Friday 22 March 2013

An exciting week

This week has been an exciting one. I've sold two Regency romances, one to Harlequin, Mills and Boon who have published four other titles of mine and one to a US digital publisher, The Wild Rose Press which is a whole new venture for me. I've no definite titles or publication dates as yet but it's great to know that the books have found good homes!

Writing is always a solitary pursuit and often angst inducing, so validation is always welcome whether it comes from a publisher, editor, agent, or best of all, a reader. But I've a particular joy in seeing my last two Regencies sailing off into the sunset and that's because I'm taking a break from the period and the genre. It may turn out to be a short break - I really don't know at the moment - but I'm currently embarked on a whole new path and 40,000 words into a novel set in 1938 in the British Raj. The working title is An Inconvenient Marriage. I'll probably need to think again about that title since it could suggest to an unwary reader that the novel is a romance. Sure, there's a little romance in it (when isn't there?) but it's primarily a mystery, crime fiction even, though not a thriller or police procedural. As always, when I'm enjoying myself, the book doesn't quite fit any set category. It's a novel about finding one's feet, gaining confidence in a strange world as well as battling that mystery, and a book that includes quite a bit of social and political detail too. Ambitious, in fact, but I'm loving writing it. And if it's successful, then I'll commit to that trilogy I've already talked about. Yes, really!