So here’s the story of how we met and started writing, as we plan to tell it to our enthralled grandchildren one day. We’ll sit them down, wide-eyed and eager, we’ll brush off the crumbs and foam from our thin lips with the backs of our withered hands, and after spending a few minutes berating them on how kids these days have no respect for their elders and tradition, then complaining about our various aches and pains, with a quick segue into how we had to walk 10 miles to school, uphill both ways and knee-deep in snow (though, in Tina’s case, that might very well be true), we’ll get on to the story they’ve been begging to hear:
We should perhaps come clean. We met over the Internet. And astonishingly enough, neither one of us are axe murderers. Although it is doubtful the Jane Austen fandom has very many of those. It is, in other words, quite a safe environment and it certainly was a nurturing environment for us because generally speaking neither one of us had much of an online life before that.
It was way back in 2006 and somehow we each managed to find the same small message board where other Austen devotees gathered. Separately we each then started gingerly dabbling in a little role-playing game there – before either of us had ever heard of the concept of online role-playing. Not only was it was great fun, it helped awaken in each a latent, heretofore stifled yearning to write. Fortunately for us, the roles of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy were already taken, so we were in turn compelled to come up with other characters, Tina choosing a spoiled, yet charming English peer and Gail choosing a poor, yet proud Scottish schoolmistress. In this game we eventually we found ourselves playing almost exclusively off one another, developing a mutual admiration through the banter and interaction of our characters. We took our two kids on their own adventures, probably causing much frustration to the other participants in the game, but giving us great delight and satisfaction.
As Holly and his lordship crept toward the inevitable in our virtual world, we thought it only proper to introduce ourselves to each other, as it appeared our ‘children’ would end up being much more than friends. It soon became very apparent that the bond between us would be every bit as strong as the bonds that were forming between our characters.
And that is how Lord David Baugham, 6th Earl of Cumbermere, and his true love/thorn-in-his-side, Miss Holly Tournier, and our writing team, too, as it happens, came to be. Their story, taken from that original role-playing game on that message board, was polished, embellished, organized, adjusted, edited, re-ordered, re-written, fiddled-with and fine-tuned over the subsequent months and years, resulting in, Twixt Two Equal Armies, our very first published book!
Twixt Two Equal Armies