Access Romance - Interviews

Interviews Index > Lydia Joyce (November 04)

AccessRomance interviews Lydia Joyce, an author of gritty, sensual historical romances.

AR: Thank you for talking with us.

Lydia: Thank you!

AR: THE VEIL OF NIGHT, your first book, comes out in April. How long had you been writing before then? How many manuscripts had you finished?

Lydia: Oh, no… People ask me this all the time since I’m newly published, and I don’t always give the same answer because really, it’s pretty complicated. I started my first novel when I was eleven, and though I worked on it—and a number of other projects—for years and was very serious about my craft even then, I never really intended any of it
for publication. After I decided I did want to write for a living in my junior year of college—that would be in 2001—I wrote a total of four manuscripts. Three of those I tried to get published, but one was just for me. The last of those was THE VEIL OF NIGHT.

AR: So you’re pretty young still.

Lydia: I’m twenty-four.

AR: Does that present any challenges? Any advantages?

Lydia: Honestly? Both. You’d think that it really wouldn’t matter to anyone who’s behind the keyboard, but it does—to everyone except for to readers, it seems! Publishers get excited about “young talent,” but they
also distrust youth’s capriciousness. *rolls eyes* As for writers… Some authors see their younger selves in me and mother me a bit, which is fine because I’ll never turn away advice even if I don’t use it all! Others are a little bemused that I’m so adamant that I already think I know what I want to be “when I grow up.” *g* And a few are uncomfortable with someone so young breaking in, though I know plenty who were much younger than I am! It’s also harder to be taken seriously at my age, no matter how much thought and work I’ve put into my craft and my career. But I’ll get my laurels and wrinkles as I go, and so that will change!

AR: Speaking of taking you seriously, let’s talk about your writing. The maturity and gravity of it is what surprises many people who have met you. Lisa Kleypas, for example, called you "a young writer who possesses remarkable maturity and style” and noted your “sensual energy and confident grace,” and you’ve mentioned that even your editorial director was very surprised at how young you were when you met in person.

Lydia: I am an old soul. I truly am! For some reason, people expect either sassy comedy or over-the-top melodrama from someone my age, but age has nothing to do with anything. I didn’t always believe that as firmly as I do now, I’ll admit. I was a little frightened at first at being caught out at writing characters older than I am—for example, my heroine in THE VEIL OF NIGHT is thirty-two and my hero is thirty-six. But it really isn’t about physical age but how well a writer connects with her characters and her own style of writing. I’m a very secure person. I suffered a turning point in a lot of things after a chronic illness shook many of my assumptions about myself and forced me to reconsider the path of my life. That experience, the manuscript that I
wrote just for myself, my own cynical market analysis, and a lot of other things sort of coalesced during my recovery phase, and I really found who I was as a writer. That has been very necessary for me to draw upon in THE VEIL OF NIGHT and its following books because the kind of
highly atmospheric, intensely emotional, and—above all—excruciatingly honest books that I want to write so much are very hard for me. I don’t write with confidence so much as with blind faith and grim determination! I have to be both desperate and unflinching to find my muse’s hiding place, but I do always find it eventually, even if I have
to drag her out screaming to put her to work.

AR: You mentioned melodrama as if that’s not what you write, but aren’t your first three books going to be Gothics? I thought Gothics were almost inherently melodramatic!

Lydia: Well, not every Gothic has ghosts, vampires, and screaming madwomen. I love the old Gothic genre—mostly, the original Victorian Gothics. Those books have many, many wonderful things about them, and within the worlds that their writers create, I’d really hesitate to call them melodramatic. But I’m writing in an age when many of the situations in the old Gothics are either not particularly believable or entirely sympathetic. Yes, I’m writing historicals, but having been born in the 20th century myself, I can’t deny a desire for a kind of suspense that doesn’t rely on the monster in the closet. My Gothics are highly atmospheric, as I said before, but the tension and the atmosphere are more cerebral and psychological than paranormal. There’s also an awareness in me of all the hundreds of books in this genre that have gone before. I really cannot write a man with a secret in a crumbling
manor on a lonely moor and take the entire situation at face value. There must be more depth to it than that! There also must be some acknowledgement at some level that there is a mold, which is X, and that this book knows about X and yet is very definitely Y.

AR: You talk about character and atmosphere in your books, but what about action?

Lydia: I love action, too! My first book, THE VEIL OF NIGHT, only has one real “action” scene, and it doesn’t have a strong external conflict for much of the book, but that was a kind of experiment for me. Before then, I’d always written plot-heavy books, and so I was afraid that I was using plot as somewhat of a crutch in my writing. THE VEIL OF NIGHT
taught me a lot about prose, pacing, and psychology, and I learned to create a tense, fast read without resorting to murder plots, kidnappings, or overriding mysteries! Not everyone has liked that book, but no one yet has called it slow or boring.

AR: So what don’t some people like about it?

Lydia: LOL! You had to ask!

I like characters who are complicated and who, at some fundamental level, think of themselves as less than what they are and behave, at first, in ways that are not up to the standards that they will later discover in themselves. There are lots of stories in which some darling, sweet girl-child redeems some scarred and debauched man through the
force of her purity, and to be honest, that really creeps me out. Instead, I love seeing two highly flawed individuals redeem each other and find, through the selflessness that love brings, a goodness and strength in each of themselves that they had not known they possessed. Only through loving someone do they themselves become worthy of love, and yet neither is deluded about the other. Through accepting another’s flaws, they come to terms with their own demons—and my characters usually have plenty!

So more than any other single aspect of my writing, some readers just plain don’t think that my characters are nice enough at first, and some miss the subtle hints when a character is lying to him/herself in an unflattering way, which makes them think less of the character. Mostly,
it’s my heroines who take the brunt of the criticism. It’s been well established in romance that a hero, as long as he’s sufficiently handsome, can be the biggest bastard that the world has ever seen, but heroines should be willing to sacrifice all for orphans, baby birds, and Daddy. But it really all boils down to taste, as everything in fiction does! Either my writing does it for a reader or it doesn’t—it’s that simple.

AR: What about the sex? Your stories are pretty spicy!

Lydia: Sex that’s just sex is either page-filler or pure titillation, and I don’t (and can’t) write either one, though I’m not arguing that the second, at least, doesn’t have its place. Yes, I tend to have a lot of sex in my books. But the basis of every encounter is emotional and mental even more than the physical, and the explicitness—I am always
explicit—is part of the raw honesty that I want in all fiction, romance or otherwise. It’s hard to be a liar in bed, and the sex itself is often the source of or a kind of culmination of various conflicts between my characters. Sex causes problems in the kind of situations that my characters find themselves in, and I like giving my characters problems!
*ggg* I am personally bored beyond belief by mechanical sex, but I do like explicitness, tension, and sensuality, and I find an absence of sexual tension in romances just a little disingenuous. I’m even inclined to be a little un-PC about the whole affair, which will come up more in my second book than my first, if I can get away with it!

AR: Can you tell us a little about your upcoming books, then?

Lydia: Well, my second is a story of revenge and revelation set among the dissolute splendors of Victorian-era Venice, and my third will probably be a story of betrayal, adventure, and redemption (of course!) that takes the heroine Arcadia from the parlors of London to a castle deep in Central Europe to the heart of the dying Ottoman Empire.

AR: Sounds interesting! Thanks for being with us today!

Lydia: Thank you for having me! If anyone is interested in finding out more about my work, you can visit my website. I’d love to hear from you!

Interviews Index > Lydia Joyce (November 04)