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Tag Archives: Susanna Fraser

Knowing what my characters can’t know yet

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I have an incomplete manuscript, not yet contracted, with a French hero and a Scottish heroine (we’ll call them Jacques and Isabel, since those are their names) who meet under perilous circumstances during the Napoleonic Wars and are reunited when he seeks her out after the war ends.

Of course, the war in question didn’t have a tidy, straightforward end. And because of that I haven’t made up my mind whether to set the reunion part of the story in 1814, after Napoleon’s original abdication, or in 1815 after Waterloo. Since Jacques in 1814 is deeply in love with Isabel and has no way of knowing Napoleon will be back next spring, the most natural thing for him to do would be to take ship for Scotland while the ink is still drying on the peace treaty. But then I’d have to deal with the Waterloo elephant in the room, since every one of my readers will know what’s coming.

Photo by Brandon Daniel, used under Creative Commons license

But as elephants in the room go, at least this one is relatively small and cute. Once Waterloo is over, Britain and France will remain at peace (or, eventually, allied with each other in war) for 198 years and counting. Jacques and Isabel can live out a happy lifetime with no insurmountable conflicts between their private and public loyalties, make the occasional trip back to Scotland to see her family, and so on. (Yes, they choose to live in France. I love Scotland as much as the next woman of partial Highland descent, but his family has a vineyard and winery along the Dordogne River. To me that’s a no-brainer.)

Other future elephants in the room present greater challenges. I can never read Rilla of Ingleside, when they’re all happy at the end that the Great War is over at last, without the melancholy thought that Rilla will get to go through this all over again with her own children once WWII comes around. If she and Ken marry in 1919 or 1920 and have a son shortly thereafter, he’ll be just old enough to enlist in 1939 or ’40! And while I’ve long forgotten the title, I once read a medieval romance that ended in something like 1345. I had trouble totally buying into the Happily Ever After because I knew the Black Death was right around the corner.

Is this just me, or do other readers and writers weigh characters’ happy endings against what history holds for them?

Posted in History, Writing | Tagged , , | 9 Replies

Featured 99 cent ebook – The Sergeant’s Lady by Susanna Fraser

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The Sergeant's Lady by Susanna Fraser

Highborn Anna Arrington has been following the drum, obeying the wishes of her cold, controlling cavalry officer husband. When he dies, all she wants is to leave life with Wellington’s army in Spain behind her and go home to her family’s castle in Scotland.

Sergeant Will Atkins ran away from home to join the army in a fit of boyish enthusiasm. He is a natural born soldier, popular with officers and men alike, uncommonly brave and chivalrous, and educated and well-read despite his common birth.

As Anna journeys home with a convoy of wounded soldiers, she forms an unlikely friendship with Will. When the convoy is ambushed and their fellow soldiers captured, they become fugitives together. The attraction between them is strong, but even if they can escape the threat of death at the hands of the French, is love strong enough to bridge the gap between a viscount’s daughter and an innkeeper’s son?

“The idea of an officer’s wealthy widow falling in love with a heroic common solider is beautifully romantic and heats up the pages right from the beginning.” — The Season for Romance

“historical fiction with a can’t-tear-your-eyes-away-from-it love story at the center” — Julia Spencer-Fleming

Buy at: Carina Press ~ Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble ~ Apple ~ Kobo

Susanna Fraser PortraitSusanna Fraser wrote her first novel in fourth grade. It starred a family of talking horses who ruled a magical land. In high school she started, but never finished, a succession of tales of girls who were just like her, only with long, naturally curly hair, who, perhaps because of the hair, had much greater success with boys than she ever did.

Along the way she read her hometown library’s entire collection of Regency romance, fell in love with the works of Jane Austen, and discovered in Patrick O’Brian’s and Bernard Cornwell’s novels another side of the opening decades of the 19th century. When she started to write again as an adult, she knew exactly where she wanted to set her books. Her writing has come a long way from her youthful efforts, but she still likes to give her heroines great hair.

Susanna was born and raised in Alabama and never lost her love for barbecue and SEC football or stopped saying “y’all,” “fixin’ to” and “might could” as her adult life took her to Philadelphia, England, and at last to Seattle, where she now lives with her husband and daughter.

Learn more and connect with Susanna at:
Susanna’s website ~ Facebook ~ Twitter ~ Blog

For a complete listing of titles offered in this sale, please visit the Risky Regencies 99 Cent Sale Page.

Posted in Risky Book Talk | Tagged , , | 2 Replies

What are you looking forward to reading this year?

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I hope everyone is having a good 2014 so far–or at least has gotten used to writing “2014” on checks and forms. It still looks weird to me, even though the day job requires me to date documents all the time.

I’m embarrassed to admit I almost forgot today was my Risky blogging day, even though it’s on my calendar, and I noticed it on Monday and spent a few minutes trying to think up a good topic. By the time I thought of it again, it was too late to come up with something deep and thoughtful about my current manuscript and my research for it, or anything along those lines. So I thought, “Hey! The year is still new. I’ll talk about the books I’m looking forward to reading in 2014!”

Sweet Disorder Cover

My critique partner, Rose Lerner, has a new book coming out in March called Sweet Disorder. It’s a tale of love and politics in an English village, and it’s smart, beautifully written, and very sexy.

My 9-year-old daughter and I are equally enamored with a series of snarky (yet highly educational!) graphic novels on American history called Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales. To give you a sense of the tone of the series, I’ll just mention that the most recent entry was called Donner Dinner Party. This time he’s tackling World War I:

NHHT

Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood is the latest entry to my preorder list at Amazon.

I’m also eager for Lindsey Davis’s second Flavia Albia book and Diana Gabaldon’s Written in My Own Heart’s Blood. For the rest, I’m sure I’ll make many delightful discoveries as the year goes on, though I figure I’ll be waiting till at least 2015 for Naomi Novik’s latest, and God only knows how long for the next Song of Ice and Fire book from George R.R. Martin…

What about you? What books are you awaiting eagerly? Have you already preordered any of them?

Posted in Reading | Tagged | 5 Replies

My first Jane Austen

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I’m closing out Jane Austen’s birthday week by offering copies of the Cozy Classics board book editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, along with my novella A Dream Defiant in your choice of electronic format. Comment by 9 PM Pacific Standard Time on Sunday (that’s midnight Eastern) for a chance to win!

Emma image

I have a humiliating confession to make:

The first time I read Jane Austen, I got about a chapter in and then quit.

I was 14 or so, and I’d taken to reading my hometown library’s extensive collection of Georgette Heyer, Clare Darcy, and Marion Chesney. They were real, adult love stories I didn’t have to hide from my mom. Which wasn’t the case with historical romance in general. Anything with the lurid “bodice ripper” covers so prevalent in the 1980’s wasn’t quite forbidden to me, but they led to lectures on appropriate entertainment, the importance of waiting till marriage to have sex, etc. I occasionally snuck such books into the house regardless, but for the most part I just found ways to read what I liked that flew under Mom’s radar–e.g. you’d never guess how much sex is in the Earth’s Children series by the covers.

But I digress. Our librarian noticed me working my way through Heyer, Darcy, and Chesney and said I really MUST try this book called Pride and Prejudice.

So I checked it out, took it home, and tried to read it. But I couldn’t quite follow what was going on somehow, and the arch wit of the writing completely went over my earnest, angsty young head. So I gave up and set it aside.

I didn’t try Austen again until just after college, when I was 23 or 24. Again I started with Pride and Prejudice–and this time it instantly clicked. I plowed through all six of her novels one after the other, and I’ve re-read them more times than I can count in the years since.

P&P illustration

I’m still baffled and not a little embarrassed by my adolescent self’s failure to Get It. It’s not like I was a poor reader–I loved Jane Eyre, and I read Romeo and Juliet for fun at 12, albeit an annotated version with footnotes clarifying all the language and references I didn’t yet have the maturity and experience to pick up on my own. Maybe I would’ve done better with an annotated Austen to explain the entail, the relative social positions of the Bennetts, Darcys, and Bingleys, and everything else that baffled me then but made perfect sense a decade later.

Or maybe I just wasn’t for anything that wry and subtle. Those Regencies I was plowing through were by far the least angsty and dramatic fiction I was reading at the time, and even Heyer isn’t quite in the same league as Austen for subtlety, IMHO.

What about you? How old were you when you got your first taste of Austen, and did you immediately connect to her stories? Do you have a favorite book by any author that didn’t work the first time you read it?

Posted in Giveaways, Jane Austen, Reading, Regency | Tagged | 17 Replies

Christmas Past (and yet to come!)

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I’m normally the type who keeps all Christmas activities strictly confined to the six weeks or so between Thanksgiving and Epiphany. I never Christmas shop before Black Friday. I wouldn’t dream of putting decorations up before the first Sunday in Advent. But this year I spent a good chunk of February and June with Christmas on the brain–I was writing Christmas novellas!

My February project will be a Carina release in 2014. Since that’s so far away, and it doesn’t have a release date or title yet, all I’ll say about it for now is that it’s the story of star-crossed lovers reunited after a five-year separation at a Regency house party…with wassailing and mistletoe and a thick coat of snow on the ground.

But my June project, Christmas Past, releases in less than two weeks, on November 25!

Christmas Past cover

As the title hints, it’s a time travel story. The heroine is from my own adopted hometown of Seattle in 2013–only in her version of the present, time travel has been invented and is largely used for medical and other scientific research. Sydney is a PhD student in historical epidemiology, making her first trip to the past to collect blood samples from soldiers in Wellington’s army for her mentor’s study on the epidemiological impacts of the Napoleonic Wars.

Time-traveling PhD student Sydney Dahlquist’s first mission sounded simple enough—spend two weeks in December 1810 collecting blood samples from the sick and wounded of Wellington’s army, then go home to modern-day Seattle and Christmas with her family. But when her time machine breaks, stranding her in the past, she must decide whether to sacrifice herself to protect the timeline or to build a new life—and embrace a new love—two centuries before her time.

Rifle captain Miles Griffin has been fascinated by the tall, beautiful “Mrs. Sydney” from the day he met her caring for wounded soldiers. When he stumbles upon her time travel secret on Christmas Eve, he vows to do whatever it takes to seduce her into making her home in his present—by his side.

I had a lot of fun writing this story, particularly going back and forth between Sydney’s contemporary voice and Miles’s Regency voice–and I’m so used to shifting into Regency vocabulary and diction the instant I open a manuscript file that Sydney’s was far more challenging to achieve!

When writing my Christmas novellas, I found myself imagining reader busy with everything that makes November and December such a joyous yet challenging time of year. Maybe she’s flying home to her family and wants a good story to take her mind off a crowded, turbulent flight. Maybe she just put her pies in the oven and wants to put her feet up and read while her house warms with the aromas of pumpkin and spice. Maybe she’s snowed in, unable to make it to work or school, and is elated to finally have time to escape into fiction.

What about you? When do you read holiday novellas? What are some of your favorites? And when do you put up and take down your decorations?

Christmas Past is now available for preorder from multiple sources, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play.

Posted in Regency, Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged , , , | 4 Replies