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(Pro: I’ve signed a contract so I have to. We made pros and cons lists for writing it. She sat me down for a session to talk through whatever the issue was. I gouged out twenty thousand miserable words by sheer bloody-mindedness, and by the point I stalled for good I was considering faking my own death.Īs it happens we were at my parents’ house for half term, and my mum has a sideline as a careers coach.

I hated every word I wrote including ‘and’ and ‘the’ (as Dorothy Parker nearly said).

Shenanigans ensue including two intertwined crime plots, and a lot of bonking. This sets off the romance whereby the self-righteous firebrand needs to loosen up while the self-centred bookseller has to rediscover his moral centre. Our hero goes to a crusading lawyer he used to know, hoping to dump the problem on his lap. The brother dies leaving a collection of dirty photos, a suspiciously large number of which depict rent boys who have been murdered. The premise of book 1 was that one hero is an earl’s bastard, who works as a pornographic bookseller. Set in the 1870s, among the dubious, the déclassé, and the dishonest, The Other Victorians is a romance trilogy about high birth, low life, inheritance, family secrets, blackmail, betrayal, deception, murder, the love that dare not speak its name, and the love that speaks its name very clearly indeed from inside plain brown wrappers.Ī pornographer ­­­­­and a left-wing lawyer join forces to investigate murder in London’s gay underworld…Ī fraudulent psychic and a sceptical journalist get tangled up in the search for a deadly family secret…Īnd a music-hall trapeze artist becomes the unwilling heir to an earldom–if a private enquiry agent can keep him alive long enough to claim it…

My working name was “The Other Victorians”, based on Steven Marcus’s landmark study of Victorian pornography. It would be Victorian London and it would focus on the people who don’t normally get romance novels-not just in terms of sexuality, gender and race but also class and occupation. Some time ago, I came up with an idea for a romance trilogy.

It’s for anyone who’s ever got 20K words into a project and thought, “…oh shit”, aka most writers. This is a post about the genesis, exodus, and resurrection of a book.