Done!

On Monday evening, I handed my wonderful editor my Christmas novella.  (I’ve seen a preliminary cover but haven’t gotten the go-ahead to share it yet–trust me, as soon as I can show everyone, I will be plastering it everywhere!)

This was the first thing that I’d written completely on contract.  I had a lot of worries about this particular novella.  It’s written as a prequel to my publishing debut, PROOF BY SEDUCTION, and there were just not a huge number of happily married characters from that book who I could work into a prequel.

In fact, there was only one character who was happily married–and that was my hero’s man of business, William White.  Mr. White was an interesting side character in the book.  He doesn’t get much time on-screen, but I always imagined him going back to his wife in the evenings and snickering at my hero, saying, “That man has money and power but HOLY MOTHER OF PEARL does he ever need to get laid.”  Even though William White is unflinchingly polite, as any servant must be, there is always that undercurrent of amusement in all of his dealings with his employer.

And so when my editor asked me to write a prequel, I began to wonder about William White.  Who was this man?  How did he get to be so self-assured?  Why did the extremely proper and stringent Marquess of Blakely hire a man just into his thirties to help run his massive estates?  And what kind of woman would be a good match for such a man?

My heroine just kind of appeared full-fledged, Athena-style.  She’s the one who told me that the hero of my novella was not, in fact, Mr. William White.  He was William Q. White–and I can’t wait until you find out what the “Q” stands for.

*snicker*

10 thoughts on “Done!”

  1. Wonderful! I thought White was a terrific character in PBS–surprisingly vivid. Now I will look forward to that Christmas novella even more eagerly.

  2. Thank you, Janga! I hope you like it (she says nervously). It’s kind of interesting to see how people react to it, depending on the order in which they read the book versus the novella.

  5. Quillius.
    Quick-yet-satisfying.
    Quirky.
    Quaint.
    Quinntessential. (Shortened to Quinn)
    Quite.
    Qimberly. (Hahaha… oh, that’s terrible…)
    Quit-While-You’re-Ahead.

    …I’ll take his advice.

    I better be able to get all this off amazon.co.jp…

  8. I love working class heroes (and heroines!). And if we’re talking fairy tales, I’ve always preferred Jackie Robinson to Prince William, anyway.

    You can keep guessing on the Q. I’m not telling! 😉

    K., I have no idea about amazon.co.jp–how does that work? My publisher has world rights, but who knows what they’ll do with it? Not me! In any event, I’ll be giving away a massive number of copies of the novella, and I’ll ship to Japan, so even if you can’t get a copy normally, you might win one!

  9. I dunno how it works either. Most of the books I want are available of amazon.co.jp, but it may take awhile longer for them to become available, or something to that effect.

    Quincy
    Quarter
    Queen
    Quiche
    Quibble
    Quezal

    My favorite part of guessing these random words is imagining the story behind how he got the middle name. Even though I have no idea who this person is, beyond a “Man of Business.”

Comments are closed.