The Joys of Binge Reading

Regency romance queen Stephanie Laurens has been in the top 100 Romance of the Year lists many times over. She is one of the most successful and popular romance novelists of all time, with over 80 works of historical romance, including 40 New York Times bestsellers.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today Stephanie talks about switching from cancer research to romance and the changing tastes of romance readers.

As usual, we’ve got free books to give away. This week it’s a range of historic adventures. Check them out here: https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/GBTyjjv9LFfGQ1X5JI9vA

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Links for this episode:

The Legend of Nimway Hall:

http://www.stephanielaurens.com/series/the-legend-of-nimway-hall/

Devon Monk: https://www.devonmonk.com/

Sam Quinn series: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/k/seana-kelly/sam-quinn/

Faith Hunter: http://www.faithhunter.net/wp/

CS Harris: Sebastian St Cyr series https://csharris.net/sebastian.php

Where to find Stephanie Laurens:

Website: http://www.stephanielaurens.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorStephanieLaurens

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9241.Stephanie_Laurens

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/stephanie-laurens

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to the show notes in The Joys of Binge Reading.com for important mentions.

But now, here’s Stephanie.

Introducing Stephanie Laurens

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Stephanie and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Stephanie Laurens Romance Bestseller

Stephanie Laurens: Thank you. It’s lovely to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: I am in awe or of having the chance to talk to you because you are one of the legends of romance publishing.

You have been working since the early 90’s, you’ve got more than 80 books now published and many accolades including landing in the top 100 Romance of the Year many times. You have an international army of fans, so tell me about how you got into this career. Give us a little bit of a helicopter view of all of those years.

Stephanie Laurens: Okay. I got into writing romances because I literally ran out of Regency romances to read. At that time, back in the late 80’s, it was 1989, I used to read Regency romances because I was working as a scientist and writing scientific grants and reviewing scientific grants and papers and stuff like that. It was all very, very dry as you can imagine, so I liked to be able to read at night. After I put the kids to sleep, I would read.

At that time in Australia there were only two Regency romances brought in a month by Mills & Boon and that was nowhere near enough. I had already gone through a lot of the libraries and what Regency romances they stocked, and so in order to keep myself occupied I started writing one. I assumed that I would never get to the end because you know how you start projects. I always have projects lying around for literally years, incomplete.

A hard beginning in Regency romance

But, lo and behold, I found that because I wanted to find out what happened I got to the end of the book, so I actually wrote a book. I read it over again and I thought, this is not bad, and so I started to write around, to find out where to send it. It was my mother who told me, send it here. She pointed to the back of a Mills & Boon romance and said, you could send it to them. So I did. They came back and said, there’s this and this and this that’s not quite right and I said, let me have a try at fixing it. So, they let me fix it, and that was my first book. That’s how it all started off.

Then I just continued to write more or less to amuse myself more than anything, and they kept taking the books. In 1993 I decided to retire from science, not because of the writing or because I thought I’d have a life writing, but because it was getting too stressful. So, I did retire from science and then of course you open a door, and you have extra time. What are you going to do with it? I kept writing.

I switched to writing for the American market which is a little bit different. Their books are longer, and it enabled me to write a bigger story, so that’s what I did. I got into the American market. In 1996 I was first sold there. Subsequently I sold all my books to the Americans, and I have continued doing that ever since.

Interest in Regency romance ‘constant’

I’ve generally written about two a year, but occasionally that goes up to three and sometimes it has been four, which was a lot but those were some of the quartets I did. It helped to be writing them very quickly one after the other because it was a continuous storyline.

I have generally had fun writing and I’ve made a lot of friends in the States because I used to travel there at least once, sometimes twice a year, for either the conferences or for retreats or book tours for a while when book tours were a thing. That’s how it all came about and how it all evolved.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s remarkable. Taking you back to that comment about there only being two regencies released a month at that time, has the taste for Regency grown in this last couple of decades? Did that reflect the level of interest there was in Regency romances at that time?

Stephanie Laurens: No, actually. I would have said that over the last two decades the interest in historical regencies may have gone up and down a little, but it’s stayed pretty constant. It was always there, but it was Australian publishers who didn’t think there was a market, so they didn’t supply it. What they didn’t realize was that instead we were getting supplied by the Americans. The American market was reasonably developed and developed more subsequently, but I don’t believe the readership has changed in breadth and depth all that much over the entire period.

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} The fascination of the Regency period

They have maybe switched from this author to that author, to something else and back and around a bit. And like most genre fiction readers, they don’t just read Regency romances. Some do, a lot of others read more widely, but it’s usually genre fiction.

Jenny Wheeler: The other thing that’s very interesting is this particular niche that Regency has in the romance market. There are lots of other periods that you’d think would warrant equal interest. I think of the Gilded Age New York. That’s coming through a little bit now, but Regency fascinates people, doesn’t it? Why do you think that is?

Stephanie Laurens: Yes. There are all the carriages and the balls and the ball gowns. There is a lot of color in it which is different to now. That is an attractive thing. It is very visually colorful, which helps when you’re writing. You can make it exciting, adventurous, quite dramatic.

But underneath it all is the fact that at that time, socially, in the upper echelons of society, you could start to marry for love. And they didn’t. That particular band of society didn’t prior to say, 1800. But through the romantic movement, which was very late 1700’s and through the Napoleonic Wars and so on, there came this questioning of marrying for love instead of marrying for dynastic purposes or for convenience or whatever, but not for love. Love was not a criterion for marriage in that band of society prior to then.

It means that the females in particular can make a decision. Do they want to marry for love or do they want to marry not for love? Do they want to marry at all? Because again, if you’re dealing with the upper echelons, then the women didn’t have to marry. It was expected but if they really wanted to dig in their heels, they generally could not marry and go and do something else with their lives.

Regency freedom squashed by Victorians

That is the same questions women of today, or certainly in the last few decades, have also had to face. What do I do with my life? I have a choice. I think that echo has always made that time period particularly useful. It’s less so in the Victorian era where I’m now writing. It’s harder to generate that resonance with modern times.

Jenny Wheeler: That is a fascinating answer and it’s one I never, ever really thought about. So, there was an evolution, because obviously the Victorians are after the Regency. That little burst of freedom, so to speak, gets squashed a bit in the Victorian age.

Stephanie Laurens: It does. Exactly. The Regency and the early post Regency, the 1830s for instance, before Victoria came to the throne and even just after, before she had an impact and Victorian society evolved, that band of time between say 1805 to the early 1840s has a different feel to it socially when it comes to love and marriage in the aristocracy.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fascinating. Looking over this wonderful body of work, you have got a number of series, but one name stands out and that’s the Cynsters. More than half your books are related to that particular family. The most recent one, the one we must talk about today, is Foes, Friends, and Lovers. That’s number 10, and this is the next generation of Cynsters.

You have had a lot of books, 20 books, with the first generation. This is the next generation down. Tell us about the differences. It feeds in wonderfully to your explanation about the Regency and Victorians. How is it different to do the two books because they’re in different generations?

Moving out of London for stories

Stephanie Laurens: There definitely is a distinctly different feel. I’ve explored to some extent in order to find the opening for a romance, particularly from the woman’s point of view, because I tend to write very strong female characters. I’ve had to look more deeply into other things for the situations where a woman would be more able to face those questions.

For instance, in Foes, Friends, and Lovers I have what is essentially a runaway heiress who has taken refuge in an estate that was run by very eccentric older women, both of whom were widows. When they die, she remains as the chatelaine of the estate. Cynster is the one who inherits the estate – a Cynster male.

In the next book after that, which is coming out in the middle of the year, the woman is running a steel mill in Sheffield. I have had to go out further in society rather than staying in the London ballrooms and the social circles of London. I’ve had to go out and find different areas in order to evolve a more interesting type of romance.

Jenny Wheeler: Foes, Friends, and Lovers is set in Nottinghamshire, towards the north of the country, and she is Scottish in her family relationships. I did wonder if that also helped to free it up a little bit from that London situation.

Stephanie Laurens: Exactly. You’re right. Because I tend to now go out into society, some of the women, although they may be well born, they’re not your typical London miss.

Situations which create strong women

The one I’m writing now is very funny because she is a London miss but she’s taken a bit of a different tack. She is very outrageous when she’s in London, and she is very much country and managing a big estate when she’s at home. As I said, I have to keep looking for these unusual situations or creating this sort of situation where I can have a very strong female character.

Jenny Wheeler: In Foes, Friends, and Lovers there is a community of artisans that revolve around the estate. In modern day terms, and they talk about it this way too, they have multiple streams of income. In those days the estates were starting to struggle a little bit for their income and so they’ve got all these extra things on the side.

They’ve got furniture making, apothecary medicines, all sorts of things going on to support the farm. You have a lot of fascinating detail about those various enterprises and my mind boggled about how you got all the research for that because it goes into quite a bit of detail about some of those extra enterprises. Is this stuff you’ve mainly collected over the years, or did you have to do a lot of extra research?

Stephanie Laurens: Some of it was stuff that I knew from my own eclectic interests over the years. As a writer you tend to start, right from the beginning, collecting little bits of information that you slot away and you may never use them, but they’re there. The rest of it was a lot of fun research. The basket weaving in particular I did not know much about.

The benefits of online research

You watch YouTube videos. I love YouTube. I love Wikipedia, and I do tend to spend quite a bit of time going into those sorts of details. Even though they may be only two pages in a book, they put a lot of authenticity into the work – that this is all real. All of what was described in the basket weaving, which was quite extensive, was real. The furniture making I had already known a bit about because I’m always interested in antique furniture, and I did a bit of research on sculpting as well.

Jenny Wheeler: Is the way men and women interact in this period with the next generation very different from how their parents interacted? You set it up beautifully with this very capable woman steward with this mysterious past. At the beginning, he doesn’t realize her class although he quickly starts to realize that she isn’t quite what she presents herself as. She is hoping that he’s going to satisfy himself that the place is running smoothly and hie back to London and leave them to get on with it, and she’s a bit concerned that he takes such an interest in everything.

You’ve got that classic situation of conflict at the beginning with them wanting different things. How does that play out on the wider field of male/woman relations in this time?

Stephanie Laurens: That’s probably reasonable edging into mid Victorian. It does seem to be that men and women lived very separate lives – far more so than in the Regency, for instance. As I said, I tend to write about the aristocracy or certainly wealthy people.

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Stephanie Laurens – Romance Queen