About Nina Gates

This is a notebook kept in public.

I’m Nina Gates. I write romantic mysteries: the Gilded books, with Maren and Alexander Girard, and the Nell Ainsworth mysteries, The Roses of Ainsworth Manor and The Vanishing Violinist. I also write books of essays on how we live: The Elegance Code and Be an Artist (or Just Live Like One). Before the books, I was a portrait painter, horse trainer, and Army officer. I studied fashion, then political science. At the time, none of it looked like preparation for writing. All of it was.

The Gilded Talisman began as a travel blog. After the first entry, I understood that I was not going to write about my private life on the internet, so I gave the trip to a woman named Maren Bennett and let her live it. She took the Orient Express from Venice to Paris and stayed at Le Bristol because I had. When Nell and Henry have drinks at the Connaught, it is because I did. I write about what I know and places I have been. It is my entire method, and the reason a reader can immerse herself in the stories.

I send Field Notes when there is something to say, which is most weeks and not all of them. They concern art and travel, romance and reserve, the small disciplines of a well-made life, and whatever I happen to be looking at from wherever I happen to be. The essays live here too, in their own section: more argued, less forgiving. Some of what appears here eventually becomes a book. Most of it does not. This is the only place it can be found.

I do not send emails for everything I publish or maintain an email list outside this publication. You will not hear from me more than you would like.

Subscribers, at no charge, receive the dispatches and essays, and access to the small world built around each novel: playlists, book club notes, fragments from the notebook, the occasional interview. Enough to stay a little longer with a book you enjoyed.

Patrons see the books as they are written: drafts, revisions, the chapter that was a disaster on Monday and better on Friday, the scene that was cut and the one that replaced it. This is the part of the work writers do not show, mostly for good reason. When a novel is finished, the working version comes down and the finished book goes out to the usual places that sell books. Patrons will have watched it being made—and paid for the privilege, which is what patronage has always meant.

They may also comment and write to me directly. I read everything, and I answer. Access to the writer was the other half of patronage, and it is the half that will not scale.

There is no chat, no schedule, and no tier above Patron. The dispatches, the essays, the books in progress, and a way to reach me. That is the whole of it.

I write for readers who prefer atmosphere to instruction and reserve to disclosure. If that is you, we will get along.

Kindest regards,

Nina

Find me on Instagram at @ninagatesauthor and @ngatesportraits