No silly idiots in Knight's regency tales

LOVE AND REVENGE: Featherston regency romance novelist Jude Knight enjoys creating "character-forming" romantic relationships, and plots filled with revenge and murder.

Feisty, bow-wielding heroines, their mentally-tortured lovers, courtesans seeking stability, disabled noblemen, revenge plots and nefarious relatives -- it's all in a day's work for Featherston's Jude Knight.

By day, Knight works as a plain English specialist (or, as she prefers, "a paragraph whisperer"), helping lawyers, bankers and government workers avoid bureaucratic language.

In her other life, she is a regency romance novelist -- and can be found most evenings concocting tumultuous love affairs, dysfunctional family dynamics and thrilling retaliation schemes, set against the turbulent politics of Regency-era England. In the last year, Knight has published two historical romance novels and a novella, and has several in progress.

She has also had a novella published in a collection of stories, The Bluestocking Belles' Guide to a Good Time, and has an anthology of stories, with characters chosen by readers, coming out next month. Not bad for someone who didn't finish a novel she "wanted to show the world" until her 60s -- spurred on by her mother's death.

"I'd always wanted to be a writer, but life kept getting in the way," Knight said. "But Mum died in 2012, and I had always dreamed of publishing a book she could read.

"I didn't want to be on my death bed, thinking of all the books I could have finished."

Knight said she has been a storyteller all her life -- from "babbling away" to her dolls as a child, to making up elaborate bedtime stories for her children.

She planned to pursue fiction writing in the 1980s once her youngest started school -- but a jump in mortgage rates forced her to look for work.

She got a job writing software manuals, which eventually led to her founding her own company, training writers in public service and corporate fields. After her mother's death, she become more involved in an online community of romance novelists, and sent manuscripts to her peers for editing.

She published the novella Candle's Christmas Chair in December last year, and full-length novel A Baron for Becky -- the story of a prostitute pursued by a Marquis -- quickly followed.

Farewell to Kindness, a tale of love against a background of vengeance, murder, illegitimacy and depraved deeds, was published earlier this year. While the romance genre has often been panned, Knight says romantic liaisons are most fulfilling to write.

"Romantic relationships are the most character-forming of all. Readers of romance don't want to see silly idiots -- they want to see real characters with depth, real conflicts, and situations they can relate to.

"I like to make my stories a bit meatier, such as the theme of revenge and how it rarely satisfies, and the complexity of marriage."

Her books also include much political commentary on the issues of the day, such as the growth of industry and invention, gaps between rich and poor and the urban shift. However, she enjoys penning a happy ending for her heroes.

"I like my readers to be confident the relationship will be successful."

Knight, who will be doing a presentation at Wai Word's December event, said she advises would-be novelists to "just write".

"If you want to do it, you'll find time.

"It's been said if you write for 10 minutes a day, you'll have a first draft by the end of the year."