Annie Burrows on meeting characters–or, how a writer’s mind works.

Is she his lost love?

With his dark, haunted eyes and forbidding expression, the menacing Lord Matthison has the reputation of the devil.  Living on the fringes of polite society, he has still to get over the death of his one true love seven years ago.  But Cora Montague’s body has never been found…

When he encounters a fragile looking woman, the image of his betrothed, working in a London dressmaker’s, he is convinced Cora is still alive.

And he will do whatever it takes to claim her!

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I first met Lord Matthison in a gaming hell when I was writing The Earl’s Untouched Bride (released by Harlequin in February 09).  I only wrote him as a lesson that my naïve heroine had to learn, but then he became much more than that.  I could not stop thinking about him.  He was such a dark, world-weary man.  How did he get like that?  And why was he so shocked when he hit a losing streak on the night he encountered the Countess of Walton?  I got so engrossed in his past, and his motivations for behaving as he did, that, as soon as I had finished my commitments to my publisher, I just had to give him his own story.

I soon realized that a man with such a dark reputation needed something exceptional to jolt him from the shadows that clung to him.  And it came in the form of Mary, a woman with only a sketchy memory of her past, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the woman with whom Lord Matthison fell in love in his youth.

The story that follows is a twist on The Sleeping Beauty.  Lord Matthison is convinced that he can hack his way through the thicket of thorns that surround Mary’s mind, and break the spell that holds her fast, with true love’s kiss.  But Mary is no docile, helpless female, waiting for some man to come rescue her.  She has had to make her own way in the world, and, though she accepts that she has limitations, she begins to think it is Lord Matthison who needs rescuing!  She cannot comprehend what makes such a handsome man cling to the ghost of a woman who is dead.  And why does he keep on insisting that she is Cora?

Yes, to her way of thinking, he is the one who needs to find a way to break the curse that has bound him for seven long years, and start to live again!

And then, during the course of writing this story, Lord Matthison did something that, I later realized, would have immense repercussions.

And that became a whole new story, centred on the daughter of a hopeless gambler, desperately trying to maintain her virtue, whilst keeping her father out of debtor’s prison…

It’s the way a writer’s mind works!

The story I’m writing about the gambler’s daughter I first met during Devilish Lord… has some parallels to Beauty and the Beast.  And I’ve already told you that Devilish Lord has overtones of Sleeping Beauty.  What is your favourite fairy tale?  Everyone who leaves a comment will be in with a chance to win a copy of Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss.

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Thank you for visiting Novel Thoughts, Ms Burrows!

You can learn more about Ms Burrows’ characters and the novels they appear in by visiting her website.

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