Today I’m sitting down with the very talented Courtney Milan and chatting about her latest–and undeniably greatest–historical romance titled UNVEILED. This book was a February Top Pick and earned each and every one of its 9 1/2 Stars! Please extend a warm welcome to Courtney.

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I read UNVEILED and absolutely loved it! I think it’s your best book to date and I’ve read you feel the same. What made this book different for you from PROOF BY SEDUCTION and TRIAL BY DESIRE?

Mostly, I’ve just grown as a writer. Between my debut and UNVEILED, I wrote more than half a million words. You have to learn something doing that! I’ve also come to understand what kind of stories are natural to me–I do better with stories where there is high, personal conflict between the hero and heroine.

But there’s one other thing: writing PROOF and then TRIAL convinced me that when I start a series I need to envision all the books at once. So when I was working on UNVEILED, I wrote pieces of both Mark and Smite’s books. That meant I had to see the story from everyone’s point of view, not just Ash’s and Margaret’s. That made the brothers feel more real to me than anything else.

Can you tell the readers a little bit about UNVEILED?

Lady Margaret loses everything when it comes out that her parents’ marriage was invalid: her dowry, her place in society, even her fiance. Then she meets a man who is willing to look past her ruin. He doesn’t see her illegitimacy; he sees what she can become. But he’s the man who destroyed her life by having her declared a bastard in the first place.

Click to read Top Pick review!

Ash, the hero of UNVEILED, was for me A Hero to DIE For! If you were forced to categorize him, where would he fall within the alpha and beta roles?

100% alpha. He is the kind of person who walks into a room, and immediately takes up the center of attention. People like him. They want to do what he wants them to do.

The only way you could arguably say that he is not an alpha is that he is actually a really nice guy–but last time I checked, you could be nice and still be a leader of men. Being an asshole doesn’t make you in charge. It just makes you an asshole.

I absolutely loved Margaret, the heroine. Why was she the perfect match for Ash?

Ash takes a sly pride in circumventing rules; Margaret knows what they are. This means that Margaret also knows what purpose rules function. In many ways, Ash needs someone to act as his conscience, and it’s through seeing how what he does affects Margaret that he understands how to go forward.

Can you tell us about UNCLAIMED, which will be Ash’s younger brother, Mark’s story?

Mark has written a book about chastity which has brought him popular acclaim–as well as enemies, who hire Jessica Farleigh, a courtesan, to seduce him and destroy his reputation. But Jessica finds that rather than seducing Mark, she’s falling for him….

In UNCLAIMED, Mark is a virgin. Did you have to consciously rein in on the testosterone when writing his character? *chuckle*

Ha! He’s been refraining out of principle, not out of lack of desire. Men that aren’t having sex don’t have less testosterone. Just remember: Before Sir Lancelot met Guinevere, he was a virgin, too.

I’m all for those dark and brooding kind of heroes, so I was immediately taken by Ash’s other brother, Smite. Can you tell us anything at all about his story?

Ah, Smite. He’s dark. He’s not…he’s not entirely brooding, see? He’s sarcastic, yet matter of fact. He’s harsh, but underneath, he has a really soft heart. You’ll see more of him in UNCLAIMED, and as you can imagine, Mark has a very different view of Smite than Ash does.

And I am afraid to say anything about his story until I get the okay from my editor. After all, she might not like it.

Which comes first for you, the characters or the story?

It doesn’t work that way. I have bits of characters floating in my mind. I have bits of story floating in my mind. At some point, character collides with story with sufficient force that they stick together; they then have enough mass to attract plot points and other characters. After some amount of accumulation, I know I have something that is a book. I have hundreds of plot points and bits of characters floating in my mind, waiting to come together. Neither comes first. It’s the marriage of story and character that has to happen.

If you could give any one particular piece of advice for aspiring authors, what would it be?

Edit more.

What’s the best thing about being published and what’s the thing you like the least?

The best thing about being published is fanmail. The worst thing about being published is that I’m kind of neurotic and so I end up refreshing Amazon to see if there are new reviews every twenty minutes, unless I switch off the internet–which I do, because it’s the only way I can get work done.

The hardest part of being an author for me is keeping track of names. In the first version of UNVEILED, one of Margaret’s brothers was Edmund, Edgar, and Edward–I could never remember which–and Margaret’s fake last name wavered from Lowell to Lowood. In fact, I don’t remember anymore which one I settled on!

I just handed in the almost-final version of UNCLAIMED and literally the day before I gave it to my editor, I realized I had three characters who had “George” as a first name: George Weston, George Lewis, and George Dickon. Whoops!

Names do not stick in my head.

To read more about Courtney and her books, you can visit her at www.CourtneyMilan.com. Today, Courtney will be giving away an autographed copy of UNVEILED and TRIAL BY DESIRE to one lucky commenter.