Free Book Giveaway: 3 Questions with Shana Galen

Special Instruction for the Drawing: We'll be choosing one lucky reader from among the commenters below to win a free, autographed copy of Shana Galen's wonderful new Lord & Lady Spy! We'll be announcing the winner on Wednesday at noon (Central Daylight Time.)


A couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to be part of a signing with historical romance author Shana Galen—and even more privileged to purchase and read her brand new release, Lord & Lady Spy.

And it was fun, readers, the most fun I've had with a historical romance in eons. Fresh and exciting, it had crisp repartee and a number of laugh out loud moments, but most of all, the story and the characters had heart.

So aside from recommending it like mad to everybody I know, I also asking Shana to stop by Boxing the Octopus for the traditional Three Questions.

BtO: Hello, Shana, and thanks for joining us. One of the things that stood out to me was your ability to blend seemingly modern plot elements (i.e. the Mr. and Mrs. Smith-like set-up, where each member of a pair of married spies knows nothing of the other's secret life) with a more traditional British setting. What gave you the idea to liven up the Regency romance with this idea? Could your secret past as a writer of contemporary chick lit have anything to do with it?

SG: Thank you so much for having me. I try to read the blog whenever I have a free moment and really enjoy it.

I don’t think my not-so-secret past as a contemporary author had as much to do with the idea for Lord and Lady Spy as did desperation for an idea for my next book. I was thinking and thinking and nothing was coming to me. One evening I was flipping channels and saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith on cable and started thinking, what if the year wasn’t 2005 but 1815? And what if the hero and heroine weren’t assassins but spies? Unemployed spies, since Napoleon was captured in 1815. I got chills and knew I finally had my next idea! Most of my books have a lot of action, and I’ve written heroes who were spies before, so that part wasn’t a huge leap. Writing a romance with a married couple was quite a challenge. I’ll get into that more below.

BtO: I recognized so many accurate historical details, I instinctively trusted that you'd done your homework. To what extent was the spy-related background really rooted in fact?

SG: There were actually spies during the Peninsular Wars, but they weren’t very well known. We tend to think of spying as dangerous and sexy. In the nineteenth century, spies were considered cowardly. A real man didn’t sneak around but fought in the open. So most of the spy-related parts of the novel were pure fiction. Two real people who did influence how I wrote the spy sections were George Scovill and Grace Dalrymple Elliott. Scovill cracked Napoleon’s Paris cipher for Wellington. His story is told in The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes. Elliott was a British courtesan living in Paris during the French Revolution. She smuggled messages from Marie Antoinette to her sympathizers in Austria and saved several royalist sympathizers from being captured and imprisoned by the French Revolutionary government. A great book titled My Lady Scandalous tells her story.

BtO: For all the derring-do and funny moments (love your sense of humor!) what really made this novel stand out for me was the root cause of Sophie and Adrian's emotional estrangement, the heart-wrenching loss of three pregnancies to miscarriage. What made you decide to add such a serious issue to the story?

SG: I was struggling with the conflict between Adrian and Sophia for a long time, and I needed to come up with some reason they were estranged to make the book move forward. During this time, I suffered a miscarriage. It was my first pregnancy, and it completely devastated me. When I was able to get back to fiction writing, I started thinking about Sophia again, and I realized infertility/miscarriage could be one reason for a marital estrangement. Also, writing about miscarriage gave me a way to address a topic that isn’t covered in many romance novels. And yet it’s something many, many women deal with. I know so many friends who have suffered miscarriages. I thought my readers could relate to a woman who struggled with pregnancy loss.

I did face some initial reservations from publishing industry people because “miscarriage isn’t sexy.” But my response was that I thought readers could handle a more complex emotional subject without feeling it made the book less romantic or the sexual relationship between the hero and heroine less fulfilling.


BtO: I'm really sorry to hear of your personal loss, but I agree that readers will be very touched, as I was, by reading of an issue that impacts so many.

Is there anything else you'd like us to know about the book or future releases?

SG: I do have a book coming out in February. It’s the third in my Sons of the Revolution series. The first two were The Making of a Duchess and The Making of a Gentleman. We’ve been going back and forth about the title, so at this point, I’m not even sure what that’s going to be. It was The Making of a Rogue and then Once a Rogue and then The Dread Pirate’s Bride. It might be something else next week! But we’ll get it figured out soon.

Also, because of the great reader-feedback, my editor and I are discussing making Lord and Lady Spy a series. I’m currently contracted to write a new series, and the first book in that will be out in Fall 2012, but somewhere between books 2 and 3, there may be another Lord and Lady Spy book.

BtO: Yea! Glad to hear that! And I almost forgot the obligatory BtO bonus question. What are you reading and loving these days?

SG: I just turned a book in today, so I haven’t been doing much reading. I did finish Ashley March’s Romancing the Countess and really enjoyed it. Next up is Sophie Jordan’s Vanish, and I have your own Colleen Thompson’s Phantom of the French Quarter on my nightstand too. I am really looking forward to taking a week off and reading.

BtO: Thanks so much for visiting, Shana (and enjoy Phantom!) We're so glad to share Lord & Lady Spy with readers—who might be interested to know that the e-book version (the book is also available in paperback) is now on sale for the low price of $2.99. Score!

SG: Thank you for having me! I want to offer a signed copy of Lord and Lady Spy to one person who comments today. I’ll check in later today and reply to any comments or questions.