Norma Darcy

Bizarre as it seems to me now, I hated reading as a child. I associated it with school and homework and I seemed to read without it engaging my imagination. I struggled to finish a single book.

Then, in my early teens, my mother introduced me to the novels of Georgette Heyer and I was hooked. To the despair of my father, who thought I should be reading much more serious works, I read all her books voraciously, before moving on to Jane Austen and other classics. I discovered that I was, in fact, a bookworm in the making.

Since that time (too many years for me to admit to with impunity) I have struggled to find many Regency Romance books that have inspired me in the same way that Miss Heyers books did. I gave up reading the genre for a long time, bored with the fashion to focus on what was happening between the sheets rather than the interaction between the characters. I am not a prude, and I am not adverse to an intimate scene or two, but when every page is filled with lustful glances, I find myself nodding off.

Am I old fashioned? Perhaps. And of course, reading audiences taste has changed over the years from the time of Georgette Heyer, but the reason I fell in love with the genre was the spark between two characters, where there is a hint of sexual tension which is played out in the way they interact with one another. I feel that many modern books are missing this and are focusing on two people falling in lust with each others bodies rather than two people falling in love with each other as people.

My aim is to attempt to write the kind of books that I love to read: strong but believable characters, verbal wordplay between the hero and the heroine and a love story that tugs at the heartstrings.