Susanna Fraser, Guest Chef

Please join me in welcoming today’s Guest Chef, Susanna Fraser.  

Susanna Fraser wrote her first novel in fourth grade. It starred a family of talking horses who ruled a magical land. In high school she started, but never finished, a succession of tales of girls who were just like her, only with long, naturally curly and often unusually colored hair, who, perhaps because of the hair, had much greater success with boys than she ever did. 

Along the way she read her hometown library’s entire collection of Regency romance, fell in love with the works of Jane Austen and discovered in Patrick O’Brian’s and Bernard Cornwell’s novels another side of the opening decades of the nineteenth century. When she started to write again as an adult, she knew exactly where she wanted to set her books. Her writing has come a long way from her youthful efforts, but she still gives her heroines great hair. 

Susanna grew up in rural Alabama. After high school she left home for the University of Pennsylvania and has been a city girl ever since. She worked in England for a year after college, using her days off to explore history, from ancient stone circles to Jane Austen’s Bath. 

Susanna lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter. When not writing or reading, she goes to baseball games, sings alto in a local choir and watches cooking competition shows. Please stop by and visit her at www.susannafraser.com, get to know her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/authorsusannafraser and follow her on Twitter at @susannafraser. 

-              Tell us about your latest release, A Marriage of Inconvenience.

A Marriage of Inconvenience is a Regency Cinderella story about control freaks in love.  James Wright-Gordon, the hero, is a wealthy viscount who came into his title and fortune very young, so he takes it for granted he can control everything in his world that matters to him.  The heroine, Lucy Jones, was left orphaned and penniless at age 9 and was taken in by an aunt and uncle who made it clear she needed to be obedient, subservient, and generally lesser than her cousins.  So she developed near-total self-control in order to be the person they expected, and also because her own words and behavior were the only things she COULD control.

After James and Lucy are caught in a compromising situation and obliged to marry, their competing needs for control start to clash.

-       You’ve mentioned how much you love to research that era between the French Revolution in 1789 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, so what typically comes first in your story process, a character or a plot?

You know, it depends on the story.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I have two lists, one with situations I’d like to write about—plot tropes, moments in history, incidents that strike me as worth building a story upon—and another with characters.  Stories are born when something connects an item on one list to one on the other.  Not that this is an orderly, conscious process.  These are lists in the back of my mind, not spreadsheets.  But the more I research history, the more I read good fiction, and the more I just sit around and THINK, the more I get the “Aha!” moment of discovering a new story.

-       What or who was the inspiration for your hero, James Wright-Gordon?

A Marriage of Inconvenience as a whole started off as something of a riff on or adaptation of Mansfield Park, so James began as my trying to imagine what Henry Crawford (the man the heroine refuses to marry, knowing him to be a cad) would’ve been like if he’d been a bit more heroic.  But as I wrote he grew into his own person, built on the idea of what it would be like to have everything—fortune, power, political influence—from the day you turned 21.

-       So far, who has been your favorite character to write?

In this book, James.  He has such a confident, expansive personality that it’s fun to see the world through his eyes.

But of all my work, I’d have to name the version of Napoleon I did for an unpublished alternative history manuscript.  He’s definitely the antagonist of the piece—I’m not a fan of Napoleon’s AT ALL—but when I stepped into his point-of-view I got to turn off all my rules and filters and write from a place of pure ambition and self-interest.  I wouldn’t want to live that way, but it’s surprisingly fun to pretend.

-       Tell us about your start in writing.

Fourth grade.  I wrote a story about a group of children who got into a kingdom of talking horses and helped the rightful king overthrow a usurper.  I’d just read the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time, and I’d been reading anything with a horse on the cover since I first learned to read so my influences are, well, obvious.  I typed it on my mom’s old typewriter—a borderline antique even then—because I thought it looked more like a real book typed than handwritten.

It was 25 years before I finished another work of fiction, though I started plenty in between.

-       Do you like to travel?  What was your favorite place?

I love to travel and wish I could do so more often.  Since our daughter was born 7 years ago the vast majority of our trips have been to see our families in Oklahoma and Alabama.

It’s hard to narrow my pre-kid travels down to one favorite place.  I lived in England for a year in the 90’s and have all kinds of memories of being young and carefree in London.  At the close of that year, my then-boyfriend, now-husband and I spent a week in Ireland, including a few days on the Dingle Peninsula.  We spent one day just circling the peninsula on rented bikes.  Beautiful place. 

In this country I love Yosemite, the rocky, dramatic sections of the Pacific Coast, and any place with giant, ancient trees like California redwoods or the Hoh Rainforest here in Washington.  And wherever I go, if there’s a historical site to explore, I’m there.

-       Any words of inspiration for other authors out there?

Writers are often told to write what they know.  There’s wisdom in that, but I think it’s more important to write what you love.  Write what you want to explore and discover.

Thank you for having me here today!  I’ll be giving a copy of A Marriage of Inconvenience in your choice of PDF, ePub, or Kindle format to one commenter.