Guest blogger of the month - July

We're delighted to welcome Jacqueline Webb to the blog. Jacqueline's first historical romance, The Scarlet Queen, was published by Robert Hale earlier this year, and was shortlisted for the RNA New Writers Award.

The Scarlet Queen is set mainly in Egypt. There's a lot of humour and adventure, and anyone who likes Amelia Peabody (as well as anyone who likes historical romance!) should give it a try.

Over to you, Jacqueline.




"When Kate Whitaker first meets Adam Ellis, she loathes him. As the spoilt daughter of an Edwardian Egyptologist, she enjoys humiliating her father's assistants on his desert digs and is looking forward to amusing herself with new prey. Adam however is made of sterner stuff and soon Kate realises if she wishes to get the better of him, she is going to have to work a lot harder than usual..."





I wrote this story when I was trying my hand at romantic fiction after years
of slogging away at sci-fi and never really getting it right. I set it in
Egypt at the turn of the last century because I remember reading lots of
Victoria Holt novels in my teens and relishing the heroines who were always
seemed to be impoverished gentry who nevertheless always got to go to
exciting exotic foreign countries where they were embroiled in horrible
murders and robberies. There was often a hint of the supernatural involved
too and I have very happy memories of wasting my summers in the latest
Victoria Holt.

When I began writing I was determined that both my hero and heroine were
both going to have a sense of humour. I personally can forgive a man a lot
if he makes me laugh, but I like women to be able to come back with snappy
one liners too and sometimes I think female characters are fobbed off with
the "straight-man" role which is not my experience of women in real life! I
hope that comes across in my story. I also wanted Kate to be a horrid
little girl at the beginning of the story for no other reason than that is
what children are like sometimes. There does seem to me to be a tendency
for children to be portrayed only as innocent victims of abuse nowadays -
they are usually having a terrible time at the hands of some evil adult and
bad behaviour is always the result of some terrible trauma which is never
their fault. Children in novels never seem to have any fun just for the
sake of it. I enjoyed writing the story immensely and I hope other people
enjoy reading it too."


Jacqueline Webb