Forever His (55 page)

Marjorie loved it. We waited anxiously for a verdict from the sales department. We pointed out that “Forever His” had a similar feel to Elizabeth Lowell’s Avon historicals—
Only His, Only Mine,
and
Only You
—which were on the bestseller lists at the time.

We didn’t have to wait long. The sales department called back later that afternoon, and the title was finalized:
Forever His
.

You might notice “stolen glory” references still sprinkled throughout the book. I left them in even after we changed the title, because I still liked it as a theme. It also helped inspire the series title I later chose for the digital editions: Stolen Brides.

The Cover

You’ll find full-color photos of both the original paperback cover and the new digital cover on my Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/AuthorShellyThacker

I’ve always wanted to ask the Avon art department a few questions about their packaging of
Forever His
. Starting with that pink lettering. I mean, it’s just so … pink. It looks like someone spilled Pepto-Bismol all over the cover. Also, the hero appears to be sound asleep. Which suggests that the heroine is so boring, she’s actually put the poor man to sleep. And, um, excuse me, but where’s the moon? You know, the
moon?
The most important symbol in the whole book?

Beyond all that, there’s one major problem with Avon’s cover: there isn’t a single clue that
Forever His
is a time-travel romance. Not one
hint
of the paranormal. I had offered them all sorts of ideas for subtle ways they could convey the time-travel element. Like maybe the heroine could have short hair, or at least shoulder-length hair. Or she could be wearing a negligee, or a short dress, something to convey that she’s from the modern era. Or they could add a clock or some kind of timepiece. Or have the heroine wearing a watch. Or surround the couple with mist.

Just
something
to entice readers to think, “Hey, that looks different. What’s that about?” and pick up the book to find out.

Avon dismissed all my ideas. They didn’t want different; they wanted
Forever His
to look the same as every other book in their line. Paranormals were risky, so they decided to conceal that aspect and package the book as a “normal” historical romance.

I thought it was a huge mistake. It made me tremendously sad that my publisher took my best book and gave it such a misleading—and deadly dull—cover. Readers looking for time-travels or paranormals walked right past
Forever His
and never gave it a second glance.

I’ve always wondered what might have happened if Avon had made the decision to package and promote
Forever His
in an innovative way.

But traditional New York publishers aren’t known for making innovative decisions.

Indie authors, on the other hand, can do whatever the heck they want. When I started working on this new digital edition, I finally had the chance to wash away the bad memories of that Avon cover. I gave my artist specific instructions: I wanted something exciting, sexy, colorful, and above all, unmistakably paranormal. I wanted a heroine who looked contemporary and a hero who looked like a medieval knight. I wanted a castle. And mist. And a moon!

Kim Killion of Hot Damn! Designs gave me everything I wanted and more.

I just love being an indie author.

Trivia

~ If I were casting a movie version of this book, an actor on a popular HBO series would be my absolute favorite choice to play Gaston. Can you guess who it is? I’ll post his picture on my Facebook page.

~ The Henry van Dyke poem that opens
Forever His
has always been a special favorite of mine. My husband and I used it on the cover of our wedding program, four years before I started writing
Forever His
.

~ The romantic detail about Gaston engraving his and Celine’s initials above the doors in his castle was inspired by a chateau in France’s Loire Valley. Yes, a real-life French lord actually did this to declare his love for his lady fair. (Mention it to your husband the next time he asks what you want for Valentine’s Day.) If I can find a picture of it online, I’ll post that on my Facebook page, too.

~ When naming my characters, I always try to find something easy to pronounce, but I also like the names to have some deeper meaning. In the case of
Forever His
, I confess that I named my heroine after a pop singer: a French-Canadian
chanteuse
who was just becoming known in the U.S. when I started writing the manuscript. Yep, Celine Dion. Celine is a lovely French name, but the meaning is what made me choose it: as Avril points out in chapter 18, the ancient Greek origins include “daughter of the moon” (along with “fair as the moon” and “goddess of the moon”).

~ One character’s name didn’t pass the “easy to pronounce” test. In the first draft, the Christiane character was named Clothilde. An accurate name for a medieval French woman, but my critique group couldn’t stand it. When my friend Linda started referring to her as “that Cloth person,” I knew I had to change it.

~ The joust scene in chapter 24 was influenced by the work of sportswriter Mitch Albom. At the time, he was an award-winning journalist for
The Detroit Free Press
and I was a huge fan of his columns. I had never followed the sports pages before, but his writing was so vivid and compelling, I found myself addicted. He had a way of putting readers right there on the playing field with the athletes. When I was faced with the daunting task of making a medieval joust scene believable and gripping, I asked myself, “If Mitch Albom were covering this event, how would he write the story?” Channeling my inner Mitch helped me bring that pivotal battle to life.

~ Avon warned me many times that “France doesn’t sell” (at least, not compared to Scotland and Regency England). But it turns out that France sells really well ... in France. The French edition of
Forever His
, titled
Pour Ne Plus Jamais Te Perdre
(To Never Lose You), went into multiple printings. I was collecting French royalty checks for years, long after the American edition went out of print and disappeared from bookstores. And this was despite the fact that the French translator had changed the hero’s name ... to Geoffrey. Seriously, Geoffrey?

~ I also love the title of the Chinese edition, which a friend translated for me:
Lady Moon Goddess
.

Challenges

I faced one big challenge while writing
Forever His:
the fact that it’s ... well, big. Really big. This is the longest book I’ve ever written. I didn’t plan it that way. I just had so many plot elements, characters, conflicts, and emotions in this story, I needed a big canvas to resolve it all.

The problem was, my Avon contract called for a 110,000-word historical romance—and I delivered a sprawling 125,000-word time-travel opus.

In the world of mass-market paperbacks, extra length is
not
a good thing. Extra pages cost extra money, and publishers do not like to spend money. Avon had slotted this book into their Avon Romance line, which meant the printed paperback needed to be about 375 pages long. How on earth were they going to squeeze 125,000 words into 375 pages?

When I mailed the finished manuscript to my editor on April 7, 1993, I felt confident that this was a special book, my best yet ... but I also worried that Avon would ask me to trim those extra 15,000 words. They had every right to demand that I cut the book to the length specified in my contract.

While waiting to hear from my editor, I nervously started a list of what I would delete if Avon required me to shorten the book: the epilogue, all of chapter 27, most of chapter 25. And that was just for starters.

To my great relief, Marjorie didn’t ask me to cut 15,000 words. She didn’t want me to cut a single sentence. She thought
Forever His
was superb exactly as it was, and didn’t ask for any revisions. It was the first time in my career that had happened. By the time she called to tell me how much she loved the manuscript, she had already sent it out for copy-editing.

Avon published the paperback edition of
Forever His
in December 1993 with 378 jam-packed pages. There was no room for the usual advertising in the back—the last page of the epilogue is flush against the back cover. There also wasn’t room for my Acknowledgments page, which I’m publishing here in the digital edition for the first time. And I did get a few complaints from readers about the type being too small.

 But I couldn’t have been prouder of it.
Forever His
has always been my personal favorite of all my books. I enjoyed complete creative freedom while writing it, I achieved a depth of emotion between the characters that still has the power to make me cry—and every scene, sentence and semi-colon of it is 100% mine.

Unfortunately,
Forever His
was the last book Marjorie and I would ever work on together. In 1994, she left Avon to accept a new position elsewhere, and I was assigned to a different editor. A high-ranking editor who had
very
strong opinions about what a romance novel “should” be.

I suspected that this was not going to work out well.

The story continues in the “Making of” chat in
His Forbidden Touch
.

Joys

The year that
Forever His
was first published marked several happy milestones in my relatively new career. In 1993,
Midnight Raider
became my first RWA RITA award finalist.
Silver and Sapphires
became my first bestseller. And
Forever His
brought me the best reviews I’d ever had—along with an outpouring of support from independent booksellers, who placed multiple re-orders. One bookseller wrote that she loved it so much, she wanted to be buried with it when she died.

With buzz like that, Avon’s modest print run sold out quickly. But Avon rarely did second printings in those days, at least for authors at my level, so
Forever His
disappeared from stores not long after it was published. It’s been out of print ever since—until now.

Forever His
also brought me another unexpected joy: a brief but exciting fling with Hollywood. It’s the only one of my books ever to be optioned for a movie.

About a year after it was published, I got a call from my agent. A producer from Studio City, California had been in touch. Her company wanted to develop movies based on popular romance novels—and they wanted to option
Forever His
. Was I interested?

Interested?
I was already breaking out my sunglasses and high heels, ready to jump on the first plane to L.A.  I’ve been a movie fanatic my entire life. Hollywood fantasies started dancing in my head. Limousines! Red carpets! Paparazzi!

Not so fast. It turned out to be a start-up production company, with few industry connections and even less development money. I did receive a three-page option contract, complete with details of what my screen credit would be (“Based on the novel
Forever His
by Shelly Thacker”). There were also a couple of phone calls from the West Coast, filled with breathy Hollywood-speak about “taking meetings” and assurances that “We’re all
such
big fans!”

And of course, there was the option money: they paid me a dollar. One buck. Cash money.

A year later the option ran out and nothing more ever came of it.

But it sure was fun to dream about while it lasted.

Changes

When I started preparing this new digital edition of
Forever His
, I didn’t plan on making any revisions. Some fans have told me that
Forever His
is their all-time favorite romance novel, and I didn’t want to risk changing it in any way that would lessen its magic for those who loved the first edition.

But as I’ve mentioned in other “Making of” chats, I’m a perfectionist. When I read the book, I felt that it needed a few minor edits. First, I eliminated most of the semi-colons (I have no idea why I used to be so madly in love with semi-colons) and cut some adjectives. A couple of the descriptive passages struck me as a
teensy
bit flowery, so I dialed them down just a notch.

Next, I changed the names of two characters, to eliminate potential confusion with characters in
His Forbidden Touch:
the guardsman Matthieu became Marcel, and the young surgeon Audric became Arnaud. I also eliminated all references to Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson because ... well, they don’t have quite the same universal appeal they had in 1993.

Finally, I made two significant changes: I revised the description of Royce’s background to match
His Forbidden Touch
more closely. And I added just a bit, here and there, to clarify
why
Celine falls in love with Gaston. I felt that his reasons for loving her were strong and clear in the first edition, but it wasn’t entirely clear why Celine falls for this macho, impossible man. I tinkered with it for three weeks, trying to make the additions as seamless as possible. Whether you’re a fan of the first edition or brand new to
Forever His
, I hope these minor revisions only enhance your enjoyment of the story.

There was one change I briefly considered, then decided against: I opted to keep Celine a 20th-century woman from 1993, rather than shifting the modern part of the story to 2011. I felt that making such a major change would have risked altering her character and the story too much—and it might also become a slippery slope: would I continuously update the book every few years to keep it current? How often? Every five years? Ten years? At some point, modern technology might completely change some element of the plot.

Just because we indie authors
can
continuously update our books doesn’t mean that we
should
. In the end, I felt that the benefits didn’t outweigh the risks, so I kept my heroine just as she was in the first edition. As she puts it, “My name is Celine Fontaine, buster, and I’m from 1993!”

Current & Future Sequels

Even before I finished the first draft of
Forever His
, I knew that Royce would be getting his own book. I just can’t resist a man with a mysterious past. You can discover all his secrets in Book 2 of the Stolen Brides series,
His Forbidden Touch
.