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Welcome to our New Faces column, where we are delighted to introduce debut romance authors to our readers. This time we're visiting with Meredith Duran, whose first historical romance is Duke of Shadows, a Pocket Books release.
Meredith, welcome to TRR! Tell us about yourself. I was raised in the Bay Area, California, but my mother's family is southern, so we spent our summers in Alabama. Everyone in my family has a keen appreciation for the art of the road trip, so we took some pretty roundabout paths during those marathon drives to my grandparents' house. By the time I was fourteen, I think I'd seen every state but North Dakota, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Alaska! (Yes: believe it or not, we managed to work Maine into the route. Straight lines, sensible routes we acknowledged no such things!) As a result, I grew up with a fondness for black-eyed peas and long-haul travel. Which segues well into the next question… Are you coming to romance writing from another job?
I'm a Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology. I work in India, so I get all the long-haul travel I could possibly want! What led you to write romance?
I've always thought of myself as a writer, although at four, I fancied myself a poet first and foremost (and bless my mom's heart for so patiently transcribing the rhymes I would dictate to her; I'm quite sure she had other things to do!). Romance came into the picture when, at the age of thirteen, I randomly came across a Judith McNaught novel. At the time, I was in the fledgling throes of two mighty obsessions: English history and historical fiction. Immediately I fell in love with the genre. Here, it seemed to me, was everything I'd been looking for in historical fiction: the everyday details of how people lived, the clothes they wore, the foods they ate, how they traveled, the bizarre expressions they used (what was this "my lord" thing about? I was clueless). It seemed so much more interesting than dehumanized chronicles about epic battles and regime changes! From the time I was thirteen, then, I knew I wanted to write romance as well as read it. Flash-forward sixteen years… Tell us about your road to publication. There are a bunch of unpublished novel-length manuscripts in my closet. The first I wrote when I was fourteen; needless to say, it will never be trotted out for public inspection. Right after college, while teaching at a high school in the Bay Area, I wrote a novel I thought was good enough to submit; I landed an agent for it, but he couldn't sell it. This was a bit dispiriting. Off to grad school I went, where all the social theory and kinship charts ate my brain for a bit. Heh. This was actually an unnerving time for me. For a bit, it seemed as if the rigor of the academic program had drained me of the urge to write. Without that urge, I genuinely felt unsure of who I was as a person. When it began to resurface, I cannot tell you how grateful I was to the universe at large. How I got published is a much shorter story. I had a manuscript sitting about in the proverbial (in fact, electronic) closet. The first half was set in India, which hadn't excited much interest from the brief list of agents I'd queried. I'd pretty much forgotten about it, and it was my sister who dug it out last summer, read it, and really liked it. She began to harass me about trying to sell it. As a result, it was on my mind last August, when one night I was surfing around on the web and found out that Pocket Books, Borders, and Gather.com were holding a contest for unpublished romance authors. Well, I had that manuscript lying around, didn't I? And Shel had liked it. Why not submit it? What was there to lose? I was astonished speechless beyond words truly stunned, incoherent, shocked in the "My skin has gone numb; I am reduced to monosyllables; this isn't really happening" sort of way when Lauren McKenna from Pocket Books called me to tell me I'd won, and that The Duke of Shadows would be published by Pocket in 2008. What kind of research was involved for your first book? The short of it: I spent a lot of time poking around the library stacks, grabbing up musty books last checked out in the 1920s and it was amazingly fun. The long of it: The latter half of The Duke of Shadows is set in London in 1861, and I discovered that my university library has a much-underutilized collection of firsthand sources about the period (etiquette manuals, travelers' accounts, guidebooks, contemporary diaries and novels). As for the first half of the story it unfolds in British India, during the uprising of 1857. Luckily, for the past ten years or so, I've been collecting books about the events of that momentous year. I've always been fascinated by British colonial history, and I've always wished that more historical romances would touch on this angle. Researching "Anglo Indian" society (so they called it) was fascinating, and I often found myself surprised by what I turned up. For instance: one source I found mentioned that British Indians imported ice from Wenham Lake in the United States! Seeing as the Himalayas were a tad bit closer, and chockfull of ice, that one still makes no sense to me. Tell us about your debut book. 1857 -- Having survived the shipwreck that killed her parents, Emmaline Martin is determined to fulfill their final dream for her: marriage to the man they chose, and a comfortable life with him in Delhi's Anglo-Indian society. But as the city trembles beneath a growing unrest, and her fiancé's callousness turns to brutality, she finds herself increasingly drawn to his cousin, Julian, the enigmatic and controversial Marquess of Holdensmoor. When revolution sweeps across India, bringing violence and destruction for British and Indian alike, it is Julian who sweeps her to safety in the city-state of Sapnagar. In this enchanted desert kingdom, romance blossoms between Emma and Julian. When he is called back to Delhi to negotiate a peace, he swears that he will come back for her. But in the wake of his departure comes a tragedy that no one could have foreseen… leaving Julian convinced that Emma is dead, and Emma too numb to care. 1860 -- Emma's paintings of the Mutiny have created a furor in London, making her artistic pseudonym, Aurora Ashdown, the talk of the town. When, on the night of his betrothal to another woman, Julian discovers that these scenes from his private nightmares have been painted by the woman he thought long dead, his world is overturned. Emma tells herself she wants nothing to do with the man who abandoned her when she needed him most. Julian, knowing better than she of the darkness that now possesses him, forces himself to stay away. But when someone tries to kill Emma, it becomes clear that buried in her paintings is the key to one of the greatest crimes committed during the Mutiny of 1857—and that they must work together to unravel the mystery before the villain silences them both. As they are forced to confront the past they so unwillingly share, Julian and Emma learn that the only thing more difficult than solving the crime is the task of resisting their attraction to each other... Who are your influences as a writer? When it comes to historical romance, my heroines are Judith Ivory, Laura Kinsale, and Loretta Chase. Patricia Gaffney's Wyckerley trilogy is also a set of books I turn to again and again. What does your family think of having a published romance author in their midst? They're incredibly happy for me. They know how long I've wanted this! However, I hear a rumor that my mom dog-ears all the naughty bits so my dad can skip past them when he's reading something that amuses me to no end. Since I try to make the sex scenes integral to the plot, I expect he must be rather confused at times… heh! Tell us about plans for future books. I'm delighted to say that my next two historical romances for Pocket will be hitting the shelves near you in summer 2009. How can readers get in touch with you? I would be thrilled to hear from readers! I can be reached through my website, at meredithduran.com.
Meredith, thanks for joining us, and best of luck with your next books! Readers, we have a review of Duke of Shadows here at TRR.June 8, 2008 |
