Courting the Sun follows a sixteen-year-old village girl who is invited to attend the royal court of King Louis XIV and become the attendant of his mistress, empowering her into the inner circle of the court. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The inspiration for Courting the Sun came from genealogy research I was doing into my own family ancestry and a group of young women referred to as Les Filles du Roi, or Daughters of the King. They were not true daughters, but were recruited by King Louis XIV to travel to New France (Canada) and marry his soldiers, fur traders, and farmers, and grow a colony for him. He promised to pay their passage, provide a dowry and a trousseau, and reward them financially for having babies. From 1663-1673, roughly 750 women took him up on his offer. I am descended from 23 of these women. I wondered what would cause a young woman to leave everyone and everything she knows and sail to a rough, unknown land. I let my imagination run wild, and thus Sylvienne was born, wholly fictional and very unlike the real Filles du Roi in terms of her personal journey.

​Sylvienne is a young girl with big dreams who discovers the reality of those dreams is not what she envisioned. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?

One of the themes of this story, I think, is to be careful what you wish for. That doesn’t mean a girl shouldn’t have dreams, but if those dreams are shallow, the outcome will likely be shallow or at the very least restrictive. Sylvienne is intelligent, curious about the world, and a bit of free-thinker and free-actor. When she gets to King Louis’ court, she learns that freedom is not a quality that is respected there and that if she is to be “free” to love whom she wishes, she will have to be subversive about it. She also learns to care about the people who care about her and to not take them for granted.

What intrigues you about the 17th century period enough to write such a captivating and emotionally resonating period piece?

I am always intrigued by and wondering about the lives of my grandmothers and many-times-great-grandmothers going back through the centuries. Once I started researching what life would have been like for Sylvienne, and thus my 7th and 8th great-grandmothers in the 17th century, I was amazed at everything I learned. It was the final century of the Renaissance period, and art, theatre, literature, and the emerging natural sciences and astronomy were at their peak, and France was at the center of it. And yet there was such a dichotomy in terms of what was believed medically, how crowded and filthy the cities of Europe were, how people were treated depending on their religious beliefs or disbeliefs, and the great divide (as always) between those of wealth & nobility vs those of the common or lower classes—though some members of the rising bourgeoisie in France were wealthier than some of the nobility and that created its own complexity.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

I am working on the sequel to Courting the Sun, tentatively titled A Tangled Dawn. It takes Sylvienne to New France (Canada) where she experiences a life entirely different from what she knew in France. She encounters those “horrendous” fur traders and “scary” indigenous people and engages in an entirely new learning curve in terms of self-survival and learning to live among and respect people who are different from herself. And of course, her love life is as complicated as ever. I am hopeful it will be released in 2025.

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