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Tessa Radley | O for a beaker full of the warm South…
Romance / October 14, 2008

I wasn’t thinking about Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale when I first started to write MISTAKEN MISTRESS. But when I conceive of a story one of the first things that I have to decide is where to set the book. For me, the atmosphere of the setting will permeate the entire story. The Saxon Brides is about a family who run a vineyard, Saxon’s Folly. So I knew I wanted the homestead to have a sense of family history and go back at least a couple of generations. I had a great deal of fun researching the locations where I could possibly set the books. My first thought was of the Napa Valley. I’d read about it, but because I like to be able to visualize the place where the story takes place my big stumbling block was I’d never visited the Napa and I wasn’t going to have time to go stake it out. Next, I considered the Barossa in Australia. It’s awesome. Named for the Battle of Barrosa which Colonel Light, Surveyor General of the day, fought in during 1811, it boasts some of the oldest existing Shiraz vines in the world. And then of course there is…