I love the extra chapters in your Readers’ Pages. Will you write any extra chapters for your older books?

Not for most of them, but I have found a couple of deleted chapters that I might put up in the next few months. And of course I'll write an extra chapter for each of my new books! If you check the website Bulletin Board in the first month after a given book comes out, you'll see a topic asking you to suggest what should happen in the extra chapter. Would you like to see a heroine tell her husband that she's pregnant? Would you like to see the hero and heroine five years in the future? Once we have enough suggestions, we'll post a poll. I'll write the winning chapter and it will go up in my Readers' Pages a month later. Enjoy!

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Do you have a list of all the characters in your books? I noticed a couple of characters with the same names in different books.

I don't keep a list, and that (unfortunately) has resulted in a few characters with the same or similar names among my various novels. Of course, some of those characters actually are the same people. The Earl of Mayne, for instance, appears in five books. Sometimes I bring minor characters back into a different novel if it works for them in terms of the novels' time-lines. My next series is set in the Georgian period, which was before the Regency, so one thing I'm doing for fun is bringing in some minor characters who are ancestors of my Regency characters. All kinds of insider information about characters can be found in my handy Connected Books section on my Bookshelf page.

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Do you have a list of all your books I could take to the bookstore with me?

You can find a printable book list right here. You can also order each novel through an on-line bookstore by clicking on the novel cover under Bookshelf.

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I read Duchess in Love and fell in love with Esme. Which book has the rest of her story? Your next book, Fool for Love, is about someone called Henrietta.

Believe me, I fell in love with Esme too! Esme's story goes through the entire Duchess series, from Duchess in Love, to Fool for Love, to A Wild Pursuit , and finally Your Wicked Ways.   I guess there's a part of me that would like to write books as long as Dickens's long, baggy novels;   spreading her story through several books gave me the chance to write a complex tale that covered a few years.

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Peter Dewland in the Pleasures series did not have any wish to marry, but I've never really understood why, even though his brother Quill did. Is there a specific reason? Will you write a book about him someday?

I won't write a book about Quill's brother, because Peter is gay. There's one moment when Peter says he'll never get married, in Chapter Ten of Enchanting Pleasures, and Quill understands something "he had certainly known, without thinking, all along." That understanding is that his brother is fundamentally uninterested in sleeping with women, although Peter does love to be friends with women. I picture him as someone unlikely to have relationships with people of either sex, although his fundamental orientation (as we understand it today) would be toward another male. For him, the great pleasure in life comes from being exquisitely dressed and having charming friendships, not from deep sexual passion such as Quill and Gabby will share.

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I just finished Taming of the Duke and I can’t figure out when Imogen realized that Rafe was masquerading as his brother. Help, please!

I planted clues as to when Imogen discovered Rafe’s deception – but I fell into a novelist’s trap:  it was so clear to me that I wasn’t clear enough with readers!  Not to worry:  I’ve written another chapter in which Imogen and Rafe talk through exactly when she found out his deception – and how.  It’s posted in the Readers’ Pages, here.  And if you’re interested, I also wrote a narrative explaining all the clues I planted, here.

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What are some of your favorite books/writers?

I read all the time, so I literally have too many favorite books to list! When I was a child, I kept a boxed set of C.S. Lewis's Narnia series right by the door to my bedroom. I had marked on the top: Take first in case of fire . I guess this was a note to my parents: leave your daughter and take the books? It certainly shows my passionate commitment to reading! Another favorite book was I Captured the Castle, by Dodi Smith. It's a love story about an eccentric family of writers, and since my father is a poet, I identified with the heroine. The only problem was that I grew up on a farm, and Dodi's heroine was living in a castle. Plus, very handsome, rich men moved next door to her, and that never happened to me. Every month I write a piece in Pillow Talk about a terrific book I've read lately. Be sure to check out the Pillow Talk Archives - there are so many great books waiting for you there.

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Are you really married to a knight?

Yup. I met my husband, Alessandro, on a blind date when we were both graduate students at Yale University. He's from Florence, Italy, and he's a cavaliere , which means knight in Italian. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a horse or a suit of armor.

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How do you manage being a mother, and a bestselling author, and a professor?

Sometimes I wonder about that myself! The truth is that my husband is incredibly supportive. I can't say that writing books is pure joy - against all logical explanation, each book seems to be harder to write - but writing them is enormously pleasurable. Teaching Shakespeare gives me the same joy. And motherhood, when it doesn't involve getting people to school on time, is just as marvelous. So though I get tired sometimes, I feel that I am tremendously lucky.

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Do you have any tips so that I can get started writing my own book?

If you're thinking of writing a romance, you should join the Romance Writers of America. They have loads and loads of local chapters. My local chapter is only a half hour drive away from me, and they meet once a month. You can go a few times for free and see if you like it. Then find a critique partner through your chapter--someone who is also starting to write, or even a critique group. Critique partners help enormously with figuring out the ins and outs of writing fiction.

Second bit of advice: On the days when you have a bit of time, sit down and say to yourself, "I'm going to write two pages, no matter how terrible they are." Nora Roberts says that she can work with a page of bad prose, but she can't do anything with a blank page -- and she's right.

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Where do you get the ideas for your covers?

In truth, I don't have anything to do with my cover designs. Sometimes I love them, and sometimes I'm less enthusiastic. Publishing companies spend a lot of time thinking and designing covers; they're the experts. Sometimes when I've thought a cover would be a total failure, it was a huge success - I thought that Your Wicked Ways was too green, for example, but that was my first New York Times bestseller!

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Will you ever visit my town?

I wish I could do more book tours, but at the moment I'm raising small children, and being a professor, plus writing a book or two a year, and I just don't have time to do many book signings. If you sign up as an Eloisa Reader, I'll send you an email if I'm ever doing a booksigning in your state.

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How do I get published by your publisher (Avon)?

I really think that Avon is a fabulous publisher of historical fiction – which makes it pretty hard to get a book accepted there. You can't do it without a literary agent; Avon doesn’t take novels from the slush pile. So you need to find an agent. My first suggestion is that you join the Romance Writers of America. They have monthly meetings and a monthly magazine with loads of great information about agents and publishers -- they do interviews with agents almost every month. Another thing you could do is watch out for a contest in which the final judge is an Avon editor. I know several people who’ve got published by winning contests. Good luck!

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