Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, thinking about how the plots of some of my published novels came about. Since I’m not one for advance planning, the route from idea to book was often roundabout, but throughout my career I have firmly believed that no writing is ever wasted. If something doesn’t work for one book or short story, it may be just right for another project. In other words, I recycle.

Henry VIII’s Greenwich Palace, setting for a 1513 novel

Very early on, well before my first sale, I wrote several very long, very bad historical novels, most set (no surprise here!) in sixteenth-century England. My first version of one of them, way back in 1977, was titled The Princess of Pleasure Palace. Set in 1513 at Greenwich Palace, it featured a real person, Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary, as the protagonist. I wrote one chapter and an outline and sent the proposal to the Harlequin Historicals line that existed at that time. They were, not surprisingly, uninterested. Undaunted, I switched to a fictional protagonist and completed a 72,000 word manuscript retitled The Perils of Pleasure Palace. This opus received two rejections before I did another revision and this time (1978) came up with a 96,000 word version retitled Pleasure Palace. It focused on a girl from the London streets who, through a liaison with a courtier, ended up at the royal court and interacted with a series of real people there. It collected ten rejections.

Skipping ahead to the 1990s, after a detour to write children’s books and contemporary category romance novels that, starting in 1985, were published, I borrowed the 1513 court setting for a new proposal titled My Lady’s Ransom, in which an English gentlewoman falls for a French nobleman who is at Henry’s court pretending to be a commoner in order to foil the schemes of his evil uncle. What little I wrote of this novel contained a scene in the room at Greenwich Palace that was used to store the set pieces and wagons used for court masques. When, once again, my idea for a historical novel set in 1513 failed to appeal to an editor, I abandoned it.

Meanwhile, in an odd twist of fate, another historical novel I had written did sell. In 1991, Harper Paperbacks published Winter Tapestry (recently revised and reissued as Death of an Intelligence Gatherer—you can find the tangled story of that book’s journey from mystery to romance and back to mystery here). Later, Harper offered me a contract for Firebrand, set in seventeenth-century England and New England, for their Monogram line. They bought the book on the basis of a one page synopsis and I ended up having to write it in three months because they decided they really really wanted it that fast. Rather desperately, I appropriated what had been the opening scene in Pleasure Palace to start a story that was, at that point, almost totally unplotted. Talk about having only the concept of an idea! The result was published in 1994 but I was never really happy with it. Last year, I completely rewrote it and reissued it as Treacherous Visions. It still contains that key scene from Pleasure Palace but now it takes place later in the story.

But wait. There’s more. After writing five books for  Harper, I sold my first Face Down mystery featuring Susanna, Lady Appleton, sixteenth-century gentlewoman, herbalist, and sleuth, to St. Martin’s Press. In 1998, I was trying to come up with an idea for the third book in the series, about to be the first in my second St. Martin’s contract. I had a pretty good handle on the continuing characters and their conflicts and I had decided before I started the series that there would be a time lapse of roughly two years between each book, so I knew this story would take place in 1563, but I didn’t have a clue about any further details. All I was certain of was that I wanted to increase the tension between Susanna and her philandering husband, Sir Robert, already slated to be the murder victim in the fourth entry in the series.

That’s when I remembered that scene in the storeroom at Greenwich Palace from My Lady’s Ransom. Recycled, it takes place in 1557, not 1513, the storeroom is in Whitehall Palace, not Greenwich, and the cast of characters is different. Face Down Among the Winchester Geese takes place in 1563, but the novel starts with a scene six years earlier, one that shows the events surrounding the murder of the first victim of a serial killer. The rest of the plot flowed easily once that first scene was set. After one of Sir Robert’s many mistresses is murdered, Lady Appleton discovers her husband also had a connection to the woman killed at court in 1557, and that a woman similar in appearance to those two victims has been murdered on the same day in each year in between. Most were “Winchester Geese,” the popular name for prostitutes in the London suburb of Southwark.

By 1999, my 1977 idea for a book set in 1513 had provided starting points for two published novels, but I still had a hankering to write about the early days at Henry VIII’s court. When the agent who sold my Liss MacCrimmon series (written as Kaitlyn Dunnett) to Kensington asked if I had any other ideas, the one that sprang to mind was Pleasure Palace. To my surprise and delight, she was enthusiastic. The new incarnation ended up with a new protagonist and a much more complex plot using a cast of characters almost entirely made up of real historical figures. Much of the book, however, still takes place in 1513. Even better, Secrets of the Tudor Court: The Pleasure Palace (2009) became the first of six historical novels I wrote for Pocket Books/Gallery as Kate Emerson—all of them set during the reign of Henry VIII.

The original name of Henry VIII’s Greenwich Palace was Placentia. It means “pleasant place,” but somewhere along the line I translated the word as “pleasure.” When my editor at Pocket loved the title I was delighted. (I really hate it when editors mess around with my titles!) In this case it might have been better if she had. I had no clue until years later that most establishments referred to as “pleasure palaces” were actually bordellos.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.