Behind the Book
Lord Sin—my very first book, written entirely for my own pleasure and entertainment—started out as role reversal book. The heroine was an extreme tomboy (a period term and concept!), raised in an almost exclusively masculine world. A world which she never left, even upon her marriage, because she married one of the boys she grew up with . . . and then he died. I was interested in just how such a woman would move on, how she would get past the loss, and how (if!) her male friends (who’d also been her husband’s friends) would react to her opening herself up to love again.
	One of the things I was certain about was that she would be the kind of woman who showed up in the scandal sheets and the tabloids, the Angelina Jolie of her age. It wasn’t until I read Jo Manning’s wonderful book My Lady Scandalous that I got the idea for using this as a facet of the book. In the book she mentions the Tête-à-Tête column in the Morning Post. This was a salacious gossip column, which featured at the very top of the page a vignette of a man and a woman (people easily recognizable to the reading public). The poses of the couple in question were a comment upon the state of the relationship: Gazing at one another implied something entirely different from one looking towards the “beloved” while the other looked away, or turned their back.   Each chapter of the book begins with a made-up quote from the column. This is a feature I’ll be repeating in the upcoming sequels. Some of the quotes give you an insight into the story, some provide misleading information, and others directly affect the plot (a facet of this that I love).