Flowers are romantic. Music is romantic. Men who go out of their way to please me are romantic. 

The Christmas before our tenth wedding anniversary (in late September), my husband put a gorgeous 1-carat total weight eternity ring on layaway and managed to pay it off installment by installment by our anniversary. He took me to this wonderful bed and breakfast in Galena, Illinois, to celebrate. There was a bouquet of yellow roses and a small box of chocolates in the room. We had reservations at my favorite restaurant that evening. I thought all this was my gift, and I was well pleased with it. Bob had called ahead and got us a rather secluded table in a nook by the upstairs window of the restaurant overlooking the street. After the waitress took our order and left, and there was no one on our end of the restaurant, he produces this little square box. I was speechless (just watery eyes and the mouth working but no sound coming out) for a good five minutes. A record for me. Now, that's romantic.

Right after Bob and I were married, I looked out the kitchen window one Saturday to find him planting bulbs. He said he wanted me to be able to look out the kitchen window while I was cooking or doing dishes to see flowers in the spring.

What's also romantic is coming out of a restaurant during a driving rainstorm and your escort saying, "You wait right here. I'll run out and bring the car around."

I think it's no coincidence that I wrote for five years before I married Bob, but I didn't sell a romance novel until after I married him. Before that, I don't think I had a clue.

Because romance is what makes life worth living. I think every human being longs for it. I read romances as a gift to my imagination. Human existence is pretty mundane. We get up. We cook/eat/pack breakfasts and lunches. We go to work, whether this is outside the house or in the house. We deal with the nitty-gritty of life -- bills, taxes, the illnesses or deaths of loved ones, our jobs, housework, chores like laundry and cooking and cleaning and buying groceries and budgeting to pay for all these things, long work weeks, irritating co-workers, interfering relatives, nosy neighbors, demanding children, rude people in general, minor and major domestic crises like malfunctioning appliances and flooded basements -- and we manage to get through it all. But we can steal little pockets of time for ourselves. They're called books. I have one with me always. In the supermarket, in the doctor's waiting room, by my side during the day to take advantage of any odd pockets of time that develop. They make the petty annoyances of life bearable.

You can tell when I'm reading a good book. It's when I'm having a long wait in the doctor's reception room and I'm annoyed because my name is called and I have to put the book aside. And if the book smells of garlic. This means it's so good I can't leave it alone long enough to cook. I've got it right by my side, and I sneak glimpses of it while I'm waiting for stuff to boil, brown or whatever. I was embarrassed once when I took one of Bobbi Smith's books to her signing. It reeked of garlic, and it was all bent up from living in my purse, and it generally looked like the dog ate it, but it had only been out a week.

Even on my busiest day -- and I have some pretty scary deadlines -- I can manage to steal 15-20 minutes at bedtime to read. It's my reward for being a good little soldier.

Why do I write books? Because I've always wanted to, from the time I was a child. People keep asking me, where do you get your ideas. Hah! I should live long enough to write all the books in my head.

It's the elegance of the era. I adore the clothes. Those flattering, high-waisted gowns on the covers of the Regencies look exactly like the prom dresses from my high school days. The men looked scrumptious -- they were all wide shoulders and long, long legs -- and they had beautiful manners. 

I also relate to the era because it reminds me of my own young adulthood during the Vietnam War. The Napoleonic Wars were fought on non-English soil, but it was always with them. Even though the country enjoyed a great deal of prosperity and it was perpetual party time, there was this horrible, bloody war going on and they were losing their young men to it. It was like that in the sixties, when I was young. The economy was going gang-busters. We actually had to learn how to pronounce "affluent" correctly, yet there was this undercurrent of sadness. It gives the work an edge.

About the men -- they didn't go in for a lot of facial hair (as they did later, during the Victorian era) or powdered wigs (like they did in the previous century), and those clothes were just wonderful and masculine and enough to make even the most sensible bluestocking drool. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it became the norm to bathe and change one's linen regularly. Maybe I'm shallow, but that's important to me.

In general, I think Regency readers expect the traditional Regencies to take place in British Isles settings (I set a couple of scenes in London so I wouldn't violate this one completely in "The Merchant Prince"), they expect the main characters to be members of the upper class and most of the social interaction to take place in an upper class setting, and they expect the dialogue to be more formal so that it simulates the language used in contemporary books and private letters of the time.

I think it is extremely important to make sure you're not using a lot of anachronistic expressions in Regencies and to make the dialogue as true to the period as possible without making it so stilted and obscure that the reader finds it annoying to wade through it. You're striving for the elegance of expression used in the books of Jane Austen (who actually wrote in the early 1800s during the Regency) and Georgette Heyer (who started writing in the early 1900s.)

Keeping it fresh. I've written ten Regencies, so I have to work very hard to keep from getting in a rut. You don't want the characters to start sounding too much alike. And plotting can be a bit tricky because the whole Regency was less than 10 years long. You have only so many historical events you can choose from to anchor your story.

Several of my Kate Huntington Regencies are related, so the challenge here is continuity. After I wrote "The Captain's Courtship," I decided I wanted to do the heroine's sister's story. So I had to go back through the first book and make sure I wasn't contradicting it in the second. The hardest part is keeping children's ages straight. And eye color. I was halfway through the first draft of Mary Ann's story, "A Rogue For Christmas" when I received my page proofs for "Mistletoe Mayhem," the previous book in that series. If you write as many books as I do, you always have several books in various stages at the same time. Anyway, I had given Mary Ann blue eyes in the first draft of her story and was shocked to read a scene in Mistletoe Mayhem that mentioned Mary Ann's "laughing brown eyes." Thank God Mary Ann's blue eyes didn't get into the final version. Readers notice things like that.

Another challenge -- sometimes you run out of pages before you run out of story. "The Merchant Prince" easily could have been another 50 to 100 pages longer, but series books have to be a standard length. My contracts read 65,000 to 75,000 words. That's all you get -- 260-300 manuscript pages.

They are both really kind, compassionate people leading a privileged existence whose lives were abruptly changed, and both have dealt with tragedy and managed to be of service to others instead of turning inward and feeling sorry for themselves. 

Amelia was engaged to a cavalry officer who was killed in a duel in Paris at the close of the war. Heartbroken, she went with her fiancé's mother to Paris to search for his grave because his mother was obsessed with the idea that his corpse might have been disposed of or be in a mass grave. And afterward, instead of dwelling on her own grief, she became a dedicated volunteer teacher in a school for poor children in London. In Andreas's case, he managed to take over his father's estate after his parents' violent deaths and take care of his dependents after the Austrians took over Venice by ingratiating himself with them, but all the while he worked undercover to regain freedom for his people.

Andreas and Amelia appeared separately in previous books, and I thought they were both such special people that I wanted to bring them together in this one.

In "The Merchant Prince," Venetian nobleman Count Andreas Briccetti finds young Amelia Coomb in Paris, looking for her fiancé's grave. She is being harassed by a crowd of Frenchmen, who refuse to give her directions, because they are still bitter about losing the war to the English. Andreas helps her find the cemetery, and because he is so kind and is dressed all in black, she assumes he is a priest. He doesn't correct her. The poor girl is alone in Paris except for her fiancé's mother, who has fallen ill on the journey, and she is upset enough. It obviously comforts her to think he is a priest, so he just lets her. When they part, neither forgets the other. When Amelia has an opportunity to visit Venice a few years later, she searches the churches in vain for the kind priest who helped her through one of the darkest times of her life -- only to come face-to-face with him at a ball in his palace.

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