(These are Elizabeth's personal notes related to this book. They're designed to be interesting to people who have already read the book, and may contain spoilers for those who haven't. So please finish first!)
It turns out that you're not supposed to write romances about Russia because nobody buys them. I guess that's a good reason not write one .. If you have a lot of common sense. But to someone like me, it seemed like a great idea.
I thought it would be a terrific romantic setting, what with the palaces and the beautiful fashions. Of course, most people weren't members of the aristocracy - most people were poor. So I didn't want to paint a lopsided picture of what life really would have been like there. So I used the book to show both sides of the spectrum. The heroine starts off as a peasant with no prospects. And then I thought it would be fun to have her swept into the world of the aristocrats so she (and we) could get a glimpse of life "up there".
My interest in historical settings is usually sort of cultural. I don't get too excited about exploring the details of a period's hairstyles etc. I usually prefer to explore how it FELT to live in a certain place at a certain time. What you'd really be thinking and feeling if you woke every morning and found yourself there. That's the kind of historical feel I usually give my books, including this one. I don't usually spend a lot of time trying to answer questions like, "What exactly was the proper way to bow in greeting?" I tend to put a lot of emphasis on big picture issues and answer questions like, "How did the world look and feel to people standing in that historical spot?" So I liked the idea of giving romance readers a glimpse of old-style Russia and letting them feel the atmosphere.
I learned a nice useless skill while writing this book. In the beginning, when she's poor, my heroine picks locks and robs for a living. To write her, I had to gain some basic understanding of 19th century locks and how to open them. One of my heroes in life, Harry Houdini was very helpful in this matter. He's kind of you know . dead . but still, he was incredibly helpful! He left behind some books, lucky for me, which gave fairly detailed accounts of how to open the locks and bolts of his time. So watch out if you're relying on 19th century locks to protect your valuables - I learned how to use picks and I can spring some of them now!
Now as for the hero, from what I can tell, most people either loved or hated Erich. He was a very intense character, and so I wrote him that way. People who go for the strong, silent type really liked him. At a book signing, I talked to a woman who blushed and couldn't say anything more than, "He did it for me." I thought that was cute! But others thought he was incredibly disturbing. Just because he occasionally kills someone in cold blood and then goes back to sleep, I guess. Go figure. Or maybe it's the way he sometimes likes to draw his own blood when he makes love. Gee, there's just no accounting for what some people will find disturbing. He-he. I thought he was sexy. And of course, he was a really good match for the chatterbox heroine who needed an anchor, who needed someone to be her rock in life.
An interesting note about this book: I seem to have two kinds of fans. One kind is sort of casual . the sort who write me notes that say, "Hey, I like your books. Can I have your autograph?" With these people, I'm usually just on a long list of authors they like OK, and probably someone more famous is in their number 1 or number 2 slot. Hey, I'm not knocking it! I' ll take all the fans I can get!
But then I also have this small group of hardcore fans who like me because my books sort of break away from the romance norm. They write me letters like, "Give 'em hell, girl. Your books are THE BEST!!!"
I can never think of anything to say, and usually wind up asking something lame like, "Which one's your favorite?"
Well, whenever I ask a casual fan that, she usually says "My Lady Pirate", though the answer can vary. But whenever I ask one of my wonderful diehard fans what her favorite book is, the answer is almost always the same: Now and Forever. I don't know what that means!
This was my first published romance, and you can really tell how young I was (25). I was just having so much fun, telling jokes, writing the sexiest love scenes I could get away with. I didn't really think it would get published, so I didn't write it very cautiously. I made some "bloopers" that you can find if you read it carefully. I also made some setting and history mistakes. And you know what? It really doesn't matter. I think the book is fun because it's so raw. The jokes are funnier because I wasn't thinking about them - I was just letting them roll onto the keyboard. The scenes of passion are seriously hot .. Because I never thought anyone would be reading them! So I made them as wild as I wanted. There was just no self-consciousness in this book - nothing but fun.
But I have to tell you about my first bad "critic experience", because it happened with this book. I was really young and excited about the whole publishing experience - seeing my name on the book, signing copies, telling all my friends. It was like going to a ball or something. I 'd been paid almost nothing for this book, so it was the honor of it that made it such a thrill .. . Until someone wrote a review that said I'm terrible. I remember shaking a little when I read it. All the thrill of having my first book published just kind of melted around me and suddenly .. I just wasn't having so much fun anymore.
You have to remember - I was 26 by then - not a kid, but .. Not really mature enough yet to handle being publicly mocked. We're not talking about a critical review here. We're talking about cruelty. An absolute panning. And I thought, you know, maybe I should take up a line of work where people don't come by and say, "By the way - you stink" every now and then. This is ridiculous. And I looked at my book, which I'd been so proud of only ten minutes before, and was suddenly embarrassed by it. Someone I didn't know had gone out of her way to tell the world that I have no talent and that my book was worthless. Someone I didn't even know.
Days later, I received my first fan email. OK, so she wasn't a "reviewer", so maybe her opinion didn't count! She was just a regular person like I was. But she loved my book. She said it was the best romance she had ever read. Ever read! And I remember thinking, "Is this my brother playing a joke on me? Is this a friend of mine trying to cheer me up? Who is this really?" But she was the real thing. A real fan. My first one. And I can 't tell you how it cheered me to hear from her!
It was a really puzzling experience. How could my book be so horrible to one person and the "best romance I've ever read" to someone else? Well, I guess that was an important lesson. You have to choose whether you're going to try to be liked by everyone ... Or whether you're going to write something that's worthy of both love and hate.
I chose the second one and I'm sticking to it!
I think Precious Passion is a riot - I still crack myself up when I read it. It may not be perfect, but I think it's a terrifically fun read.
I now keep a painting in my home office of Aurora, the heroine. I don't think the artist intended it to be Aurora, but it looks just like her, so I had to buy the painting. She is, after all, the heroine who got me published!
Pirate romances were my first exposure to romance novels. So I wanted to write a tribute to them, and at the same time, I wanted to make it my own. I mean, why write a book that's already been written a thousand times?
The first thing I did differently in this book was I gave the pirates a point of view as a "class of people". Instead of just making them chaotic swashbucklers, I talked about where they had really come from in life and how they really saw the world. I also gave them an historically accurate daily life, even studied what they would really have for breakfast! And I didn't include any of the old "pirate myths".
There's a lot of false history on pirates out there. Some of the myths were actually planted intentionally when governments sought to pass anti-pirating laws and wanted to gain public support for them. They put out a lot of gory stories about things pirates do, which in some cases were completely made up. Unfortunately, many of the myths still make routine appearances in fiction. But not in this book. I was pretty careful about which portraits of pirate life were verifiable and which ones were just universally accepted myths. As a result, even though this book is mainly just a tale of romance and I'm never one to get bogged down in a lot of slow detail, this is actually a pretty good account of pirate life. Not perfect - not a straight history lesson. But it should be a better than average account.
Something I did which ticked some people off, (But I'm standing by it!) is I translated all of the Portuguese dialog into 20th Century American English, rather than Victorian. I did this to bring the pirates closer to our own lives. I wanted to show that from their point of view, everything they said was in casual, everyday speak. So I put it in OUR casual, everyday speech so we could feel the connotations and really catch their meanings. Unfortunately, some people thought this meant I didn't know how people really spoke in the 1700s. Well, yes I did. In this case, they spoke Portuguese. So one way or another, the dialog had to be translated. I chose modern English instead of Victorian English - neither would have been historically accurate. Only Portuguese would have been historically accurate.
The heroine in this book was kind of like a romance novel herself. She was gentle, kind-hearted, a little dreamy, and just a little scared of the real world.
The hero was a cynic and a womanizer who didn't trust romance until he looked it in the eye..until he looked into the heroine's eyes.
I wrote this book as a fable. Some of my other books feel more real, like this is really happening. But this book, at least to me, feels more like a fairy tale with a lot of grown-up messages. I tried to write it in the style of a legend. A romantic parable with a lot of laughs and sexiness. That's what I tried to do.