I’ve got a book out now titled Hero of My Heart, and it’s a Regency-set historical about an opium-addicted Marquess suffering from PTSD and the illegitimate daughter of a vicar.

Which sounds really rule-breaking, but it’s not so much, because they fall in love, and spend a lot—A LOT—of time together and yes, they find themselves naked and supine quite frequently. Yay.

In writing it, I wanted to do something that would tease at the edges of propriety—the hint of class differences, drug abuse, the scandal of an illegitimate birth and so on—but that would still color within the lines of what was acceptable and enjoyed by readers of historical romance. Whether or not I succeeded is not for me to answer, but it spoke to something greater that I’ve thought about a lot—tweaking things that end up different than how you meant.

I have a music industry background, so I spent over fifteen years of my life listening to new music and deciding what I thought would be popular, and should be paid attention to. Music as well as books define who I am, and one of the things I find most fascinating in either creative art is how someone sees another person’s art, tries to recreate it somehow, ends up failing miserably in recreation, but makes something beautiful nonetheless. The Rolling Stones wanted to play the blues, but they were white Brits, not black Americans, so what they made sounds totally different from Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, et al. One of my favorite bands, Gang of Four got inspiration from such disparate sources as Television, the Ramones, American funk, and reggae, but their sound is none of those things.

(By the way—I know I totally sound like a tool, which is true when I write down my thoughts. In person I explain all this a lot more goofily, like when I used to describe certain bands as ‘garlic bands.’ I still can’t quite figure out what I mean, only there’s bad breath involved).

So in writing a Regency-set historical, I stayed well within the lines, as I saw them, but I played around with the conventions and, hopefully, created something fun to read.

I took inspiration from the two pillars of my early historical reading: Edith Layton and Mary Balogh. At the start of their respective careers, both were writing “traditional” Regencies, but both wrote quite non-traditional characters within those constraints; Mary Balogh’s Notorious Rake (in my Top Five EVER books) has the hero and heroine having SEX in the first chapter because the heroine is terrified of thunderstorms. Edith Layton had a heroine who thought she loved a gay character, but it wasn’t revealed until way on in the book, and this was published long before that became anything but an anomaly. She also had a book where it seemed as though the heroine was headed one way, romantically, only to end up with another guy within the last five pages.

I love it when someone twists something recognizable into something else, like Jamie Cullum does with Rihanna’s “Please Don’t Stop the Music,” above (although I am so not on board with the tweaking of literary classics—they’re classics for a reason, get your own damn story). I wasn’t very familiar with Rihanna’s song (I KNOW! I really sound like a tool now!), but when I heard the song for the first time, I knew I knew it from somewhere. And I fell so in love with his version I think I could listen to it every day for the rest of my life and not get tired of it.

Um—so let’s see. Not quite sure where I’m going with all this, except to say that in writing romance, I take inspiration from the things I love. And that I have a book out that might seem untraditional, but is a regular old historical romance at heart.

Thanks to Mandi for having me guest today!

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Thank you Megan! Today, Megan is giving away TWO e-books of Hero of my Heart.To enter, just leave a comment. Contest open through May 8.