Breathless In the Bush: Alyssa James

Miranda's May Musings

Hello beautiful readers, welcome! I have a very serious question to ask this month: how big is your To Be Read pile? Ha, stop laughing... Is it like mine? Enormous? Even if I live to be eleventy billion years old I'll never finish. Such a thrilling dilemma.

Today fellow BITB blogger Alyssa J Montgomery and I went to a wonderful High Tea run by the Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA), and it was divine. Held in a beautiful boutique hotel in Sydney, there were three tables, each hosted by an author: Kandy Shepherd, Shannon Curtis, and my table's lovely hostess Avril Tremayne.

You know where this is going, don't you? Yes, more books! I don't care that I've got a trillion books at home (slight exaggeration only). I staggered home full of tea, scones, sandwiches and cake, with a bag of free books and divine swag (unicorn pen! tiara! chocolates!) from Avril. So now, deliciously, these books are on my TBR:

Photo credits: amazon.com

Here Comes the Bridesmaid is a beautiful hardback (isn't the cover sumptuously bridesmaid-y pink? I adore it!), and of course both books are signed by Avril. Swoon. Thankyou, Avril, thankyou.

...But wait, there's more. Our recent guest blogger Melanie Milburne was also at my table (read her recent column here). Congratulations Melanie on your 75th book (wow!). These are now on my TBR:

Photo credit: amazon.com

Somehow or other I missed getting a book from Kandy Shepherd. I love her sweet romances, they are gorgeous to read, and Kandy is the nicest person to meet and chat to. So I've pre-ordered her latest, which sounds right up my alley and has a divine wedding pic on the cover. I love it already.

Photo credit: amazon.com

I did get this book from Shannon Curtis, quite outside my normal genre picks, which will be interesting to read. Shannon suggested I read Lycan Unleashed first, to get the gist of the world building. Alrighty then.

Photo credit: amazon.com

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand there was more: some books by Penny Reid in the Knitting in the City series. And so many others to choose from - I honestly couldn't carry them all home, such a tragedy. Everyone staggered out from that High Tea with happy tummies and books spilling out of their arms, adding to their TBRs with gay abandon. Alyssa's bag was just as heavy as mine.

It is so, so, SO easy to add to the TBR, isn't it? Life is sweet! ...I'm off to read.

Until next time, my friends,

Love from Miranda xxx

Love to Love:

Free books! High teas! Meeting new authors and old friends! Thankyou ARRA.

Love to Laugh:

...at how dead easy it is to add to one's mountainous TBR. Awesome.

Love to Learn:

Has something fabulously wonderful like this happened to you? Free signed books poured your way? Or are you disciplined (unlike moi) and finish your TBR before you add more? (But seriously, does such a person even exist?!)

with guest blogger Alyssa James/Alyssa J. Montgomery

Thank you for having me on the Breathless in the Bush Blog!

I'm here as ALYSSA JAMES and ALYSSA J. MONTGOMERY. I write contemporary romance for Escape Publishing, but when I decided to pen Medieval romances I used different branding because the genres appeal to different audiences. The stories are vastly different, even though the goal is always to write a story which will engage and satisfy readers' emotions.

I aspired to write contemporary romance because I grew up reading them. My first Medieval romance evolved due to one imagined scene, which I knew wouldn't work in a contemporary romance. I was touring castles in Europe at the time, so the Medieval period appealed.

From that one scene, pivotal to the conflict between my hero and heroine, an exciting new world of writing opened up. Medieval life afforded few rights for women and the justice system hardly seemed just, enabling me to raise the stakes for my characters, force them into desperate situations, and test their morales in life and death scenarios. It's the stuff fairytales are made of. Enter the most heinous of villains, the strong heroine who must take action to save herself - and, of course, the even stronger hero who really does ride up on his charger to save the day!

The Medieval time frame lends itself to believable intrigue and plotting, murder and brutality that can engross the reader. In the second of my Medieval stories, the historical events of the time actually inspired the conflict and motivations of my characters.

I find historical research riveting. The challenge is making sure the historical details are right. I've struck gold because the lady who reviewed Knight of Her Heart for the UK Historical Novel Society enjoyed the story and offered to help with future research. She gave me a lovely review, but wrote privately and pointed our a few minor historical glitches, eg. King Henry V should have been referred to as Your Grace rather than Your Majesty. (That was corrected before the print version of the book was published!) When she read through Book 2 in the series, Knight of Her Dreams, she also found some errors: eg. the blade on the type of sword one of the characters wielded was too thick to fit between the joins of two pieces of armour. She recommended a different type of sword that would do the job. Problem fixed!

Because there's not a lot of research in my contemporary romances, I write them faster. I also don't have to worry about making the dialogue period friendly!

I currently have three contemporary romances in the works, and I fall asleep at night plotting the third Medieval story, Knight of Her Desire, scheduled for release December, 2016.

I wonder whether readers across the romance genre prefer different sub-genres for different times? For example, holiday reads VS mid-week or weekend reads? It would also be interesting to hear from authors who write in different sub-genres about what challenges they face.