in romance now? Do you like them? If you are a fan of story epilogues, have you always been one? Is the abundance a recent phenomenon, or have I just become more aware of it lately? I’m going to give away a copy of The Captain’s Dilemma to someone randomly chosen among those who comment, and if we get a lot of comments, I’ll give away a second one! Keeping it simple. Please jump in. I’ll be very interested to hear your thoughts!
And if you want to know more about TCD, you can click here to see it on my web site. Or you can click here to see it on Amazon.
Anne Gracie is our guest today to tell us all about her latest, The Winter Bride, second book in her Chance Sisters Series. It was just announced that Anne’s first book in the series, The Autumn Bride, is a RITA finalist for Best Historical!
Here’s what reviewers are saying about The Winter Bride:
“Gracie has created a wonderful cast of characters…lively dialogue and tender emotions compel readers to relish every moment of the developing romance” —RT Book Reviews
“Charming…thoughtful and tender.” —Publishers Weekly
“…another delightful, emotionally complex romance…a romantic winner, with Gracie’s typical witty charm and sweeping emotion.” —Kirkus Reviews
Anne will be giving away a copy of The Winter Bride to one lucky commenter, chosen at random.
Anne! Welcome back to Risky Regencies.
Tell us about The Winter Bride and the Chance Sisters series.
The Chance sisters series are about four girls who come together in Regency-era London. Two are real sisters, but, being orphans and without any means of support, they band together to become a family, “sisters of the heart” rather than by blood. When they meet an elderly aristocratic old lady who is in an even more desperate situation than they are, they rescue her—and their fortunes change for the better. That happened in The Autumn Bride, the first book in the series.
Now we have — surprise surprise — The Winter Bride. This is Damaris’s story — she was raised in China as the daughter of a missionary, and came back to England as a penniless young woman. With secrets in her past, she has no desire to marry; a cottage of her own — security and safety— is all she wants.
Freddy, our hero, is a lighthearted rake, an elegant bad-boy with no interest in marriage. In line to inherit his father’s title, he’s rich, well connected and a catch. Freddy is pursued by muffins – his term for the kind of respectable, eligible girls bent on marrying and reforming him.
To keep the muffins at bay, Freddy offers Damaris a cottage in exchange for pretending to be his fiancée for a visit to his parental home. Of course it backfires.
What is risky about The Winter Bride?
Freddy isn’t the usual kind of romance hero — he’s very much a beta hero — a lightweight, funny rake, and women often get the better of him. Even Damaris’s employer says this of him:
“Tomcat in gen’leman’s clothing, that’s what ’e is—a rake through and through.”
“Rake? You thought—”
Mrs. Jenkins snorted. “I knew what he was the instant I clapped eyes on him! Dressed like that in his fancy duds at this hour of the mornin’. The cheek of ’im, thinking he could seduce away one o’ my girls in broad daylight.”
“But he wasn’t—”
“Bless you, my dove, you’re too young to recognize a Wicked Seducer when you see one, and I grant you that one is an ’andsome devil, and charmin’ as an oiled snake, I have no doubt!” She fixed Damaris with a gimlet eye. “But it don’t do for a girl like you to catch the eye of a gentleman, take it from me. He’ll soften you up with sweet words and little gifts and . . . and poetry, and you’ll think ’e’s ever such a nice fellow, then in the twinklin’ of an eye, he’ll ’ave your skirts over your ’ead, and there you’ll be, rooned forever!”
“But Mrs. Jenkins—”
“Rooned forever!” Mrs. Jenkins repeated firmly. “And we don’t want that, do we? Now, I’ve given him a piece of me mind—blistered ’is ear’oles good and proper, I did—and if ’e knows what’s good for ’im, he won’t be back to bother you again, so let’s get to work.”
Damaris nodded and resumed her seat at the bench. She had to press her lips together to hide the smile that kept threatening to break out. She could just imagine Mr. Monkton-Coombes’s face when he was confronted with Mrs. Jenkins, four foot eight of Righteous Indignation.
But Freddy comes into his own, and grows into a hero I hope readers will love.
You asked fans on Facebook to pick a favorite The Winter Bride book cover – North America or Australia? Which one won?
I think the Australian one, by a whisker. But why not let the Riskies readers decide?
Share with us one memory of your own “sisters of the heart.”
I’m the baby in my family and am far in age and geography from my blood sisters, but I have some wonderful friends who are my “sisters of the heart.” I have two friends I went to school with and we’ve celebrated every birthday since we were fifteen, and been there for each other for all that time. And right now I’m away with a group of writer friends who are very much my “sisters of the heart” — we go away for a week each year and write, and in between, there’s email and phones. We’ve been there for each other through death, divorce, illness and for all the joyful occasions. I love my “sisters of the heart.”
What do you like best about the writer’s life?
The wonderful friends I’ve made, some of whom I’ve only met in person several times. And it’s a blessing to be able to have the stories that blossom in my head come out as books and have readers enjoy them.
What is next for you?
You probably find this surprising, but I’m working on a book called . . . wait for it . . .The Spring Bride. (You’d never have guessed that title, would you? )
This is Jane’s story, but her hero is a surprise — a bit of a wild card.
Thanks so much for letting me visit, Riskies and Diane. I’m currently writing The Spring Bride, and since I know so many people are desperate for winter to be gone, here’s a question: what do you most love about Spring?
Remember. I’ll give a copy of The Winter Bride to someone who leaves a comment.
Diane here. Be patient. Anne is “Down Under” and may be asleep when you comment. She’ll drop by when daylight reaches Oz.
We’ll select a winner and announce on Wednesday.