Marilyn Clay

I spent most of my adult life in Dallas Texas in the United States, thoroughly enjoying my career as a free-lance graphic artist. I loved being a fashion illustrator and attending the exciting runway fashion shows at the Apparel Mart. But, during this same time period, I was also writing and eventually accepted a position as University Editor at The University of Texas at Dallas and later, teaching newspaper layout and news story editing to journalism students at Southern Methodist University. After joining a local chapter of Romance Writers of America, I was thrilled to win their national contest to design the new RITA award and even more thrilled to be awarded the first RITA ever presented at the RWA Conference in San Francisco that year. After that, I became hooked on writing and soon sold my first two Regency Romance novels to a New York publisher. Six of my Regencies have been published and are all now available as e-books on Amazon for the Kindle and other reading devices. During this same time, I had also begun to publish The Regency Plume Newsletter which focuses on the Regency period in English history. All back issues of The Regency Plume Newsletter can be ordered from my web site. Just type in "The Regency Plume" on Yahoo or Google and you'll get there quick.

After my first six Regency romance novels were published in the late nineties, I quit writing for a time and didn't think I'd ever take it up again until 2006 when an odd ailment (that baffled doctors then and still does today) rendered me unable to stand, walk, drive, sit up, read, or watch TV. Lying in bed, day after day, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if I would ever get my life back, I eventually began to think again about writing and how much I loved spinning stories. To keep from losing my mind during those dark days, I began to jot down ideas on a yellow pad, and at times, even scribble snippets of a scene.

Later, after I had recovered enough that I could sit at the computer for short periods of time, often no more than fifteen minutes before I felt myself passing out, the story I'd begun writing began to take shape. I called it THE LETTER. I did sell the book and a few years later it was published. You can read THE LETTER now as an e-book on Amazon. It's the story of a young English girl who comes to America in search of her childhood sweetheart, who had traveled to the New World in search of a new life. To actually see my book published, one that I had conceived and written during such a trying time in my life did, indeed, feel like a triumph.

Eventually, as my health improved, I began writing a sequel to THE LETTER, a book I was also fortunate to see published earlier this year, 2012, titled SECRETS AND LIES. SECRETS AND LIES tells the story of four English girls who travel to the New World on a Bride Ship, each in search of love and husbands, but once in Jamestown, the girls are shocked to discover that someone wants one, or all of them, dead. Both of these historical suspense novels are set in Colonial American Jamestown, a time period which I thoroughly and meticulously researched. I love doing research and try always to weave little known facts about life as it was then into my stories.

My most recent novel is also set during Colonial America, but I moved up from the early 1600s to the 1700s and set this book during the Revolutionary war. Aside from a few books written about Betsy Ross by her descendants, neither my publisher nor I know of any published fictional works for adults featuring Betsy Ross as the heroine. Apart from the historical facts that I incorporated about the war and George Washington and other Patriot generals, BETSY ROSS: ACCIDENTAL SPY is a work of fiction and should be regarded as such. I discovered in my research that very little is known about Betsy's life during the year 1776, the year after her husband John Ross was reportedly killed in a freak warehouse explosion, therefore I chose that year in which to weave my story. When the authorities did nothing to investigate the warehouse explosion, Betsy decides to solve the mystery herself and in the doing is drawn into Philadelphia's underworld of spies and double spies working for both the British and the Patriot rebels. BETSY ROSS: ACCIDENTAL has also been published in print, but is simultaneously also available as an e-book for the Kindle.

I hope you are enjoying my Colonial American historical suspense novels and also my Regency romances. I am now working on both another Regency romance and also a contemporary mystery. I feel very blessed that my life has (almost) returned again to normal. Thank you for reading my books! I love hearing from readers so if you'd like to contact me, you'll find a link to my e-mail address on The Regency Plume website. Happy reading and God bless.