Guest Author: Margo Maguire

Today’s guest, Margo Maguire, and her new book were spotlighted at RT last week where her book earned a 4 1/2 star Top Pick review for March!  Go Margo!  Check out an excerpt and the review at Romantic Times.

A Little Insider Info

I wrote my first book in the wee hours of the night after coming home from my late shifts working as a critical care nurse. I always found it difficult to fall asleep after a long, typically tense stint in the unit, so I started writing to relax.

I’d tried writing several years before – it was a “hospital horror” novel, but I didn’t get too far with it. I scared myself too much! I love scary movies and books, but when you’re writing a book, you have to sort of live with the characters and scenario. This story was too much – I think it hit too close to home (me, working in a hospital and all). I found myself jumping at shadows. It was a very scary book! (Stephen King, move over. J)

I almost gave up on writing, but then I read a historical romance novel that someone gave me, and decided to try my hand at one. It was far more pleasant to keep a hunky hero and spunky heroine in my head, so I picked up a few more romances and really studied their structure and conventions. After a few, I figured I’d give it a try.

That first book became The Bride of Windermere, which came out in March, 1999, and was a medieval tale set in the time of Henry V. The hero is a knight who does a huge service for King Henry – he finds and protects Henry’s bastard half-sister (a totally fictional character, of course) and Henry makes him Duke of Windermere, with property in England’s gorgeous Lake District.

Fast forward 12 years. I’ve written and published seventeen more novels, the most recent being Seducing the Governess. In it, the heroine is a young woman (Mercy Franklin) who was orphaned at a very young age, and sent away to be raised by a harsh vicar and his wife. Turns out that her mother married a man her father did not approve of, and so her father disowned her. Now the father – Mercy’s grandfather – is old and dying, and he wants to find his two granddaughters. The old grandfather? He’s the current Duke of Windermere. I never thought that my original hero in my first-ever book would have such a mean old descendent, but hey – you never know, right? You can read a portion of this book if you visit the “books” page of my website http://www.margomaguire.com/theCollection.html.

Mercy’s sister is the heroine in my next book, Brazen (December 2011) but her story is completely different from her sister’s. This one was raised by an earl and his wife, and she … Well, I’ll leave that for another blog. What I want to know is – what insider info have you caught onto in books you’ve read? Sometimes authors plant little tidbits that you might or might not pick up.

I’m going to choose one responder to receive a copy of a book from my backlist. And I might even throw in a copy of The Bride of Windermere (if I can find any copies).