Lara is another author I discovered thanks to Rachel’s Random Resources. So many awesome authors bring their books on tour with Rachel.
While regency romance is a genre that has a fairly simple recipe, Lara brings her own flair to it that I’ve found to be a unique combination of romance, drama, rogue-ish-ness and the side of the upper classes they want to hide.
Not to mention a dash of sexiness just to keep things a little spicy.
Lara writes about regency romance. Often about the unconventional side of it.
Top pick
This is so hard to pick! I feel like I’ve read more of Lara’s books than I’ve reviewed so I’ll pick from the one’s I’ve reviewed.
Based on that, The Return of the Disappearing Duke slides into first place. I mean, a Duke pretending not to be a Duke escorting a “boy” across the desert with people chasing them?
It’s pretty dramatic and definitely captures your attention!
Second pick
This was the other one I was tossing up with, so it’s a VERY CLOSE second!
A Match for the Rebellious Earl was another one I fell in love with thanks to the mix of drama and romance!
I always had a vivid imagination and a need to express it in words. I dictated my first (fantasy/sci-fi) story to my Mom when I was four years old (she kept it bless her, and it’s not bad!). Reading and daydreaming are part of the same mechanism for me and I would daydream to slip out of a sometimes tricky world and soon I was writing down these daydreams and would often keep a notebook in my drawer at work so I could write a little when I needed to blow off steam from my job (I worked on Wall Street, so there was a lot of steam and not the romance steam kind). Writing was my sanity. I can’t imagine not doing it.
This is one of the hardest parts of writing for me – I actually write fast and long, but then I have to go back and slash and slash so I can fit my stories into the Harlequin Mills&Boon word count limits. It’s agonizing. I have to get rid of side characters and sub-plots and historical detail and I hate this part of the process. I keep telling myself next time I’ll just write without stopping and self-publish and see what happens, but the truth is that self-publishing is a big commitment of time and effort that I can’t spare now between my full time job and young kids. So for the moment I just try to keep to the guidelines and spend a lot of time pruning away.
I used to write just to give myself pleasure. I would be inspired by something and that would set off my daydreaming glands and then I wrote the stories I wanted to read and created the worlds I wanted to live in, and mostly the men I wanted to have in my life. It isn’t very different when I think about my broader aim. I hope that is what I’m doing for my readers – helping them create the worlds in their minds they’d like to inhabit for a while.
I’ve always loved history but I fell in love with Regency when I came across a copy of Georgette Heyer’s Faro’s Daughter in a second hand bookstore. I was fifteen and blown away. I searched for her books everywhere. Soon I was daydreaming in a Regency world and scribbling fanfiction in notebooks when I should have been listening in class. There’s something about the 19th century – when everything was just taking off and the world was caught between grandeur and the industrial revolution. There are so many conflicting forces during this period that it’s perfect for the conflicts of romance.
Getting published. Hands down. And not just because trying to break into publishing is tough, but because the first step – believing that I have written something that someone else might actually want to read is the biggest obstacle to becoming a writer. For years and years it never occurred to me I was good enough. If my mother hadn’t told me about Harlequin’s So You Think You Can Write contest and told me to give it a shot, I might never have tried. I sent in the beginning of one of my many for-the-drawer books and was absolutely shocked that I reached the top ten. At that point they offered me a two book contract. It was an amazing experience. I suppose more recently I’m very proud of two of my latest books being nominated for the UK’s leading romance fiction prize, the RONA awards. Mostly I’m just so happy readers find my books an engrossing and rewarding escape. That’s the best feeling of all!
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