reviews_and_ramblings | Candice Hern: Reading Regency Romances by the Bagful

Ciao, everyone! I am delighted to be here today to speak with some of my Italian readers. The novella for which I won the AAR Award has not yet been translated into Italian, but hopefully it will someday soon. So far, five of my novels have been published in Italian by Mondadori (Lady Be Bad, Just One of Those Flings, In the Thrill of the Night, Once a Scoundrel, and Once a Dreamer), and two of my traditional Regency Romances were published in Italian by Editrice Quadratum (A Garden Folly and An Affair of Honor). Since I do not read Italian, I can only hope the translations were good! I have been quite pleased with my Italian covers -- with the exception of Lady Be Bad (Dama licenziosa) which looked to me like an old romance cover from the 1980s. I would love to hear what Italian readers think of the Italian covers.

My AAR-winning novella, "From This Moment On", was part of the anthology It Happened One Night. The anthology came about when Mary Balogh, Jacquie D'Alessandro, and I were on a bus tour together with a bunch of other authors. We were sitting together and talked about how we should do an anthology together. Mary said that she'd always wanted to do an anthology in which all the authors wrote a story based on the same plot premise. She believed that, however similar the general plot, no two stories would ever be alike, that each author's voice and style and perspective would result in unique stories. Jacquie and I loved the idea, and we brainstormed the general plot while riding on the bus between Chicago and Detroit. We decided it would be about a man and a woman who know each other but haven't met in ten years, and are stranded at an inn for one night. The stories would each take place in just 24 hours, hence the title It Happened One Night.

We needed a fourth author, and Stephanie Laurens agreed to join us. To keep the experiment pure, none of us discussed our stories with one another at all. Even our editor did not know what we were going to write until we turned in our manuscripts. None of us read the other stories until they were ready for publication. Mary was right: all four novella are quite different.

For my novella, "From This Moment On", I decided to use a character from my Merry Widows trilogy (In the Thrill of the Night, Just One of Those Flings, and Lady be Bad) who readers seem to have liked, judging by the amount of fan mail I received about her. Wilhelmina was older (41) and had a scandalous past (she'd been a courtesan), so I had never planned a full-length novel for her, thinking she was too unusual to be a sympathetic heroine. When the anthology opportunity came along, I thought the shorter-length story would be perfect for her. An author has much more freedom in a shorter format. For example, if a reader dislikes an older heroine with a scandalous past, they can skip my story and enjoy the other three. There is usually something to appeal to everyone in an anthology.

Based on fan mail, I am pleased to say that many readers loved my older hero and heroine. In fact, I got so much mail thanking me for using a middle-aged heroine that it makes me think we should be writing more stories about women who are not in their twenties, who are not beautiful, who are not perfect. Many readers can identify with such heroines.

How do Italian readers feel about older heroes and heroines?

To read more:

http://rosaromance.splinder.com/post/20315809/