by Mary Jo
Okay, last week was my turn to sit on a shady porch on a sunny island, reading and watching the waves roll in. This week is Pat’s turn, so I’m filling in for her. But while Pat invited you to a beach party with virtual drinks, good books, and buff beach boys, I’ll be doing some promo. Feel free to jump back to Pat’s post. <g>
I’ve had an unusual run of reissues in the months since we started the WordWenches—something like four if you include the Faery Magic anthology, which I most certainly do. Now it's five. Lady of Fortune is unusual in that it’s the only one of my books that has never been reissued, not even once. And it’s not a major release now—it’s coming out in a hardcover large print edition from Thorndike Press, so it will mostly show up in libraries.
But I’m happy that it is indeed available. Partly this is general authorly love for all our book children. Plus, the book is now available for completists who want to have copies of all my books. (If you’re interested, here’s the Books A Million URL: http://tinyurl.com/2wkh9x )
So what about the book itself? Lady of Fortune was my second book, so it has all the early Regencyisms of semi-omniscient points of view that are on display in The Diabolical Baron, my first book. (Which was reissued earlier this month in the Dangerous to Know compendium.) LoF was also written when Signet defined a Regency as anywhere from the French Revolution to 1830.
There were fewer rules in those days, and I had a very tolerant editor who didn’t mind that my book was set in the 1790s. I plunged in merrily—and ground to a screeching halt when I realized how little I knew about the French Revolution. The generalized knowledge I had wasn’t much use when it came to writing a book, so it was research time, and a good lesson in writing was learned. In all subsequent books, I've had a research phase before starting to write the actual story.
My heroine, Marie-Christine D'Estelle--Christa to her friends--is a young French countess who has taken refuge in Britain after losing her mother and brother as the family attempted to escape the Reign of Terror. Christa’s older half-brother was an English earl, so she is taken in by his uncle, the new earl. But when she comes out of mourning, she find that her step-uncle has a distinctly unavuncular interest in her, so she flees to London and finds work as a lady’s maid.
Annabelle, the young lady who hires her, happens to have a handsome naval captain brother called Alex, and any good romance reader can probably figure out roughly what happens from there. <G> But there’s a cast of thousands—scheming young social climbers, cowardly fops, temperamental French chefs, and so many secondary romances that an exasperated RWA contest judge told me that I didn’t have to pair off everyone.
Lady of Fortune is about as close to a romp as I’ve ever gotten. And the book was long. My 75,000 word Signet Regency was sent around 120K words. (You might have noticed that brevity is not one of my virtues.) I was trying to figure out how to cut a hundred plus pages when my beloved editor decided to put LoF into the new Signet SuperRegency program for books that were historical romance length but traditional Regency voice. So every one of my rambling sentences and redundancies is there, preserved for posterity. <G>
Incidentally, one of the launch SuperRegencies was Edith's wonderful Love in Disguise, the first in a terrific trilogy. I was in great company!
I didn’t like my original cover. The hero looked like a hunchbacked vampire and the couple are about to receive grievous injuries as they topple the bench over. No one had heard of me at that point, so the book didn’t sell well. It vanished into the ranks of Ghostly Books past. (Though I did send a faux galley version to a Wenchling who recently celebrated a Round Number Birthday.) Which is why I’m tickled that Lady of Fortune is available again. Authors love all of our children, after all! Even the clumsy, verbose ones.
If you’re still with me, I’ll make it worth your while by giving away a signed copy 
of the new large print hardcover. To qualify, leave a comment about this blog between now and Thursday night, midnight Pacific Coast time.
Mary Jo