Here are a few, which don’t seem very Dickensian to me in the daylight but at night…oh yeah. High drama.

Anne Rice is a difficult woman. She has done some unpopular things, such as loudly taking offense to an unflattering Amazon review and recently set her legions of fans on a reader who used a copy of Pandora for a crafts project. These things make Anne Rice appear to be thin skinned, and maybe she is, but they also force me to recognize a certain difficulty in Anne Rice that I can’t help but admire. She causes a ruckus. She refuses to shut up when someone posts a review that she feels is misguided or stupid. If she were an artist, she’d be scrawling graffiti on overpasses and wearing t-shirts that say FUCK THE POLICE. She is a genuine rebel.

In the early to mid-2000s, Rice rediscovered the Catholicism that had so enraptured her in her youth. She became a hard-core Christian. Her website was almost unreadable for all the Jesus-love going on there. She handled her religion as she handled her books: it was in your face, and while there was deep thinking (she is a genuine intellectual), there was also her bedrock certainty that she was correct, and anything less than total agreement was…well, apostasy.

Her son, Christopher Rice, a talented author in his own right, was openly gay and people would ask her questions about how she handled that, considering the Catholic church’s stance on homosexuality. She would answer seriously that she would pray for her son, that she loved her son, but she could not question the authority of the church.

That broke my heart. In that transaction she illuminated an issue that probably many Christian families face. It seemed to me utterly wrong. Your child is your CHILD. And yet she believed that her child was sinning.

I would read her Tweets, hoping she might say something about one of her S&M novels or Lestat, only to be given a Psalm to contemplate or a bland warning not to sin.

Thankfully, that didn’t last long. Just as abruptly as she rediscovered her religion, she totally renounced Christianity. She wrote on her Facebook page that:

I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life.

Those who loved her and believed along with her probably felt some betrayal. She had probably seemed like such a major score for the Lord. But she was as firm in her anti-coviction as she had been in her conviction. But many of us breathed a sigh of relief. Does this mean we’ll get more sex novels? Maybe some more vampires? Whether or not her art would suffer for her beliefs, I was more excited just to get some Facebook updates from one of my favourite authors without worrying that I was going to have to quietly disagree with whatever religious message she had that day.

That whole period, which frankly seemed a bit bizarre from the outside, was valuable inasmuch as it demonstrated her integrity – she was determined to live by her own conscience and nobody else’s.

Another incident comes to mind – the details are barely remembered but I’ll try to get it right. A few years ago, JP Morgan foreclosed on her $3.6 million Rancho Mirage home. She was unapologetic about it and said she wouldn’t stop buying beautiful places to live because she liked beautiful places. It was natural to her to simply see the foreclosure as an inconvenience (at best) and not change her thoughts on the way she ought to live. She wanted what she wanted, and there was nothing that was going to get in her way.

I love that kind of thinking.

All her determination and refusal to accept anything less than what she wants goes into her novels, which are bursting with detail and vividness. They are rich and dense and filling as a flour-less chocolate torte. Only a personality that refused to compromise on her vision could have produced the Beauty books. When she wrote them, her publisher didn’t want to buy them. The publisher had no idea what to make of them. But Anne Rice didn’t tame them, soften them, or allow them to be written by committee in order to make them palpable to the masses. She went to a braver publisher, and sold them exactly as they were written. And they, like the author, are difficult. Not difficult to read but they challenge you. They ask you what you’re afraid of sexually, and why.

Anne Rice lives and writes at the far edge of the bell curve. By rights she should be a minor figure whose appeal is limited. But ironically the fact that she is so committed to her own vision – be it sex slavery or vampires – means she manages to attract huge swaths of readers. She is utterly delightful to read, whether fiction or a Facebook update. She is today’s only living rebel, a genuine feminist who refuses to be anything other than what she wants to be. And she’s a damn fine author. All writers should strive to be as independent-minded and as difficult.

And don’t forget, add it to your to-be-read list on Goodreads and add your reviews as soon as you’ve read it.

So many people have been following my progress as I’ve written the book, and I am so thankful for all the support. I’m so eager to hear your response to the book.

Read, enjoy, review!

My anti-socialized medicine stance has been well documented. I loathe the idea of the NHS. I hate that people consider medical care “free” when in fact it is damn expensive: everybody pays a huge amount in taxes to support this infrastructure that encourages people to abuse it. (National Insurance, a salary tax, pays for the NHS. That means working people pay for it and those who aren’t working get a free ride.)

The horror stories that we hear in the USA were enough to send chills down my spine: long waits, subpar care, and premature deaths are common. And in my own imagination, all this takes place in a grim, drafty Gothic hospital that is no doubt haunted by previous occupants.

I was very much dreading this trip to the doctor surgery.

I had been warned to expect a month’s wait for this visit since it wasn’t urgent. I called on Tuesday and was in by Thursday morning. So far so good, I guess. I sat down in the waiting room and got a text from my FI saying that he hoped I brought my Kindle, because it was gonna be a long wait. I pulled out my Kindle and only read half a page before the nurse called my name.

Okay. Nice.

I met with the doctor who examined me, asked questions, and then set me up for an x-ray, which would be in a nearby neighbourhood at my convenience (it is a “walk-in x-ray clinic” – something I’ve never heard of before). She gave me a prescription and sent me on my way. I was in and out in 10 minutes. It felt very strange to walk out of a doctor office without paying even a co-pay. In fact, the office wasn’t even set up to accept payments. It was downright bizarre.

The prescription cost £7.

My own experience with the NHS has been amazing. I hate to say that – my conservative creds are in danger here. I still have moral problems with it (slavery has been abolished for ten generations now, and I can’t fathom why it is okay to demand doctors give their labor on demand without appropriate compensation.) But I have to be honest and say it was probably the smoothest doctor visit of my life.

Maybe it is different when a patient needs a hip replacement or a liver transplant. But for this visit, the NHS was a total win.

One day the man went for a walk in the woods. It was very quiet and dim in the woods; even on the sunniest days, the thick canopy of trees blocked the sun, leaving a dappled, dancing light, fragrant, spongy ground, and almost total silence. It was here that the sadness of his life and the despairs of war would lift, briefly, and could find a state of being that was nearly calm. Because it was the only place he could go that didn’t bring back memories of his lost family or the war, he went to the woods often, spending many hours a day roaming the footpaths, thinking.

When he heard a little flurry of footsteps in the dried leaves on the ground, he was immediately on alert. He spun around and saw the devil. Though the devil appeared as a dapper middle-aged man, he knew that this was the devil. But he was not afraid. He stood very still and waited for the devil to state his business.

“You are alone,” the devil said.

The man nodded.

“You have nothing.”

The man nodded again.

“I can return your life to you,” he said. “I’ll give you a loving wife, children, a home and family and friends. I’ll give you more money than you can possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.”

The man said nothing, so the devil continued.

“All you have to do is live for seven years on seven coins. Your pockets will be full of money but you can’t spend it. You will always have food, but you can’t spend any money on anything else. You may spend only seven coins.”

“And at the end of seven years,” the man said, “I’ll have all these things?”

The devil nodded gravely.

“What if I fail?”

The devil smiled. “After all you have been through, do you really believe you can fail?”

The man did not know what he was capable of anymore. He didn’t know if he could live for seven years on seven coins, but he knew that during the war, he’d lived in the most appalling conditions with the promise of nothing. And he had returned to nothing. At least this way, he reasoned, there was the possibility of something.

“But what if I fail?” he asked again. “What do you get?”

“Your soul, of course,” the devil replied.

The man took the offer.

The first year, he lived in the woods, and he saved all seven coins. He roamed the woods, eating meals the devil always provided, exactly as he said he would. The second year, the man left the woods and went into the city. He was smelly and unshaven, and most people looked at him strangely. He wandered the parks, and thought about the war. He thought about the wife the devil would provide for him, and the life of calm peace that would follow. The third year, he was a ragged figure. His hair had grown long, his body ached from walking and his spine had curved downward, so he walked with a pathetic hunch. The fourth and fifth years, he wandered to neighboring villages, his condition worsening every step. The sixth year, he returned to the city where he was such a ragged figure that nobody showed him even the smallest kindness. The seventh year, he returned where he started. Seven years after he met the devil, as he was walking through the woods, he heard the same flutter of footsteps and saw the devil.

“How much money have you spent?” the devil asked.

The man held out seven coins. “I’ve spent none.”

“Very good,” the devil smiled. Seeing that the man had kept up his part of the deal, the devil allowed him to bathe. The devil then cut his hair, and shaved his face, and even cut his fingernails and toenails.

“Now you may meet your wife,” the devil said.

The man was nervous. After dreaming of her for seven years, he was certain he would love her, but less certain that she would be as passionate about him. “What if she doesn’t like me?” he asked.

“She’ll like you,” the devil replied. Indeed the solider was now a very handsome man, tall and lean with a look of sad determination in his eyes.

The woman was lovely, plump blond perfection with kindness and compassion radiating from her like a corona. She loved him at first sight. She ran to his arms and kissed his parched lips and told him she loved him. She couldn’t live without him; she had waited seven long years to meet him and had been so afraid that he would not love her. He assured her he did love her. He could never not love her, not now, not when she had been all he was living for those long seven years.

She invited him home to meet her father so he could ask for her hand in marriage.

That evening he met her father and her six sisters. He was so handsome now that all the sisters loved him. All the sisters wanted to marry him! They ran their hands through his sweet-smelling hair, they sat on his lap, they kissed him and begged him to marry. “I only want to marry her,” he replied and looked to the girl he had been promised.

Heartbroken, one of the sisters threw herself out of a window that evening. The next morning, upon discovering her death, the five other sisters were so heartbroken, they too killed themselves.

The man was once again left alone. He had lost everything from another senseless act that made no sense to him.

He went into the woods to weep at his bitter fate. To his surprise the devil appeared beside him.

“Why?” he asked. “I did everything you asked! I gave you seven years of my life, I lived on seven coins for seven years.”

The devil smiled and shrugged. “The money was beside the point,” he said. “Instead of one soul, I’ve now got seven.”

Dear Author recently published a controversial article calling for the death of the historical romance novel. The central idea was that the historical needs to die and be born again into something less predictable and formulaic.

I’ve been mulling over this proposition for a week, trying to figure out how I feel about it. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t love the idea. I find that with the historicals I love, I found because I want exactly what historicals have traditionally offered: the landed gentry, the restrained courtship of the day, the lovely subtlety that the Regency period in particular provides.

There are some who manage to produce amazing, vivid, beautiful, wrenching novels from these constraints. Authors like Sarah MacLean, Meredith Duran, and Sherry Thomas have lifelong fans in me. They respect the era while also delivering fresh stories. Other authors take the trope and try to infuse a modern sensibility into it and it fails. I’ve read historicals that really should be contemporaries. That’s always frustrating – I pick up historicals because I want historicals, not because I want a revised historical, sterilized of all controversy (i.e., the lack of women’s agency, slavery).

I concede that Regency novels may be overdone. But whose fault is that? The way I see it, if readers craved steampunk historicals or novels about Revolutionary America publishers would publish them.

Maybe authors are locked into the Regency period because that is such a romantic period, the low hanging fruit of lovely dresses, pretty balls, and rich, gallant dukes. Maybe it is lazy, but those books sure do go down easy.

And they’re not just fluff, at least not always. Meredith Duran’s A Lady’s Lesson In Scandal brought to life London’s East End poverty in a way I’ve never experienced before, even through my own research. I actually learned something in that book. I’m not sure I could have really pictured the grittiness of Bethnal Green without that book. That book really stands out as an example of what historical romance can be.

I’m still waiting to find a romance set in the medieval period that would affect me the same way. I’ve read a lot of time travel romance from that era, and it is nearly always disappointing, but that means the market is wide open for both authors and publishers. And how about we move away from England and look at the rest of Europe? I’ve been craving some great French historicals and have found little to satisfy. The rest of the world – from China to the Caribbean – is also untapped. Secrets of Sin by Chloe Harris, an erotic romance, took place in the Caribbean, and while I enjoyed the book, it didn’t feel very historical.

There is a lot of room for expansion and improvement in the genre, but to see it wither before that great reformation? No way. I believe that I will try my hand at a Regency within the next three years. I might not actually succeed at it, but I have an idea brewing and I’d like to try.

I just hope the genre doesn’t die before I get my hands on it.

Author of DESTINY and REBECCA’S TALE, Sally Beauman’s THE VISITORS, about an eleven-year-old girl drawn into the world of a lord and all the intrigue, confusion and excitement surrounding the obsessive hunt for the last pharaoh’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, to Harper, at auction, and LIttle Brown UK.

As someone who is absolutely batty about Sally Beauman, this is the best possible news. [You can see proof of my fangirlism here and here and here and here and especially here and some more here and here.] I just love her books so much. Her characters haunt me, particularly Helene; every time I’m in London, I think if I just look hard enough, I’ll catch a glimpse of Helene.

But what really adds to the pleasure of this book is that it involves the “last pharaoh’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings.” I am intrigued by that because earlier this year I visited Highclere, the beautiful setting of the show Downton Abbey and the home of the Earl of Carnarvon:

George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, was the financial backer for the search for an excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb. He was quite ill when the tomb was eventually discovered, but he had dug with his own hands in that hardpan soil; it had become an obsession for him. While I was at Highclere, there was a very interesting museum in the basement of Egyptian artifacts that Herbert himself had discovered. It made a strong enough impression on me that I began to devour books on the history of the family as well as Egyptology.

Thus, Sally Beauman’s new book will work on me on several different levels. I’ll be first in line to grab it, in full on hard-back, baby!