Last month I joined about 250 others at the Romantic Novelists’ Association annual conference, a chance to network with other authors and hear from the publishing industry professionals who spoke on panels and in workshops. What did I learn? There was much to absorb, some of which is on the RNA blog (see link on Home page). With regard to trends in romantic fiction topics, it was said World War Two was much in vogue at present. So here are three of my recent reads which I recommend:
·         Cressida Connolly’s ‘After the Party’
·         L P Fergusson’s ‘A Dangerous Act of Kindness’
·         Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Warlight’
All very different but in all cases quite gripping with extremely well researched historical background.
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I’ve mentioned drawing inspiration from past events and places for my historical romances, but for my contemporary short stories, I often draw on actual experiences of my own:
For several years I was caretaker for an isolated holiday letting cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. It had borehole water, plenty of resident mice, sheep that messed the garden and fell ponies that blocked the entry gate and were also known to kick. It was only my second week when an unhappy tenant rang me late at night to say the bedroom ceiling had fallen in! No injuries, I’m happy to say, but the setting gave me the idea for NEW LEASE OF LIFE (in the collection TOWN MEETS COUNTRY) and also for SNOW PICNIC (free download under Books tab).
I once toured the Royal Yacht Britannia, moored at Leith, Edinburgh, and saw how compact it was and the cramped quarters for staff and crew. Then I read an article about super yachts owned by the very rich and how they are run. It inspired me to write MUTUAL DESIGNS (in the collection HOME AND ABROAD).
A visit to my local MP’s constituency ‘surgery’ inspired POWER TO THE PEOPLE in which a female MP gets involved in a local alternative power project and its rather dishy designer.
Finally the tire blow-out in the middle of Africa portrayed in WRITTEN IN THE BEADS (also in the collection HOME AND ABROAD) really did happen to me (45 years ago!), although I wasn’t being pursued by a felon.
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​If you read A MASTER OF LITIGATION  you will have met Roland Burford (Thomas Carnforth’s best friend) and Penelope Fitzgibbon ( Gwendolen Ashforth’s best friend) but they have not met each other—until now. Roland has been courting another lady and Penelope is married to Lord James Derwent. Why then is he launching a new career in the diplomatic corps? And why is she running off to Italy?
Read all about their travels, their first encounter and what follows in HER SECRET AMBASSADOR, out now in Kindle, paperback and KDP Select.
My inspiration for setting a story in the Mediterranean came when Ancestry sent me my latest DNA update and informed me I was 1%  Sardinian! I calculate that must have been an ancestor from the 1700s.

 If historical research provides story themes, visiting places can inspire a setting and add that touch of authenticity. Looking back at my story-lines over the past 10 years, here are some that were born following a particular visit:
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Carlo Gatti’s ice wells at the London Canal Museum near King’s Cross led to my exploring just how ice-cream was made before the advent of modern refrigeration and the early development of refrigerated ships. So was born ROSE GLACE, CONFECTIONER TO A DUKE, about an orphaned young girl who makes a new life for herself as an ice-cream maker, and encounters a self-make businessman who runs a shipping line and is looking to inherit a dukedom. (a finalist for historical romance in the EPIC awards 2016)

Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire was my model for the cotton-spinning mill that features in A MASTER OF INDUSTRY, except my version isn’t run quite as well and provides the opening scene of the story when the heroine (a feisty governess) confronts the earl on whose land the mill operates about some pretty telling health and safety issues!
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The Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke-on-Trent put on a special exhibition of the history of the toilet and inspired IN FOR A PENNY, in which the heroine is the daughter of a sanitary engineer. Then there’s the ne’er-do-well younger son of a duke who needs reforming, a philandering viscount after a new mistress, and a good dollop of society scandal. Quite a raunchy tale.

A friend recently asked me where I got ideas for the plots of my books. Usually it’s been a single fact/event that grabs my attention when researching a particular period and then that seed germinates and grows. I began, 10 years ago, with attempts at contemporary romantic fiction, but wanted to avoid the instant communication of modern technology so checked out the 1980s. 1987 stood out as a year when so many terrible events happened that I wove them into ‘The Year I found Great Aunt Alice’ as the context against which the heroine compares her great aunt’s experiences in both world wars.
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 I then researched the 2nd Boer War, including the records of the British Red Cross, where something caught my eye. One of the volunteer doctors (referred to as ‘civil surgeons’) was listed as ‘missing’ at the end of the conflict. Did he die? Probably, but I imagined a scenario in which he actually survived, but there was a reason why he needed to hide away, for his own safety. After various attempts that finally turned into ‘Miss Deacon investigates’, about a British woman sent to France in 1918 to investigate the behaviour of the WAACs on the Western Front and coming across the mystery of the missing doctor, which she uncovers by talking to various ‘witnesses’ of the time

​After that I got into Victorian events such as the Baccarat scandal at Tranby Croft (the context for ‘Fair Play and Foul’) and the Cleveland Street scandal (‘Heiress to a Duke’). More recently I’ve gone back in time to the Regency period, post Waterloo. The inspiration for the first of these, ‘A Master of Speculation’ was the real involvement of some radical British aristocrats in helping one of Napoleon’s former marshals (Lavalette) escape from France after his wife had daringly visited him in prison the night before his execution and swapped places with him.
 
​The real events provide the inspiration but I then play with them, ask ‘what if…?’ and create my own version and my own characters to fit in with the rest of the romantic tale.

Someone once wrote that a happy ending is where you choose to stop the story. The implication is that it cannot be happy ever after (though don’t we all love the idea!), or certainly not for everyone.
 
Thinking about this led me to consider the unhappy circumstances of one of my minor characters in my Regency Master Series, Lady Elizabeth Allgreave. That turned into “Her Secret Benefactor” which has proved so popular (thank you readers!) that I’ve applied a similar approach for another new story.
 
If you read “A Master of Speculation” (first in the Regency Master Series) you may recall Elizabeth Morgan, former governess, then maid, then outcast, who is saved by an offer of marriage from Robert Denison, the hero’s former naval colleague and now his estate manager. He will give Elizabeth’s unborn child his name.
 
“Her Secret Commission” tells that child’s story. She is Joanna, who at seventeen discovers the truth of her origins and, in anger and shame, runs away from home. We meet her some years later, aged twenty-eight, caught up in the world of espionage and coming to the unwelcome attention of the police, in the form of the rather handsome Detective Inspector Matthew Harcourt.

OUT NOW FOR KINDLE AND KDP SELECT!
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Jewish Book Week 2019 has just drawn to a close and I was privileged to attend the inspiring appearance of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch at King’s Place, where she repeated (in English) her address of last year to the German Bundestag describing her early life and her survival in Auschwitz and the role of her cello-playing in that story.
By chance, on the train to London that weekend (not knowing that we were due to attend that event) I read, almost at a sitting, “A Woman of War”. This is a first novel by Mandy Robotham. It seemed to me to be very well researched and the lead character, a midwife caught helping Jewish women give birth, felt very authentic. It is fiction, but so cleverly woven into the factual history of the time, one could almost believe it could have happened. Highly recommended.
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ROSE GLACE: Confectioner to a Duke
Now available for the first time in KDP Select. If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited or the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library you can read for free! This popular rags-to-riches tale was a finalist in the EPIC awards 2016 and follows the fortunes of orphan Rose Turner and self-made businessman George Kemble, heir to the Duke of Fairleigh.
Also coming to KDP Select are three other titles:
*THE BARONET’S DAUGHTER, an Edwardian romance set in the Boer War
*THE ADVENTURES OF JANE WATERFORD, a Cinderella tale set in the 1890s
*THE GIRL BACK HOME, a World War 2 romance
Yours to enjoy at the press of a button. All 4 also available to buy on Kindle at the new lower price of 99p/99c each.
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2pm on Wednesday 23 January 2019, Settle Community Library, Susan Leona Fisher will talk about the life and career of Violet Douglas Pennant, how she discovered and investigated this lady's dismissal from the Women's Royal Air Force in 1918 and how she came to write the biography. All welcome. 

NEW YEAR GREETINGS TO FELLOW READERS & AUTHORS!

Remember Lady Elizabeth Allgreave? She appeared briefly in “A Master of Industry”, when Lady Somerton paraded the young heiress before her son as a potential marriage partner. As you’ll know if you read the book, Lord Somerton had other plans. But I rather wondered about the cool and controlled Lady Elizabeth. What had made her like that? Who might thaw her out?
So here is her story for you to enjoy.
“Her Secret Benefactor”, available now on Amazon Kindle and in print from Amazon books.
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