Trivia
Celine, Ciara, Avril…I really didn’t name all the heroines in this series after pop stars. Honestly, I didn’t. (Only one of them was named after a pop star, but it wasn’t Ciara. You can find out which one in the “Making of” features in Forever His and Timeless.)
Actually, I had an unusually hard time naming the heroine of this book. She was just “princess” in the first drafts. Then she was Chantal for a while, but that didn’t work. I tried Allegra, Juliana, Gwyndolen, Carina, Kassia, Gianna…nothing seemed to fit her.
In the end, I named her after a perfume. I saw an ad in a magazine that showed a woman wrapped in a fur throw, wearing nothing but Ciara perfume. The image and the name suited my heroine perfectly. Still, I hesitated because a secondary character in Forever His is named Fiara, and I didn’t want to create confusion. In the end, I decided to just go for it. Ciara fit my princess better than any other name I had considered.
World-famous pop star Ciara was still an unknown middle-school student when this book was first published, so the two are completely unrelated. I do think it’s kind of fun, though, that my Ciara also happens to be a musician.
Challenges
You may ask—and it’s a fair question—why His Forbidden Touch isn’t a paranormal when the Stolen Brides books that come before and after it are.
The short answer: my editor made me do it.
The long answer is a rather long story, all about the challenges of writing for a New York publishing house. Feel free to skip this part if you’d rather not venture into the gritty, mean streets of Manhattan publishing. It’s kinda dark and scary in there. This is not the pretty part of our behind-the-scenes tour.
On the other hand, if you’ve wondered why so many published authors are going indie these days, this story may provide some illumination.
Still with me? Okay, we’ll keep rolling. Remember to keep your hands and feet inside the ride until the tour bus comes to a complete stop.
And please don’t feed the editors. Some of them bite.
Avon Books published my debut novel in 1991 and by the time I wrote this book in 1996, I had been under contract with them for five years. For the first three of those years, I had a marvelous editor who never worried about the fact that my “historical romantic suspense” novels didn’t really fit the Avon mold. She loved my voice, allowed me to take risks, and granted me a degree of creative freedom that I would never experience again.
It pains me to admit that I didn’t fully appreciate her until after she left. In 1994, I had just signed a new multi-book contract with Avon when she accepted a position elsewhere. I was assigned to a different editor. A high-ranking editor who had strong opinions about what a historical romance novel “should” be.
An editor who didn’t like my voice or my style at all.
This editor was determined to squish me into the Avon mold. By any means necessary. For my own good.
She wanted me emulate her favorite Avon author, whom she mentioned frequently and by name. She encouraged me to stop choosing “different” settings and switch to Scotland or Regency England. She wanted me to cut the action and adventure and suspense. And eliminate what she called my “sitting and thinking scenes,” where the characters think about their feelings for each other (which she called “a bad habit” of mine). She insisted they should just say it all in dialogue. The more dialogue, the better. She wanted witty ballroom banter and plenty of it.
Above all, she wanted charm and sweetness and light. Nothing violent or “dark.” And the hero and heroine needed to meet by page five.
In His Forbidden Touch, she asked me to cut the entire Prologue and replace it with “something charming.” She suggested a scene of Ciara and Christophe as children, playing in the woods together, maybe gathering flowers.
She asked me to add Ciara to the meeting between Royce and King Aldric in chapter two, because chapter three is much too late for the hero and heroine to meet in a romance novel.
She wanted the heroine to have some kind of “charming, funny habit,” like sneezing all the time, except that Ciara would never have a handkerchief, so she would constantly have to ask Royce for one. So charming!
This, dear reader, is why published authors are jumping at the chance to go indie.
Never—never—again will I be forced to work with an editor who is determined to eradicate my voice and my style from my work. Who tries to convince me that all my strengths are weakness. Who demands changes that would wreck my books and disappoint my readers.
If you’ve read HFT (and I hope that you have), you’ll notice that I didn’t make a single one of the changes listed above. It was an exhausting battle that went on for weeks, but I managed to preserve everything I considered essential.
Still, my agent gently suggested that I cooperate in some way. “Be a team player.” (That’s one of my least favorite publishing-industry phrases, along with “France doesn’t sell” and “We’ll do a big push on your next book.”)
In the spirit of cooperation, I cut 34 pages of narrative and added 10 pages of dialogue. I also complied with one of my editor’s requests: “Put a dog in it.”
She couldn’t really explain why she wanted a dog in the book. She just felt strongly that there should be a dog.
I considered that the least damaging of all her suggestions. So I did it.
Ciara’s puppy, the one who makes her first appearance in chapter seven? She wasn’t my idea. That’s my editor’s dog.
Yes, I was tempted to delete the dog when I started working on this new edition. But I just didn’t have the heart to kill her off. She’s kinda cute, and I had given her a tiny role to play in the plot in chapter ten. So Hera was allowed to stay.
I’m actually able to laugh about the whole thing now, as I sit here reading that editor’s revision notes from so long ago. But at the time, it was no laughing matter. My three years with this editor left me feeling bruised and battered. She never stopped trying to remake me in her own image.
She’s also the reason why His Forbidden Touch is not a paranormal. That was one rule she refused to bend: Avon did not want me to write any more paranormal romances because “there’s just no market for paranormal romance.”
No market for paranormals. Yes, that was the conventional thinking, back before Twilight turned the entire publishing industry upside down and the undead took over the romance genre. Today, Avon has a large and thriving paranormal romance program.
Unfortunately for me, I was just slightly ahead of my time.
His Forbidden Touch was never meant to be the next book in the Stolen Brides series after Forever His. I had submitted the proposal for Timeless first.
My editor hated the idea. She gave me one choice: she would let me write Timeless—as long as I completely removed the paranormal element and made it a “normal” historical romance.
I called my agent to discuss my options. The paranormal element is the heart of Timeless. I wasn’t about to just yank it out. Rather than make such a devastating change, I told my agent to pull the proposal.
Then I asked her to being planning my escape from Avon. (As I recall, my language during that phone conversation was slightly less dainty and more colorful.)
I had reached the end of my rope. I couldn’t be the author Avon wanted me to be. And I wasn’t willing to twist myself into a pretzel anymore to please them. I didn’t want to be a synthetic imitation of some other author—no matter how many books that other author might be selling. I wanted to be me. Genuine, authentic, 100% me.
But I was still under contract to Avon for one more book, and I had a deadline. The clock was ticking. And Avon insisted on a book with no paranormal elements.
So I set Avril’s book aside and started His Forbidden Touch.
A few months later, my editor was shocked—shocked!—when I left Avon and sold Timeless to Dell.
I’ll share the rest of the story in the “Making of” chat in Timeless.
Joys
In the spring of 2011, when I made the decision to try my hand at e-publishing, I knew that I wanted to release my medieval series first. The Stolen Brides books are some of my personal favorites, and two of them are paranormals, which is a hot genre with readers right now. So that was an easy decision.
But next I needed to sit down to read all four books—and I couldn’t decide which one to read first.
Falcon on the Wind seemed like the logical choice. But it was the first novel I ever wrote. I was afraid it would be so bad, I would quit before I even started and abandon the whole idea of e-publishing my books.
Forever His also seemed like a good choice. But it’s always been my personal favorite of all my books. I was afraid it wouldn’t be nearly as good as I remembered, and I would quit before I even started and abandon the whole idea of e-publishing my books.
Yes, we writers are neurotic little bundles of conflicting emotions. Seriously, we should all be kept under lock and key. When we’re not having raging attacks of Godzilla-size ego, we’re chewing ourselves to pieces with self-doubt. There is no middle ground.
Anyway, I didn’t want to start by reading either FOTW or FH. And at the time, Dell still owned the rights to Timeless. I wasn’t sure yet if I would even be able to indie publish that one. Which left me only one choice.
I started my new e-book venture by sitting down, taking a deep breath, and reading His Forbidden Touch.
Within a few pages, I fell in love with it.
I loved the hero. And the heroine. I loved the conflicts and the adventure. I loved the chapter two scene between Royce and King Aldric that I had fought so hard to protect. The dialogue. The sensuality. The rebels! Even though I know how it all turns out, I couldn’t put the darn book down. One morning, I skipped a workout so I could keep reading.
The next day, I skipped another workout.
I’m a total gym rat these days and I never skip workouts. But these characters had become so real, so important to me, I didn’t want to do anything but read.
It was such a pleasant surprise. His Forbidden Touch was definitely worthy of being published again.
I was worthy of being published again.
As I read, it also struck me that I have a lot in common with one of the protagonists. Not Ciara, but Royce: he’s coming back to a place he once loved, after many years away, hoping for a second chance after being banished—but unsure of the reception he’ll get.
Royce’s journey home felt like a metaphor for my return to writing novels. Romance fiction is my writing home, and I’ve been away much too long—not entirely by my own choice.
In chapter two, when Royce thinks, “Until this day, he had expected to spend the rest of his life as an outcast…” I found myself blinking back tears. When I wrote those words in 1996, I had no idea that they would someday apply to me.
In the end, my hero gets a warm welcome home and a happily-ever-after.
My journey just started, so only time will tell whether the same will be true for me.
Changes
I actually made very few changes to His Forbidden Touch while preparing this new digital edition. Which surprised me. As any of my past editors will tell you, I’m a perfectionist, determined to get every scene, sentence, and semi-colon exactly the way I want it before I’ll let go of a manuscript.
Now that I’m an indie author, I have total creative control and no deadlines—so the temptation to tinker with every page endlessly is incredibly strong. But this book received only a light edit: I cut a few adjectives here and there and changed some punctuation, mostly semi-colons. I used to have a mad, inexplicable love of semi-colons, which I’ve since outgrown.
If you own the original print edition, pretty much the only change you’ll notice is that I cut almost every ‘twas, ‘twill, and ‘tis. I made that change for the sake of consistency across all four books of the Stolen Brides series. When I read all four back-to-back this summer, I realized that I went a little crazy with ‘twas and ‘twill in HFT. As I started working on the new editions, I felt it was important that all four books “sound” the same, so I went through the dialogue line by line to get it right.
Have I mentioned that I’m a perfectionist?
Future Sequels
I just hate to leave any unmarried males wandering around in my fictional worlds, so I’d love to expand the Stolen Brides series. First, I want to give Prince Mathias his own book. As he said himself, he needs a queen for his kingdom. I have an arranged marriage in mind for him, with a wonderful heroine who’s keeping a painful secret. I’ve never written a virgin hero before, so that would be a fun challenge. It’ll all depend on reader interest—in other words, on sales of the first four books in this series. I’m just getting started in this digital publishing adventure, so we’ll see where it takes me.
Follow Me
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip behind the scenes of His Forbidden Touch. If you’d like to receive advance notice about my upcoming books, special discount sales, and exclusive sneak previews, please visit my website and subscribe to my e-mail newsletter. You can also like or follow me on your favorite social-networking sites:
Website www.shellythacker.com
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Until next time, best wishes & happy reading,
Shelly
Acknowledgments
I want to express my deepest gratitude to my critique partners, LaVerne Coan, Elizabeth Manz, and Linda Pedder, for their creative insights, helpful suggestions, and endless support as I wrote and revised the original manuscript of His Forbidden Touch. Now that we’re scattered across the country, I miss you like crazy. You truly are the sisters I never had.
About the Author
Reviewers use words like “exquisite” and
“stunning” to describe Shelly Thacker’s unique blend of powerful emotion, edge-of-your-seat adventure and steamy sensuality.
Shelly’s historical and paranormal romances have earned her a place on national bestseller lists and lavish praise from such diverse media as Publishers Weekly, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Locus, and The Oakland Press, who have called her books “innovative,” “addictive,”
“memorable” and “powerful.”
A two-time RWA RITA Finalist, Shelly has won numerous other honors for her novels, including a National Readers’
Choice Award, several Romantic Times Certificates of Excellence, and five straight KISS Awards for her outstanding
heroes. The Detroit Free Press has twice placed her books on their annual list of the year’s best romances.
When she’s not at the computer, you’ll find
Shelly reading with her kids, knitting in local cafes, or
kickboxing at the gym. She lives in Minnesota with her husband and two daughters. For the latest news and sneak previews of upcoming books, visit www.shellythacker.com
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
eBook Titles and Excerpts
Bonus Content: The Making of His Forbidden Touch
About the Author
The Stolen Brides 02 -His Forbidden Touch Page 36