Ramblings From This Chick: Feature and Giveaway: What Not to Bare by Megan Frampton

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Feature and Giveaway: What Not to Bare by Megan Frampton

Meet Megan Frampton, author of What Not to Bare.

Megan Frampton majored in English literature at Barnard College, with a double minor in political science and religion. She worked in the music industry for fifteen years, editing and writing music reviews for a music-industry trade magazine and eventually becoming the editor in chief. Frampton married one of her former interns and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with him and her son. When she isn’t writing, she serves as the community manager for the romance novel website Heroes and Heartbreakers.

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Writing steamy in historical romance is a challenge--a writer has to balance the fictional fun of writing some hot encounters with the historical reality of people in that time.

For example, Regency women did not generally have knowledge of contraceptives. There were a few whore’s tricks--soaking sponges in vinegar, and other unpleasant things--but a lady would not have a clue about any of that.

Nor did she have much of a clue about what went on down there anyway. Again, generally speaking, a woman had to figure out her own sexuality. If she was told anything, it might have been the night before her wedding or talking about such delicate subjects with married girlfriends or sisters.

(The bonus part about that is not having to fuss about contraception, and mentioning it, nor to worry about sexually-transmitted diseases--of course they existed at that time, but our heroes did not have them, and the heroines wouldn’t have known about them anyway, so it’s a non-issue).

But writing romantic historical fiction is a different matter than what might have happened generally at the time; in our books, we allow our heroines to be sexual, to explore what certain sensations feel like. It is a delicate balance between maintaining historical accuracy with also telling a good story (not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but if you are writing a particularly steamy story, there’s bound to be some behavior that would be not standard for the period).

In What Not to Bare, my heroine Charlotte makes up for her lack of expertise by her curiosity; she likes knowing how it feels like to be kissed, to be touched, and she is also extremely interested in touching the hero, Lord David. Because he might be the most gorgeous man she has ever seen, and she knows she’d be a fool not to take advantage of all that.

Of course she does consider what could happen if she has tab-A-into-slot-B sex with David, because she’s not a ninny, no matter what time period she exists in. Before all that occurs, however, she indulges her curiosity with doing other things, things she knows won’t result in an unexpected pregnancy. And David is bemused, and then enchanted, by her curiosity and his own...curiosity is aroused, so they do all sorts of things that most unmarried young ladies and gentlemen would not have.

In Megan Frampton’s witty historical romance, a woman is judged by her gown, and a man by his reputation—until both are shed in one sexy moment of seduction.

Lady Charlotte Jepstow certainly knows how to make an impression—a terrible one. Each one of her ball gowns is more ostentatiously ugly than the one before. Even she has been forced to wonder: Is she unmarried because of her abysmal wardrobe, or does she wear clashing clothing because she doesn’t want to be pursued in the first place? But when Charlotte meets Lord David Marchston, suddenly a little courtship doesn’t sound so bad after all.

David will be the first to admit he’s made some mistakes. But when he gets yanked from his post by his superiors, he is ordered to do the unthinkable to win back his position: woo his commander’s niece. If David wants his life back, he must use his skills as a negotiator to persuade society that Charlotte is a woman worth pursuing, despite her rather unusual “flair” for color. But David does such a terrific job that he develops an unexpected problem, one that violates both his rakish mentality and his marching orders: He’s starting to fall in love.

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