Sometimes story ideas come quietly on cat’s paws. You don’t
know they are there until they start to flow from your fingertips. You can’t
really say when or why they arrived, you simply know you need to write the
story. Other ideas roar into your mind and refuse to let go, drowning out all
other ideas until they vanish as quickly as they came, leaving you to sort through
the wreckage.
My latest book from Harlequin Historical A DEAL WITH HER
REBEL VIKING was one of the latter. I saw a tweet about an Oxfordshire Easter
tradition about women capturing men and then men capturing women and
thought there must have a romance in it
somewhere. Although I have written a number of Viking set romances, I had never
set one in the Midlands, in the old kingdom of Mercia. In many ways, Mercia is
overlooked as it became part of Wessex after Aethelflaed, the Lady of the
Mercians and daughter of King Alfred died. She is probably the person most responsible
for stopping the Vikings and for helping to ensure England evolved as a
concept. She is also one of my great heroines. However, my story takes place
slightly earlier than her reign, during that period when the Great Army was
first on British shores.
The idea seemed deceptively simple when I
first started writing it but as ever with these things, the initial idea proved
slightly elusive (among other thing I forgot the romance) and I had to work
hard to make the story work for my characters (cue large scale revisions).
However after working very hard and
completely re-jigging the ending, my editor loved it (cue celebrations on my
part). I was also very pleased with the cover as they used the model Carson who
had inspired the hero as the cover model.
As I wrote it, I also realised that there was more than one
story here and so I have ended up writing a trilogy. The slight hiccup with
this was that I had already committed to writing a book in the Sons of Sigurd
series which Harlequin Historical is publishing in 2020. The four other authors
are Michelle Willingham, Harper St George, Jenni Fletcher and Terri Brisbin. My
book is the third one and is entitled CONVENIENTLY WED TO THE VIKING
(publishing July 2020). Michelle Willingham’s Stolen by the Viking will be published in March 2020. It has one of the new look Harlequin Historical covers. And having read an early draft, it is every bit as lush as the cover looks. Writing in a collaborative series was a
totally new experience for me and it took me a little longer than I had planned.
So after a long
hiatus, I have just returned to Midland
set trilogy and am writing the second one. It is wonderful to revisit the world
that I created last year. This time,
rather than setting it in the Forest of Arden, I have moved the action
northwards to Sherwood Forest. It is easy to forget that these forests existed
long before the tales of Shakespeare or indeed Robin Hood and I wanted to do something
to address that.
Right now, I am hoping that people enjoy my new book. You can
read the start of it here for free.
Michelle Styles writes warm ,witty and intimate historical
romances for Harlequin Historical in a wide range of time periods, including
Roman, Regency, Victorian but most recently Viking. Her latest A DEAL WITH HER
REBEL VIKING will be published on 18 November 2019. Her next book CONVENIENTLY
WED TO THE VIKING will be published in July 2020. You can learn more about Michelle
and her books at www.michellestyles.co.uk
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