The Promise Harbor Wedding features four books (Jilted, Bolted, Busted, and Hitched) by four different authors (Kelly Jamieson, me, Sydney Somers and Erin Nicholas) that all start with the same wedding. It’s a wedding that goes rather disastrously awry, but it’s also a wedding that’s seen by seven different characters, using seven different points of view. Do I have to tell you how much fun that was for us?

First of all, we needed to figure out what our characters were doing at the wedding in the first place. We had a bride and groom, of course—Kelly’s hero and Erin’s heroine. But since [SPOILER ALERT] they don’t actually make it through the wedding, we also had their Significant Others, both of whom qualified as guests (one in a very loose sense). Syd and I had the supporting players, the best man in her case and the matron of honor in mine. Syd also had the best man’s “date,” the cop who arrested him earlier for disorderly conduct. My heroine’s SO was actually not a wedding guest so that left us with seven points of view to deal with.

Kelly and Erin laid out the basic wedding for the four of us. The bride and groom would obviously be able to see the main events better than the other characters. But once we had that template to work with, the other characters could all cut loose. We also had to be aware of the emotional states of the characters involved. Kelly’s hero is the groom and her heroine is the groom’s ex-girlfriend who’s a guest at the wedding. Both of them have reasons to be emotionally devastated by what happens at the wedding, and they’re both pretty upset. Nobody writes emotion like Kelly writes emotion, and I guarantee you’ll feel upset for them by the end of the wedding in Jilted.

In my case, my heroine, Greta Brewster, has just gone through a divorce of her own—something she was trying to keep from her mother and her brother, the groom. Her view of weddings and marriage in general is a little jaundiced, based on her own experience, and what she sees at the wedding does nothing to make her feel more positive. Greta also has a slightly snarky personality, not unlike mine, and her sense of the ridiculous causes her to see the wedding events in a somewhat more comic light than the other characters. Kelly’s view of the wedding will make your heart ache. I hope mine will make you grin, at least a little.

I think of the wedding scenes in our four books as a kind of kaleidoscope vision. Each person sees the same wedding a little differently, and each person reacts based on what she/he thinks he/she’s just seen. Which is all to say—don’t stop with just one version. Remember, you’ve got a lot of other ways to see the Promise Harbor Wedding.

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