S.K. Snyder

Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer are, quite simply, the reason I write. What draws me back to their work again and again is the absolute conviction of their characters; they are fully realised, flawed, and human in ways that feel startlingly modern despite the period. There is never a moment where you question whether a character is believable, whether their choices are their own, or whether their growth has been honestly earned.

I have returned to their novels countless times, not merely for pleasure, but as a student of craft, studying the architecture beneath the story. How they pace each character's transformation, how they time every emotional revelation with such precision. And their world-building is masterful. It does not describe the Regency era so much as inhabit it, drawing the reader so completely into that world that setting and character become inseparable.

They taught me that a great romance is not simply a love story. It is a portrait of two people becoming.

Mary Balogh and Judith McNaught have shaped my writing in two distinctly different but equally essential ways.

Mary Balogh taught me the power of an opening. She does not rely on immediate conflict to hook her reader, instead, she introduces a scene or a character in such a way that you are emotionally invested before you have fully realised it. Whether what you feel in those first pages is sympathy, empathy, or outright anger, she has you. I have read every one of her novels, and I return to them still, studying how she creates that immediate and almost effortless emotional bond between reader and character.

Judith McNaught gave me perhaps the most liberating lesson I have ever received as a writer: let the characters tell their own story. Do not rush them. Do not attempt to control them. Let them breathe and live at their own pace, for as long as the story demands. She freed me from the anxiety of word counts and market expectations and reminded me that the characters themselves will tell you when the story is finished, and not a chapter before. That single lesson changed everything about how I write.

Together, they taught me that a reader must feel before they can follow, and that the story always knows its own length.

The honest answer begins with Cinderella. I was drawn to stories of nobility and royalty from childhood, I could watch that story unfold again and again and never tire of it. That fascination never left me, and it found its natural home in the Regency era.

But what keeps me there is something far richer than ballgowns and titles. The early nineteenth century was a world in magnificent turmoil. Known as the Romantic Period in English literature, it was an era when everything was shifting at once: the industrial age was reshaping daily life, medicine was evolving, modern conveniences were reaching the wealthy, and education was no longer the exclusive province of the privileged few. The world was at war. Inventions that still shape our lives today were transforming theirs. Women were changing. The old ways were no longer simply accepted.

And yet the nobility clung to their carefree lives of privilege even as the ground shifted beneath them, which makes them endlessly fascinating to write. The tension between the world they had always known and the world rushing in to replace it creates an almost inexhaustible well of inspiration. A writer can find anything there: political intrigue, the devastation of war, debauched gentlemen, bluestocking ladies, and love stories playing out against a backdrop of breathtaking change.

It is, quite simply, irresistible.

It is perhaps the most delicate balancing act in historical fiction, and the most rewarding when you get it right.

The Regency era possessed a language of extraordinary richness. Every word carried weight and depth, chosen with care and spoken with intention. We have lost much of that in the modern world, eroded by technology, television, social media, and the relentless pace of contemporary life. None of those distractions existed two hundred years ago. People lived simply and elegantly, and communication with those around them was the very essence of daily existence. The average person never ventured more than twenty miles from their birthplace. Sharing stories, sharing lives, that was their entertainment. People mattered, in a way that feels almost startling to us now.

So when I write, I strive to honour that language without alienating a modern reader who has grown unaccustomed to its rhythms. The goal is not a history lesson; it is an escape. A Regency novel, when it works as it should, offers the reader a quieter world. A more elegant one. A place where life moves at a different pace, and human connection is the currency that matters most.

That, I think, is why readers return to the genre again and again. Not merely for the romance, though the romance is glorious. But for the peace within the pages — the sense, however brief, of stepping out of the noise and into something slower, richer, and more beautifully human.

Calling it a walk is generous; it is an absolute run, and it never truly stops.

Research, for me, is immersive by necessity. I read voraciously, the authors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries themselves, every modern historical romance author worth their salt, and everything in between. I belong to clubs focused exclusively on the Regency period, not merely the romance of it, but the full breadth of the era. I receive transcribed newspaper articles from the period by email. I have a personal collection of books published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and a dictionary dated 1699 that I would not part with for anything. I surround myself with the sights and sounds of the Regency until the world of the story feels more immediate than my own.

When something strikes me emotionally, it invariably sparks a character or a story. My second novel, Born For Love, began with a newspaper article about the Seahorse shipwreck off the coast of Ireland in 1816, a vessel carrying soldiers and their families home after Waterloo. The tragedy was devastating enough, but what haunted me was the detail that people on the Irish shore watched the devastation in horror, utterly powerless to intervene. Those aboard panicked. Unspeakable things happened in the desperation to survive. I felt compelled to honour them somehow, and a story grew from that compulsion.

From there, the research deepens with every idea. I verify that the Crown maintained spies during the period. I authenticate military papers, ships' rigging, sail cloth, tides and accessible docks. I calculate travel times across the Irish Sea and the English Channel. Every detail must be plausible; every word of dialogue checked against etymology to ensure it existed when my characters would have spoken it.

The research is, frankly, overwhelming.

As I often tell people, writing the story is the easy part.

One might expect me to say the ballrooms, the opulence, the glamour, and I confess, those do draw me in. The traditions held for centuries, the elegance of a world that dressed for dinner and wrote letters by candlelight, all of it captivates me.

But if I am being entirely honest, it is the architecture that makes my heart sing.

I grew up in a general contracting family and once seriously considered becoming an architect. Buildings have fascinated me all my life. For years, I worked in homes, assessing damage caused by nature's worst, and in doing so, I walked through some extraordinary spaces. What the craftsmen of the early nineteenth century conceived in their minds and then built with their own hands still astonishes me. The Rococo, the Baroque, the Georgian, ornate, dramatic, deeply personal, and emotionally complex in a way that modern design rarely attempts. Every building was a work of art. Every ceiling, every cornice, every staircase was considered and crafted with an intentionality we have largely abandoned.

I am genuinely saddened each time one of those old buildings is lost. The clean lines of contemporary architecture have their place, but they cannot compare to the drama and humanity of what came before.

When I place my characters inside those spaces, a grand entrance hall, a candlelit drawing room, a crumbling country estate, I am not merely setting a scene. I am putting them inside a piece of art. And that, perhaps more than anything else, continues to inspire me.

In many ways, it is not as difficult as one might expect, because at its heart, very little has actually changed.

The Regency era was, I believe, the tributary that in time became a raging river. Women were beginning to see themselves as something more than property, more than ornament. There were remarkable women doing extraordinary things during this period, many ignored, many uncelebrated, but accomplishing nonetheless. That quiet, determined push toward something greater feels startlingly familiar to a modern reader, because we recognise it. We have lived versions of it ourselves.

The heroes present an equally fascinating study. Delving deeply into the novels and documents of the period, I was struck by how little was genuinely expected of these men beyond inheritance. Accomplishment was not required of them; their place in society was considered a birthright, immovable and assured. And then the world began to shift beneath their feet. They were challenged; by other men, by changing economies, by the very industrial age reshaping England around them, and perhaps most unsettlingly, by women. The class they had been raised to regard as their privilege began to quietly reveal itself as their equal.

That tension between who they were raised to be and who the world was demanding they become, makes for compelling heroes.

But if I am being perfectly honest, the deepest reason my characters feel relatable is simpler than any of that. Two hundred years later, women still find themselves wondering about their worth. Men still find women utterly fascinating and entirely incomprehensible. The push and pull between two people trying to find their way to one another has not changed in the slightest.

There are many, and I return to different ones depending on what the story demands of me in a given moment.

Jane Austen is always my first port of call, my foundation. She epitomised the romance novel before the form even had a name, and she made the trials of the heart feel utterly real and utterly consequential. If one is committed to authenticity, one must begin with Miss Austen. There is simply no substitute.

For wit, I turn to P.G. Wodehouse. His genius for self-deprecating humour, the ability to make one laugh at the very people one most admires, remains as sharp today as it ever was. When I want my characters to sparkle, I read Wodehouse and remind myself what genuine wit looks like on the page.

For the darker threads in my writing, those subjects that polite society preferred not to name, Ann Radcliffe. She understood how to let shadow fall across a story without overwhelming it.

And for the particular alchemy of mystery woven seamlessly into romance, Georgette Heyer. Novels like The Talisman Ring and The Masqueraders demonstrate a balance of intrigue and romance I aspire to and frankly, am still working to master.

Among modern authors, Mary Balogh is, in my estimation, simply untouchable. For wit, I read Barbara Metzger and for mystery, Madeline Hunter. There are many others I could name; I read three or four books a week, every evening without fail, but there is never quite enough time to honour them all as they deserve.

The trope I return to most often, and the one whose conflict I most enjoy writing, is the betrothal arranged in childhood. Sometimes my hero and heroine are pledged to one another at birth, sometimes when they are still very young, but in either case the decision has been made for them long before they are old enough to have any say in the matter.

It is a challenge before I begin a single page to decide whether they grow up knowing one another, or whether they meet only after the discovery that they are bound. The complications open into a never-ending chasm of conflict. For characters with strong personalities, and mine almost always are, there is the rebellion first. To learn, at one and twenty, that the most important decision of one's life has already been made, years or even decades earlier, by parents long since absent from the negotiation, is enough to ignite any spirited young man or woman. The determination to make the other party cry off, to save the scandal for one's own family while shifting the burden of refusal to the other, can be played for humour or for darkness, depending entirely on where the story wishes to take me.

But either way, forever friends or strangers meeting on the morning of the wedding, the moment they fall in love is always the moment I most love to write. Each carries their own particular revelation. What fascinates me is that instant of recognition, when one of them suddenly sees the other not as the boy who pulled her ribbon loose at twelve, or the girl who skinned her knees climbing trees alongside him, but as the man or woman they have quietly grown into. Or, in the colder version of the tale, the moment when a hero or heroine who had resolved that they might be obliged to marry this person but should never, ever love them, discovers, quite against their will, that they already do.

The moment is at once shocking and inevitable. Of course, it is him. Of course, it is her. It always was.

I am equally drawn to the theme of found family, particularly the families we choose. The orphan brought into a household and loved as wholly as any child of the blood. The four young men forged into brothers at Eton who carry that brotherhood through every chapter of their lives. The widow taken in by her late husband's friends and discovering, perhaps for the first time, what it means to belong somewhere.

Both tropes share the same essential truth: love is not always a meeting. Sometimes it is a recognition.

This is one I have thought about a great deal, and the honest answer is that distance, in itself, has never felt like an obstacle. The Regency world I write does not exist on any modern map. It exists in letters and ledgers, in dictionaries dating to 1699, in transcribed newspapers of the period, in the architecture preserved between the pages of books I have collected for decades. That world is as accessible from a farmhouse in North Texas as it is from a flat in Bloomsbury, perhaps more so, because here I have the quiet to inhabit it fully.

What living in America does give me, I think, is a useful kind of perspective. I love England with the particular devotion of someone who has loved her from afar, and that love comes without sentimentality. I see the period as it was, not as it has been romanticised by national memory. The privilege and the cruelty alongside the elegance. The brilliance and the blind spots. An English author writing of her own heritage carries a weight of expectation I am, in a sense, free of. I write of England because she enchants me, not because she belongs to me.

There is also, I confess, something rather Regency about my own life that helps. The farm is quiet. Letters and conversations matter. The horses must be tended, the cats must be fed, the seasons announce themselves on the land rather than on a screen. The pace is closer to the world I write than any city could offer.

Distance, in the end, is largely a matter of where you place your imagination.

Born For Love: The Earl's Choice is anchored in one of the most devastating real events of the period, the wreck of the Sea Horse off Tramore Bay on the 30th of January, 1816, and the challenge there was both technical and moral.

Technically, the research was overwhelming. I needed to verify the rigging, the type of vessel, the soldiers and their families aboard, the conditions at the harbour, the precise hour of the wreck, the names of those lost, what those who watched helplessly from the Irish shore could and could not have done. I had to understand the currents, the winds, the ships nearby. I had to know the truth before I dared to fictionalise around it.

But the deeper challenge was moral. Real people died that day, and real people watched them die. To use that tragedy as the engine of a romance, to weave fiction through fact, is a responsibility one cannot take lightly. The temptation, when one is moved by something that genuinely happened, is to pour every detail onto the page. To honour the dead by leaving nothing out. But that is not honouring them. That is overwhelming the very story they sparked.

The discipline I have learned with this book, and I am still learning it, is that historical accuracy must serve the narrative; the narrative does not serve the research. The Sea Horse had to be present in the bones of the story, not draped over every page. The tragedy informs Leslie's life. It informs the world the characters move through. But it does not interrupt the love story it set in motion.

I dedicated Born For Love to those who lost their lives that day. That, I believed, was the most honest thing I could do.

This is the question I wrestle with on every page.

The novelists of the actual period, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, William Thackeray, Henry Fielding, even Austen at her most elaborate, wrote in a register modern readers find genuinely difficult. Double negatives layered upon inverted sentence structures. Subjunctive moods nested within elaborate circumlocutions. Where one word might do, ten were preferred. It is glorious, but it is not accessible, and a reader closing the book in frustration is not a reader I have served.

So my approach is to keep the cadence and the dignity of the period without strangling the modern ear. The gentry, when they speak, do not contract their words. I do not, I cannot, I shall not, never I don't, I can't, I shan't. The formality is itself a form of characterisation; it tells you exactly the world these people inhabit. Forms of address are scrupulous: my lady, your grace, sir, never softened, never modernised. Period vocabulary is verified against my dictionaries before it is allowed onto the page. I have a list of words I will not use because they did not yet exist, and another list of words I am always reaching for because they did. At least, I try my best to authenticate the language.

But the servants, the grooms, the merchants and the soldiers, their dialogue lives in another register entirely. They speak with contractions, with regional dialects, with the rhythms of working life. The contrast between gentry speech and servant speech is itself a fingerprint of the era, and it gives a chapter texture that mere description never could.

The cardinal rule I gave myself years ago, and which I have not strayed from since, is this: do not treat your reader as stupid. A modern reader is intelligent enough to navigate authentic Regency dialogue when it is written with care, and a writer who panders by flattening the language into modern speech has paid the period the very worst kind of disrespect.

The reader will rise to meet you. The trick is simply to extend the hand.

The central love story is the river through every novel I write, but the romance does not begin and end there. It runs into a hundred smaller tributaries, and those tributaries are often the moments that make a reader put the book down and reach for a cup of tea before continuing.

There is the romance of friendship, particularly the brotherhood of the Eton Four, four young men forged at school and bound together for life. Their loyalty to one another, their teasing, their willingness to come at a moment's notice when one of them is in trouble, is its own kind of love story, and one I find as moving to write as any kiss exchanged between hero and heroine.

There is the romance of family, chosen and given. The earl and countess who raise an orphaned girl as their own. The servants who have grown old in a house and watched the children grow with it. The dowager who stands quietly behind her son and steadies him without ever needing to say so. These are the relationships that surround the central romance and give it ground to stand upon.

There are the secondary romances, the shy young viscount finding his way to an unsuitable young lady, the widow who never expected to love again. These threads complicate the central love story, complement it, and remind the reader that love does not happen in only one form or to only one person at a time.

And there is, perhaps, the quietest romance of all, the love a character finds for themselves. The heroine who learns her worth. The hero who learns to feel. That, ultimately, is what makes the central love possible.

A romance novel, when it is doing its proper work, is not a single love story.

It is a portrait of love taking many forms at once.

I have admitted on several occasions that my stories come to me in my dreams. It is not an answer I pulled from a hat to sound poetic. I truly do dream my plots and characters into being.

As a child, I lived almost entirely in my imagination. My family moved a great deal, and I was constantly meeting new children, trying to find my footing in unfamiliar places. I learned to adjust to whatever environment I was set down in, though I did not know at the time how stressful that constant adjustment was, and I found myself building imaginary worlds where life was easier and where the endings were always happy ones. My childhood was comfortable in every other respect; family was the safe place. It was friendships outside the family circle that demanded all my attention, and I learned a great deal about people in those years. I learned that friendships do not simply happen. Some of the dearest friends I still have today began as people I did not like at all. I learned, very young, that arrogance and haughtiness are most often the cloak hiding insecurity, and that adolescence is the most difficult passage any of us walk.

All of that, I think, settled quietly into me, and many years later, it began returning to me in dreams.

The Born For stories did not come in order, though Born For You did arrive first. What I knew from the beginning was that I wanted four young men at Eton bound by an unbreakable bond, and an unbreakable bond is not forged through ease. It is forged through difficulty, defence, blame, hatred, and finally the necessity of joining forces in a common cause. Which is precisely what these four boys did. Each came from a different childhood, and yet they were bound by class at a time when class alone could create both camaraderie and dissent. They were chalk and cheese in many ways, and yet a particular kind of friendship can form between boys at that age, fierce, irreverent, protective, absolute. The kind of bond that survives the transition from boys to men, from school to society, from carefree privilege to genuine responsibility.

I knew, before I had written a word of their love stories, that I wanted to follow these four through their lives, and that each of them would meet a heroine worthy of him, even when she was the very opposite of everything he had imagined for himself. That, in its own way, was another of the bonds that held them together. They had agreed, in the carefree confidence of young men, that they would not marry until their thirties, and that when they did, they would choose blue-blooded young women who knew propriety and their place, who would bear their heirs without interference or question, and who would honour the family reputation above all. They hoped for affection, naturally, but so long as the lady was good ton and the household ran smoothly, that would do.

Then, of course, life had other intentions. Each of their stories turns upon a moment when the hero's entire understanding of himself is challenged, and the woman who challenges it is never, ever the woman he had planned to marry.

They became Jack Norrys, Richard Hawthorn, Thomas Worthington, and James Sheffield — the Eton Four. And as I wrote them, I discovered that James in particular had taken hold of me. He carries a thread through all four books, and his own story, in the fourth, became the largest and most personal undertaking of my writing life.

The phrase Born For arrived almost as a gift. Each hero, I realised, had been shaped by life for one particular woman, and each heroine, in her own way, for him. They had been born for one another long before they were ever introduced, though neither of them yet knew it. The phrase carried the inevitability I wanted, the sense of two people whose meeting was always, somehow, going to occur.

And so the four titles wrote themselves.

Born For You. Born For Love. Born For This. Born For Me.

Four books. Four heroes. Four women who were always going to meet them.

The series simply could not have been called anything else.

My experience with AllAuthor has been, on the whole, a positive one, though I shall confess at the outset that I have not yet engaged with the platform as fully as I intend to. The unpublishing and republishing of my flagship series has occupied a great deal of my attention this past year, and AllAuthor is one of several places where I know I have been quieter than I ought. As I emerge on the other side of that effort, I look forward to delving in properly and discovering the fuller range of ways one may engage there.

For an independent author, discoverability is the single most difficult mountain to climb. We can write the best book of our lives, but if a reader cannot find it on the shelf, the work might as well have stayed in the drawer. AllAuthor has been one of the platforms that has made the climb a little less steep, connecting authors with readers who are actively seeking new voices, and doing so with a professionalism and a warmth I have come to appreciate enormously.

What I have particularly valued is the sense of community. It is, in some ways, a place to ground oneself amongst authors of like mind and genre, to find one's people. The other authors I have encountered there have been generous and supportive without exception. Writing is, by its nature, a solitary occupation, but it need not be a lonely one, and platforms that bring authors into kind company with one another are doing more good than they perhaps realise.