Guest blogger - Mary Nichols

We'd like to welcome Mary Nichols to the blog, talking about her new book, The Earl and the Hoyden.



Hello, and thank you for inviting me to the blog!

Miss Charlotte Cartwright is incredibly wealthy and incredibly stubborn. She cannot forget that Roland Temple rejected her six years before, calling her a hoyden, even if he has since become the new Earl of Amerleigh and is highly eligible; let the other young hopefuls battle it out for him, for she will not. Her fight with him is over a strip of land and a lead mine to which both lay claim and until that is resolved, they cannot move forward. And Roland needs that mine. He has come back from the wars, older and wiser, to find his father dead and the estate in a parlous condition. It is going to take all his energy and resources to set it to rights and the fiery Miss Cartwright can only be a distraction…



The inspiration for this book came from a visit I made to the Snailbeach Mine in Shropshire, now a museum, although I have used author's license to site it further north than it really is. There was a time when the lead mines of Shropshire were the most productive in Europe. Mining in the area goes back to Roman times, though it would have been extracted from shallow workings. When ores close to the surface became exhausted, greater depths were explored and some of them became very deep indeed.

Mining was a hard and hazardous occupation. By the light of a candle attached to their helmets, the miners worked in gangs, usually two experienced miners, a labourer for heavy shovelling and a boy whose job it was to take the ore to the bottom of the shaft. One miner held the drill while the other hammered it into the rock and the ensuing holes were packed with explosive. Once the explosive had loosened the rock, the ore was lifted to the surface via shafts and taken in wagons to the crusher house where it was prepared for smelting by women and children working in terrible conditions. Understandably, there were frequent accidents: from flooding, from rock falls and cables breaking on the cables that lowered the men to the rock face. In spite of steam powered pumping engines to deal with the water and compressors to help with the drilling, by 1885 the competition from cheap imported ore sent the prices tumbling and many of the mines were forced to close.

This might seem a strange background for a romantic novel, but romance can be found everywhere and in my hero and heroine I have two stubborn characters who come to realise that pride comes before a fall, and fall they do, in love with each other! You can see a review of this book at http://cataromance.com/?p=1407

Thank you, Mary, the book sounds fascinating!

Guest blogger - Janet Mullany

Janet Mullany's new Regency, Rules of Gentility, is something different. Here Janet talks about her writing, her love of the Regency period, and of course her new book.

Thanks for having me as your guest here today and allowing me to talk about myself--oh, and the book.

Fashion and charitable works are all very well--but what's a Regency girl got to do to get married around here?

Regency heiress Philomena Wellesley-Clegg is not short of offers. Unfortunately those doing the offering--two lords, a viscount and a mad poet--all fall short of her expectations. But she's about to meet Mr Inigo Linsley. Unshaven, wickedly handsome and hiding a scandalous secret, he simply isn't Philomena's type--so why can't she stop thinking about how good he looks in his breeches?
Pride and Prejudice meets Sex and The City in this ravishing Regency romp about boys, bonnets and breaking the rules.


I started writing The Rules as a joke--light relief from the angsty ms. (as yet unsold) I'd just finished where everyone gave everyone else a hard time, the heroine laughed at the hero in bed, and the weather was atrocious. First I started imitating Bridget Jones' Diary (the US tagline was Bridget Jones' Diary meets Pride & Prejudice) but I couldn't find an equivalent to a daily weigh-in, cigarette, and calorie count. So I abandoned that format in about five minutes.

Then I thought I'd write a parody of trad Regencies (a la Signet Regencies)--although my first book, Dedication (2005), published by that line, had two (yes, two, count 'em) bondage scenes and some fairly grown-up sex. And I didn't feel like cruising the used bookstores for ancient Signets, so I decided to write both a parody and a get-back-to basics Regency: I chose a heroine who has some smarts but isn't particularly intelligent or gifted and frustrated because of it; her goal is to get married; and she's smart enough to trust her instincts in choosing a husband. She has some fairly silly hobbies (fashion and fashionably good works). And the hero is basically a nice guy, the youngest son of a normally dysfunctional family, who's done some stupid things but has grown up enough to get beyond them.

I should add that I have a very low tolerance for tortured heroes (and heroines). There comes a point, usually very early on, where I want to smack them and shout, Oh, get over yourself already. Grow up!

Basically it was a lot of fun to write. I threw in as many bad jokes as I could, because my experience of most romantic comedies is that they're not that funny, and I became very fond of Philomena, who is innocent but not stupid, and certainly very observant. Someone told me (I think it was my daughter) that I have the humor level of a twelve-year-old boy, something I'm quite proud of.

Also there is no overt sex in the book, purely because of the characters. On the other hand I think it's one of the sexiest things I've ever written (and I also write erotic romance as Jane Lockwood, www.janelockwood.com) because of the intense awareness between the hero and heroine, and the acknowledgment of desire that cannot be acted upon--yet-- and the power of anticipation.

Being published by Little Black Dress is amazing. I'm their first historical writer, and my editor told me she loved my voice (writers take note: it's how you write as much as what you write). My first thought, very early on, was that I should sell it to a chicklit line in the US. It was a hard sell in the US--for one thing, it was written in alternate first person between Philomena and Inigo, and in present tense, which is unusual in US romance. HarperCollins published it as a historical in their Avon A+ line (2007), and told me it wasn't a romance (and here I was thinking I'd finally cracked the romance code!). They gave me a superb cover--as did LBD.

One warning--the LBD edition does not carry the Top 10 Things No One Would Ever Say in a Regency Romance that was part of my afterword in the HarperCollins edition. I've published them on my website, www. janetmullany.com

In March 2009 a sort-of sequel will be published by LBD--A Most Lamentable Comedy. It's set six years later and most of the characters are still around, but the heroine is Caroline, who you meet early on in the Rules. I thought it might be fun to write about a bad girl, having written about a good girl in the Rules.

Thanks, Janet, the book looks terrific, and hooray for Little Black Dress for doing something different with the Regency.