It is my pleasure to report that from now until 1 March, the e-edition of A Duke in Shining Armor, the first book in the Difficult Dukes series, is on sale in the U.S. and Canada for $1.99.
I wrote this series in a disorderly fashion. Ripley’s story came first, and that was not a problem. The problem was that, practically from the beginning, I knew that (a) one of the dukes, Blackwood, was already married to Ripley’s sister, Alice, and (b) something was amiss in the marriage.
Making things difficult for myself is nowhere on my list of favorite things to do. But my brain has its own ideas about the stories, and since that brain has been in my skull my whole life, I have to work with it. So A Duke in Shining Armor came first, as it was intended to do. Then I planned to tell the Blackwoods’ story, because, after all, I had raised questions about them. But they weren’t ready for their closeup, so it was Ashmont and Cassandra next, in Ten Things I Hate About the Duke.
This did not make the third book any easier to write. In fact, it made the process hellishly difficult, with the additional aggravation of keeping track of who did what when, because even in fiction it’s a bad idea to have a character in two different places at the same time. Unless it is science fiction or fantasy, neither of which is in my skill set. And somewhere in all this mess came the writer’s block which, if you’ve been following this blog for a few years, you know all about.
It did finally dawn on me that what I didn’t want to write was a whole book about a troubled marriage. This is what led me to go back in time, to their courtship, and the fly they didn’t realize was in the ointment. This fly, which eluded me for ages, turned out to be an issue I ought to have pinned down right away. My brain knew all along, but as you have no doubt deduced, it chose not to let me in on the secret until it was good and ready. Still, it did all come together, as a sort of combined prequel and sequel, and the result, My Inconvenient Duke, made its debut in January.
I’m telling you all of this because a reader asked me why the third book starts before the first book, and I believed hers was a not unreasonable question. But my hope is that, wherever you start in the series; you start somewhere, and wherever you start, you have an agreeable reading experience. And if you’d like to start now—or lure a friend or family member or complete stranger into starting now—you can do it for the next few weeks at a bargain price.
