What about Lady Clara?

1835-08 Promenade-detail-LMM-001.jpg

Readers have asked about Lady Clara, who has played a secondary role in my Dressmakers series.

Will she get her own story?

Will she get her happily ever after?

Originally, I'd imagined her story working out over the course of the series.  But the number of enquiries about her future has indicated that this might not be sufficient. Her own book or at least a novella would be sufficient.

Since it takes almost as long to write a novella as it does to write a whole book, I think she's going to get a whole book.  It's going to take some thinking.  But there's time for that.

Right now, I'm still working on Leonie's story.

2013?  I think that will be Lady Clara's year.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Dickens

 The illustration of a young Charles Dickens (about age 30 if the info is correct), is from Wikipedia—and quite a different look from the more familiar portraits of his older self.

 The illustration of a young Charles Dickens (about age 30 if the info is correct), is from Wikipedia—and quite a different look from the more familiar portraits of his older self.

Today, 7 February, is Charles Dickens's 200th birthday.  He was and continues to be my inspiration.  Every year I reread at least one of his books, for the sheer fun of it as well as the re-setting of impossibly high standards.  No matter how many times I reread his stories, I always discover something new.  This was a writer who could give a chair a personality. 

He inspired my love of English history and taught me to love a city I'd never seen—London—and set off that writer's itch that keeps me going and enriches my travels and makes me endlessly curious about the past, especially the world he grew up in and lived in and wrote about.

I am not sure I would have written a single novel, if not for him.

Thank you, Mr. Dickens, for all you've given us & all you've given me.

And a very Happy Birthday to you, wherever you are.