Can you keep a secret?

For the last few weeks, I’ve been sitting on this one, not saying anything to anyone. But now it’s ok to speak about it – the silence was up on April the eighth.

So I had an email that I’ve been shortlisted for the Historical Romantic Novel Award category with my novel, The Wicked Lady (Elena Collins) for the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s (RNA) Romantic Novel Awards 2025.

Half way through reading it, I was dancing around the room and singing my head off.

Just to know that the awards celebrate excellence in romantic fiction in all its forms is amazing in itself. I read lots of novels in that category, and there are some astonishing authors who’ve written some brilliant books this year. To be published by an outstanding publisher and stand alongside these genre giants is a joy. But to be shortlisted is incredible and I’m really grateful.

I didn’t start out as a historical writer: Boldwood Books asked me if I would and Sarah, my talented editor, gave me a clear idea of what would be marketable.

And I was off.

I wrote The Witch’s Tree, and from the moment I’d scribbled the prologue, I was hooked. This genre pulls you in; it makes you hold your breath and stops you breathing out until the final page.

I love it.

I wrote three more novels in the same genre and researching the history and location and dreaming up characters is my passion. I’ve travelled to Scotland, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, East Anglia, Cornwall, Hertfordshire and all across Somerset to find background and information. And it’s there, in boatloads.

I always begin my books from what I think the reader wants, as opposed to what I’d like to write. Invariably, the two collide seconds later. And The Wicked Lady, Katherine Ferrers, a seventeenth century heiress married at thirteen, who became a highway robber, was irresistible. I could make her feisty and fun. It would be a story of heartbreak and courage.

And is there anything more romantic than the first woman who becomes a highway robber?

Her dashing partner, perhaps.

There were all sorts of stories about Ralph Chaplin. A local farmer turned highwayman. A bad influence on Kate. No records of him existing at all. This was a writer’s dream.

Even the story of what finally happened to Kate was unclear. Did she die of her wounds having been shot robbing a coach? Or did she die in childbirth?

How can I resist all that? A stirringly handsome farmer who loves Kate with a passion unlike any other, a headstrong heiress who falls in love and is determined to make her life her own. A chemistry that simmers, then bubbles and explodes.

All this, against a backdrop of Nomansland Common, ghostly sightings and time-honoured legends that are yet unresolved.

I found a modern timeline to balance the historical story. Dumped teacher Charlie Wolfe, with his saxophone and his dog Alan, is desperate to start again. He buys a house on the edge of the Common intending to renovate it, to try to forget the past.

But of course the past, in the form of Kate and ghostly hoofbeats at night, haunts him.

I loved writing The Wicked Lady. The genre is in my blood now.

So a huge thanks to RNA for putting me and Katherine Ferrers on the shortlist.

I couldn’t be more excited.