Author Spotlight: Donald Hardy

Please welcome Donald Hardy, whose historical m/m romance, LOVER'S KNOT, just came out from Running Press a few weeks ago.

Set in Cornwall in 1906, LOVERS’ KNOT tells the story of Jonathan Williams, who came to Trevaglan Farm one long lost summer a heart-broken young man in need of healing and peace. The hot days were filled with sunshine, the nearby ocean, and a new friend, Nat. Jonathan and the farmhand quickly grew close, Jonathan needing comfort in the wake of his grief, and Nat basking in a love he didn’t know could exist. But feelings of love and passion were soon mixed with darker currents of rumor and suspicion, jealousy and doubt. As the summer faded, Jonathan was devastated by another death, and fled to Cambridge to forget.

Fourteen years later, he is determined to start anew at Trevaglan. Until he sees Nat’s figure in the shadows of a darkened library. Until lost mementos of that summer idyll reappear. Until lives are in danger and Jonathan learns that ghosts are real.

Inspired by the stories of E. M. Forster and E. F. Benson, LOVERS’ KNOT is a haunting tale of love and loss, betrayal and redemption.

Tell us about your recent publication.

Lovers’ Knot actually has an interesting history.  It was originally intended to be a short story for an anthology that never worked out.  The stories were to be gay themed and involve spell-craft; it was to be a speculative fiction sort of thing.  The stories were supposed to be between 3,000 and 5,000 words long.  I had an idea for a story, and started to write it.  When I hit 10,000 words, and the main characters hadn’t even arrived at the Cornish farm that figures largely in the story, I thought maybe – just maybe – this wasn’t going to be a short story.   It was going to be at least a long novella (my writing friends joke I am incapable of writing anything short).  And it was going to be a ghost story.

I set it aside for some time, and then a little over a year ago started again on it.  Erastes told me of the Running Press M/M series, and strongly encouraged me (read, strong armed me) to submit it.  In spite of the fact that I hadn’t set out to write a classic Romance novel, it had strong, strong Romance underpinnings. And Running Press liked it.    My editor told me that she particularly liked the supernatural layer, and the fact that the story has two timelines.  The reader starts the story in 1906, when Jonathan Williams, the main character, inherits the farm where he’d spent the summer of 1892.  Even before he arrives, however, memories rush back, told as a parallel narrative, each flashback triggered by a face or an artifact.  The flashbacks are not quite half the book, but a very sizeable portion.  The editor found it very interesting, and atypical for romance, as was the ghost story part.  She liked that RP was going to shake things up a bit.  

What gave you the idea for this story?

This sounds a little silly, I suppose, but I had a dream one night about a rather peculiar little incident, involving a woman telling a young man that he had to do a specific thing.  I woke up, and thought “That’d make a good story for that anthology.”  I typed the two or three sentences I remembered of the dream’s dialogue (only one of which actually made it into the book).  Then the story around it…well, just sort of appeared full blown in my head.  I knew I wanted it to be in Cornwall, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, that there would be two timelines, just who the main characters were, and what the arc of the story would be.  It grew, of course (a lot), but the basic framework was there from the beginning, all from three lines of dialogue in a dream.

Why do you write?

Because I love words.  I love the English language and its thousand plus years of history right there in the words themselves, in their irregularities, their spellings, their clearly foreign origins.  They are beautiful things, and I would resist to my last breath those who would try to change and dumb down the way English is written or spelled.

What do you like to read?

Lord.  Well.  I’m a pretty rabid Austen fan, I’m afraid, and a bit of a purist about it.  I’m not keen on Austen fic, nor do I like most of the film versions of her books.  I’ve read all the works (including the juvenilia) um, mumblety-mumblety times.  And all of her letters.  Four times.  And the footnotes.  For fun.  And I’m now starting on biographies and critical analyses.  Actually, there’s a reason for that: I’m adapting Pride and Prejudice to the stage for a theater company I work with.  I’m going to bury myself at the cabin where I did most of the work on Lovers’ Knot over the coming holidays and try to bang a lot of that out.

I love E. F. Benson, and this book owes a lot to the atmosphere and tone of his ghost stories and was very heavily influenced by some of them.  I revisit them all the time.  Some folks might recognize that, if they’re familiar with his work.

I’m reading a lot of Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout – I have an idea for a 1940s series of mystery novels, rather like the Thin Man movies, that I’m going to work on with a friend (so stay tuned). Chandler’s particularly brilliant.  Phenomenal prose.  C.J. Cherryh and Barbara Hambly are my favorite Sci Fi and Fantasy authors, respectively.  I’ve been reading a lot more history and biography lately, things like Devil and the White City and The Verneys. 

So I’m kind of…all over the map. 

How did you start writing?

I’ve always liked words, and I’ve always done fairly well at writing essays or long chatty emails, but any original stories I tried were disastrous.  There’s a failed fantasy novel/world that is so appallingly derivative that I’ve buried it deep, deep, deep in a box in the attic.  It’s embarrassing.  I have always been good at telling stories that really happened, though.

Then about eight years ago I had a very, very odd event happen to me, something that I couldn’t explain, and it triggered a week and a half of utter bizarreness that I couldn’t understand.  I can’t go into it too much, because, well, they’d lock me away in an asylum.  =-D

Anyway, so much happened that my friends suggested I write it down so I didn’t forget any of the details.  It turned into a 30,000 word first person manuscript (see what I mean about brevity not being the soul of my wit?) By chance some months later I read a story by an author that…echoed the events that had happened to me very closely, and what’s more, listed sources.  I also got the impression that she believed the things she wrote.  So I sent my manuscript to her, asking her if she thought my event and her research for her story were related.  She thought it possible, but the thing that bounced it for me was that she said at the end of the email “You’re a very good writer.  You should turn this into a novel.”

I didn’t, but that fall I decided to try NaNoWriMo, and write a 50,000 word novel, if I could spin a story out that long.  Heh.  It was 140,000 by the time I finished it in April.

After that, there was one false start (which I’ve not given up on yet), and then I started Lovers’ Knot. 

Was there a time when you almost gave up?  What made you keep going?

Not writing, but I almost gave up on Lovers’ Knot.  I got about one third of the way into the novel, and I just locked solid.  I couldn’t come up with a thing.  I’d stare at the computer screen for hours, and nothing would happen.  That state of events lasted from January until November of 2008.  I wrote a novella in the summer, 35K words, which was, heh, supposed to replace Lovers’ Knot in the anthology, but was, oh, ten times too long.  By then I was pretty certain that Lovers Knot would never be written.  It really upset me, because I liked the characters and the story a lot.  Then Erastes, who very much liked the story as it stood (she was being Brit Crit and beta), started nudging me to pick it up again.  I buried myself for two weeks in the woods.  For several days, I didn’t get more than 100 words in a day.  And then it ramped up and broke loose, at least a little.  It was a difficult book to write.

In a broader sense, there are times that it is hard to buckle down and write.  I love words, but a novel has a lot of them.  I’m afraid some people might think I’m a bit too much of a dilettante.  I love to write, but I don’t seem to be driven to it. 

It’s the same with my other interests.  I’m very active in a theater company out here in the Bay Area, and we do excellent work.  And I’m quite busy throughout the Renaissance Faire season, usually portraying Shakespeare – people are fascinated to watch me write with a quill pen.  I suppose I spread my time too thinly amongst many interests, and there are moments when I wonder if something should go.  Unfortunately I like them all.

And that’s what makes me keep going.  I really like writing.  It’s work, make no mistake.  The Oscar Wilde story of his spending half a day trying to decide if he should put in a comma and the second half of the day trying to decide if he should take it out isn’t that far off.  Almost everyone I know who writes tells me “Just get it down.  Don’t self edit.  Don’t worry about that first time around.” 

I can’t seem to do that.  I love sentences and I love paragraphs.  I very much love dialogue.  I’m most at ease writing that.  The characters in the stories are always talkative.  In fact, they often don’t shut up.  And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, I’ll come to the end of a long day, turn off the computer, and next morning re-read what I’d done, and think “Who wrote this?  This is pretty good stuff!”  And I really don’t know where it came from, or where the characters came from, or where the words came from (my characters are far cleverer than I)…but they’re there, and I love that they are.

And that’s why I do it.

What have you always wished someone would ask you?  Now answer!

Why, yes.  I’ll marry you.  =-D

Aw, way to butter up your host, Don. 'Fraid I'm already hitched but if you want to be my bit on the side, maybe we can work something out. ;>

Everyone, I want you to know that Don was quite nervous about his spotlight, the goose.  He did great though, didn't he? I particularly liked the story of how the story began as a dream. It's got me wondering which line from the novel is the one Don dreamed.

Please click the link below for an excerpt from Lover's Knot.

Cornwall 1892

The path dropped again into a ravine and crossed the river, barely more than a deep stream, ten feet or so across.  A small cataract plunged over the stones at the head of the glen and into a deep pool overhung by shrubs and trees.  The air was cool, and the rush of the falls soothing.  Nat stooped over the water and scrubbed his face, and Jonathan dropped his pack and sank into the soft grass growing on the bank by the pool under a willow.  Nat climbed back up and kicked him in the foot.

“C’mon, Jonny,” he said.  “We’ve another mile and a half to go at least, and the day’s wastin’.”

“Can’t we just stay here?” Jonathan said, shading his eyes against the filtered sunlight.  “This is a nice spot.”

Nat snorted.  “We’ve been through this once already,” he said.  “You wanted to see the stones, and see ‘em you will.”

“Well, I’ve changed my mind,” Jonathan replied, putting his hands behind his head and leaning back.  “I’d rather stay here.  It’s too hot to keep walking.”

“Is it now,” Nat said and sat beside him.  “Are you too much of a lady to go walkin’ on a hot afternoon?”

“A lady is it,” Jonathan said.  “I’ll give you lady,” and without warning jumped on Nat and pushed him over onto his back.

Laughing, they rolled around in the grass for a few minutes, but in short order Nat had gained the advantage and pinned Jonathan under him.  “Well, ye may not be a lady,” he said, sitting back on Jonathan’s hips, “But ye’re certainly no wrestler, lad.”  He looked around the glen. “Aye.  This looks as nice a place as any to spend an afternoon lazing about.”  He grabbed Jonathan’s wrists and pinned them above his head.  “We can stay here if you’ve a mind to.  I could do with a good dip myself, come to think of it.”

Jonathan’s heart raced.  Nat’s weight on his body, his helplessness before the other man’s strength, and Nat’s face smiling down at him frightened him – or rather, not frightened, but aroused in him an emotion he didn’t recognize, and his inexperience  combined with the sensations racing through his body made him fear them.  They looked into each others’ eyes for a long, fraught moment, and Jonathan struggled for breath.  “Aye, that’d be good,” he said finally, lapsing for a moment into a lilt that matched Nat’s.

“Well then,” Nat said quietly, almost tenderly, “we’ll stay here a while, won’t we.  We could do worse.”  He brushed Jonathan’s hair back from his brow, and for one terrifying moment Jonathan both hoped and feared that Nat was going to kiss him.

Instead, Nat rolled off and stretched out in the grass next to him.  “Ay, a nice dip’ll do both of us good.  ‘Tis a hot day, make no mistake.”

Jonathan lay quietly for a moment, then asked nervously, “Should we swim then?”  He knew better than he knew his own name that he dared not undress.

Nat stretched and sighed.  “There’s no rush,” he said.  “We’ve the whole day, and jumpin’ in the water without coolin’ down a little first might be unhealthy.”

Jonathan could not have agreed more.

Comments

[Don Hardy]

Oh. My. God. I forgot you'd seen that, Tina!

The *world* wasn't too bad (though a bit derivative), and the world history wasn't too bad (though a little derivative), but what little writing actually happened...oh, no. NO. =-)

It's either in the attic of the house back east, or it's tucked in a box out here. I think it might actually be here.

Weren't we going to write thirteen interlocking stories for that world? Or something like that?

[Jessica Freely]

Oh! Now I'm getting a vivid image of Don's fantasy manuscript, if Don's fantasy manuscript were a cute blond twink boy, huddled in an attic.

"Manuscripts in the Attic"

Bound to be a bestseller, Don, I say go for it!

[Tina Stanley]

I actually *liked* that failed fantasy novel in the box in the attic. Perhaps that's because I'm appallingly derivative myself, but honestly, it's better than 95% of what's out there. Just my $0.02, there. :D

[Jessica Freely]

See Don, I told you it would be fine!

[Charlie Cochrane]

Well done, Donald. You're a natural, mate.

That's a lovely excerpt; this book has just leap frogged my To Buy list and the purchasing of same has made it onto my To Do list.

:)

Charlie

[lee rowan]

Bravo! Hope the process was painless--you sound like a pro. I've got LK on order through the local Chapters--they actually put the books in the Romance section, and I'm trying to encourage them.

[Alex Beecroft]

Great interview! I read and loved the book, so it's interesting to find out how it came about :)

[Don Hardy]

Well, you know me. I'm shy, retiring. A bashful sort.

::snicker::

[erastes]

There now--that wasnt so hard was it! I'm so proud of you, Don i could burst!