I’m so pleased to welcome romance author Laurie Alice Eakes this week. She let me ask her all manner of impertinent questions, and I get to share her new release, True as Fate . . .
What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?
I have spent anywhere from days, to years researching a book. Yes, I said years. My American-set midwife series—three historicals and one contemporary—was just an insane amount of research from reading original documents published in the seventeenth century and imported through Interlibrary Loan from Great Britain, to talking to midwives practicing in the field today. I wanted to write the series, but just had to read one more diary or something until I was ready. Once I was ready, the books just flowed from my fingertips.
I did a great deal of research for My Enemy, My Heart and True as Fate also, for the entire Ashford series. Probably enough to add up to years. I needed to know about ships and went sailing on a tall ship, about prisoners of war in England, about noncombatant prisoners like women captured, and the everyday Regency stuff, which I will never know enough of.
How do you select the names of your characters?
I torture myself over names. Sometimes I write entire scenes of the book and end up changing the names. I try to make them appropriate to the time period, and yet appropriate to the character as well. Oddly, though, with True as Fate, I always knew the names of the main characters. The only ones that changed were those of two secondary characters.
What was your hardest scene to write?
I’ve pondered this question for quite a while and think the most difficult scene was about three-fourths of the way through when they both have reason to believe the other is acting in bad faith. They are literally locked in a room together, desperately hurt in an emotional way, desperately angry, and desperately in love. I wanted to get this all across without going over the top or letting the tension drop too soon. Just remembering writing that scene makes my breathing quicken with remembered tension of my own.
What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?
I went to grad school for writing popular fiction. That taught me how to discipline my writing, how to analyze it for ridiculousness and stupidity—as much as anyone can do for their own work—and be disciplined about my process. I could come up with ideas, but struggled to turn them into actual novels. We had to write a thesis novel. When I started, I had a vague idea and a setting and little else. No wonder my first line of True as Fate, the thesis novel was:
Seventeen miles of barren moorland lay between Ross Trenerry and freedom.
I thought I would never get through it, but True as Fate is published next week.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between them?
I am hoping to build a world around my current series, The Ashford Chronicles. Once upon a time, I wrote the prequel to the first book in the series, My Enemy, My Heart. That prequel is Georgian, though, and no one wanted Georgian, not set during the American Revolution, despite the story primarily taking place in England. So I started on the Regency era books. I have two published; True as Fate releases June 6, and the third comes out this autumn. I want to continue the series and would love to incorporate these characters as secondaries in other series. I’m quite attached to all of them.
Tell us something about your new release that is NOT in the blurb.
My hero, Ross Trenerry, is an angry and bitter man. He isn’t unkind because of it: he’s just hard and distrustful. His life has been pretty rough, from his family disowning him, to going to a British prison—not fun—then a worse prison, then his own country turning on him despite what he did for it during the war. He is out for blood, or at least revenge, not knowing that Chloe, our heroine, is one of the people who has done him the most harm.
Yes, I love to torture my characters.
Lady Chloe Ashford detests going to balls, loathes social pretense, and finds the very idea of hunting for a husband obscene. But she has an even more scandalous secret: she once helped an American—the enemy—escape from Dartmoor Prison. Now, nearly three years later, Ross Trenerry is back—and in trouble again. So is her traitorous heart. He doesn’t know she’s the one responsible for sending him to a second prison, and she has no intention of telling him.
A former privateer, Ross has finally run out of his legendary luck. Only one woman lies between him and freedom. He desperately needs Chloe’s help to prove he hasn’t committed treason, but he’s distracted by the passion that flares between them.
They set out on a cross-country adventure together to prove Ross’s innocence, but peril soon dogs their heels. As they race to reach their appointed rendezvous on time, they must fight their growing attraction and focus on discovering who is behind this deadly plot. Will they finally admit their love and put the pieces together before it’s too late?
About Laurie Alice Eakes
“Eakes has a charming way of making her novels come to life without being over the top,” writes Romantic Times of bestselling, award-winning author Laurie Alice Eakes. As a child, Eakes began to tell herself stories. Since then, she has fulfilled her dream of becoming a published author, with more than two dozen books in print. Accolades for Eakes’s books including winning the National Readers Choice Award and Rita finalist status.
She has recently relocated to a cold climate because she is weird enough to like snow and icy lake water. When she isn’t basking in the glory of being cold, she likes to read, visit museums, and take long walks, preferably with her husband, though the cats make her feel guilty every time she leaves the house.
You can read more about Eakes and her books, as well as contact her, by clicking the links below.
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