An Interview with Juliana Gray

 

The Reading Cafe is pleased to welcome Juliana Gray as our guest today.  Juliana debuted her first novel on August 7th, with A Lady Never Lies. 

The review of A Lady Never Lies was posted earlier today.  Let us begin our interview with Juliana.

 

 

TRC: Hi Juliana, and welcome to The Reading Café.

Juliana: Thanks so much for having me here!

TRC:  We would like to start with some background information. Please tell us something about yourself. Have you always been interested in writing?

Juliana:  Like most writers, I’ve been scribbling stories for as long as I can recall. My parents weren’t particularly tuned in to popular culture, but they did take me to plays and ballets and operas from a completely inappropriate age (I still don’t know how they explained Othello to my five-year-old self) so I was steeped early in the storytelling broth. The trouble was, I was also something of a perfectionist, and it took me about three decades of pursuing more practical goals before I finally felt ready to take on the ego-crushing necessary to become a professional writer.

TRC: Is there anything (in general) you find particularly challenging about writing?

Juliana:  Beyond the ego-crushing part, writing is a tremendous joy to me, and I still can’t quite believe I’m allowed to do this for a living. The hardest part is simply the discipline, because that’s what writing takes: sitting down, day after day, and writing through the sticky parts and the failures of inspiration instead of getting up and walking away to do the laundry. You have to ignore your inner editor and stop trying to achieve perfection in the first draft; the most important thing is to get the story on the page.

TRC:  A Lady Never Lies is your first book released this month in your historical romance trilogy, The Affairs by Moonlight. Would you please tell us the premise of A Lady Never Lies, and how you came up with the idea of this trilogy?


Juliana:  I’d always thought that the plot of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost would make a marvelous starting point for a romantic trilogy. You have three aristocratic gentlemen swearing off wine, women, and song for a year-long academic retreat, and of course a trio of irresistible women shows up on their doorstep first thing. In A Lady Never Lies, the first couple take the stage: Alexandra, the recently-widowed Marchioness of Morley, who falls in love with Phineas Burke, a brilliant, handsome, wealthy, and rather plain-spoken inventor. Alexandra’s a dazzling woman, charming and clever, but unbeknownst to anyone she’s been left penniless due to a badly-invested jointure; she certainly never expect to fall in love with Finn, who doesn’t give a fig for social status, and who introduces her to a world vastly more exciting than the drawing rooms of London.

  Links to purchase A Lady Never Lies:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
The Book Depository

TRC:  What drew you to write historical romance? 

Juliana:  I have always loved history, which lends itself so well to transportive fiction, and I love a good love story. I read loads of historical romance in my teenage and college years, and then I became so busy with career and family life that it fell away from my reading pile. By the time I returned to the romance fold, so to speak, I was amazed at how the genre had changed, and how many terrific writers were crafting wonderful historical romances. So I took the plunge myself!

TRC:  What are some of the challenges (research) in bringing a historical romance to life?

Juliana:  Well, the research challenges are much diminished in the age of Google! It’s always important to read widely about your chosen era, but for those niggling little details — what hat would have been worn for a summer picnic in 1890, for example, or what dishes might have been served on a train — an internet search saves countless hours. In fact, there’s so much information out there, the greatest challenge is knowing how much to use. A novelist shouldn’t be delivering a history lesson; it takes momentum away from the story. You need to incorporate details seamlessly, just enough to explain things to the reader and paint the necessary picture, and so ninety percent of your research ends up staying in your head.

TRC: What are you working on now? 

Juliana:  I’ve finished all three books in the Affairs by Moonlight trilogy, and have just started work on the next series. It inhabits the same world, with a couple of recurring characters, and will follow the adventures of three royal sisters as they’re forced to hide in English society from a mysterious assassin. Naturally they all fall in love with ridiculously attractive men, and their disguise makes romance…complicated!

TRC: Many authors bounce ideas and information between each other and their family and spouses.  With whom do you bounce ideas?

Juliana:  I did allow my nine-year-old daughter to name a character once, but my family is largely uninterested in my ideas! I do most of my bouncing with my wonderful agent, Alexandra Machinist at Janklow & Nesbit, and with my keen-eyed editor, Kate Seaver at Berkley.

TRC: Upon reviewing your website, on which you have some wonderful humorous posts, we noticed your heading says “Clandestine Author of Elegant Period Romance”…..would you care to elaborate what clandestine means?

Juliana:  Juliana Gray is a pen name; I also write mainstream novels under my real name, Beatriz Williams. So I like to think that Juliana is my clandestine alter ego, scribbling romantic stories at night when the rest of the household is asleep!

LIGHTNING ROUND

Favorite Food: Anything with caramelized onions

Favorite Dessert: Chocolate creme brulee

Favorite TV show: Downton Abbey, of course!

Favorite Movie: Gallipoli

Favorite Fictional Character (not your own): The Scarlet Pimpernel 

Dark or Milk Chocolate: If it isn’t dark, it isn’t chocolate!

TRC: Juliana, thank you very much for taking the time to answer our questions.  Good luck with A Lady Never Lies, and we look forward to your next book in this series, A Gentleman Never Tells, which releases in November.  The Reading Café wishes you all the best.

If you would like to learn more about Juliana Gray, you can follow the links below:

Website: http://www.julianagray.com/
Facebook:
Twitter:
Goodreads: