Interview with Beverley Kendall

Lily: I am delighted that Beverley Kendall, Zebra Historical Romance author, agreed to be my inaugural interview at Sisters of the Heart. Welcome Beverley!

How did you get into writing historical romances?

Beverley: I absolutely love reading historical romances. I still remember opening up my first Johanna Lindsey book. Up to that point, I'd only read Harlequin category novels. I loved the longer length of the books and enjoyed being swept back to a romanticized time in history. From that point on I was hooked. But when I started writing, I didn't even think about writing a historical romance. I was simply too intimidated by the research aspect of it. Fast forward many many years to 2006 when I took part in the Avon Fanlit contest. After that experience I was determined to write a historical and I did!

Lily: I was interested by the fact that you chose the 1850s for Sinful Surrender and A Taste of Desire rather than the Regency period when so many historical novels are set. Why did you decide on Victorian era England to write about?

Beverley: I chose the mid-Victoria timeframe simply because I wanted to write in a time when things like plumbing and electricity were a bit more advanced than in the Regency era. Gas lighting was becoming popular, not just on the streets of London, but in many homes. Some of the grander homes were equipped with standup showers and running water. I'm about the creature comforts so things like that matter to me. I plan to write another series that takes place in the latter part of the Victorian era (1890s) and I'm really looking forward to that.

Lily: I understand this completely. I once decided to do research in New Zealand rather than in the wilds of some jungle because I was partial to indoor plumbing. Have you ever been drawn to writing modern romances?

Beverley: I’ve always been drawn to writing contemporary romances. Actually, when I first started writing, I was writing contemporary category romances. I have a plethora of contemporaries that I fully intend to publish in the future.

Lily: How fun! Do you give hints about what your contemporaries are about? Do they have the same kind of bad boy heroes you have in Sinful Surrender and Taste of Desire?

Beverley: All my heroes tend to be ‘bad boys’! I’m a huge Rachel Gibson fan simply because her heroes (and sometimes) heroines tend to be the flawed kind that need some pretty heavy redeeming. In contemporaries, I really love a hero who speaks and acts like men really do. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want them too real—this is romantic fiction after all—but I like natural sounding dialogue and heroes not thinking that the heroine looks so lovely in her lilac and smoked salmon colored gown. When I see stuff like that all I can think is, ‘No man—save some artist—would ever describe a woman’s dress like that.’

I started a single title contemporary romance that I simply refer to as Rebound. I absolutely love the premise and I love that my hero is very flawed and has a huge character arc. It’s always nice to see them have to grovel from time to time!

Lily: Which Rachel Gibson would you recommend for a first time reader? What other authors do you love? Who has influenced your style the most?

Beverley: With Rachel Gibson you could start anywhere and be fine but if you wanted to start at the beginning of a series, I would start with Simply Irresistible. I’m a fan of Lisa Kleypas, Maggie Robinson and simply love Courtney Milan’s latest, Unveiled and Julie Anne Long’s What I Did For a Duke. I think my style was greatly influenced by Sherry Thomas. I remember reading her debut Private Arrangements—one of my favourite books ever—and thinking, ‘Ah, that’s what they mean by voice.’

Lily: What struck you so much about Sherry Thomas's voice? How do you try to have that sense of voice come out in your own work? I know you value emotional romances, how do you summon up and capture that emotion?

Beverley: Sherry’s voice was like nothing I’d ever read before. It was strong, lyrical and intelligent. It’s the kind of voice you can’t read without noticing it. It completely drew me into the story. Because I love a lyrical voice, I do try for that. And since I adore well placed metaphors and similes, you will see that throughout my books.

I love emotional stories and that tends to come out in my books because of the emotional conflict that goes between the hero and the heroine. The more either the hero or heroine fight their feelings for the other, the more emotional the story becomes because usually that denial comes with rejection and hurt feelings.

Lily: Will we see this same fighting of emotions in the two works that you have coming out this spring? Is one of them the story of Alex, the third of the trio of men you have written about in Sinful Surrender and A Taste of Desire? I'm know I'm looking forward to Alex's story. I love men with subversive senses of humor.

Beverley: Thanks, I love men with a subversive sense of humor too and that describes Alex to a ‘T’. This Spring, I will be releases a novella titled All’s Fair in Love and Seduction and while the hero and heroine are as yet unknown to readers who read Sinful Surrender and A Taste of Desire, it will feature the heroes and heroines of both stories as well as Alex and Charlotte, whose love story will be told in An Heir of Deception, which will be coming out August 9, 2011. In turn, you will also meet up with Derek and Elizabeth (of All’s Fair in Love and Seduction) in An Heir of Deception. As you can see, they’re all just one big happy family.

Lily: I'm excited already. I love series where we get to meet friends and family and see everyone happily (though of course not easily) paired off. One final question. I am a big fan of the Season for Romance website. What inspired you to start it?

Beverley: Thanks so much. The Season is definitely a labor of love. The Season came about by sheer chance. Someone on Twitter found me, began to follow me and tweeted to her followers that she just found another debut author. She then went on to say she wished there was a site that listed all the debut authors coming out that year. My sister told me I should do that. I mulled it over but thought a site for just debut authors wouldn’t pull in that many visitors…but if I expanded that to include all new historical romance releases in a given month, that might enough of a draw for readers. And since I was a debut author who—at that time—had really zero presence online, I thought it would also benefit me in helping to promote my two books. Soon the site took on a life of its own and I added a blog and pretty soon I was posting reviews. It can be a huge time suck but I really don’t know where I’d be without it today.

Lily: Well I am grateful that you and The Season site have introduced me to your work and that of many others, so thank you for all your hard work. It has also been a great pleasure chatting with you, so glad we could do this.

Love at first sight

I am a wandering academic who has settled down in Wyoming. As I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, it is still surprising to find myself surrounded by miles of prairie and mountain ranges but I love the sky, the open spaces and even the wind that is our inevitable companion. In this blog, I want to talk about life out in the West, my two guilty pleasures, romance novels and the World of Warcraft, authors and their books, and anything else that comes to mind. I hope I will be soon joined by my sister, a mom of three boys and a pre-school teacher. I thought I would start by talking about what brought a nice girl from Brooklyn out to the wilds of Wyoming.

Love at first sight

In the classic division of ways of love between the sexes, women are not supposed to fall in love at first sight. Men are. And then, if all goes well, women oblige by falling back in love with them. An Egyptian friend, an up and coming scientist, proposed to two Egyptian women from good families on first sight. The first fiancée broke up with him while he was away in the United States at grad school but the second married him and moved to America for life with a young professor making his way in the world. My Brooklyn Irish Catholic father fell for my Oxford-educated English mother the moment he met her at a party. My devout brother prayed to God for a wife. He met her when she was visiting the church with her parents. Because he knew this was the woman for him, he had the confidence to stick it through a first date where she (who is often shy) gave him monosyllabic answers to his questions. He was absolutely right, she is a lovely woman and a perfect match for him.

In this world of the internet, it is as easy to find a partner half a continent away as next door, but basic human instincts to love remain the same. What has changed is that the people we meet in person or in the ether world will often have a much broader range of views and cultural characteristics than those of our ancestors from tight knit communities. Even those that traveled thousands of miles to new worlds often married people from home. My Irish grandmother who emigrated to Brooklyn married a man she had known since childhood, another Irish emigrant. Love at first sight works when you know what will make you happy and you can recognize those qualities in others. As multitudes of failed relationships have showed, we are not necessarily born with the quality. A friend who liked tall gregarious men found happiness only when she allowed herself to fall in love with a short gentle man.

I have my father’s and brother’s ability to know, to recognize what I want in friends or a lover. It is a tricky gift. I am big and tall and loud, not the feminine ideal for many men. I have had my heart broken over the years because men did not fall in love with me back or relationships did not work out. I have also rejected a number of good men because I did not feel that spark I knew I needed from true love. I live in Wyoming because the first time I saw a post by R.J. on a chatboard for George RR Martin, author of wonderful bloody 1000 page novels, I knew I could fall in love with him. He understood the limitations of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series, that Chaos Theory completely invalidated claims of predicting the future. He was a man that could talk both science and literature. He could talk about wind turbines and write hysterically funny doggrel about his cat. I know these are not a typical requirements of most lovers but they were essential to me. I needed someone understand both parts of my training, both parts of the mind that worked so hard to develop.

Given he was a stranger from a chatboard, lived a 1000 miles away from me, and was seven years younger, I felt quite foolish falling for a man I had never even seen a picture of. But I was right. We chatted and flirted on line for a year and a half. I moved from one state to another, dated various people who I liked but who could never be “the one”. After years of living in dingy basement apartments, he broke ground and began to build his own house. I filed him firmly under “Could love but wouldn’t work” until the death of a friend on the chatboard changed the conversation, heightened all emotions. When he signed a letter “love,” I threw caution to the winds and took a summer vacation to Colorado and Wyoming. We had a meal at the local hamburger place, dug his septic trench, walked in the Snowy Mountains and have been together ever since. After a long distance relationship for four years, I packed up all my belongings in a Ryder truck and moved here.

Love is never perfect, but starting from that flash of love from the very start can let one (woman or man) know why they are in the relationship and let them survive the fiercest of storms. But it only works if one instinctively knows what one actually needs, rather than what one thinks one wants. A different matter altogether.