When the pandemic finally trickles to a halt, Titania Greenwood, has to get away from her San Francisco art gallery. After buying a dilapidated manor house in the UK, she discovers a hidden cellar full of paintings by a previously unknown 19th-century artist. Hoping their sale would pay her debts, she ships to her gallery, only to discover that the paintings are magical gateways into a painted world. Entering the world in the shape of Anne, one of the artist’s models, she meets Avery Goddard, the oddly mercurial artist who has been dead a hundred years.
At first, Titania only hopes to learn enough about Avery’s magical creations to sell his collection to the highest bidder, but she feels herself falling in love with him. However, there is an obstacle: the beautiful Erin Hawthorne, a young chambermaid in Avery’s employ that she suspects of having an affair with her master. Bisexual Titania discovers she is also attracted to Erin, but also jealous that Avery would be interested in her; and her feelings are further complicated by the impending auction that will cost her any future chance of seeing either of the two of them again.
Titania finally learns why Avery is so strangely unpredictable: the two of them have been experiencing the same events in a different order due to the strange rules of the timeless painted world, and a glimpse into the future shows Titania that she is destined to sell the collection against her better judgment. Regretfully she turns down Erin and expresses her love for Avery, knowing they can never be together after the auction. However, Avery reveals that he and Erin are the same person, and together they conceive a method to sell the original collection but still see one another in a painted world they create together.
Now, how did we get here?
First, let's start with the banal. Why did I choose to write a romance?
When I came to the end of National Novel Writing Month in 2018, I had finished Seer of the Sands and I wanted to start querying it. I wasn't optimistic I would get an offer, because it was everything agents say they don't want from a debut author: a Western-based high fantasy that's over the recommended word count. As a debut, it's not worth a publisher's risk. Furthermore, all the advice online suggested that I shouldn't attempt to write Book 2 of the series until I had a buyer for Book 1. So I turned to my handy list of novel ideas — I keep a journal of them — to decide which project would be best.
Immediately, I thought of Woman on Painted Bridge. I had had a vague idea for a romance novel about a magic painting, but as I was in the middle of Seer I couldn't do much more than make a note of it, or write a single page at maximum, to capture the basics. It ticked all the boxes: it was a standalone novel with no built-in series, it was relatively short by comparison to Seer, and I liked the idea and the genre.
The idea was pretty basic at the time: a woman falls in love with the self-portrait of an artist who died a hundred years ago. I knew there would be some kind of love triangle — an "other woman," if you please, visible in the background of the painting — to add complications. I knew the main character would work in the field of art, but I didn't know if she'd be a museum curator or a docent, or an art gallery owner, or a painter, or an artist's model. She'd be in the art world somewhere. And I didn't know much about the mysterious painter at all.
I had the basics. Now I had to develop them.
First: what role would the female MC have? That was easy: I didn't know anything about being a museum curator, but I knew about retail and commissioned sales. Besides, making Titania the owner of the gallery gave her higher stakes — she has a financial interest to sell the painting. If the magic portrait had been hanging on the wall in a museum, it's not going anywhere, unless it's a limited-time showing or something. Still, that's low stakes. Selling the picture would deny her future access to it.
Second: who was the "other woman" in the picture? From the start I figured it would be a young woman in the village. Perhaps the artist could see her from the window and longed after her, so painted her into the background of various works. Or, I thought, the other woman was Titania. Maybe Titania spends so much time wandering around the village looking for the "other woman" that the artist sees her and longs after her ... but no, that wouldn't work, I thought. If there is no other woman, we never get to meet her; we never get the tension of seeing what kind of person she is, or what she wants, or whether she loves the artist in return. With a plot twist like that, I could outsmart myself into having no dramatic tension at all.
I clung to the idea for a while during development. Maybe Titania could meet ... someone else. A girl from the village, but not the girl. So who would that be? I didn't know.
Then I thought: could the girl actually be the artist? We don't know much about the mysterious painter, after all; we only have an alleged self-portrait to go by. If this artist died a long time ago — I still didn't know exactly when, but more than a hundred years — then we might not have reliable records. Just a painting. Maybe the artist had used his (or her) own features as the model for various portraits. as Leonardo da Vinci may have done with the Mona Lisa.
At that point I realized I was going to have to decide how Titania and Avery were meeting. Was it purely time travel? Or was there some other world beyond the frame? Could you take high-tech items with you, or were there limits? If you go to the past, do you appear out of thin air, or do you assume the form of someone already extant? What about paradoxes? If Titania appeared in the past and Avery painted her, wouldn't that mean there's an old portrait of Titania somewhere?
Instinctively I wanted to eliminate the possibility of bringing back anachronistic technology. It wouldn't do. For one thing, if Avery painted a 19th-century portrait of Titania on her iPhone, or even mentioned any of her modern ideas or knowledge of future history, that would have wide-reaching repercussions. Sure, you could tell a story like that, but that wasn't what I was going for.
I concluded that Avery's creation would have to involve some separate secondary world, one which would limit Titania's contact with real historical events; and the process of visiting that would would translate any anachronistic objects (like her iPhone) to something of the local equivalent. On further consideration, I decided that visiting this world would require one to inhabit a predetermined vessel. The visitor would assume the form and attire of the person in the portrait. I thought this would be a good way to eliminate more paradoxes of the hey-isn't-that-Titania-in-the-painting variety. It would also allow for disguises and identity mix-ups, which I thought might be fun.
So I had a shape. Now it was time to re-evaluate, and I saw some problems.
If Titania were visiting in some other assumed shape, how could she be sure Avery was in love with her and not with her image? I'd have to fix that — Avery would paint a picture of her real self, somehow, and that portrait wouldn't turn up right away. It would be hidden away. Also, I realized, Avery could be both the rugged self-portrait and the "other woman," and I could strike one character from the story. Titania could meet Avery and Erin, and not realize they were the same person.
In order to pull that off, I'd have to keep them (and the reader) off balance, so nobody guessed the secret too quickly. That's when I invented the idea of the out-of-order time loop. Titania's first time meeting Avery would not be Avery's first time meeting her. That would disguise the "beginning" of their relationship and make Avery seem much more commanding and knowledgeable. He would know her first, before she ever met him. And there could be no question of anything but a happy ending, which meant Titania would have to accept Avery as well as Erin as one whole person.
After that, I built the characters in Titania's life.
December was easy. I didn't want to follow the stereotype of the Sassy Girlfriend Who Supports the Heroine. It was predictable. I invented December with the express purpose of a business-only relationship. This would give December a pure, unsullied perspective on the sale of Avery Goddard's work. December's opinion is not contaminated by her opinion of Titania's relationships.
I then made a list of Titania's exes. As an attractive and bisexual single woman over forty, she will have had prior relationships, and they hadn't worked out. I wanted to know who, when, and why.
Creating Titania herself took more time. I was well into the first draft before I had a handle on who she was, and I went back and revised her personality. If Avery was withholding his own identity, Titania should have a parallel story. There should be something about her — her specific ethnicity — that she played social games with. Some fundamental act of ... not dishonesty, exactly, but concealment.
So that's how I developed the basic concept of Woman on Painted Bridge. I started with a few ideas and followed through on the consequences to see which paths made for good stories.
