Romancing the Genres caught up with Amanda Scott who graciously answered a few questions about Scotland, writing, Scotland, history and Scotland!
What
draws you to Scotland?
I've written books set in the English Regency and
Victorian periods and books set in
Wales, as well as the Scottish Historicals I’m writing now. My field is British history with an emphasis on
England
and
Scotland,
and my heritage is Scottish on both sides with the addition of Welsh on my
father’s side.
Most of my Scottish ancestors hail from the Borders (Scott,
Douglas, Logan), and the rest are Jamisons from Clan Gunn and the Isles of Orkney.
I tell people I have horse thieves (reivers) hanging from every branch of the
family tree.
Library
Journal actually credited me with starting the Scottish Historical genre
with my book BORDER BRIDE (which took seven years to find a publisher, at Dell!
Then Diana Gabaldon sent Outlander to Dell just about the time
the numbers for BORDER BRIDE began rolling in, and Outlander is what really set everything off. Kensington republished
BORDER BRIDE in September 2001, and it hit the US Today best-seller list. It is now available only in its
electronic version from the usual online outlets.
What
do you love about writing Scottish historical romances?
I love writing about Scotland, because historically
Scottish women have always had strong influences and been legal entities under
early Celtic and later institutionalized laws. In the Celtic regions, their
influence was particularly strong, because they were allowed, even expected, to
sit in on the doings of the chiefs, even of the Lords of the Isles. Legally,
such meetings or courts had to be held outside or at least in a space large enough
to accommodate all comers.
In the Lowlands and
Borders, men did tend to expect their women always to heed their commands, but
they were not legally allowed to beat them severely or control them the way
Englishmen could legally control wives and daughters (and were legally expected
to).
In England,
a woman was not even an entity under the law unless she was a widow. Before
that, she was merely her father’s daughter or her husband’s wife, and the man
was supposed to control her. Englishmen who wanted to leave inheritances to
their daughters or granddaughters had to go through legal hoops to make sure
that her husband or father could not seize her inheritance.
Those of you who
read Regency romances will recognize Lady Sally Jersey as such a woman. Sally was
the wealthiest woman in England,
because her grandfather (Robert Child of Child’s Bank) left her his fortune,
skipping his own daughter, Anne, who married a man he loathed Sally’s father,
John Fane, the 10th Earl of Westmorland). He wasn't fond of the Earl
of Jersey, either, so he arranged for Sally to inherit the works in her own
right. In Scotland,
a woman could even inherit a title. A Scotsman could certainly put his wife or
daughter over his knee and smack her, but if a man was brutal to his wife or
daughter, the rest of the clan or village would shame him for it.
What's
the hardest aspect of writing your books?
Getting the ass in the chair
(as Virginia Woolf so gracefully phrased it). I’m very disciplined, overall,
and get everything in on time (albeit often at the very last minute). However,
when Life intervenes, things can go way off course and getting back on course
can be challenging.
I also sometimes have trouble getting into my normal
rhythm. I work better in the mornings and evenings than I do in the afternoon,
but I also need exercise and fresh air, and in Sacramento, anytime other than
winter or early spring (and yes, we do have winter when temps can drop into the
teens and twenties) I need to walk in the morning, and I prefer to get the big
walk out of the way then. I can hear some of you who live in the Midwest and East snickering at the temperatures I
mentioned. My husband and I lived in Omaha
for 7 years, and our son was born there, so I know what real cold is, too. In
any event, things do usually come together, and by the second half of any first
draft, I normally produce ten to twenty pages a day.
Where
do you get the inspiration for your characters/storyline?
Ideas, especially the first
germinations, come from everywhere you can possibly imagine. Since I write
Historicals, the background ideas and characters usually come from the
research, and I do a LOT of research for every
book.
But everything else, character traits, even characters, can pop up when I
least expect them. For example, I sign books at Scottish games all over the
west coast and inland as far as Colorado,
and I met a woman who worked in the booth, who was so nice that she nearly
drove the rest of us nuts. If I stood up, she would ask if I was going to the
bathroom, and should she tell fans that I would be right back. At lunchtime,
she would make a list of all the food vendors and offer to get sandwiches or
drinks for any of us who were signing. She hovered but always very kindly and
with our best interests at heart.
I had just finished Border Fire, where the
heroine’s brother was a bad guy, and I wanted him to be the hero of my next
book, Border Storm. I knew he’d have some lessons to learn for readers to
accept him in that role, and giving him a kindly aunt seemed just the ticket.
By the way, any author who tells you that s/he never uses people s/he knows as
characters is full of it. We all write what we know (or we certainly should).
The thing is that we pick certain traits and use those examples to pattern our
characters. We also give those characters flaws that the originals either do
not have or would never admit to having. J
You
have a new release, Devil's Moon, coming out next month. Tell us a little about
this book.
DEVIL’S MOON (Forever, late
March 2015), the sequel to MOONLIGHT RAIDER (Forever, September 2014) is set in
early 15th century Scotland
and is an excellent example of how a plot can germinate. In the course of
researching the Scotts of Buccleuch (my own most likely heritage), I came
across the Gledstanes of Coklaw in a book written in the late 19th
century about the Scotts. The Gledstanes are ancestors of the Gladstones,
as in Prime Minister Gladstone of Great Britain.
More to the point,
for DEVIL’S MOON, during the late 19th century, a jar of silver
coins was discovered a short distance outside Coklaw’s wall. The coins were
very old, though, dating to the 14th century and before. The author
made a good case for their provenance, and the seed for DEVIL’S MOON was
planted and began to germinate.
The heroine is Lady Robina
Gledstanes, whose twin brother died recently in a Border skirmish with the
villainous English, and Robina can still hear Rab talking to her but has
confided this fact to no one else. Her nine-year-old brother, Benjy is the new
heir.
The hero is Sir David “Devil” Ormiston of Ormiston, a knight and warrior
with a legendary temper, whose best friend was Rab Gledstanes. Rab died
defending Dev and made him promise to keep an eye on Robina and Benjy. Not
being a relation, still grieving himself, and knowing that Robina has a mind of
her own, Dev has not yet decided how to approach the matter when he sees
someone riding Rab’s charger and leading a band of reivers, sets out in
pursuit, and catches guess-who in her bedchamber ….
Tell
us a little about yourself, your writing life.
 |
| Amanda Scott |
I think I covered my writing life
above. I’m a fourth-generation Californian with Scottish ancestry on both
sides. My father’s Scott family included Jamisons, Logans, Fergusons, and other clans. My mother's Lowell family included Douglases. There are also a few Welsh Joneses in the
Scott mix. I’m married, have one son, two grandchildren, and a Persian cat
named Willy Magee, who was the model for the Wee Biter in SEDUCED BY A ROGUE. I
spend a good part of my summers writing, hiking, kayaking, and just zoning out
at our cabin in the High Sierras. No phone, no electricity, no sewers, no road,
just peaceful bliss.
Also, I am always eager to learn
more about readers’ thoughts and expectations. So, if you've yearned to read
about something historically Scottish or a particular type of hero or heroine
that you have yet to discover in my books or anyone else’s, just let me know.
Likewise, if you have a pet peeve, just say so. I've received many excellent
suggestions from readers in the past (such as the one who discovered the
unpublished 16th century manuscript from which sprouted the seeds for the
Galloway trilogy: TAMED BY A LAIRD, SEDUCED BY A ROGUE, and TEMPTED BY A
WARRIOR).
Collette Cameron
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