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Alison Mckenzie Samples The Blacksmith's Bride
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Katherine Grant: Welcome to the historical romance sampler podcast. I'm your host, Katherine Grant, and each week I introduce you to another amazing historical romance author. My guest reads a little sample of their work, and then we move into a free ranging interview. If you like these episodes, don't forget to subscribe to the historical romance sampler, wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Now let's get into this week's episode.
I am so excited to have today, Alison Mckenzie. Alison is a history nerd, born and bred with a special love for all things revolutionary. She left undergrad with a minor in history and went on to library school so that she could indulge her other passion connecting people with books. Now she's here today to read from her debut Historical Romance, The Blacksmith's Bride.
Alison, thank you so much for coming on.[00:01:00]
Alison Mckenzie: Thank you so much for having me. I am really excited for this.
Katherine Grant: From the blurb alone, you did a great job of setting up the time period. And because it was post Black Plague and Nottingham share, I immediately went, is this Robinhood Times?
Alison Mckenzie: We'll get there.
Katherine Grant: We'll get there.
Yes. So I'm very excited to take a, take a journey back to very old English days. Yes. What do we need to know about the Blacksmith Bride and the scene that you're gonna read?
Alison Mckenzie: Okay, so this is from chapter two. I went pretty early when I selected the excerpt. Matthew and Elizabeth are best friends have been since they were children.
He lived with her family briefly after his parents died. He is now a blacksmith. She is still living at home with her very unpleasant mother and her younger siblings and taking care of all of them, except she also had an affair with her employer and has just found out she's pregnant, which is a problem because her employer is absolutely not going to marry her.
So [00:02:00] Matthew comes to visit and he can tell something's up. So he is like, Hey, what's going on? And he's sort of trying to pry this information out of her, and that is where we come into the scene. He touched her shoulder gently and she did not flinch away.
"You may tell me," he said, "I am not your mother, nor am I a child who requires your protection. I can bear your troubles as well as my own. Mine are small enough."
"No," she sniffled. "You may not. I believe you are strong enough to bear them, but I cannot bear the telling of them. You would turn from me in shame and you would be right to."
Matthew Scoffed.
"Don't be ridiculous. What could you do that would cause me to turn away? When we have known each other so long, we're hardly strangers to each other's faults."
"It's not a fault, but an action." She sniffled again, taking her hands from her face so that she could wipe her eyes. "And even if you don't, I will still feel the shame of it."
" The shame of what?" On impulse, he caught her hands in his and held them. "Whatever has befallen you, I can help. If only you'll tell me what it is you need." She made a half-hearted attempt to pull her hands away, but he hung on too tight for her to [00:03:00] manage it. Failing that, she kept her eyes cast to the ground worrying her bottom lip between her teeth.
"If you do turn from me," she said, "I will not blame you for it."
"You'll have no need," Matthew said, "for I won't do it." Elizabeth made a wet sound halfway between a snort and a cough. For a moment, Matthew was afraid she was about to be sick again, but she rallied.
"And if I tell you-" she stopped. He squeezed her hands.
"If I tell you that I'm to bear a child out of wedlock with no father to claim it..." looking back on the moment later, Matthew would be infinitely grateful that he didn't drop her hand out of sheer shock. of all the sins she might have confessed to the possibility of pregnancy hadn't occurred to him. "You?
How?"
"Matthew!" Now, she looked up at him reproachfully. "Surely you understand how."
He felt himself flush. "I do, but I I had no idea you..." He wished to run his hand through his hair, as he often did when confounded. But he knew he couldn't let go of her without signaling that he was withdrawing. "I never realized there [00:04:00] was a man who..."
"There isn't." She dropped her gaze again. "That is, the child's father will not, cannot claim it. I'm alone in this."
"But he must!" Outrage flared in Matthew quick as a spark to kindling. "How may he not claim the child when it comes about from his own actions? He must share on the guilt with you if there is guilt to be had."
Her talk of shame made little sense. At least a quarter of the woman in the parish had already been heavy with child when they were first wed and everyone knew it. There was no punishment for them so long as they were safely wed by the time the child was born, with a husband to provide for them in their offspring.
Barbary's own oldest daughter had been born only four months after her wedding day, and it had done nothing to lower her in Matthew's estimation. He couldn't imagine why Elizabeth thought the case would be different for her. A thought struck him. "Is he wed already?"
"No." This time Elizabeth pulled her hands away with such violence that Matthew was forced to let go.
"I would never do such a thing, you know, I wouldn't."
"Then why?" His hands now free, Matthew indulged in his earlier impulse to [00:05:00] push them through his hair. "If he has no other ties to keep him from taking responsibility for his own child, what prevents him? He cannot expect you to bear it alone."
"Matthew, please."
Elizabeth pulled her knees up, hugging them to her chest. "I can tell you nothing more. Don't ask me anymore." She looked close to tears. On impulse, matthew shifted towards her and put both arms around her, pulling her close. She went limp in his grasp almost immediately, putting her head down against his chest.
They hadn't embraced like this since they were children, back when such a gesture was free from the potential for fraught emotions on either of their parts. Matthew would never have dared to do it before. He knew it would tear at him to let her go, but she needed him now, and that meant more than his own petty jealousy.
He was jealous. He could feel it burning in his breast much as he wished he felt otherwise. He had no right. He tried to tell himself that, that the sensation was only anger. Anger at this man who had used his friend and gone on his way while leaving her with the consequences. But he knew there was a meaner, baser element to it.
[00:06:00] Elizabeth had chosen a man and that man wasn't him. And though he knew it was wrong of him to feel spurned when he had made no offering for her to spurn to begin with, the feeling still sat there like a lump of coal.
"I have ruined my family," Elizabeth said into his shirt. "When the child comes, I will have to pay a fine for fornication and we have no money with which to do so and I cannot work with a babe in arms, and mother's eyesight fails her more each day and we will soon have nothing at all."
His shirt was growing wet with her tears. "I would be of more use to them now if I simply went to away into the woods and lay down to wait for the wolves to take me. At least, then they would have too fewer mouths to feed."
"Don't say such things." He held her tighter. "You've shepherded your family through endless disaster and you still believe they'd be better off without you?
You're speaking nonsense." She laughed, wetly. "You may ask my mother if she feels the same and come away with a different answer."
"Your mother is a rotten scold." When Elizabeth drew back from him, open mouthed in shock, he only shook his head. "Did you think I didn't know? I see how she treats the lot of you.
No matter how hard you work to please her, [00:07:00] she will carry on with her cruelty no matter what you do, so I see no purpose in attempting to please her."
"Don't," she said. Her fingers dug hard into his tunic. "You mustn't. She tries. Truly. You don't recall her before. When father was alive, she wasn't like this.
It's the loss of him that has made her hard." She shook her head. "I pray God that I will never be so dependent on a husband as she was for I think the better part of her died with him. I cannot blame her for that."
"I remember her perfectly well before," Matthew retorted. "Do you really see such a great change in her?
She was always unkind, especially to you. You need never think that what she says of you is true."
"Whatever she may think of me now," Elizabeth said, "no one could blame her for turning me out of doors when she discovers my condition. There's no room in the household for another child, and that's the plain truth of it.
Whatever use I am to them for my wages, I'm worth nothing once the child is born and I cannot work." She made a small snuffling sound, rubbing her cheek against the rough fabric of his tunic. "I spoke to... a woman who [00:08:00] deals with situations like mine suggested that I find a husband to claim the child since its father will not."
Matthew opened his mouth to reply, but she hushed him before going on. "But I have no enticements that might compensate for bringing a bastard into a marriage, and I can think of no man who would take on such a thing."
"I would!" The words were out of his mouth before he had a moment to consider, but he meant them wholeheartedly.
He would take a dozen bastard children for Elizabeth's sake if that was what she wanted. What man who truly loved a woman seeing her in need would not do likewise? Elizabeth wrinkled her nose and swatted him lightly. "Don't talk nonsense." She said her voice pitched to an approximation of his. "Besides, you have your wealthy bride to think of.
Surely you wouldn't wish to disappoint her."
"It's not nonsense," he said. "I would gladly marry you, wealthy bride or no. The marriages of kings and queens may be made for profit, but we are none of them and we needn't wed for any purpose other than our own happiness."
Elizabeth sighed, sitting up and sliding out of his arms as she wiped her face with her sleeve.
"I cannot imagine it would make you happy," she [00:09:00] said, "to take on a wife who simply chose you out of the need to conceal her own shame. Truly, Matthew, don't jest. not about this. I have little time to consider what I must do and I can't bear to laugh about it."
"I don't ask you to," he insisted. "Must you believe that I'm insincere in what I say?
Any man would be lucky to have you for a wife, myself included, child or no child."
She was silent for a long moment. Matthew wanted to pull her into his embrace again, but he knew without asking that it wouldn't be welcome. He wished he could convince her somehow that her low estimation of her worth was horribly wrong, that whatever she had convinced herself or more likely what her mother had convinced her of, she had more value than as her family's workhorse, but none of his words ever seemed to make the slightest difference.
When she spoke again, her voice was low and serious. "Are you in earnest?"
"I do not know what else I might say to convince you." Matthew rather felt the control of the conversation was sliding away from him, but he wasn't quite sure how. "I know of no man who would not want such a view as a wife. And if he did, then I would call him a fool."
[00:10:00] "No, I..." She huffed a laugh, dropping her head into her hands. "You don't understand me. I mean..." She turned to look him full in the face, her eyes wide and dark and serious. "Are you in earnest?"
The realization when it fell on him, landed like a bolt out of a clear blue sky. He knew now why he'd felt the conversation slipping away.
He had lost control to such an extent that he had accidentally proposed marriage to his best friend without intending to. He'd only meant to reassure her. And now she was looking at him with such painful hope in her eyes, like she was drowning in the sea, and he was the rope thrown to her to pull her to shore.
Of course, he had to deny her. It wouldn't be fair to either of them. He couldn't make an offer like this, not when he loved her and she never knew, and she would be tricked into agreeing without truly understanding what it would mean, and he could hardly burden her further by confessing himself now when she had no so many worries to contend with already.
And, and, and... What he said instead was. "Of course." As he said it, he realized he meant it. Every objection his mind had cast up remained as true [00:11:00] as it had been moments earlier. But so were the arguments in favor. This was Elizabeth. This was the girl who had curled up to sleep beside him in childhood, chased off the other boys when they'd pelted him with rocks, and saved portions of her meals so that he would have enough to eat.
The girl with whom he had explored the Greenwood, climbed the great oaks and gotten sick eating green apples. Hadn't they promised each other over and over that they would be true and loyal friends to each other? What would those vows mean if he would turn away from her now?
"Of course," he said again and took her hand.
She looked dangerously close to crying again, blinking rapidly as her eyes grew glassy, but she swallow hard, took several deep breaths and replied in a steady voice. "I don't know how I could ever... what thanks I could give you."
"You needn't give any," he said. " How much worse could I do in life than to marry someone I know as well as I know myself and who has always been a friend to me? Marriages are made on far worse foundations than that." He wouldn't ask her to love him. He couldn't. For all he knew, she still loved the man who had fathered her child, but it hardly mattered [00:12:00] anyway.
Not all marriages were rooted in love. His sister's arguments for a strategic marriage had rung false in his ears, but a marriage between friends was something else, wasn't it? They would be wed, and they would be friends as they had always been, and that would be enough. It had to be enough. "I have a house of my own,"
he went on, "and you've seen it, so you must know that it's large enough for a family to make a home in. You'll come and live in town with me and help me in the Smithy. Your our children will grow there, sons and daughters of a Freeman. It will be a good life, Elizabeth."
"I believe you." She squeezed his hands.
"I do. It's only it's hard to trust in the future when everything has been so hard."
"Trust in yourself then," he said, "and trust in me that we can build something better." And for all that the morning's events had gone careening out of his control and he still felt wicked for not disclosing his own feelings and the knowledge of how furious his sister would be for all that,
he still believed what he said.
Katherine Grant: Aww. What a [00:13:00] sweetheart. I love a hero who's in love, love, love
Alison Mckenzie: He is so down bad. absolutely pathetic.
Katherine Grant: Well, I have a lot of questions for you, but first we're gonna take a quick break for our sponsors.
Katherine Grant: All right, I'm back with Alison Mckenzie who just read a sample from The Blacksmith's Bride and there are so many beautiful, fun historical romance things that we love in this scene that you just read. There's the hero who's just so in love.
There's the marriage of convenience. There's the kind of idea that you don't deserve the love you want, because how could you possibly see, you can't admit that you love her. Tell me about how you got into this story and the tropes that you explored. And since this is your, this is your first historical romance mm-hmm.
Why those are the tropes that you [00:14:00] think that called to you the most?
Alison Mckenzie: So you mentioned Robinhood earlier when we mentioned that it set in Nottingham Shire. Yeah. This story started almost 15 years ago now in a role playing game my friends and I were playing based on the BBC show Robinhood, which if you haven't seen it, I cannot honestly recommend it, but we had a, when RPG based on it. Elizabeth was my character, and Matthew was like one of the npcs who sort of turned up to support her story and she had a bit of a
a relationship going on with her employer, the lord of the manor. And so I was sort of looking at that and thinking, what happens in a relationship that's that unbalanced and what happens when you come away from that much worse off than when you started? And then you have to think, what am I gonna do now?
I have no power in this situation whatsoever, and the person who should have been protecting me is not going to do that. And I think that's something that a lot of young people especially go through in their early twenties. I know I [00:15:00] did, I know a lot of my friends did. Where you get into a relationship with someone who's older and in a position of power over you,
and you think to yourself that you're the one in control and then all of a sudden it comes crashing down that no, you're absolutely not. And sort of what I wanted to explore with this book was the aftermath of that. What happens when you're processing the sort of the wreckage after relationship like that happens?
And then I wanted to give my character, a sort of soft place to land while she's processing this. And that's where Matthew comes in. And I also wanted to, and part of this is just the Robinhood of it all, but part of it is also just a narrative thing that's always interested me is how we live in systems that are not stacked in our favor.
So I mentioned in the blurb that, a few years before this book is set, there was the Peasants Revolt, which was England's first working class uprising when the peasants of England actually tried to overthrow the government. And it failed. [00:16:00] But it is in the air now that these characters are thinking something could change.
We don't have to live like this. This is something better than this is possible. So I sort of wanted to capture that feeling of maybe things could get better. Maybe we have the possibility of the life we want instead of the one we've always assumed we have to have. And so I think something like marriage of convenience is also really good for that because it's usually
a compromise in some way. It's, well, I need to get married, so we're gonna get married. And it's not perfect and it's not a fairytale, but it is what it is. And then s slowly you start to realize, oh this, this is better. This is, this is for me. This isn't just about making the best of things. This could work.
I find relationships and fiction really interesting when it is the character sort of putting that work in of. What does a, a good relationship look like? What does it look like [00:17:00] for us to live with each other? And that's why I really love this trope and why I was drawn to it for my, for my first book.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. I love that. I personally find there to be so much resonance between the metaphor of the marriage or whatever the romantic relationship is and political systems. Mm-hmm. I am. I think I am drawn to that in my own work and I'm drawn to it. I think it's one of the reasons why historic romance, it is really interests interesting.
Alison Mckenzie: It's the heart of the genre. It's women saying, how do I navigate this system that wasn't built for me, and how do I carve out a place for myself in it?
Katherine Grant: Yeah, absolutely. My grasp on British history gets very, very elusive once you get
before the 1500s. I'm pretty sure Robin Hood is a legend.
Alison Mckenzie: Not real, the guy who might have been him, but like it's. Yeah, it's like King Arthur. They may have been a guy named King Arthur. He did not have a round table.
Katherine Grant: Okay. So what was your approach to walking the [00:18:00] line of filling this story with historical world building versus telling the romance story?
Alison Mckenzie: I really wanted to root it in the political climate of the time because it was such an interesting transition period in English history. I mentioned the Black Death as well, and part of the reason this was such a transition time and why the rebellion happened when it did is that historically speaking in the feudal system, people were tied to the land they lived on.
Matthew mentions being a Freeman and that is unusual for people of their class. Usually you're a serf. You live on the land. You are not allowed to leave unless you ask permission, and you are stuck working there until the day you die. There's no bargaining power because there are more people who need work than there are jobs available.
And then the Black Death wipes out half the population, which is not good. I'm just gonna say that. Not great, right? But what it means practically is that now there are more jobs than there are people. [00:19:00] And so if you are a surf. Or a villein, which V-I-L-L-E-I-N is what they were called. You now had that possibility of saying, actually, I don't like working here.
I don't like the way you treat us. I'm going to the next manor over and seeing if that guy will give me a job. So I always knew that I wanted to root it specifically in that period because it was such a time of upheaval and change and possibility. And so there was one book that I relied very heavily on, which is Ian Mortimer's, the Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England, which is just an absolutely fantastic resource if you're interested in this period, because it very much goes into like the day-to-day here is what people do when they get up.
Here is what they eat, how they play, where they sleep. And I wanted to make sure that the conflicts were also rooted in this. So, for instance, the fact that Elizabeth now has to go to the Lord of the manor, the father of her child, and say, will you please let me leave to marry this man? Because you needed permission to marry too.[00:20:00]
And Lords could also say, well, I need more workers. And you are a woman of childbearing age and you don't have a husband, and I need you put popping out babies for me to make more workers. So you're gonna marry this guy. And you don't get a say. So there was so much, coercion isn't even the right word, because it's like there was no persuasion.
It was just, you're gonna do this. Yeah. I wanted to set it in that milieu of, I have so few choices in my life, because I think that's what makes historical romance so interesting is that it's setting characters in a place where they have restrictions on their lives that are wildly foreign to us now, but it informs every choice they make, and I wanted to make sure that came through clearly.
Katherine Grant: Yeah, that sounds really interesting. And were there historical romance authors or books that you were like, that's the type of book I wanna write?
Alison Mckenzie: Not period wise, because it's very hard to find medieval romances. I'm, I'm hoping we're gonna turn it around. I'm hoping this is gonna, this is gonna start a trend, [00:21:00] but one big influence on me is Rose Lerner's book in for a Penny, which is a Regency Romance novel.
It is also marriage of convenience. Basically, this guy inherits a title and finds out they're flat broke so he marries an an heiress to like a shipping fortune. And again, they have to learn to live with each other. So that kind of was my model for what a marriage of convenience romance looks like in the sense of what.
What beats are the characters going to be hitting in this marriage? What does it look like when you're suddenly married to someone and you have to figure out how to live together? So that was a big influence. I really like Cat Sebastian's work as well. Cat Sebastian, I think is someone who One has very leftist politics.
Her website used to be, I think she's changed it now, but her tagline on her website used to be Fall in Love, eat the Rich. So that was like in the back of my head. She has one book in particular called The Queer Principles of Kit Web. That is very much it. It's set in the, I think it's the Georgian period, it's the [00:22:00] 1700s.
So I don't remember exactly, but it is very much about the abuses of the feudal landlord system. So that was also in my head as I was writing. So those two I think were big ones. And there's also KJ Charles writes a lot of historical fiction. She also is someone who is very, sort of keyed into the characters navigating systems that are not built for them. And so those three, I would say are my biggest influences in terms of the kind of story I wanted to write.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. Three great influences to have. All right.
Well, now is a good time to move into our game. Love it or leave it?
[Musical Interlude]
Katherine Grant: Love it or leave it? Protagonists meet in the first 10% of the story.
Alison Mckenzie: A hundred percent. I will read it if that's not the case, but I think that that initial meet cute, or meet hate or whatever is going on with them, sets up a lot about [00:23:00] who the characters are in addition to the actual romance, because I think the best romances are
revealing character through how they deal with a relationship. And so when you see them meet for that first time, you can look at it and see, here's what they're gonna bring out in each other. Here is what clashes they're going to have. And it's really sets up the whole tone and conflict of the book in just a single scene.
So I do generally have them, if they don't know each other already when the book starts, then I want 'em to meet right away.
Katherine Grant: Love it or leave it? Dual point of view narration.
Alison Mckenzie: Yeah. Love it. Yeah. I have read books that are single point of view. I mentioned kj Charles, her book, Any Old Diamonds does single point of view really well.
I find single point of view works best when one of the characters is hiding something and we don't want the audience to know. Yeah. Because that, because if you're in their head and they're constantly thinking, oh, here is my tragic secret that I can't tell anyone. It drives the audience crazy. 'cause they're like, oh my God, just [00:24:00] say it,
i'm getting so annoyed. So I think single POV can work. It's not my go-to, but it can be done really well. And generally I do lean towards dual POV.
Katherine Grant: All right. Love it or leave it? Third person, past tense.
Alison Mckenzie: That's also generally my go-to. I actually write horror fiction as well under my, my wallet name as it were.
Mm-hmm. In that I generally write first person. In romance, I generally do third person past tense because I find that if you're in first person, it's almost too much. Being that close in their head, like they're experiencing such heightened emotions that you're like, okay, I, I need to get a step back from this.
This is freaking me out. So I think it allows for that distance. So you don't feel almost voyeuristic in their head, but you are also still engaging with their emotions.
Katherine Grant: Hmm, very interesting. Love it or leave it? The third act breakup or dark moment.
Alison Mckenzie: I, I love it and I think there's a very [00:25:00] important reason for it.
I think the point of the third act breakup in romance fiction is that the characters need that moment to say, What does this relationship bring into my life that I did not have before? And what would I be losing if it wasn't there? Because the best parts of romances are about the fact that characters make each other better.
It's not just you make me happy, although that's great. It's also, here is what you provide in my life that I didn't have and how you encouraged me to be to reach for things that I wouldn't have reached for otherwise. And so I think the third act breakup. The purpose of that is for that character to have a moment to say, if this relationship ended and I never saw this person again, what would I lose?
And that really reinforces for them, oh, I would lose all of this. I don't want to lose that. I need to rededicate myself to this relationship. So as much as it can be like an eye roll thing, like, oh boy, here we go. They're having an argument because we got 50 pages left. It is also I think, a really structurally important aspect of the [00:26:00] romance plot.
Katherine Grant: Well said. Love it or leave it? Always end with an epilogue.
Alison Mckenzie: You know what? I think I'm neutral on that one. I like a lot of epilogues, but I also think that sometimes it's okay to just leave it where it is. I mentioned Cat Sebastian. She's got one book I think it's called Two Rogues Make a Right, which is very funny when you read it because neither of them are anything approaching a rogue.
It's, it's very much one of those things where like it's a historical romance novel, call them rogues, whatever.
Katherine Grant: Is that the one where
one of them is dying of...?
Alison Mckenzie: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that's what I was about to say. One of them has a terminal illness and so it's a happy for now ending. We don't know how long he's going to live afterwards, but we know they're happy now, and I think that's a valid approach to it.
I think sometimes saying, you know, you are not going to live until you're 80 and die surrounded by your grandkids and great grandkids, but you're going to be happy for the time you have left, and that's still valuable, is something I think that we [00:27:00] could use more of in historical, in romance in general, because I think almost the, the happily ever after,
and then the epilogue, can almost create this expectation of it. You have to have a very specific type of happily ever after ending. It has to look like this when that's not how it looks for everyone. And I think historical romance should be a big tent where there's room for all different kinds of happy endings.
So I like the Epilogues a lot of the time. But I will also say, I think that there are some books that are better without it. And also some books where it's like this not in the book proper, but the author puts it on their website, so the reader can take it or leave it. And that's also great. I think that's a really good compromise.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. All right. Love it or leave it? Always share research in your author's note.
Alison Mckenzie: Oh, a hundred percent. I've been on an Erin Langston kick recently. Forever. You're Rogue and The Finest Print. And I love her books because you can tell like she really digs into the research. The finest print is set in a newspaper shop, [00:28:00] and you, like, I'm reading it like, I don't know a ton about printing in the Victorian era, but I can tell that you do and I want to know more.
So I, I love it when authors include their research afterwards because I am at heart a history nerd and my next step is going to read the original sources.
Katherine Grant: Alright, and finally, are there any other romance rules I didn't ask about that you like to break?
Alison Mckenzie: Well, I don't know if I'd call this a rule, but it is something I ran into a lot when I was querying, and so I think it's, it's a publishing rule if not a writing rule.
I had a lot of people tell me, I like the book, I really enjoyed it, I like the characters, et cetera, et cetera. But it is not going to be sellable with working class characters. Like point blank. This is a lords and ladies genre. Have you considered making her her employer, her, her baby's father, the main character and making these guys the B plot?
I, you make that face, but like I [00:29:00] told a friend, my friend Hannah, who beta reads all my books and she was like. But it's their story! I'm like, yeah, yeah. I appreciate agents telling me that. It's much more actionable advice than, I don't think I'm gonna take this on at this time. And it is what pushed me to self-publishing. So I'm like, okay, this is just a bit too outside the norm for traditional publishing right now. But I do think there's a market for it, so I am gonna go the
self-publishing route. So that is a rule I think that very much should be broken, needs to be broken because if we are writing romance on the assumption that everyone deserves a happy ending, but the only people we actually see getting happy endings are the Lords and ladies, what are we even doing here?
Why are we, why are we saying that only a certain subset of the population are the ones whose love lives and happiness are worth talking about? So that is a rule I am very dedicated to breaking.
Katherine Grant: Well. Fantastic. I'm so glad you're breaking that rule. I would [00:30:00] be so devastated if the Lord of the Manor was the lead of this story.
Where can readers find The Blacksmith's Bride? And this episode's gonna come out the first week of August.
Alison Mckenzie: Awesome. So it's going to come out a week before the book release, which is on August 13th. I have a website, Alison Mckenzie writes.wordpress.com.
It's gonna have links to all the purchasing options. I also have a Substack and a Blue Sky and a TikTok, all of which are under amckenziewrites. You can find me on any of those platforms. Oh, and, and in Instagram as well. Same name. And all those places I'm gonna be posting stuff about my upcoming releases, stuff about my current works in progress.
Katherine Grant: Awesome. I'll put your website in the show notes.
Alison Mckenzie: Awesome.
Katherine Grant: Did you say, is your book Kindle Unlimited or will it be wide?
Alison Mckenzie: No, it is wide. So it's Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, apple Books, smash words, literally everywhere. Google Play. Yes. Perfect.
Katherine Grant: Well, Alison, thank you again. This has been a [00:31:00] fantastic chat and I'm really glad you came on. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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