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The Story
Backstory
In my first novel, CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, I dropped 21st-century Los Angeleno Courtney Stone into the social confines of Jane Austen's England, where she awoke as nineteenth-century gentleman's daughter Jane Mansfield (no relation to the 1950's screen siren).
Although I considered including in that book the parallel story of that very same gentleman's daughter taking over Courtney's life in the 21st century, it felt right to
devote myself to Courtney's journey as Jane in the first book, and to Jane's journey as Courtney in a second book.
The two books are parallel stories. One doesn't have to have read CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT in order to enjoy RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, and vice versa.
The process of writing RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT was full of surprises for me. The biggest surprise was seeing my own world through the eyes of someone from a proto-industrial time, someone who never saw a computer, or a car, or a movie, or the Internet. What would she think of all these wondrous things that we take for granted in our daily lives? The opportunities for comedy were everywhere.
And what about our arcane set of rules and regulations about dating and relationships? How would a thirty-year-old virgin who had never done more than kiss a man and who still lived with her parents feel about finding herself in the body and life of a woman who had not only slept with the fiancé she then refused to marry, but also bedded who knows how many others? And how would inheriting that personal history affect her growing attachment to a young man of this strange future world? Especially when that young man had supposedly betrayed the lady in whose life Jane has inexplicably landed?
I had no idea, but I had a blast watching the story unfold.