May 9, 2008

It’s the RNA Summer Party next week and (sob) I’ll be handing back my New Writers Award to one of the five contenders. I wish them all the best of luck and I know they’ll have a fantastic evening.

However, I do know one of them, Elizabeth Hanbury. She’s the third person from my North &South messageboard to make it into print and she did it via the New Writers Scheme. Here’s her call story.

Hi there everyone,

Elizabeth Hanbury here *waves* Phillipa has kindly asked me to guest blog with my call story for my regency romance, The Paradise Will, so here it is….

I’ve always been fascinated by the regency period as it was a time of paradox; the exquisite taste, elegant manners and honourable code of the time ran alongside vulgarity, gambling and a penchant for excess in all things. Rakes and courtesans lived alongside (and often collided with) an exclusive ‘polite’ society.

Plenty of good material for fiction there then (!) and unsurprisingly, I chose to write regency romance. I began writing short stories in my limited spare time before deciding to try a full length novel. This proved to be a much tougher proposition. I dashed off five chapters, promptly ran out of steam and left it untouched for months! Eventually I returned to the manuscript and planned the rest of the story. Doing so helped me to persevere and work through to the end; I felt compelled to give the characters I had created a fitting conclusion. The story completed, it then gathered dust at the back of a drawer for a couple of years….until the advent of a BBC drama called North and South in the autumn of 2004. What’s the connection between my regency romance manuscript and the BBC adaptation of a victorian novel? Let me explain.

North and South, and particularly Richard Armitage, the actor who played Gaskell’s hero John Thornton, caused something of a stir in cyber space and when it aired on TV. A group of ladies - Phillipa, Rosy Thornton and myself among them – found our way to the BBC drama messageboard, looking for information on North and South and Richard Armitage. Such was the demand we were given our own N&S messageboard. When the BBC decided to close it in the spring of 2005 (and Richard Armitage posted a message which sent the BBC board into meltdown!), many of us moved to C19, a messageboard set up to discuss N&S,19th literature and many other subjects as well.

Our new playground was great fun! Friendships, both cyber and real life, sprang up and continue today. We could post after 10.00 pm, upload images and – hurrah – fiction and fanfiction for other C19 members to read. I was amazed by the quality of the fiction on offer. It was brilliant and the clamour for N&S fanfiction was, naturally, loudest of all.

Another corner of the board was devoted to Georgette Heyer, the queen of regency fiction and, being a Heyer fan since my teens, I joined in the discussions. When I mentioned that I had written a regency romance, some members asked if I would share it. Feedback was extremely positive and their encouragement led me to begin work on two further regency romances, one of which was The Paradise Will.

I joined the New Writers Scheme of the Romantic Novelists Association in 2007 and revised The Paradise Will manuscript using the feedback from the scheme. Robert Hale Ltd., an independent London publishing house, accepted it in October 2007 and The Paradise Will was published on 30th April 2008. I’m also pleased to say The Paradise Will is a contender for the RNA 2008 Joan Hessayon New Writers Award.

It feels surreal – yet totally wonderful – to be a published author and it’s all because of C19, North and South and a certain actor called Richard Armitage, whose memorable portrayal of John Thornton was the original catalyst..