Word Wenches

Here today, gondola tomorrow

From Loretta:

Didst ever see a Gondola?  For fear
    You should not, I’ll describe it to you exactly:
‘Tis a long cover’d boat that’s common here,
    Carved at the prow, built lightly, but compactly;
Row’d by two rowers, each call’d ‘Gondolier,’
    It glides along the water looking blackly,
Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,
Where none can make out what you say or do.
  (Lord Byron, Beppo)

Thus opens Chapter One of Your Scandalous Ways.

Thanks to all the screen adaptations of Jane Austen's work, most readers have some idea of what, say, an early 19th C carriage looks like.  But the early 19th C gondola--the carriage of Venice, whose streets are mostly water--may not be quite so clear.
Since gondolas play a big role in Your Scandalous Ways--much as a carriage might in one of my English-set “road books”--I’m going to expand on Byron’s evocative and witty description.  And, as always, I shall supply visual aids.

The first thing we modern readers need to get used to is the cabin or felze.  People think of a gondola ride today as romantic, but the passengers are in public view.  In the time of my story, the passengers were likely to be inside the felze.  It would have a door, casement windows, Venetian blinds, and a cushy interior. (Katherine Shaw kindly sent me this photo.  Please scroll down this page to see another.)

Thus Byron’s “coffin clapt in a canoe.”  It was quite private--and yes, in Your Scandalous Ways, I take advantage of that privacy in more than one scene, as in this excerpt.

      He needed desperately to be taught a lesson.
      Unhurriedly she slid shut the casement beside her and closed the blinds.  She reached across him, letting her bosom brush against his chest, and closed the window and blinds on his side.
      As she moved back to her place, she felt his chest rise and fall a little faster than it had done a moment earlier.
      She folded her hands in her lap.  “There,” she said.  “No one can see.”
      “There won’t be anything to see,” he said.
      “We’ll see,” she said.

Today, a gondola ride is an expensive luxury, reserved mainly for tourists.  It's faster and much cheaper (and noisier) to board one of the water taxis or buses.  In Byron’s time the gondolas
were everywhere.  Picture these black vessels with their little cabins, like black taxicabs, converging on a theater.  “And round the theatres, a sable throng,” as Byron puts it. 

Here's a recent view of the rear of La Fenice opera house, where Francesca's gondola would be waiting to collect her after the performance.  Below it is a (mid?) 19th C view.

     "After midnight, when the theaters let out and the parties began, the lights of hundreds of gondolas danced over the canals and candlelight twinkled in the windows of the palaces.  Here, where no coach wheels and horses’ hooves clattered over pavement, one moved in a quiet punctuated only by voices.  Carried over the water, conversations ebbed and flowed around her, as though in a great drawing room."

And no, the gondoliers did not then wear the straw hats with the ribbons and they did not sing.

In the time of my story, one would glide along in the vessel in a quiet world.  As Lord Byron's friend Hobhouse wrote, “during the night a profound stillness reigns though the canals and streets, interrupted only by the warning cry of the gondoliers, and the drop of their paddles, or by the tinkling of some solitary guitar."

Research is the closest I can come to time travel.  The challenge is to make my hero and heroine’s surroundings vivid in the reader’s mind without letting it intrude.  I don’t spend pages going into all the details of gondolas.  And I cannot illustrate my books.  But I’m thinking this blog is enough to let you answer one of those time travel questions so many of us have fun with--and get a chance to win a free book.

If you could ride in a gondola in 1820 or a gondola now, which would you rather and why?

The winning commenter will receive, sometime in early June, a signed copy of Your Scandalous Ways.

Your palazzo or mine?

From Loretta:      

In response to readers who encouraged me to discuss the settings and other background material of Your Scandalous Ways, today we're taking a house tour.

“Ah, Venice,” James said as he took in the view--such as it was--in front of and behind him.  The buildings and gondolas were merely darker shapes in the grey haze.  “A fine place, indeed, but for the damp.”

       I don’t know about the rest of you but I didn’t, really, know all that much about Venice before I embarked on Your Scandalous Ways.  Casino Royale inspired my British agent hero.  "Hmm,” I said to myself.  “What would 007 be like in the early 19th century?”  The film inspired my setting, too.  Those climactic scenes in Venice awakened my curiousity.
      I did not realize, for one thing, that Venice was built on a bunch of islands in a marshy lagoon.
       Originally, it was where people from the mainland fled when the barbarians attacked in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.  It was a safe haven because the lagoon was very dangerous and tricky to navigate.  After a while, they quit going back to the mainland and started building.  How they built is the miracle of Venice.

       “All this, on top of water,” Sedgewick said, shaking his head as he looked about him.  “What sort of people is it, I wonder, goes and builds a city on stilts on a swampy lot of islands?”
       “Italians,” said James.  “There’s a reason they once ruled the world, and a reason Venice once ruled the seas.  You must at least give credit for a marvel of engineering.”

       Here's a view of the Grand Canal and some of the case (houses) or palazzi (palaces). You’ll find “ca” and “palazzo” used interchangeably.  Until the fall of the Republic (i.e., when Venice surrendered to Napoleon in 1797), only the Ducal Palace (that building to the right in the painting above this one) could be a palazzo.  All other houses, no matter how grand, were simply houses, case.  Afterward, the restriction went away.  And so the same house might be a “ca” in one book and a "palazzo" in another.
       These magnificent structures were indeed built on stilts packed close together.  From my Eyewitness Travel Guide to Venice & the Veneto:  “Pinewood piles were driven...25 feet...into the ground....They rested on the solid caranto (compressed clay) layer at the bottom of the lagoon.”  On top of these were laid layers of brick and stone.  The foundations were of Istrian marble, which resists damp.  This book has some wonderful cutaway illustrations that are well worth a thousand words.  But one need only look at the buildings and consider how much labor was involved--not to mention ingenuity--to appreciate the accomplishment.

     They followed Zeggio up a staircase to the piano nobile, and found themselves in a vast central hall.  This portego, as the Venetians called it, ran from one end of the house to the other.
      It was clearly designed for show.  The line of magnificent chandeliers down the center of the ceiling and rows of immense candelabra standing on tables along the wall--all dripping the famously magnificent glass work of Murano--would, when fully lit, have made a dazzling display of the gilt, the plaster ornamenting the walls, the sculpture, the paintings.

Here for your delectation are lots of pictures of Venetian palazzi.
       Getting pictures of the exteriors was easy.  Finding interiors was another matter--and for Your Scandalous Ways, it does matter, since many of the scenes are...um..intimate. Happily one of the Wench readers suggested Venetian Palazzi (ISBN 3-8228-7050-1--that's the English edition), which offers the proverbial visual feast. Copyright prevents my sharing those images with you, but there is some material online.
       Here's one of the many internet sites I perused in the course of my research.  This "Ceremonial Stair" in the Ca' Rezzonico is a fine example of the magnificent interiors.  This site provides a floor plan of the Ca’ Rezzonico, too.
       Virtually all Venetian palazzi have the same basic layout.  A great hall runs from the side of the house facing the canal to the side facing land, usually overlooking a courtyard.  The hall on the ground floor is the andron.  The one on the main public floor or piano nobile, is called the portego.  Rooms extend from either side of these central halls.  Some buildings have interior staircases and some have exterior ones.  Sometimes the building was extended to surround the courtyard.  Side rooms open into other side rooms.  But if you keep in mind that big central hall running from the front to the back of the house, and doors leading into rooms on both sides, you’ve got the general picture.
       This shows the floor plan of the Ca’ Mocenigo, where Lord Byron lived, and the picture is of the poet at his leisure in his humble abode.      
       You can picture my hero James Cordier in a room like this, though he’s more likely to be gazing out of a window at Francesca’s palazzo across the canal than lounging on a sofa.

That brings us to the end of today's tour.  Did you learn stuff?  Was it fun?  Want more?  About places in the book?  About other stuff--gondolas, Byron, characters, writing it, researching it...?  Ask, and some of ye shall receive.

Wenches Rock!

Where to start?  Lots of good news on the Wench front.

Pat - Mystic Guardian
Pat's book cover is a finalist in the Cover Cafe annual book cover contest. The covers aren't up yet, but they plan to have the contest up and running by early May, so you should be able to view the finalists then. 

Jo - A Lady's Secret
Jo's book has moved up on the New York Times bestseller list and is now #10! Way to go, Jo! You better lay in a big supply of champagne. 

Loretta - Your Scandalous Ways
Loretta's book received a great review over at Publishers Weekly.  Well done, Loretta!

Mary Jo and Pat - Pioneers of Romance
Both Mary Jo and Pat attended the Romantic Times convention in Pittsburgh April 16-20 and each came away with a lovely award ("a big chunk of glass" according to Mary Jo!)  for being pioneers of romance.

Sneak Previews
Be sure to stop by on Sundays when we post announcements!  And just to give you a sneak preview, in May Jo will be interviewing a wines and spirits expert, which we'll announce in more detail next month.  In addition, Susan/Miranda will be doing a two-part interview of Loretta the end of May in connection with the release of Your Scandalous Ways. In June we're bringing back costume historian Kalen Hughes to talk about Georgian dress.

Book Reminder
Wenches have books coming out in the next few months.  In May, Mary Jo's A Distant Magic will be reprinted.  In June, two Wenches have books out:  Edith - His Dark and Dangerous Ways, and Loretta - Your Scandalous Ways. In July, two more Wenches have books out:  Pat - Mystic Rider, and Susan Holloway Scott - The King's Favorite.

So, we have some busy months coming up, and we don't want you to miss the fun.  Drop in early and often!

Starred Reviews for Jo and Loretta

Library Journal has awarded a coveted starred review to Jo for A LADY'S SECRET and to Loretta for YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS. 

Read the full reviews here.

They had some very nice things to say about A LADY'S SECRET. They said This cleverly plotted story  rewards readers with a captivating blend of thrilling adventure, steamy sensuality, and gratifying emotion ... and went on to praise it as another flawless Georgian gem.

They didn't stint on enthusiasm for Loretta's YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS, either, saying Chase does an exceptional job of turning a ruined woman into a believable heroine of surpassing quality and strength, making her sympathetic and giving her a worthy hero. They also said Loretta was an exceptionally gifted historical romance writer.

Trust a librarian to know.

Congratulations, Jo and Loretta!

Worst Job Ever

From Loretta:

I’m just back from a writers' conference, which reminded me, once again, that I have one of the best jobs in the world.  My personal favorite best job ever of my whole experience was being an English major in college, which is at least partly because of the Lack of Responsibility Factor.  But being a writer definitely qualifies as a Best Job. 

I have had worse jobs, believe me.

As some of you already know, once upon a time, many, many eons ago, I was a meter maid.  People screamed at me, made fun of me, and some even threatened me with bodily injury.  The downtown characters--the drunks and extremely demented people--raved at me or demanded money or insisted I arrest figments of their imaginations.  We had to wear polyester--and this was the old style polyester that did not breathe at all--and we courted heatstroke in the summer and frostbite in winter.  Downtown Worcester, wherein lay our “beats,” is small but very hilly.  In the beginning especially, I ended the day with aching legs and feet so sore I wept .  I wore the ugliest possible shoes for the comfort factor.  No matter.  I still got blisters.  I got sunburned and windburned and broke out in mysterious rashes.  When people fought their tickets, I had to go to court, which terrified me.  And I had to communicate with police officers almost daily.  I was in one of my college dropout phases at the time (these went on for about a decade), and in those days college youth tended to view the police with extreme mistrust.  Trusted or not, they were a species of which I had no experience, let alone understanding.  For me, it was like talking to Extra Terrestrials, all of them heavily armed and some of whom thought meter maids a far lower and more repellent life form than the drunks & crazy people.

This, however, was not the worst job I ever had, not by a long stretch.  I actually kind of liked it a good part of the time because our bosses and the office staff  were really nice and the other meter maids were fun to hang with.  Bonus:  Within a few months, I was in amazing shape.  With very strong legs.

The worst job I ever had looked really glamorous.  I was hired to sell groovy clothes and shoes in a boutique.  I loved fashion magazines, so this seemed to be the ideal job for moi, at the time, a college dropout (again).  But as those who’ve watched the reality shows know, what goes on behind the scenes is not always pretty.  I got blisters from having to wear fashionable platform shoes for 8-10 hours a day on a concrete floor thinly covered with carpeting.  We had to climb up and down ladders while carrying stacks of jeans for the shelves.  We used seam rippers to take out the manufacturer’s tags from the clothes and then we hand-stitched in the store’s tags. 

But hey, I worked in a jewelry store over the course of several years, and learned the art of writing codes & numbers on price tags barely visible to the naked eye (the kind that went on expensive jewelry of the type my heroine in Your Scandalous Ways would wear).  That was tedious, too, but I didn’t mind.  It appealed to the fussbudget (now called OCD) in me.  I don’t mind detail work.  It’s retail that gets to me.

The problem, in short, was Dealing with the Public for 6 days a week, 8-12 hours a day.  I’m not an extrovert.  In fact, others would find it a considerable challenge to be less extroverted.  My Personality Type came out INTJ--at 93% Introverted.  Let’s add in the facts that I was still more or less college age (read Immature) and had an Attitude.  So I didn’t deal really well with people who needed size 12 and insisted something was wrong with the clothes I was selling because size 8 didn’t fit or the ones who tried on ninety-eleven sweaters only to leave with nothing, telling me the clothes were too expensive or the ones who flung silk blouses on the floor for the menials (us) to pick up, etc., etc.  Then there were the shoplifters.  And the drunks & crazy people who wandered in, thinking we were--what?  The bus station?

Plus, I really didn’t have confidence in my ability to put the right shirt together with the right tie, so I always had a small panic attack when I had to wait on a male person, even though they were less likely than female persons to infuriate me.  Too, we had to keep the place shipshape, folding clothes, endlessly folding & even ironing.  We had to keep the glass display cases sparkly clean and dress up the dummies.  Then there was the behind-the-scenes backbiting and stabbing and alliance-shifting.  All of which happens everywhere, but for some reason it felt more like Purgatory there.  Looking back, with the advantage of age and wisdom, I think it was simply a matter of a horribly wrong personality fit. 

It was useful in terms of giving me a degree of understanding of what it was like to be a servant in early 19th C London. 

But it was MY WORST JOB, ever. 

Meanwhile, there  are those, I know, who’d run screaming from my present job:  Sitting alone all day in front of a computer listening for voices in your head?  There are people who couldn’t, wouldn’t do it.  They are not tempted, even though it means not having to wear pantyhose and being able to work in one's pajamas.

My best job could be your worst job and vice versa.

So RevMelinda gets a Loretta Chase book because she asked the question, “What was the worst job you ever had?”

Everyone else:  Let’s see who suffered most.  What was your worst job ever?

Italians Love the Wenches!

Yes, it's true!  In recent months a very special lady who runs the Immergiti in un Mondo Rosa blog has been featuring several of the Wenches in her romance-friendly site.

The posts are in Italian and English, so you won't have any trouble reading the interviews.  Thank you, Rosaria Kimbler, for featuring the Wenches on your blog!

You can read the interviews here:

Mary Jo Putney, Loretta Chase, and Jo Beverley

And the Wieners Are ...

We have 10 (ten, count 'em!) winners this week!

Our first winner is Talpianna, who left a comment on Mary Jo's Home Sweet Home post.  As a result, she won a copy of Mary Jo's Silk and Shadows.  Congratulations, Talpianna!

Our next 9 winners won Loretta Chase books for participating in the Dating Game post.  (See answers, below.)  Loretta generously decided to award books to all who participated, even those who Googled the quotes.  Since she didn't actually specify, "No Googling," it seems unfair to disqualify them--including those who disqualified themselves. So here are the winners:

Buggalugs
Jane George
Anne Gracie
Maya Missani
Tiffany
Jenny Haddon
Theo
Ingrid
Maria

Congratulations, to all 9 of Loretta's winners!  Please take a moment to visit Loretta's Booklist page and choose your book.  All are available except Three Weddings & a Kiss, The Last Hellion, and the Christmas Collection.  Once you've made your choice, please let Loretta or me know.  Ingrid and Maria, we don't have your e-mail address, so if you read this, please contact us off-list.

Now, are you curious about the answers to Loretta's little test?  If you are, just scroll down and read the next post.

Dating Game--the answers

The correct answers to the Dating Game are:

1.  Old  (19th C, Jane Austen, Persuasion)
2.  Old  (17th C, Pepys, his diary)
3.  Old  (19th C, Dickens,  Dombey & Son)
4.  New  (21st C, Susan Holloway Scott, Royal Harlot)
5.  Old  (19th C, Lord Byron, Letters & Journals)
6.  New  (21st C, Loretta Chase, Lord Perfect)
7.  Old  (19th C, George Eliot, Middlemarch)
8.  New  (20th C, Patrick O’Brian, The Ionian Mission)
9.  New  (20th C, Georgette Heyer, An Infamous Army)
10.  New  (20th C, P.G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh)

Dating Game

From Loretta:

I’ve just spent a few days playing verbal Dodgeball with the ladies at Romance Novel TV.  I was this week’s Mystery Author.  It’s a sort of 20 Questions game they play.  It's fun and challenging.  They ask questions and the author tries to give answers that answer without giving away who she is.  It ain’t easy, believe me.  These readers are sharp, and there were times where I felt as though I was standing against a big board with darts landing a gnat’s nose hair away from tender flesh.

The Q & A goes on Mon-Wed.  On Thursday the Mystery Author’s identity is revealed.  So as of today I am all revealed and can tell you about it, and send you over to admire their sleuthing skills and my powers of deception.  The rest of the blog is cool, too, so check it out. 

However, after playing mind games all week, and tiring out my brain in a major way, I’ve decided to let you do some work.  We’re going to play a game.  Since you already know who I am, we can skip that one.

This is a Dating Game.  Specifically, date the verbiage.

A while back we had a guest blogger talking about old and new language, and I’ve had some discussions elsewhere about what sounds modern & what doesn’t & how some very old words strike some readers as “too modern” for a Regency era story. 

So I wondered how hard it was to tell when a book had been written.  Is it easy to distinguish between say, an excerpt from Jane Austen and one from Georgette Heyer?  Can something written in the early part of the 20th century seem as though it was written in the 21st?

Below are are some quotations.  You don’t have to guess the author.  All you need to do is guess whether it’s old or new.  But the more you narrow things down, the more credit you get.

Old would be something written in the 19th century or earlier.
New would be something written in the 20th or 21st century.
Bonus points for guessing the century correctly.
Bonus bonus points for guessing the author, too.

Two of the highest scorers will win signed copies of my books.

Now put on your thinking caps, because I tried to make these fiendishly difficult. (I honed those skills over at Romance Novel TV.)

1.   Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions.  A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world.  But fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions...

2. There are factions (private ones at Court) about Madam Palmer; but what it is about I know not. But it is something about the King’s favour to her now that the Queen is coming.

3. ...ragged tenements, fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.

4. The girl’s flushed face was as round as the oranges in the willow basket on her hip as she grinned up at us from the theatre’s pit.  Every such chit in the place would come parade below the royal box, flaunting their overripe breasts like more oranges for sale...

5. So that if I come away with a stiletto in my gizzard some fine afternoon...

6. While not as busy as it would be during the daylight hours, the area was by no means deserted.  The waterman still carried buckets to the hackneys lined up at the coach stand.  Some soldiers gossiped under a street lamp.  A milk-woman carried her empty pails back toward Knightsbridge.  The tollgate keeper would continue to work through the night.

7. Why not?  A man’s mind--what there is of it--has always the advantage of being masculine.

8. “It seems that he forgot the discretion his legal advisers urged him to observe, and it seems to them than an absence from the country is now essential for a while.  I forget the details--mayhem, attorneys flying out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, glass damaged to the extent of several pounds, clerks put in fear of their lives, blasphemous words, a breach of the King’s peace.”

9.  “Oh!  People never say nice things about me.  What have you been told?”
       “That you were beautiful.”
       “And?”
       “And disastrous.”

10.  Nature had equipped him with a mind so admirably constructed for withstanding the disagreeableness of life that, if an unpleasant thought entered it, it passed out again a moment later.

While you work on it, I'll be staring out of the window with Francesca, looking for trouble.

Learning new tricks

From Loretta:

About a year ago, I blogged about the things one wants to do but never gets around to.  One of those things was reading The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.  As mentioned in a later blog, I did finally read it, with great delight. 

Another thing I never got around to was learning Italian.  I am not sure what finally did it.  Watching Divorce, Italian Style?  Writing Your Scandalous Ways and immersing myself in Venice (even though Venetian & Italian are not the same language)?

Whatever the impetus, ten days ago my husband and I started Conversational Italian classes.  Thanks to our amazingly patient teacher--an actual Italian man who is actually from Italy--I can now greet people (Buon giorno, everybody!) and introduce myself (Mi chiamo Loretta) as well as identify the dog, the cat, the pen, the mother, the father, the blackboard, the professor, the dictionary, and some other things.

(That's il cane to the left.)

Anyway, my vocabulary is growing by something less than leaps and bounds but it’s all interesting and enjoyable as well as incredibly hard, because I am two or three hundred years old, not five or six, which is the age at which one really ought to begin learning other languages.  We have one high school student in our class, and...OK, I want to shake her because it’s so much easier for her to learn.  It’s a good thing we haven’t any first graders in the class, to humiliate the lot of us.

However, the class also includes a veteran of WWII.  If he can learn, so can I.
He, however, agrees that the older you get, the harder it is to learn a new language.  And Italian ain’t easy to begin with.

As happens with so many other languages, we English speakers must wrestle with masculine and feminine nouns and the assorted articles one must attach to same.  English has one definite article, “the.”  It has two indefinite articles, “a” and “an.”  This is one way we make up for the completely demented way we spell and pronounce words.  Italian, which has a consistent way of spelling and pronouncing, has seven thousand articles.  Or so it seems to a beginner.

And we haven’t even got to conjugating verbs yet.

However, my husband and I both did learn Latin back a century or two ago, and while we have forgotten most of what we learned, we do recognize similarities and grasp certain foreign concepts.  Like the difference between the formal and informal or singular and plural second person.  In English, we lost this distinction a good while back.  In English, you are always “you” whether you are the president of the company or my sister, no matter how many of you there are.  Not so in other languages.  This, I ought to point out, includes the language Southern (my husband’s native tongue), in which the plural of you is formed thusly:  “you all.”  And contracted to “y’all.”

But I digress.
Why learn a new language at this time of my life?  It’s not as though I lack for ways to occupy my time.  In fact, my time is horrendously  over-occupied.
But as I told the teacher when he asked us why we were taking the class, learning Italian was simply something I’ve always wanted to do.  I did not tell him that I am an author, so he doesn't know that my latest book is set in Venice, or that discussions with my brilliant and hard-working consultant, Anna of the Isn’t it Romantic blog, gave me a new appreciation of the language and its subtleties.  Yet it’s likely that writing and researching Your Scandalous Ways as well as those discussions gave me the final push to do something that, frankly, is a little scary.

I have been writing for... erm...a really long time.  I’ve grown comfortable with the English language and developed a degree of skill in using it.  There’s a sense of accomplishment in having attained a degree of proficiency (though by no means perfection) in the language of my early 19thC English characters.  It’s gratifying to know something about a particular historical period in a particular place, to be able to recognize names and dates and have a picture in my head of a world that’s invisible to most other people.  It's easy to build on this foundation.  It's easy to visualize and place people and events every time I open a new book on some aspect of this subject.  With early 19th C England, with the English language, in short, I’m in my comfort zone.

Starting all over again, plunging into a new world and language with a much older brain, is humbling, to say the least.  And at the same time, it’s exhilarating.  Every word and concept I master feels like a great accomplishment.  That is not a feeling one has every day in one’s everyday life.  In fact, it's the closest I've come to the thrill I felt when I first learned to read.

What about you?  Is there something you’ve always wanted to learn--if you could afford it or find the time or work up the courage?  Have you done it?  Do you think you will?  And if any of you have studied Italian--or any other language, for that matter--please feel free to share the experience.