Elizabeth Beacon: A Season For Scandal?

My latest book, The Viscount’s Frozen Heart, is published this month by Harlequin Historical. (Sorry, but I still love saying that, can’t get over the fact even after seven years that there’s a book out with my name on it).

Now let’s talk about the weather. It’s what the British do. All the time. When we see friends, meet someone new or just can’t think of anything else to say. We claim to be the only country to have four seasons in one day (probably untrue, but it keeps us happy) and that phrase gave me a light-bulb moment one day. I stared out of the window at snow in June or a heatwave in March or whatever it was that sparked us off, and wondered what if? Mainly what if I could persuade my lovely and very patient editor to let me write four books, each set in a different season of the year? Then my editor and the Harlequin Historical series editor both said yes! Once I’d finished cheering and dancing round the room there was that awful, panic-stricken moment when I realised, oh, no, I’ll actually have to write them all now, won’t I? After lots of false starts, rewrites and doubts, The Viscount’s Frozen Heart is out in the big world as the first of the four and is set in winter.

I wanted to start this series at the coldest and darkest time of year and try to show my hero and heroine finding out that warmth and passion and hope can grow irresistibly at a time of year many of us dread. So why publish it in August, I can almost hear you asking? It could be an international scheme to save on air-conditioning and ice cream; read this book and shiver, or use it as a fan if you prefer paper to digital. It just happened that way is the real answer, but it certainly didn’t feel as odd to me as the time I had to write a Christmas book with birds nesting and spring a-springing all around me, but that’s another story.

Next in the series is set in spring and is called The Marquis’s Awakening. It will be published as part of Harlequin’s December 2014 release and I’m currently having a wonderful time working on summer, during the right season for once, which makes my writing life feel so much easier somehow.