A Mad Wicked Folly: Guest Blog by Sharon Biggs Waller

I really adore the boys in A MAD, WICKED FOLLY.  

I have a soft spot for them, I really do.  There are actually two boys in Vicky’s life.  There’s Edmund Carrick-Humphrey, Vicky’s fiancé.  He’s very handsome and suave in that Dominic Cooper kind of way. He’s very much a frat boy and all he really wants out of life is to have fun.  He and Vicky start out with a lot in common because they are both in trouble.  Edmund’s father had to bail him out of some financial difficulties, which led to a scandal.  So he and Vicky bond over their shared woes.

And then there is the sensitive, kind, and gallant PC William Fletcher. He’s very swoony and handsome and he’s also Vicky’s art muse.  Vicky meets him after running into him, literally, at a suffragette riot.  Will moved to London from the country to become a police constable and to write.  His dream is to publish novelettes, and he and Vicky collaborate. Vicky draws him for her art portfolio, and she illustrates his stories.  Will understands Vicky probably more than she understands herself.  

Full disclosure: my husband is a retired Metropolitan mounted police officer, but Will is not based on him. 

Well, the swoony part was! : )  

A Mad, Wicked Folly Synopsis:

The year is 1909. After seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling poses nude for her art class, she is expelled from her French finishing school and shipped back to London to live with her parents. To minimize the scandal Vicky has caused, her parents inform her that she is to marry the young man they have selected for her, Edmund Carrick-Humphrey. She is not to continue painting. Vicky knows little about Edmund but accepts the match, reasoning that she can use his money to pay for tuition at the Royal College of Art.

But things don’t go according to plan. Despite her engagement, Vicky develops an interest in the handsome young police constable William Fletcher, an aspiring novelist who encourages Vicky to pursue her dreams. She goes quickly from seeing Will as an artistic muse to seeing him as much more, all the while knowing that she could never be with a man so far below her class.

When Vicky becomes entangled with a group of suffragettes, she comes to realize that the constraints on her aspirations and independence don’t apply only to her—they apply to all women. But how can she fight for women’s equality and pursue the life that she wants without driving away everyone and everything that she’s known?

About Sharon Biggs Waller:

Sharon Biggs Waller is a novelist and award-winning non-fiction writer who lives on a 10-acre sustainable farm in northwest Indiana with two horses, four dairy goats, four cats, two dogs, and 60 laying hens. 

She is a dressage trainer who for many years was a Civil Service Club instructor at the Royal Mews in Buckingham Palace in London.  

Visit her at http://sharonbiggswaller.com or on Twitter @Sbiggswaller.