Lauren Willig, author of the Pink Carnation Series, on Saying Goodbye and New Starts

Fresh Fiction Reviewer Make Kay sits down with Lauren Willig to talk saying goodbye to the Pink Carnations.

Make: Hi,Lauren! Thank you for joining us on Fresh Fiction. THE LURE OF THE MOONFLOWER is the final book in the Pink Carnation series. After twelve books, I feel like these wonderful spies and their families have become MY family. Can you tell me one fact that readers wouldn't expect about wrapping up the Pink Carnation series (even readers like me who stalk you on Facebook, twitter, and your website!)?

Lauren: Thank you so much! That’s exactly how I feel about these characters, too—and part of why this book was so very hard to write. It’s like one of those goodbyes where you keep lingering on the porch or running in for just one last thing because you’re not quite ready to go yet. So, here’s the deep dark secret about the writing of Pink XII: this book came scarily close to not being written!

Now that it’s safely out in the world, I can admit it the horrible truth…. The existence of THE LURE OF THE MOONFLOWER was touch and go for a while. There was a dark period this past winter, as I was working on extensive revisions for my latest stand alone, THE OTHER DAUGHTER, and writing my portion of the novel I was co-authoring with Beatriz Williams and Karen White, THE FORGOTTEN ROOM, where I didn’t see any way that I was going to get Pink XII in on time for an August 2015 publication date. I’d committed to way too much, not really factoring in just what a new baby (and baby-related tendonitis) would do to my writing schedule. Also, the whole not sleeping thing. And two books a year. Which somehow became three books and a novella this year. I was in a massive deadline crunch—and I was also just plain terrified of writing the final Pink book. What if people didn’t like it? What if Jane’s story, after all these years, wasn’t what they wanted it to be?

I turned in THE OTHER DAUGHTER on December 20th and THE FORGOTTEN ROOM on January 29th. Pink XII was due March 15th, and it was a hard deadline, which meant that if the manuscript didn’t make it in on that day, it would be too late for production and we’d have to push the whole thing back a year. I had nightmares about missing the deadline by three days… a week… and having to explain to readers why the book wouldn’t be out until 2016. THE LURE OF THE MOONFLOWER was written in a mad six week marathon of caramel macchiato, more caramel macchiato, and sheer deadline terror. It was a particularly snowy February in New York, so the backdrop was the frost-blasted gray of recently salted city sidewalks.

The weird thing, though? When I look back on writing this book, I don’t remember it as a rush. There’s an odd feeling of suspended calm, as if, once I stepped into my favorite writing Starbucks every day, out of the snow and slush, time slowed down and the Pink Carnation and the Moonflower (aka Jane and Jack) stepped up to meet me.

Looking at the final book, I’m still kind of amazed it’s actually here. And so grateful for an amazing twelve years with these characters!

Make: I love the annual Pinkorama contest that you've hosted now for three years, where readers can submit a diorama showing a scene from one of the Pink Carnation books, with all the characters depicted by Easter candy Peeps. Are you going to keep going with the Pinkorama contest after the last book is released, or a variant thereof? I am always so jealous of others' creative talents when you post the winners.

Lauren: Me, too! Would you have ever imagined anyone could do all that with a few sugar colored marshmallows? Each year, I’m impressed and amazed by the talent and ingenuity of my readers.

My website has been a collaborative experiment from the very beginning. So many of the best things about it are the product of members of my website community, like the Pink Carnation recipes produced by Christine, the dream-casting masterminded by Miss Eliza of Strange and Random Happenstance, the book recommendations people post weekly, and, star of the show, the Pinkorama.

I’d like to think that even if the Pink Carnation series is officially ending, the world of Pink is still alive in all of our imaginations. Which is a convoluted way of saying that I’m happy to go on hosting the Pinkorama and other Pink-related fun as long as my readers are willing to go on participating! And we’ll see what new diversions develop over time. I’m all about trial and error and stumbling into things by accident.

Make: As a faithful follower of your blog posts, I love your posts when you talk about how you submerse yourself in the time period of a book you're writing, by reading lots of books written in that era and nationality. What has been the time period and locale that you've had the most fun immersing yourself in?

Lauren: Definitely the Napoleonic wars! Inadequate medical care, lack of contact lenses—what’s not to love? But, seriously. There’s a cleverness and wit and sarcastic humor to the early nineteenth century that I adore. It’s an era where a man can still show up in public with lace ruffles on his wrists and a rapier at his waist.

Life gets much more serious later in the century. The era that was the least enjoyable to inhabit was the 1840s. I’m very proud of the way THAT SUMMER turned out, but living in 1849, even vicariously, was not a bundle of laughs. (They took themselves very seriously, those mid-Victorians.) Getting to hang out with Dante Gabriel Rossetti did provide some consolation, but even so. As Tennyson wrote in his poem Mariana, “life is dreary… I am aweary”. Or something like that.

The 1920s have a sarcastic humor and an alcohol consumption rate akin to that of the Georgians, but there’s a dark shadow there, a pain from the Great War lurking just beneath the snarky surface. I certainly enjoyed my time partying with the Bright Young Things while I was writing THE OTHER DAUGHTER, but it left me with the literary equivalent of a champagne hangover —a lot of painful emotions just beneath the bubbly surface.

Right now, I’m embarking on a new historical journey: France in three eras! Belle Epoque Paris, occupied Picardy during World War I, and Paris on the eve of World War II. Once I’m settled in, I’ll be sure to send a postcard….

Make: Is there a book you've read this year that you've thought, "I wish I had thought of that plot!" ? If so, what was it and why?

Lauren: I feel that way with every single one of Simone St. James’s books. I adore both ghost stories and gothics and have been itching to write one. I have no idea if I’d be any good at them, though—so I’m so very glad she is!

Make: I understand that you have co-taught a seminar on Historical Romance at Yale with Andrea DaRif (aka Cara Elliott). That is a fascinating subject to me, I absolutely lap up much of the academia about romance that I find through some of my blogs. Can you tell us a little about your experiences teaching about it?

Lauren: Oh, goodness, where to begin? We had a blast—and the best students anyone could ask for. We decided to limit the course to the Regency romance, both because it’s our own particular bailiwick and because that gave us a manageable field, a microcosm through which to look at the development of the romance genre as a whole. We started with Austen’s Northanger Abbey, moving from there to Heyer’s Regencies, then the American “bodice ripper” with Woodiwiss’s Flame and the Flower, and from there to Johanna Lindsey (Gentle Rogue), Judith McNaught (Whitney, My Love), Julia Quinn, Loretta Chase, and so on, tracing the way the sub-genre changed over time, examining the ways the authors employ the historical period, the subtle growth and shift in tropes as you get successive generations of Regency romances building off each other, and the emergence of sub-sub-genres from the sub- genre, such as paranormal Regencies. Our basic non-fiction texts included Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel which does a beautiful job situating the romance novel as text rather than sociological artifact, and Sarah Wendell’s Beyond Heaving Bosom’s, which is both a very shrewd look at the past few decades of romance and also just plain fun.

Eighty students wrote essays applying to be admitted to the seminar; the class was capped at eighteen. It was a wonderful group of students, with a good balance between those who had read romances before and those who hadn’t.

One of the funniest moments? Then day we discussed McNaught’s Whitney, My Love. Andrea and I just couldn’t understand why the students were so incredibly blasé about the hero whipping the heroine—until we realized that they’d been given a rewritten version of the book that didn’t include that scene. We’d been discussing two entirely different narratives. When we told them about the original version, it sparked a very interesting discussion over whether or not romances should be updated to reflect changing times and mores.

If I could teach that class annually, I would in a second! Aside from the whole, you know, being behind on deadline bit….

Make: What are you obsessed with right now? It can be a book or series, a tv show, a band... What's captivating your soul currently?

Lauren: I have a not so secret obsession with British police procedurals. Modern, historical, with paranormal elements, you name it, if there’s a British accent and we have to figure out whodunit, I’m on the case. So my two current obsessions, tv and book, have been the television adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories (which is set in Edinburgh, one of my absolute favorite cities) and Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London books, paranormal cop stories set in a modern London where there’s a very secret branch of the Met which investigates what the characters periodically refer to as Harry Potter sort of stuff. Both are incredibly well crafted, with snappy dialogue and well developed characters.

Make: I know you've got a lot of your writing plate (yay for us readers being the beneficiaries of that), not to mention the rest of your life! With a busy toddler and your writing career, how do you grab some "me" time, and what do you like to do for it?

Lauren: “Me” time? What is this “me” time of which you speak? If you find any, can you send it my way? It sounds nice.

To be honest, I feel like a slacker compared to some writers I know, who turn out multiple books a year with multiple children and very little help. I look at them with awe. I’m only doing two books a year with one small person—and I’m very lucky to have local parents who provided essential back-up when I had an infant and a book due.

The hardest part of juggling writing and small person is the lack of reading time. For me, reading is like breathing. And I don’t mean the sort of non- fiction research reading I can justify doing during work hours. I turn grim and cranky if I don’t get my recommended daily dose of other peoples’ fiction. Fortunately, my small person seems to want to be a college student—or, at least, keep the hours of one—so I’ve struck a private deal with myself that if she sleeps past seven or so, any time between then and when she wakes up is found time, like that ten dollar bill you discover crumpled up at the bottom of the pocket of an old coat.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, my child will undoubtedly discover her inner Benjamin Franklin and decide that there’s virtue in being an early riser….

Make: Lauren, thank you for joining us!

About Lauren Willig

A native of New York City, Lauren Willig has been writing romances ever since she got her hands on her first romance novel at the age of six. Three years later, she sent her first novel off to a publishing house—all three hundred hand- written pages. They sent it back. Undaunted, Lauren has continued to generate large piles of paper and walk in front of taxis while thinking about plot ideas.

After thirteen years at an all girls school (explains the romance novels, doesn’t it?), Lauren set off for Yale and co-education, where she read lots of Shakespeare, wrote sonnet sequences when she was supposed to be doing her science requirement, and lived in a Gothic fortress complete with leaded windows and gargoyles. After college, she decided she really hadn’t had enough school yet, and headed off to that crimson place in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a degree in English history. Like her modern heroine, she spent a year doing dissertation research in London, tramping back and forth between the British Library and the Public Records Office, reading lots of British chick lit, and eating far too many Sainsbury’s frozen dinners.

By a strange quirk of fate, Lauren signed her first book contract during her first month of law school. She finished writing "Pink Carnation" during her 1L year, scribbled "Black Tulip" her 2L year, and struggled through "Emerald Ring" as a weary and jaded 3L. After three years of taking useful and practical classes like “Law in Ancient Athens” and “The Globalization of the Modern Legal Consciousness”, Lauren received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. For a year and a half, she practiced as a litigation associate at a large New York law firm. But having attained the lofty heights of second year associate, she decided that book deadlines and doc review didn't mix and departed the law for a new adventure in full time writerdom.

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About THE LURE OF THE MOONFLOWER

In the final Pink Carnation novel from the New York Times bestselling author of THE MARK OF HE MIDNIGHT MANZANILLA, Napoleon has occupied Lisbon, and Jane Wooliston, aka the Pink Carnation, teams up with a rogue agent to protect the escaped Queen of Portugal.

Portugal, December 1807. Jack Reid, the British agent known as the Moonflower (formerly the French agent known as the Moonflower), has been stationed in Portugal and is awaiting his new contact. He does not expect to be paired with a woman—especially not the legendary Pink Carnation.

All of Portugal believes that the royal family departed for Brazil just before the French troops marched into Lisbon. Only the English government knows that mad seventy-three-year-old Queen Maria was spirited away by a group of loyalists determined to rally a resistance. But as the French garrison scours the countryside, it’s only a matter of time before she’s found and taken.

It’s up to Jane to find her first and ensure her safety. But she has no knowledge of Portugal or the language. Though she is loath to admit it, she needs the Moonflower. Operating alone has taught her to respect her own limitations. But she knows better than to show weakness around the Moonflower—an agent with a reputation for brilliance, a tendency toward insubordination, and a history of going rogue.