LAUREN WILLIG

If I stay in academia, I might end up going someplace random.

Every young girl wants to be a princess. Then, when you find a real-life one, it's very easy to imagine yourself in that role.

My official field was Tudor-Stuart England; I also considered myself reasonably competent when it came to Renaissance and Reformation Europe.

I couldn't make myself write serious; I was surrounded by serious: in monographs, in articles, in my own dissertation prospectus, in the very earnest e-mails of students telling me just why that paper couldn't be in on time, cross their hearts and hope to get an A-minus.

'Purple Plumeria' I dithered over for months and then wrote the whole thing between the beginning of July and end of August. The dithering and procrastination time was three times the writing times.

The minimum I need is six months to allow for dithering, procrastination and the research. The research times varies from book to book; some are faster because they're based off resources I have at my disposal.

As a friend once pointed out, the crotchety dowagers do tend to get all the best lines. That may be why I have so many of them in my books.

Did I invent anything? I don't think so, not really. But if I've helped make history fun... then my work here is done.

Ever since reading Jean Plaidy's 'Queen in Waiting,' I've felt deep admiration for Caroline of Ansbach.

I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.

I tend to navigate by indirection, meaning that most of the major things in my life have happened when I've been thinking about something else.

I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels.

I'm not sure that teaching a Core course is necessarily the best introduction to teaching.

My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance.

My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.

People who would never sneer at sci-fi and murder mysteries have no trouble damning the whole romance genre without reading one.

Romance tends to be the whipping boy of genre fiction.

When I'm in heavy-duty writing mode, there's something great about reading a series. Soothing, but not distracting too much.

I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week... there's not much room for novels.

I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.

I'm an eighteenth-century girl at heart. I wouldn't mind being set down in London in 1715, in the midst of all the drama of the Hanoverian succession.

I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.

I've had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn't a romance - with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader's expectations going into the story, and that's very hard to predict person to person.

Iris Johansen's lovers weathered the sack of city states and the vagaries of the French Revolution; Judith McNaught's heroines endured amnesia, social ostracism and misunderstandings so big they deserved their own ZIP code.

Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.'