Special Guest: Imelda Evans talks about Melbourne

First, thank you so much ladies for having me on the Lovecats!  I am a big fan of you all so it’s a great honour to be invited.

I wanted to share with you today a bit about the setting of my debut novel with Destiny Romance, Rules are for Breaking. 

Rules are for Breaking is set in Melbourne, which, for those who don’t know, is the capital city of Victoria, Australia and my adopted home town.  

I’m a big believer in setting.  I like to be able to visualise the houses my characters live in and the places where they work and play – basically anywhere that’s important to the story.  I’m weirdly fussy about it.  I’m quite happy to plunge into a story without knowing the colour of a character’s eyes or hair, but I’ll spend hours wandering town looking for a building that looks like a good home for my heroine’s business, or drawing the floor plan of her flat.  (Some might say that I spend too long, but is it my fault that my fantasies tend to real estate?  I think not.  It’s research, I say!  Very important for writers. ;) )

In the case of Rules are for Breaking I had ample scope for fun research, because buildings are quite important in this story.  Quite without me meaning them too, the buildings that are most associated with my two lovers became metaphors for their differences and, in the end, for the things they had in common.

Jo, my heroine, is an art dealer and the story opens in her art gallery.  In the story I don’t specify exactly where the gallery is, or what it looks like, but, like most of my settings, it had a real-life inspiration. 

I discovered ‘Jo’s gallery’ many years ago, not long after I moved to Melbourne – although I didn’t know then that it would star in a story one day.  I was just trying to get a feel for the city. 

I didn’t have a car in those days, so I walked everywhere.  I hoofed it to Italian in Lygon St and Laksa in Chintatown; I strolled south across the river to the Botanical Gardens and back north to loiter in the grand domed reading room of the State Library; I explored the Paris end of Collins St and, one fateful day, I wandered up Bourke St, in search of the coffee with a side order of flirting that no-one does quite like Pellegrini’s.

The Eureka Tower on Southbank in Melbourne

And there it was: on the corner of Bourke and Exhibition Sts, next to Hill of Content, one of my favourite bookshops.  A commercial art gallery, a thing I had not previously known existed (I was young at the time, remember).  It was selling Aboriginal art (and still does) and I remember lusting after many of the pieces, which were lovely but well out of my price range.

But even more than the art, I remember coveting the space.  It’s not enormous, but it is white of wall, high of ceiling and flooded with light and in that moment I, who wouldn’t know good art from guano and who shudders at the idea of running any kind of retail outfit, wanted to own it.

The Eureka Tower on Southbank in Melbourne

I soon left and forgot my crazy impulse, but when I came to write a story about Jo, a young Melbournite lucky in her profession, but unlucky in love, oddly enough she turned out to be an art dealer with a gallery that looked, at least in my head, exactly like that one I first saw in Bourke street 20 years ago.  (Which just goes to show that you should never annoy a writer because they apparently don’t forget EVER and EVERYTHING is material.) 

Jo has poured her heart and soul into that gallery.  She has built her whole life around it and the quiet, genteel, old, simple, low-rise building it lives in.  She’s happy in it – mostly. 
And then in swans Declan, an engineer from Sydney who spends his working life building tall, ultra-modern and complicated buildings, like the one pictured in the photos.

On the surface, they have nothing in common.  But ironically, it is through his ridiculously tall, loud, almost brash, building that he starts to make her see that maybe they share more than she thinks.  Enough for unexpected friendship.  And maybe even love.

Rules are for Breaking is a contemporary romance about two stubborn people who have to learn that they can’t run their love lives the way they run their businesses if they want a happy ending.  It’s also a story about buildings and music and picnics and rock-climbing and how you know when you’ve found ‘The One’.  It’s available now from Destiny Romance and I hope you like it!


Thanks for visiting us, Imelda! Melbourne is one of my favourite cities, so it was great to hear more about it, *and* to hear more about your debut book - it sounds like a whole heap of fun.

If you want to find out more about Rules Are For Breaking, you can see it on Destiny's website. You can visit the lovely Imelda on Facebook or Twitter or pop over to her website.