My baby! So while I'm proud of every book I've written and published, some are closer to my heart than others, and Desmond and Garrick is one of those. The long and short of it is that this was the book that was as challenging as it was fun since I set out to write my one and only Regency romance that was also a pastiche, and I was able to sustain the dry kind of humor I've always loved from my favorite British sitcoms.
See: Blackadder for my primary media inspiration.
As for specific elements in the book, I played with tropes so popular in YA fiction in those days (not sure if they're just as popular now, though) and gave them all my own spin.
What tickled me the most after my then-publisher released the book was some readers' initial reactions of concern about the possible romantic relationship between the titular characters (the age gap between them is pretty large with Desmond being only sixteen), but such wasn't the case at all. My purpose for choosing the title really was all about friendship developing between two people -- or one human and one vampire -- who at first don't see eye-to-eye but eventually find a middle ground and learn mutual respect.
Desmond does fall in love, but it's not what you think just by looking at the title. The romance, moreover, is secondary to the main conflict since I really set out to focus on friendship over that. Ironically, this piece was my primary musical inspiration, which only added to the fun:
A bonus detail: all of the really terrible poems in the book are real, i.e., I wrote them all when I was an emo teen. Yes, I did. I ran across them in the course of working on the book and realized, yes, I can actually shame myself and put those ghastly verses out there for everyone to see.
So, yeah. You're welcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment