HIDDEN TREASURES
Kathleen Buckley
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GENRE: Sweet Historical Romance
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BLURB:
Allan Everard, an earl's illegitimate son, is dismissed from his employment at his father’s death but inherits a former coaching inn. Needing to make a new life in London, he begins by leasing the inn to a charity.
Unexpectedly orphaned, Rosabel Stanbury and her younger sister are made wards of a distant, unknown cousin. Fearing his secretive ways and his intentions for them, Rosabel and Oriana flee to London where they are taken in by a women’s charity.
Drawn into Rosabel's problems, with his inn under surveillance by criminals, Allan has only a handful of unlikely allies, including an elderly general, a burglar, and an old lady who knows criminal slang. A traditional romance.
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Excerpt:
Despite his active night, Higgs came in with hot water as Allan opened his eyes.
“Eight o’ the clock and a fine summer’s day,” his rascal announced, “if you happen to like the country, which I do. I’d move back to the fields and hedgerows of my youth if it wasn’t so pestilent hard to make a living there. If you’re meaning to stay more than another day, I’ll see about having your shirts and neckcloths washed,” he added inconsequentially.
“I need to speak to one of the Stanburys’ neighbors. With luck, we’ll leave tomorrow. How will you occupy yourself today?”
“I’ll have a quiet talk with Phelps. He spent yesterday listening to the folk around here. Grooms and stable-hands mostly, but a few others as well. I’ll write down what he learned. Don’t forget to lock what you don’t want to lose in your portmanteau. Countryside’s not as wicked as town, but there’s ding-boys everywhere.”
“Says the Ding-boy General.”
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Kathleen Buckley writes traditional historical romance (i.e. no explicit sex). There are fewer ballrooms and aristocratic courting rituals in her books and more problems than does-he-love-me/does-he-not. Sometimes there’s humor. Kathleen wanted to write from the time she learned to read and pursued this passion through a Master’s Degree in English, followed by the kind of jobs one might expect: light bookkeeping, security officer, paralegal. She did sell two stories to the late Robert Bloch, author of Psycho. And no, he wasn’t late at the time.
After moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, she wrote her first historical romance, striving for Georgette Heyer’s style, followed by nine more.
In Kathleen’s gentle romances, the characters tend to slide into love rather than fall in lust. Their stories are often set against the background of family relationships, crime, and legal issues, probably because of her work in a law firm.
When she’s not writing or reading, she enjoys cooking dishes from eighteenth century cookbooks. Those dishes and more appear in her stories. Udder and root vegetables, anyone?
Kathleen Buckley’s current work in progress is her first historical mystery, tentatively titled A Murder of Convenience.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/kathleen_buckley
Website: https://18thcenturyromance.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/18thcenturyromance/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Kathleen-Buckley/author/B072J2GPZ3
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Topic: Pros and cons of writing in your genre
I set out to write historical romance, as Georgette Heyer’s Georgian and Regency novels are my gold standard. However, the romance genre requires that the love interest be the overriding element of the story. To me, that feels a bit confining. My books have always had much more going on (as Georgette Heyer’s also did). This may mean they’re actually historical fiction with a romance subplot.
Historical fiction’s genre expectations are lengthier than those of romance. They boil down to this: a feeling of authenticity of time, place, the way the characters act, speak, think, and the problems they face. At the same time the characters must be understandable to modern readers.
The plus side of writing historical romance or historical fiction is that the setting is exotic: another time with a different way of life at the very least, interesting background, and different problems. The genre is also reliably popular.
For some writers, the necessity of doing research (intensive research in the case of historical fiction) is a drawback. For me it’s a positive: I was the nerdy student who prayed for a juicy term paper assignment. For my stories I’ve read up on legal issues, watched hours of flintlock pistols being fired and have dozens of 18th century books on my Google Play. These include cookbooks, parliamentary history, an English/French dictionary, a manual used by magistrates, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and books on English dialects, among others. Sometimes I have to buy an old book that’s not available otherwise (like a book on riding sidesaddle or on flintlock firearms). The last two were essential for my ninth book, By Sword and Fan, in which the female character might need to dismount and remount. An unusual pistol also featured in the story.
For me, the drawback comes at the writing of romance in historical fiction. What works in a contemporary romance can be jarringly anachronistic in earlier periods. Ladies in the eighteenth century (my period) usually had far less freedom than they do now, unless they were widows. Even easy companionship in public with a man could be censured. The kind of conversation we would consider normal and necessary for an unmarried man and a woman to get to know each other would paint a female as too free and easy. As one conduct book for a lady’s instruction pointed out, men would take any lack of reserve as an invitation. Privacy with a man, except one’s husband or a close relative would be rare.
Love—and sex—were far freer in the lower classes.The girls were less chaperoned and thus less protected both from predatory men and their own inclinations. Among agricultural workers in rural England, both premarital sex and pregnancy carried little stigma, as young people could seldom marry until they had saved enough money to set up their own household. But historical fiction seldom deals with the working classes: their lives were too limited and often too grim to be appealing to modern readers. But working twelve hours or more a day, six days a week, leaves little time for the sort of activities that make an entertaining story, so my novels are set among people who are at least gentlefolk, and occasionally titled.
Sometimes in historical romance novels the characters are assisted in gaining some acquaintance by having them fall in lust at first sight. I’ve never encountered this phenomenon, myself. Men may first be attracted by a woman’s appearance but lust alone seems unlikely to lead to the required “happily ever after”. My characters generally meet in circumstances appropriate to the period. Their love grows slowly and with decent reserve, and without explicit sex.
GIVEAWAY INFORMATION
Kathleen Buckley will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.
Enter here:
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f4922
Follow the tour:
https://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2024/06/nbtm-virtual-tour-hidden-treasures-by.html
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