Mt. Lebanon romance novelist has eighth book published
Harry Funk / Staff Gwyn Cready was presented with a RITA Award by the Romance Writers of America for her second novel, "Seducing Mr. Darcy" (2008).
Cover illustration for "First Time With a Highlander"
So, you think that writing a romance novel would be that proverbial piece of cake.
“Knock yourself out,” Gwyn Cready might tell you, with a knowing nod of her head.
The Mt. Lebanon resident, whose eighth published book was released in October, has heard it all before about her chosen genre:
“I know I can write one. I mean, they’re very formulaic. You just follow the formula.”
Oh, sure. What about considerations such as character development, plot twists, suspense, catharsis, redemption, all the elements of an effective story? Try putting that together, skeptics.
“Romance novels are constantly the butt of people’s jokes, unless you read them,” Cready explained. “Then you love them.”
Her latest offering for romance-loving readers is “First Time With a Highlander,” which represents the second book in a trilogy called “Sirens of the Scottish Borderlands.” Here’s the skinny:
“What do you get when you imbibe centuries-old whiskey, besides a hangover the size of the Highlands? If you’re 21st-century ad exec Gerard Innes, you get swept back to 18th-century Edinburgh and into the bed of a gorgeous, fiery redhead.”
Cready has crafted most of her novels with romances between protagonists of different eras, but the Borderlands series has a twist.
“All my books so far had been women going back in time,” she said. “I thought it would be fun to switch it around. You start to look for new challenges.”
Innes and Duncan MacHarg, the “battle re-enactor and financier” who time-travels in the trilogy-opening “Just In Time for a Highlander,” represent an idea Cready had for character development.
“If you took men from the present day, and they were kind of powerful men – they had good jobs and headed departments of people, and were used to have the world look up to them – how interesting would it be to send them back in time to where a woman has more power than they do?” she explained. “Are they men whose only worth is from the position they held? Or can they reinvent themselves to be good, worthwhile, contributing people to society?”
And, of course, the main question is: Can the couples fall in love and live happily ever after?
“In time travel, you get an added level of tension,” Cready said. “Even if they figure out how to overcome all the hurdles and are in love and want to be together, whose time are they going to pick? Will she go to the future? Will he stay in the past? How will this work out? And they both have important reasons to be in their separate times.”
The concept has worked for Cready since her first published novel, “Tumbling Through Time,” which hit the bookshelves in 2008.
Her first manuscript, the yet-to-be-published “Blackmuir Fires,” was strictly a historical novel, and it took seven years to complete. She thought about ways to finish the second book much more quickly:
“Maybe I should do time travel, because then at least one person is from the present,” she said. “That would mean that she’d talk like me; she’d know things that I know.”
Her subsequent books have drawn on similar themes with the exception of “A Novel Seduction,” in which the protagonist is a magazine writer who is assigned to write about, well, what Cready does.
“This is really almost in defense of romance novels,” she said about the 2011 book. “So I had to have the heroine be someone who needed to learn how valuable they can be.”
Her next novel, “Every Time With a Highland,” is due out in August. In the meantime, she and some of her colleagues will be Tweeting the play-by-play, so to speak of the final season of the popular TV series “Downton Abbey,” using the hashtag #TeamSource. After all:
“Who knows romance better than romance novelists?”