Category: General, Historical

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Loretta Chase
Photo by Walter Henritze

Loretta Chase

Fun with Dick and Jane

The trouble started in first grade when we learned to write. I had started making up stories even before that. Now I could write them down for posterity.

It Wasn’t All Rock 'n' Roll

Cut to adolescence. It got worse. Long, long, long letters to my friends (this was pre-email days), poetry, a journal, and the Great American Novel. It was all dark and anguished but funny, too, because I couldn’t help it. My father told jokes all the time and I inherited that way of looking at things.

They’re Actually Paying Me to Do It?

On to college. I started out as a psychology major at Clark University, one of the places where psychology actually got off the ground as a course of study, and where Freud lectured. That, my attempt to be practical, lasted exactly one semester. Then it was on to the English department and my beloved British authors, and—the main point of being an English major—writing. Many papers. Long papers. In hindsight, it was really great practice. At the time, it felt horribly impractical and I despaired of ever getting a job that paid a living wage. But one thing led to another, and I ended up working at my alma mater. Then my favorite English professor got me a job writing an exhibition catalog. That, I think, was the first time anyone paid me real money for writing. Then my writing disease was brought to the attention of some alumni who were working in corporate video and needed a scriptwriter. They paid, too. I became a Professional Writer. On the side. Next to my Real Job.

The Hero of My Life

That’s how I met my husband. He was a terrific video producer. We ended up doing many projects together. The script meetings started getting longer and longer, and before long it looked as though we were dating, and then we realized we were. But we went on working together for years afterward and still collaborate.

Sometimes You Need a Shove in the Right Direction

Somewhere along the way, the nagging started: “What do you really want to do?” says he. I mumble something about writing a book but no it’s not going to happen. Look at my Great American Novel—thousands of pages in boxes in the basement. It had forty-seven different beginnings and went in two hundred and eighty-two different directions and didn’t have a plot. He said, “If you can write a script, you can write a book.” He said, “If you can make filing systems entertaining” (and I had—my script about a filing system had the audience in stitches), “you can write a novel.”

Discovering Romance

My husband is very smart and very, very persuasive. He kept after me, and in time I was looking around for something to write about. This was when I discovered Romance. Please remember that I was an English major and had been brainwashed into believing Romance was junk. My sister Cynthia—whose reading tastes I had scorned for years—introduced me to her favorite writers. Her particular favorites were the authors who wrote Regencies. They turned out to be my favorites, too.

Entering Jane Austen’s World

In preparation for writing my own story, I studied them the way I’d studied Chaucer and Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens and Thackeray and Virginia Woolf. I understand Chaucer & Shakespeare & Austen & Dickens & Thackeray, but Virginia Woolf and the rest of those modern British novelists were and remained incomprehensible to me. I like a story to have an obvious beginning, middle, and end, and I like to know what it’s about. Yes, old-fashioned, but that’s how it is. So it was delightful to discover that Romance had beginnings, middles, and ends. Plus happy endings. And they were love stories, even better. But best of all, the Regencies were set in early 19th-century England, with English lords and ladies, and many were written like the comedies of manners I’d so loved in college. 

Mark me down as converted.

Plant Derrière in Chair

After a year or so of studying the books, came the actual writing, which took another couple of years. It did have to be squeezed in between my job at Clark and the video script moonlighting. And it had to be critiqued and proofread by every single human being I knew. Including—praise be—my English secretary, who reduced my gaffes considerably. To eliminate them entirely is impossible, as hard experience has taught me.

Await Rejection

Book completed, I made a list of publishers who had Regency lines. There were many, in those days. Walker went to the top of my list because they published in hardcover (classy) and didn’t require agented submissions. I sent in Isabella over the transom—no query letter first or anything—along with the necessary SASE. Despite all my care and pains, I confidently expected to be rejected because I’d read the biographies and the writer magazines and knew this was what happened to aspiring novelists: years of rejection before finally breaking into print…and quickly thereafter becoming New York Times bestselling superstars.

There was a lot I didn’t know then.

Shock Happens

Walker didn’t reject my story. Some months later, while I was hard at work on the next book, The English Witch, the editor called and asked if it was “still available.” Later, much later, I figured out that the book didn’t get rejected the way others do because (1) I’d been writing professionally for years and had practice (as my husband had pointed out repeatedly) in doing dialogue and being entertaining, (2) I’d studied the market, and (3) being slightly OCD, I’d sent in a very clean, properly formatted, grammatically correct manuscript. 

Write More

Six traditional Regencies later, Ellen Edwards, an editor at Avon who’d bought the paperback rights to most of the hardcovers, suggested I try writing something bigger: a historical romance. This was a daunting proposition. Historical romances at the time had a wide sweep, and I wasn’t sure my kind of storytelling—or my voice—suited the genre. But Ellen had confidence in me. 

Write What You Know—Or at Least Fake It 

I set my first historical, The Lion's Daughter, in Albania, because that’s where my family came from—and I’d actually been there. Then, because I fell in love with the villain—a gorgeous Albanian named Ismal—the instant he entered my imagination, I made him the hero of my next book, Captives of the Night. In the course of that story, Ismal (known as the comte d’Esmond) spends some time in Paris.

It turned out that The Marquess of Dain was in Paris at the time, and demanded his own story. Almost at the same moment, Jessica Trent marched out to center stage and tried to elbow him aside.  hey became the hero and heroine of Lord of Scoundrels. This book struck a chord with a great many readers, went on to win a RITA, and continues to appear on readers’ favorites lists. Next came a novella, The Mad Earl’s Bride, whose events take place between the time of Lord of Scoundrels and The Last Hellion, which followed a few years later. I’m particularly attached to The Last Hellion because of the London research and the plot and subplots. It may be the closest I’ll ever come to Dickensian.

The Lost Years

In academe, faculty members might take a sabbatical in the seventh year. It’s a time to recharge and regroup, to work on special projects, do research, etc. This was what I did, too.

The Unlost Years

Six years after The Last Hellion , I was back, with Miss Wonderful, the first of my Carsington Brothers books. This series was inspired by a trip to England and a visit to Derbyshire, one of many UK locales I fell in love with—and partly in response to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Bennett is desperate to get her daughters married. What if, I thought, it was the father who was desperate to get his sons married off, to rich wives?

Globe Trotting

I love to travel, for real and in my imagination. Derbyshire for Miss Wonderful. Then to Egypt for Mr. Impossible. Back to London and the English countryside for Lord Perfect. Then came my return to Avon and the series conclusion, Not Quite a Lady. Another English setting, this time, in the country, with a pig and a bulldog playing prominent roles. Next on the itinerary is Venice, and the book currently in production, Your Scandalous Ways, coming in June 2008.

Not the End

More to come. Stay tuned.

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