"If I visited the reign of James 1st, I'd probably be outed and killed as a witch!"

Christine King is the author of award-winning Regency romances including The Blade and The Dove, Echoes of the Stones, Smuggler’s Moon and Stolen Innocence. Her short stories for Harvey tend to be more contemporary, more spooky and aligned more with the paranormal.

We catch up with Christine as her first book The Blade and the Dove is finally published in paperback.

Q: It’s great to see The Blade and the Dove in paperback, and we know your readers have been asking too… why has it taken so long?

A: Hi Gillie, well, the short answer is I had a problem getting the rights back from the original publishers of the eBook, Piatkus Entice. When I won the competition with them back in 2013, they published the book as an eBook only with no plans to release it as a paperback version. Once I started publishing my other novels with 6E I decided I really wanted to have The Blade and the Dove as a paperback version too. It took a few years to actually get my rights back but in the end Piatkus were quite helpful and released them back to me a few months ago. I promptly sent it over to 6E to design a cover and get me in print again and voila! the book is finally available as a paperback!

Q: What are you working on now and what’s the next book we can expect?

A: My current project is another Regency Romance called Hunter’s Moon. It is the story of a poor but brave young woman forced into an arranged marriage. Her husband is not who he seems and the man she actually loves is caught up in a mission to find a traitor, foil a plot and rescue his missing family members. All this is set in a reputedly haunted mansion house where strange beings walk the hallways at night. (Ooo err missus!)

Q: If you could time-travel back to the Regency period, where in the world would you go?

A: I think I would have loved to live in one of the genteel spa towns of the era, Brighton, Bath or even Harrogate, which were all very fashionable. Of course I would have to have been a well born lady as anyone not upper class or wealthy in any respect would have a very different and hard life in those days.

Q: If there was a different era in history you could go to, when would it be?

A: I love the Elizabethan era, all the intrigue of the Royal court, Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh, Drake and the lives of the people of that time. I would not have liked the reign of James 1^st as I would probably have been outed and killed as a witch!

Q: Is there a novel you’d love to write if you had infinite time available?

A: I had an idea for a novel some time ago but it has not yet materialised. There’s a lot of research involved as it is based on the Royal Navy West African Squadron (also known as the Preventative Squadron). Their goal was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa after the British parliament passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807. My hero is one of my characters from The Echoes of The Stones. He was a child called Joe but in this novel he has grown up and joined the Navy, working his way up from a young Midshipman to Captain over the years. I had the idea of him falling in love with one of the young ladies he grew up with but after getting rejected he concentrates on his life at sea. I wondered whether he could fall in love with one of the slave women he rescues and the challenges they would face as a mixed race couple living in England in the early 19^th Century. Despite what is shown in series like Bridgerton, life for black people in England was not quite as kind as depicted on the television.

Q: Your stories for Harvey are definitely more spooky than your usual Regency romances… is there a spooky novel on the horizon?

A: I wrote a spooky novel some time ago but never actually got round to finishing or editing it. It’s a story based on a programme like ‘Most Haunted’ where a female researcher goes to an isolated hotel in the Yorkshire moors in the middle of a total blizzard white out and gets stranded there. She is assessing whether the hotel would be a suitable subject for one of their programmes and gets to meet a lot of quirky and strange people, some of whom unbeknownst to her are the actual ghosts! I deliberately tried to make it amusing and a bit of a chic lit story and it remains in the drawer to be looked at again one day!

Q: What short story ideas are you working on for future Harveys, and which basket excites you the most?

A: My favourite ‘baskets’ are the horror genre and supernatural. I love ghost stories and the creepier the better. I’ve written a story where I’ve taken an old fairy story and given it a very sad and macabre ending (Hansel and Gretel), and I rewrote a version of Red Riding Hood which appeared in an older Harvey anthology. I recently wrote a story which I submitted for a possible Harvey After Dark anthology but if that doesn’t come to fruition, I have re-written it slightly to take out the erotic and replaced it with a bit of a horror twist. I also have an idea for a ghost story which I will be working on soon.

Q: Where do you write and what does your perfect writing spot look like?

A: I write in a very cluttered office (formerly bedroom) above the car port.  It has two desks, one for my fiancé, one for me, six bookcases, the cat’s litter tray and an absolute pile of stuff that we will get round to sorting out one of these days. My perfect writing spot would be a ‘She Shed’ in the garden which I would decorate as a beach hut with white walls and blue accessories, a white armchair for reading and a small desk and chair for working at. The only problem I face is that the only spot for it would be our current vegetable garden and compost heap and I face a bit of a battle to get him to give it up!

Q: What advice would you give anyone starting out on their writing and publishing adventure?

A: Read lots of books and short stories to find the type of genre you are drawn to the most. Find a good editor who can help you fine tune your work and suggest improvements along the way and in my humble opinion, if you are not 100% certain your book is the best it can be, please avoid self-publishing! I have read too many badly edited works, with terrible mistakes in grammar and formatting. We all need help along the way and if you can find someone you can trust to help you with publishing your novel, or poetry or short stories, the work will be all the better for professional input! But at the end of the day, never give up and keep on writing!

Find Christine's books on Amazon and enjoy a cracking Regency romance.