Welcome to Nicola
Cornick who writes our first blog post for 2015.
Thank you very much for inviting me to the RNA Blog today.
It’s a great pleasure to be here!
It was with something of a shock that I realised in 2013
that I had been writing Regency historicals for fifteen years. From the publication
of my first traditional Regency, True Colours, by Harlequin Mills and Boon in
1998, I have had a wonderful time living in an alternative historical world.
Along the way I have changed from a UK to a US publisher and now back again.
The stories have become longer, more sensual and have ranged in setting from
the ballrooms of London to the Highlands of Scotland to the far north of the
Arctic.
It’s been an amazing time but for more than ten of those
fifteen “Regency” years there was something else that I also wanted to write, a
book with paranormal elements where the past and the present are entwined, and
secrets and mysteries from centuries past are brought to light. I’d been
promising myself for years that one day I would write this story but it always
got squeezed out by contracts and deadlines until last year I thought that if I
didn’t stop and write it now, maybe I never would.
I work as a guide and historian at the National Trust house
Ashdown Park, a place with a rich and vivid history that has given me so much
inspiration. It was a given that if I wrote a timeslip book then Ashdown and
its history would take centre stage. So I started to plan a book set at Ashdown
with three intertwined stories. One takes place in the 17th century
and involves Ashdown’s owner, the Earl of Craven and Elizabeth, the Winter
Queen, to whom it is rumoured he was secretly married. A second strand of the
story is based on the notorious love affair of the 19th century Earl
of Craven and the courtesan Harriette Wilson, and there is a contemporary
thread revealing the connections that link the characters through the
centuries.
When I first started
to write the book (as opposed to it being a collection of ideas in my head) I
also started to have dreams in which I took on a series of ever more bizarre
challenges (organising a competition for racing pigeons was one!) I felt
scared. I had doubts. I think that maybe I was afraid deep down that I didn’t
know how to write something so different. It was exciting to have the time and
space for this new project but it was also disorientating because suddenly,
after years of promising myself that this was the book of my heart, I actually
had to prove it. I had to write it.
With three intertwined stories the book required a lot of
planning, a detailed structure and a complex plot, three things that have never
been my forte. My books usually arise out of the characters or from particular
historical events. I get an idea and write off into the blue. This time,
though, I was mixing fact and fiction and also mixing three time periods. When
I tried to plan in detail my brain froze up so in the end I did what I always
do and just plunged straight in and waited to see what happened. The whole book
was a very, very steep learning curve as I struggled to create three stories
that were individually compelling yet also wove together to create a much
bigger canvas than anything I had ever written before. It was also a huge
amount of fun!
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| Ashdown Park |
Now the book is written and I am revising it to layer in
some more character depth and texture, smooth out the wrinkles in the plot and
tighten the pace. At the moment the most difficult thing to decide upon is the
title – something suitably historical and a tad mysterious! Please look out for the book coming in
September from MIRA Books – by which time it will definitely have a name!
Thank you, Nicola for
writing such an informative piece.
The RNA blog is brought to you by
Elaine
Everest & Natalie Kleinman
If you would like to contribute an article or write about
your latest publication please contact us on elaineverest@aol.com
