A. Gareth is bad with people generally, and he’s never had anyone to teach him how to get it right. In fact, most of the people in the world—not just his grandfather—have been teaching him that he’s better than everyone else. And since he’s rather isolated, nobody is in a position to correct him.
His own natural inclination is quite introverted, and that’s probably not a complete description. After I’d written the first draft of Proof by Seduction, I read Look me in the Eye by John Elder Robison, about his experience with Asperger’s, and I realized that for whatever reason, Gareth felt a lot internally like Robison described. I wouldn’t want to venture a guess as to how far down the spectrum Gareth falls, but it made a lot of sense to me. The only change I made to the text after I read Robison’s memoir was that I made more mention of Gareth’s eye contact. Gareth doesn’t notice this is happening—he’s of a social status where people would naturally not make friendly eye contact. When this happens in the book, Jenny interprets it initially as arrogance. It’s only a little later that she starts to translate it as unease.
None of this is explicitly explored in the story. I really don’t think that anyone of the time would notice that someone fell on the mild end of the Asperger’s spectrum. They had no idea what Asperger’s was, and most of the symptoms can be interpreted in other ways. Wealthy, powerful men were allowed to be eccentric, and nobody expected an explanation. And at the time, the understanding of mental differences was so poor that the notion that someone could be a sane, functional human being, but not neurotypical, would have been beyond comprehension. So I’ve never really talked about this much. It’s really more of author headcanon than actual, textual truth.
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What is up with Hat on Top?
Q. Where did you get the idea for Hat on Top?
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The origins of Hat on Top (0:17)
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About the ending…
Q. In the climax of the book Gareth doesn’t just accept Jenny as his equal, but as his better and in the process overturns a lifelong belief in his own superiority that heavily influenced how he lived and connected to people. In the moment, he was obviously more concerned with Jenny, but was that complete overthrowing of his core beliefs easy for him to accept or did he continue to struggle with it here and there?
A. I doubt Gareth will ever get over all of the issues that he has—who ever does?
But I think that for him, getting to the point where he is able to admit that someone else is his superior is indicative of the fact that he’s becoming more secure. He no longer feels threatened by those who are out there.
And the thing that I think saves Gareth from being an incurable jerk (as compared to just, you know, a regular jerk) is that he is actually very fair-minded. Once he has come to the conclusion that Jenny is not his inferior, he wouldn’t go back on that. Instead, he’d realize that he learned a lesson—that he needs to examine his beliefs and try to be more fair to the people around him. I imagine that examination would take time, but with Jenny around to smack him (figuratively) when he gets overbearing, I think he’ll be a better person.
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Elephants.
Q. Why elephants?
A. I have an aversion to the typical things that heroes give their heroines as part of a book. I absolutely hate the scenes where the hero takes the heroine out and gets her a brand new wardrobe—usually telling her what to wear, and encouraging her to drop her neckline over her protests. I know lots of people love that kind of thing but I personally don’t enjoy it.
(Possibly this is because I have had the experience of going shopping with someone who “knew better” and it was deeply, deeply humiliating. Every time I read one of those scenes, I wince. Because instead of imagining the heroine looking the mirror and thinking, “Oh, gosh, I’m beautiful!” I always remember my own reaction—which was “I have been doing this wrong for thirty-three years. I am so dumb.” But this is rather a digression.)
There’s that scene that’s in about 50% of the romance novels wherein the man buys the woman some absolutely gorgeous piece of jewelry. I hate that. (True fact about Courtney Milan: as of 2014, she has been married for six years. And she and Mr. Milan have not yet picked out wedding rings.) Jewelry, for me, is cold and impersonal. It’s something that every man gets a woman.
I’ve always felt that stand-ins for traditional romance aren’t nearly as romantic as something that is so purely personal that it gets to the heart of the person you love.
So, yeah. Elephants.
This is how I envision the interior of the stable.
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Change.
Q. Proof by Seduction was your first book. If you could go back and change one thing about Proof, what would it be?
A. There are consent issues in Proof, especially involving that first kiss, that I have become much warier of writing as an author. I don’t think I would write a character like Gareth any longer, but I don’t know how I could change this book without completely rewriting it and making it a different book.
The one thing I most wished I could go back and change about Proof is something I did change for this version. In the original version, I used a word to refer to the Romani that is a racial slur.
I didn’t know the history of that word when I wrote this book. That’s not an excuse; I’m a writer, and I should have looked into it. I’m sorry I did, and for everyone who read it and was hurt by it, you have my apology.
I went through the book and found every instance of the word. It was never necessary. It added nothing to the story—no depth, no additional meaning, nothing except the capacity to harm people. I can’t defend its use, and I don’t want to. I’ve removed it. And if you didn’t notice until you read this… Well, that’s why I needed to take it out.
Trial by Desire: Enhanced Content
Q. Why does Ned leave on a ship named Peerless?
A. I used to be a law professor. I taught contracts. There is a very famous case involving a ship named Peerless coming from Bombay, which turned on the fact that there were multiple ships named Peerless. The contract was declared void because the parties to the contract had imagined they were contracting for shipments on different ships Peerless. In short, Ned’s ship’s called Peerless because I am a dork.
For those who want more dorky details about the Peerless, the case is Raffles v. Wichelhouse. It’s not actually famous. It was only made famous by law professors. Why? Because over a century ago, someone decided it was important to make law students read cases from the 1860s. I’m really not clear on why this is still considered sound pedagogy. Apparently, it’s important in some bizarro version of the world where it’s more important to teach our students how to parse old English case law than to teach them how to be a lawyer today. (That bizarro version of the world is this world. Sorry, law students. This is why I’m not a law professor any longer. I write historical romances, where it’s socially acceptable for me to get ridiculously excited about cases from the 1860s.)
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On writing remarriage
Q. Were there any special challenges or joys to writing a remarriage plotline? What made you pick that instead of, say, focusing on the marriage of convenience/shotgun marriage elements of Kate and Ned’s relationship?
A. I’m going to issue a warning. In order for me to answer some of these questions, I will have to talk frankly about how I wrote this book. It was not all love and roses. There was substantially less love in writing this book than any other book that I’ve written, and absolutely no roses. I thought about trying to pretend otherwise…but decided against it. So you’re forewarned.
Now on to the question. I am extremely unlikely to write a book where the characters start off married again, and it is because
of this book. I actually tried to write a version of this book in which Ned did not leave instantly for China, and we had a chance to explore the shotgun marriage elements. It did not work.
See, the thing is, I tend to write people who are fundamentally reasonable, and the truth is, if you’re married to someone in a historical era and that person isn’t horribly objectionable (to the point where I couldn’t make them a hero or a heroine), you don’t really have a choice about staying married to them. That’s it; there’s no real divorce, and while separation is possible, it’s not separation with the possibility of more unless you really throw everything over the edge and cut yourself off from polite society.
You might as well try to make a go of it, and if you’re not going to try to make a go of it, you need to have a darned good reason. There are some authors who can write that plotline extremely well—Mary Balogh comes to mind, for instance; Sherry Thomas does it deliciously perfectly.
I do not. I work much, much better with people who can walk away from each other.
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Berkswift
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What is going on with Ned?
Q. What is happening with Ned? Why does he describe his feelings like this?
A. Ned is bipolar. It was difficult to try to capture his experience because in the nineteenth century, they had no idea about mental health or mental illness. Not even an inkling. So it posed challenges to try to explain what was happening to him a historically accurate fashion while still making his feelings accessible to the modern reader.
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Kate’s False Front
Q. Would you say that Kate uses a façade of traditional femininity to keep people from finding out her secrets or does she simply go along with people’s assumptions about her intelligence based on her actual interests?
A. Oh, Kate absolutely uses people’s assumptions about what a small, petite pretty woman is and should do in order to misdirect how they see her.
But this is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. She’s probably been underestimated her entire life. I imagine that when she was very young, she glowered about it and complained, but that eventually she figured she might as well use it, and started playing up to society’s expectations. I don’t imagine this was uncommon at all.
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Why is Harcroft such a jerk?
Q. Did you construct Harcroft’s misogyny directly in response to Kate’s hiding her abilities, or were they just two elements that ended up working well together?
Q. Harcroft’s misogyny is sadly par for the course in that era. They had some very strange ideas about what women could and could not do back then. Fun reading (and by “fun” I mean “horrible”) is to look at some of the debates surrounding female education. There were people honestly worried about whether teaching women Greek would give them a brain disorder.
Never mind that half of the people who speak Greek from birth were, in fact, women. It was a matter of legitimate debate: Can we educate women and not have them all go bonkers from the strain of using their feminine minds in such a masculine way?
But in any event, for Harcroft to be the person he was—a clandestine abuser of women—he would have to have a healthy dose of misogyny. Of course he doesn’t think that women are fully realized human beings.
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Kate’s Work
Q. Where did the idea for Kate’s work with battered women come from?
A. Heh. The idea came from…desperation. The first version I sent to my publisher didn’t fly and I had to completely rewrite the book. As it happens, the first version I sent to my publisher wasn’t the first version of the book. There were two versions before that, neither of which had Kate working with battered women. Those were abandoned relatively early.
By the time I got around to putting together the version that got published, I needed some excuse for Kate to be poking around ballrooms in Proof by Seduction, and she needed some kind of secret from Ned, and this was the best I could come up with.
I must have tried ten billion things to fit the facts established in Proof. Here are some of them:
• Kate has a sister that she remembers, who was hidden away for some reason, and is still looking for her sister.
• Trigger warning for child abuse: Kate was molested by a member of the ton and she is planning to kill him.
• Kate is acting as a spy in order to enable her father’s political activities.
• Kate is trying to prove herself worthy of her mother’s love.
• Kate was swapped at birth with another child and is trying to figure out where she is from. [There are elements of this version hidden in Proof by Seduction: Kate is described very explicitly as looking nothing like either of her parents, and the comment that Jenny makes in the first scene of Proof about Ned ending up with a street thief was supposed to be foreshadowing. Didn’t work so well.]
The reason Kate was working with battered women? Well, one of the other directives from my publisher (and they were 100% right about this) was that I needed to make sure that Jenny and Gareth from Proof played a role in Trial by Desire.
In the second version of this story that I sent to my publisher, the woman in question wasn’t Louisa, the wife of Harcourt. It was Laura, Gareth’s sister. That version also had way too many problems—like the fact that Gareth would have been far more involved in matters, since his sister’s safety was on the line. I needed Ned and Kate to take point as hero and heroine, and so in the final version, I severed that family relationship.
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Ned’s self-treatment
Q. How did you come up with Ned’s method of managing his illness given his lack of treatment options?
A. There are two things that occur in the book:
1. Things that Ned does that he thinks manage his illness, and
2. Things that Ned does that actually manage his illness.
The thing is, depression lies—and if you don’t know what depression is and that you have it, you’re going to come up with ways of managing it, and yourself, that are not necessarily helpful. A number of the things that Ned does—sleeping in the cold, keeping people at bay, trying to be completely in control of himself—are not, in fact, helpful for treating depression. Ned is lying to himself. Ned does not have the advantage that we have today—of studies run with large populations and control groups.
Some of the things he does—exercise, for instance—have been shown to help some (but by no means all) people with depression. But this is almost by happenstance. Do enough things, something’s bound to make a difference.
I think the big thing for Ned was coming to an understanding that this thing is happening to him, and recognizing that while his experience is atypical, he can prepare for it and map out it’s phases. Knowing that he has depressive spells, and that they go away; having a support group that understands what is happening to him and knows how to reach him—all these things are things that I believe will actually help him.
Ned would undoubtedly be better off with a modern health professional who understood mental illness. I wish that had been an option.
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Ned in the forest
Q. Where did you get the idea for the scene with Ned in the forest?
A. The dedication for this book is:
For Teej. Because when I had to make Ned a hero, I gave him a little bit of you.
“Teej” is my elder brother, and that scene with Ned is one of three scenes in all my books that were inspired by real-life events. Here’s a lengthier explanation.
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Why Ned breaks his leg (1:30)
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Does Ned ever get better?
Q. Ned’s arc is not really about recovery so much as
it is about allowing Kate in so that they can better navigate their respective needs. Often, people would want to see the hero “freed” from such a severe illness as that from which Ned suffers. Was it a hard decision to treat it more realistically?
A. It wasn’t a hard decision. I don’t want to write books where people get magically healed from their disabilities. That sends the message that people with that disability are not worthy of love, and cannot have happily ever afters unless they stop being disabled.
I could talk for hours about problems I have with this book, but the one thing I was sure about, and that I insisted on, was that Ned’s manic-depression would not ever magically go away.
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What did you learn?
Q. Trial by Desire is the end of your first series. If you had to name one thing that you learned from the process, what would it be?
A. One of the things I learned from this is that I need to plan out a series from the very beginning—that is, I need to know who the characters are and what their books will be about.
I also learned that planning is no substitute for writing, and so I need to leave myself enough wiggle room for the next book that I can change elements substantially, if necessary. I think the series I have written since the Carhart series have all hung together just a little better.
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The Carhart Series Page 70