About Nina Gates

This is a notebook kept in public.

I’m Nina Gates. I write romantic mysteries—The Gilded Talisman, The Roses of Ainsworth Manor—and books of essays on how we live—The Elegance Code, Be an Artist (or Just Live Like One). Before the books, I was an Army officer, a portrait painter, and a horse trainer. The notebooks from those lives, and from the years since, are where these letters come from.

I send dispatches occasionally when there’s something to say—Field Notes on art and travel, romance and reserve, the small disciplines of a well-made life, and whatever I happen to be observing from wherever I happen to be. Some of it stays where it is. Some of it, eventually, becomes an essay or a novel.

Free subscribers receive the dispatches as they go out, and have access to the small worlds I’ve built around each novel—playlists, book club notes, fragments from the notebook, occasional interviews. Enough to extend the spell of a book a little further, for readers who want that.

Patrons—the paid tier—see something almost never done. The part writers do not make public: the crafting of the novels as they are written. Drafts, revisions, the chapter that was a disaster on Tuesday and better on Friday, the scene that was cut and the one that replaced it. The working version, with the seams still showing, in the months before it’s polished and published. When the novel is finished, the working version comes down. Read along while a book is being made, and play an essential part in the making of it with your patronage.

There’s no chat, no bonus essay tier, no weekly thread. Just the dispatches, and the books-in-progress for those who want them. Finished books find their way to the usual places that sell books.

I write for readers who prefer atmosphere to instruction, and reserve to disclosure. If that’s you, I’m honored to meet you.

— Nina

More…

Bohème Éclat is the imprint that publishes my books. It was also the original name of this Substack, and remains the philosophical base of the whole project.

Bohème—a life lived freely, outside the conventional grooves, on its own terms. Éclat—brilliance, distinction, a flash of style. Together, the conviction that artistic freedom and elegance are not opposing values but the same value, seen from different angles. A life that is both unguarded and luminous, both creative and precise.

Bohème Éclat is, in this sense, a press and a sensibility—an invitation to live artfully and well, where intelligence, beauty, and curiosity gather in the same room. Everything I write is colored by this premise.

Find me on Instagram at @ninagatesauthor and @ngatesportraits.