Teaser Tuesdays
Pink XII has a cover!
The twelfth and final Pink Carnation novel, The Lure of the Moonflower, has a cover! That fort in the background? That’s an actual fort in Portugal that plays a significant role in the book. There’s something a little bittersweet about having the cover of the final Pink book in hand. I began writing the first…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: putting the Halloween in the Halloween book.
Although I call The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla my Halloween book, I do so with some reservations. True, it’s set in October, in that season of mist and shrinking daylight hours, of changing leaves and that sudden, sharp chill in the air. And part of the book, the part that’s set in Cambridge (the…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: THE PINK CARNATION IN LOVE
I have another little secret project that I’ve been itching to tell you about– a Pink Carnation novella! The Pink Carnation in Love will be appearing in e-form on June 16, 2015. I’d always wanted to write about the Pink Carnation’s failed love affair with the Chevalier de la Tour d’Argent. (Whom those of you…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: Friends of Peniche
It’s the little details that make a writer’s day. I won’t be telling you too much if I let you know that a crucial piece of Pink XII is slotted to take place around the coastal city of Peniche, in Portugal. As I was doing my crash course on Portugal and Portuguese culture in 1807…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: Interconnections
Sometimes, the eighteenth (and early nineteenth) century can feel like a very small place. Right now, I’m doing a crash course of research for Pink XII, aka The Lure of the Moonflower. In 1807, the Portuguese royal family flees Lisbon for their colony of Brazil, just steps ahead of General Junot’s rag-tag army, the mad…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: How autobiographical is Eloise?
Recently, I’ve received a number of messages asking whether (and some assuming that) the Eloise portion of The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla is autobiographical. Here’s the short answer: it’s not. There are certainly elements of my world woven into Eloise’s story. The descriptions of Cambridge in 2004 are as true as my memory can…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: Colin & Eloise
Only two weeks to go until The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla… and it just dawned on me that I haven’t shared a scrap of the Colin and Eloise portion of the book! Here, with just two weeks to go, is the entire, unabridged Prologue (aka the first Colin and Eloise chapter) of The Mark…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: a little bit of MIDNIGHT MANZANILLA
The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla comes out in just six weeks! To pass the time until then, here is one of my very favorite bits from The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla… in which Miss Gwen, once again, thinks this book is about her. And Sally, like another famous personage, is Not Amused. Points…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: THAT SUMMER, the painting
There’s a painting that lies at the heart of That Summer, a painting hidden behind the false back of an old wardrobe in a house in the suburbs of London. (And, just because life does imitate art sometimes, a month or so after I handed in the final version of this book, an article appeared…
Read MoreTeaser Tuesday: THAT SUMMER Fun Facts
With less than a month to go until That Summer appears in stores, here are some fun bits and pieces behind the story: — The modern hero is a descendant of Miles and Henrietta Dorrington (of The Masque of the Black Tulip fame– not to mention the winners of every Pink Carnation popularity contest I’ve…
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