Interview with Historical Romance Author Jackie Barbosa #interview #blogtour

Jackie Barbosa can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be an author when she grew up, but there were plenty of times when she wasn’t sure she ever would be. As it turns out, it just took her about twenty years longer to grow up than she expected!

On the road to publication, Jackie took a few detours, including a stint in academia (she holds an MA in Classics from the University of Chicago and was a recipient of a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities) and many years as a technical writer/instructional designer for a data processing company. She still holds her day job, but her true vocation has always been writing fiction and romance in particular.

Jackie is a firm believer that love is the most powerful force in the world, which that makes romance the most powerful genre in the world. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise!

 WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: http://www.jackiebarbosa.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackiebarbosa
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JackieBarbosaAuthor/

About the Book

When Mrs. Laura Farnsworth discovers the blood-stained body of a man wearing the distinctive red coat of the British army, her first instinct is to let dead dogs lie. It has, after all, been just two days since the Battle of Plattsburgh, and the disposition of enemy corpses is hardly her purview. But then the man proves himself to be very much alive by grabbing her ankle and mumbling incoherently.
After almost twenty-five years in His Majesty’s service, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Langston never expected to wake up in heaven, much less being tended by an angel. But when he regains consciousness in the presence of a beautiful, dark-haired woman and with no memory of how he came to be there, what else can he think? Except it’s rather odd for an angel to have an American accent.

As the long-widowed Laura nurses the wounded Geoffrey back to health, the attraction between them heats from a simmer to a boil. Bound by his oath to the British crown, Geoffrey should be working to find his way back to his regiment and from the, to England. Instead, he’s sleeping with the enemy…and thereby committing the crime of desertion if not treason. But then, who’s going to find out?
If only Geoffrey didn’t have a family back home who refuse to take “missing in action” for an answer.

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Can you tell us what your new book is about?

Sleeping with the Enemy is a Regency-era romance set around the end of the War of 1812. The heroine is Laura Farnsworth, an American widow who runs her family’s apple orchard and cider business near the town of Plattsburgh, New York. The hero, Geoffrey Langston, is an officer who has spent his entire adult life in the British Army. In the opening chapter of the book, Laura finds what she believes is the body of a British officer on the side of the road, but quickly discovers he is alive but seriously injured. She resolves to help him and thus begins the romance. There are, of course, plenty of obstacles for lovers who belong to opposing sides of a war!

Can you tell us a little about your main and supporting characters?

One of my favorite things about this book is that both the protagonists are somewhat older than in the typical romance. Laura is 38, has a seventeen-year-old son, and has been widowed for about a decade. Geoffrey is the second son of a British viscount who was raised with the understanding that he would join the military and when the book opens, he’s 44 years old and has spent almost twenty-five years in the army. I really enjoyed writing a book where the main characters had a lot of personal history to bring with them.

This book is also the fourth and final installment in the Lords of Lancashire series. Each of Geoffrey’s siblings (two brothers and a sister) have their own stories, although one of those books, Taking Liberties, is technically not part of this series. Most of Sleeping with the Enemy takes place eight years after the end of the previous story, A Matter of Indiscretion. This gave me a fun opportunity to revisit the characters from all the earlier books and show them and their children on the page. Of those characters, my favorite is Walter, the vicar hero of Hot Under the Collar. He’s just so steady and compassionate and clever, and I enjoyed being able to write about him again. So much so, in fact, that my next project is a Christmas-themed bonus epilogue to Hot Under the Collar. I expect to release that short story in October and all my newsletter subscribers will be entitled to a free a copy. You can sign up for my newsletter here: http://www.jackiebarbosa.com/newsletter.

Your book is set in Plattsburgh, New York and later in London, England.  Can you tell us why you chose this location in particular?

When I came up with the idea for this story, I knew that I needed it to be set near the end of the War of 1812. I didn’t want my main characters to have to deal with getting married when a war between their nations was going to continue for several more years. The Battle of Plattsburgh was the penultimate in the war and a stunning victory for the American army, which was heavily outmanned and outgunned. This confluence of location and events provided me with the setup for the romance and the larger plot.

How long did it take you to write your book?

{Laughs} I got the idea for the story shortly after I finished writing A Matter of Indiscretion (which I originally thought would be the last in the series), and that was back in August of 2018. So it you start counting from there, it took 2 years. That said, I wasn’t working on this book non-stop from then until finishing it this summer. I wrote a one novel and a novella (both contemporary romances) and also did a fair amount of not getting any writing done at all during that time.

One of my worst flaws as a writer is that I am great at coming up with story ideas and also pretty good at starting them. What I’m terrible at is sticking with the story all the way to the end. In the case of Enemy, I wrote about 15,000 words in early 2019 but then set it aside because other new, shiny ideas seemed like more fun and it was getting hard. But I picked it back up in February of 2020, reread what I had written, and everything just seemed to start clicking. From that point on, it took me about four months to finish.

What has been the most pivotal point of your writing life?

The most pivotal point in my writing life also the most pivotal point in my life, period: the death of my oldest son in March of 2014. He was 16 at the time and got into a head-on collision with another car on the way to school one morning. Julian and I were as much best friends as mother and son and after he died, I really didn’t believe I’d ever write another book. Moreover, if I did, I figured there was no way it would be a romance. After what happened to me and my family, how could I believe in happily ever afters?

I can’t say exactly how or why I got past that, but there was a turning point in early 2018 and I suddenly found myself wanting to write again. And to my surprise, what I most wanted to write was romance and happily ever afters. In the final analysis, I suppose I’ve come to realize that love is the most powerful force in the universe and that makes it the most important thing to write about.

What kind of advice would you give other romance authors?

There are only two rules in the romance genre as far as I’m concerned. 1. The central plot must revolve around a romantic relationship. 2. The story needs to end with a happily-ever-after (HEA) or at least a happy-for-now (HFN). If you don’t follow those rules, it’s not genre romance. But if you do follow those rules, feel free to stretch your imagination to its limits and most of all, have fun!