The following interview is intended to give readers a greater insight into what motivates certain storytelling decisions, what goes into constructing a story, and what challenges I've faced along the way.

Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue Interview 30th August, 2011

It's been a long time since we've seen the Cynster girls. What sent you back to do their stories?

Their stories were always destined to be told - when was always the issue. I had an insistent feeling that I had to wait - I explained it at the time as waiting for them to grow up, and in part it was that. I needed to let them evolve in my head to the point where their characters had matured enough for me to see them as adults instead of the girl-children they were in, for instance, Devil's Bride. Without having mature characters to work with, it was very difficult to foresee what sort of hero they'd have to play against them. In short, their characters had to come first - without that, I couldn't see the rest, the details of their heros or their stories. And then, suddenly, the time had come, and I knew who Heather, the eldest's, hero was, and then Eliza's, and lastly Angelica's. Once I had the first story - Heather's - then the other two rolled on from that, the concept of the trilogy was born, and I was ready to write.

In your last set of works, the Black Cobra Quartet, the four stories ran largely concurrently - quite a difference to the sequential stories of most standard trilogies or quartets. All your previous Cynster stories were connected by characters and set at a specific date, but weren't connected via the storyline. But this trilogy is different from all the above.

Yes, it is - while we have three, distinct and complete in themselves romances, the three books form a true trilogy in that there's one overarching storyline, not the romances but a different storyline, that runs through the three books. That storyline starts in the Prologue of the first book and ends in the Epilogue of the third book. In between, however, as with all my books, you get three romances, and each book can be read on its own and the reader will get the full romance story experience. However, as with the Black Cobra Quartet, to get the full impact of the overarching story, you will need to read all the books in the trilogy. I am aware that some romance readers grumble and "demand" that every last thread in every story is tied off and completed, all revealed, in every individual book, but frankly, if you read or wrote nothing but such books, life would be boring - I make no apologies for every now and then doing something different. Trying something new makes life interesting. I believe the majority of readers appreciate something a touch different and interesting, as long as they get their romance as well - that certainly seems to have been borne out by the response to the different structure of the Black Cobra Quartet.

Were there any special challenges in plotting this trilogy?

Whenever you are working with more than one book, there's an additional challenge in scripting the overarching storyline. However, working with a set of three, consecutive-in-time - meaning running directly one after the other in time - books for this trilogy was a lot, lot easier than the work involved in scripting and working with the concurrent villains' storyline in the Black Cobra Quartet. That was a real headache, and not something I'll soon do again! In comparison, the trilogy was relatively easy, although of course more work than three entirely separate books. In the case of the overarching story in this trilogy, the principal decision to be made in progressing through the books is how much to reveal in each book - however, there is, of course, a twist to the tale, as there so often is in my books! - and that, I've discovered, imposes additional demands on how much must be revealed of that overarching story earlier rather than later.

Most of the action in the trilogy occurs in Scotland. Why Scotland?

That's one of those questions that I really don't have an answer for - I just always knew that Heather and her hero ended up with Richard and Catriona, their family and household, at the manor in the Vale of Casphairn. That was one of those "story" things that simply always was - I had no idea how they got up there, or why. I just knew that's where they ended up. Later in the interview I'll touch on how that "story fact" for want of a better term played into the rest of the story that unfolds in Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue.

How did the "searching for a hero" concept come about?

This was one of the earliest elements of the trilogy to become clear to me - from the time I wrote the Cynster twins' stories, On A Wild Night and On A Wicked Dawn, way back in 2001, I knew that this - actively searching for their hero - was what would motivate Heather and Eliza especially in proactively initiating their stories. As younger girls, schoolgirls at that time, they saw their older cousins, Amanda and Amelia, go out and seek their heros, both stepping beyond the accepted social lines to do it, and saw them succeed in every respect. After that, of course Heather and Eliza would have similar hero-standards, and once they failed to find their heros in the obvious places, neither would hesitate to look beyond polite circles for their man. From that background, I knew that they would actively do something that would precipitate the action - they would be actively searching for their hero, would do something, go somewhere, and that would lead them to him, albeit in ways neither of them anticipate.

You've described these three books as: 1) Errol Flynn rescues Jane Austen in the wilds of Scotland; 2) Errol Flynn rescues Jane Austen in the wilds of Scotland; and 3) Jane Austen rescues Errol Flynn in the Scottish highlands. Why those descriptions?

As authors we are often asked to describe our books - the essence of our stories. As all my heros have a certain swashbuckling charisma, Errol Flynn - or more accurately the heros he depicted on the screen - is in many ways the epitome of the type, so "Errol Flynn" becomes a shorthand way of referring to that sort of male character. My heroines, are, likewise, more like Jane Austen's characters than Jane herself, but again it's the same shorthand way of evoking that concept. As for the "wilds of Scotland" versus the "Scottish highlands" that's literally correct - the first two books have the heros and heroines unexpectedly and unintentionally exploring two different, wild and rugged areas of the lowlands of Scotland, while the third book takes place primarily in the Scottish highlands.

It's been quite some time since we've seen abducted heroines, yet it is a classic historical romance plot. What prompted you to return to it?

That came about because of another of those muselike flashes of story - like knowing that Heather and her hero end up in the Vale of Casphairn. A few years ago, I "saw" - basically simply knew - that Heather's hero was Breckenridge, and the way their story started was that Heather - taking her first step to actively search for her hero outside the ballrooms of the ton - was seen by Breckenridge, and he essentially evicts her from a "soiree" she shouldn't be attending. She gets on her highhorse, of course, and miffed, marches off down the street to her carriage…but is kidnapped along the way, right under Breckenridge's nose. I didn't need to see anything more to know he would of course race after her…and from that initial scene, the rest of their story unfolded. It also gave me the overarching story, because who on earth would kidnap Heather, and why? That single flash of story more or less gave me the whole trilogy - from that point, all the rest followed.

Were there any special challenges in working with such a classic romance concept?

Not really. I didn't use an abduction plot because it was a classic plot - I don't come at my stories that way, by deciding what sort of story I'm going to write and then making my characters up to fit. Instead, as noted in the last several responses, my stories arise organically from the characters I already have, and their already existing backgrounds. The instant I had that kidnap scene with Breckenridge looking on, I knew how and why it was perfect for those two characters. I suspect if it hadn't been the perfect initiating event for those two characters' romance, it wouldn't have occurred to me in the first place, but once it had, it became an integral part of the overarching story plot - which is the reason behind, and what drives, the abduction. Therefore, in regard to the question, as the abduction plot is driven by the overarching plot - and therefore doesn't just "happen" - and also strongly affects and impinges on the hero and heroine, who then react and take the plot and run - meaning because they are not passive but very proactive characters, they react, act, and affect the outcome of the abduction in major ways - then the "classic" plot is transformed into a novel, different experience that's very personal to these two characters, and is therefore fresh and different to any other "classic abduction plot" ever written. These three books, each of the books in the trilogy, are examples of how a "classic" plot is transformed and made fresh by the characters involved.

The fact that with modern historical romances it is the characters that determine the story, not the plot, is wonderfully clearly illustrated in the two anthologies It Happened One Night and It Happened One Season, in each of which four authors take one plot, and generate four utterly different novellas by putting their own characters into-and therefore their own spin on-that single plot.

In this first book of the trilogy, Gretna Green is a featured spot, one in which the characters spend quite a bit of time, yet there is no wedding over the anvil.

No, indeed. Again, Gretna Green was a serendipitous fact - there were numerous logistical story reasons why the traveling abduction party had to stop at that point in Scotland, just over the border with England. It just so happened that that spot on the map was in fact Gretna Green. So the blacksmith's forge, which incidentally still stands, and its famous anvil, play a part in the overarching story, and lend a certain sinister tension to the by then evolving romance between the hero and heroine, neither of whom is at all happy about the abduction party halting and waiting at an inn across the road from the blacksmith's forge for the to them unknown man behind the abduction to arrive. The relevant facts about marriages performed over the anvil in the blacksmith's forge at Gretna Green were a) that the woman could be much younger than allowed in England, and did not need her parents' or guardians' permission to marry, just as long as she freely agreed to the wedding, and b) that such marriages were legally binding in England as well as Scotland. So in this case, rather than Gretna Green being a destination our lovers look upon as a romantic place, because of the story, it's transformed into a threat - a bit of a twist.

In the first section of this book, the abducted heroine is being driven north in a coach, which stops at various small towns and villages. How do you work out which villages to use?

Determining the speed of a private coach-and-four, driven under various conditions along the highways of England in 1829, was a point I had to research thoroughly for this trilogy. I eventually found sufficient references from that time to be certain of the likely speeds of travel. From that I worked out how far the kidnappers' coach in the first book would go each day. I then spent quite a bit of time poring over old maps to determine exactly which towns the kidnappers, who wanted to avoid notice and therefore wanted to stop in small, out-of-the-way hostelries, would have used. Once I had the likely small towns and villages, I use the internet and satellite maps to drop in on the main streets and check the age of the buildings. England being England, in small villages I can often find inns and taverns that, from their architecture and construction, I can tell would have been there in 1829. That said, I don't use the same names for the hotels unless those names appear in the historical record for that period.

In this first book of the trilogy, we meet a past hero and heroine, and catch up with their lives, and their now established family. Was it part of your original concept to revisit a previous hero and heroine?

As mentioned earlier, I knew from the first that Heather and her hero ended up with Richard and Catriona in Scotland-presumably because Richard, Catriona, and their family and household had some role to play in the story. I tend to initially assume that it's just as background, a need to catch up as it were, and any actual role in the action will be incidental, but once I was in the throes of writing the story, I discovered - as I often do - that the real reason the hero and heroine are with Richard and Catriona and company is far more intrinsic amd important to the story. As it transpired, many of the primary characters in the Vale had active roles to play, and for three of them - Catriona, and her eldest children, the twins Lucilla and Marcus - their roles were absolutely vital to the story in this book, and also to a contuing theme that will continue over all the Cynster girls' books to come. That last was one of those lovely aha! moments in story evolution that authors live for.