Word Wenches

Welcome to the New Wench

Anne here, and today I'm delighted to introduce you to our newest wench — Christina Courtenay.

Christina is an award-winning, bestselling author of sweeping historical romances, regencies, time slip/time travel novels, and young adult novels, among others. She has won several awards, twice winning the RoNA for Best Historical Romantic Novel with Highland Storms (2012) and The Gilded Fan (2014), and won the Big Red Reads Historical Fiction Award with The Scarlet Kimono.

She also chaired the RNA (Romantic Novelists Association) in the UK from 2013-2015. (Read an interview here.) Naturally she is friends with wench Nicola, but she's also very good friends with our departing wench, Susanna. Here's a photo of the two of them together at an RNA event some years ago.

I first came across Christina's books five years ago, when Nicola mentioned one of her books, saying that it was set partly in Asia, something that always interests me. I bought Trade Winds, read it, and immediately glommed the rest of her backlist. I loved her big sweeping stories where Scottish and Swedish people found love and adventure in Japan and other parts of Asia.

Christina: Thank you Anne, so glad you enjoyed them, and I’m hugely honoured to have been asked to join the Word Wenches! I have been a fan ever since Susanna first told me to seek out this blog many years ago (thank you, Susanna, great advice!) so to actually be a part of it is just amazing.

Anne: Christina, you had something of an adventurous youth yourself; born in England, raised in Sweden and then, when you were sixteen, your family moved to Japan. What was that like?

Historical Icons and Celebrities

Nicola here. A new book about celebrity was published a couple of weeks ago. Called “Dead Famous” it’s written by Greg Jenner, a historical consultant on Horrible Histories and traces a history of celebrity from the Bronze Age to the modern day. The Amazon blurb reads: “Celebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating, and outraging us for much longer than we might realise.” Quoted examples are Lord Byron, the Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean and Sarah Bernhardt.

Way back in 2007(!) I wrote a book called Lord of Scandal which was about a Regency celebrity. I was writing it at the same time that I was researching my MA dissertation and it was this research into heroes that fed into the book. Now I have a new book, The Forgotten Sister, coming out in a couple of weeks that also features celebrity, this time in a slightly different way, drawing on parallels between the cult of Queen Elizabeth I and modern-day fame.

On Shawls

Anne here. It's the 1st of April, but I doubt we're in the mood for silly jokes, but maybe I'm the April fool, because today, I was halfway through writing this blog on shawls, I went looking online for an image I knew I had buried in the old computer, but didn't want to dig out — this one, which comes from a book I own by Auguste Racinet. Pure shawl porn, don't you agree? I love all the various styles in which a shawl could be worn.

 

 

But guess where I found the image? In a blog I'd written for the Word Wenches back in 2012, on the topic of — you guessed it — shawls. Not a bad blog, if I say so myself, but it covered a lot of the territory I'd planned to cover today. Curses!

 

But after a bit of grumping around, I decided to soldier on and write a second blog on shawls. Not as informative as the first, which you can read here, but hopefully entertaining enough.

What the Wenches are Reading in March!

Pat here, joining the other wenches in bringing you new books and old favorites to fill your days as we watch spring pass by from our quarantines. I hope all of you are staying well and not ready to kill your families yet!

My contribution this month is from a wench favorite, Barbara O’Neal (Barbara Samuels in historicals)—a contemporary women’s fiction titled WHEN WE BELIEVED IN MERMAIDS.

I’ve read Barbara in her very many incarnations from historical romance to contemporary category romance to women’s fiction, and I love it all. She’s an emotion-wrenching writer, and it’s impossible to read her without laughing and crying. It’s also impossible not to be swept into the world of her creation. I’ve saved this book for months. The anticipation of knowing it was in my reading pile for a day when I really needed it made me happy. I finally gave myself permission to open it, and it was well worth the wait. I savored every word.

Audiobooks!

by Mary Jo

Audiobooks!

Those of you who have been following me here know that I've had a slow but ongoing program to get more of my stories into audio format.  The main reason is because a fair number of people really like audio books.

They're great for those with commutes, or who want the distraction of stories while gardening or doing housework or other mundane tasks.  They're also a real boon for those with vision problems.  (My mother listened to a lot of audiobooks from the National Library of the Blind in her later years.)

 

Susanna Kearsley: Hail and Farewell!

by Mary Jo

Authors love hanging out with each other, interacting with readers, and writing about delicious bits of research. (Especially historical writers on the research!)

But sometimes an author becomes too busy to include regular blogging in her life.  Such is the case for Susanna Kearsley, who is bowing out with mutual regrets all around.  To say farewell, we're sharing some memories of her and her books.  The picture above is a record-setting five Wenches together in Real Life at last summer's RWA conference in New York.  From left to right: Anne Gracie, Mary Jo Putney, Andrea Penrose, Susanna Kearsley, and Patricia Rice.  (Joanna Bourne arrived later: SIX of us!)

 

A Roller Coaster Ride Through Regency Paris

Andrea here, hoping all of you are staying safe and well in these very difficult and frightening times.

It feels a little strange to continue as normal with our posts on research and whatever strikes our fancy when the world is in such turmoil. But we’ve decided that a little “normal” is probably good for all of us. (Especially things that make us smile.)

And today, it so happens that my research topic is a fun one. So, let’s all take a roller coaster ride—quiet literally—through one of the most popular entertainment to arise in Regency Paris! (Who says history doesn’t take you on some wild rides!)

On Tropes

Anne here, and today I'm thinking about tropes. "What's a trope?" you wonder? In popular fiction, it's a frequently revisited, generally beloved theme or set-up for a story. In romance it might be "friends to lovers" or "convenient marriage", "the ugly duckling", "a Cinderella story", "the Innocent and the Playboy," — you get the idea. There are dozens of tropes and new ones (or variations on old ones) are popping up all the time. (Fifty shades of trope, anyone?)

Publishers like writers to explore tropes as it makes the job of categorizing (and therefore selling) books easier, so much so that some publishers (for instance Harlequin) have titles that are not so much a book title as a phrase containing words that signal to the reader what tropes the story will explore. "The Sheikh's Convenient Bride", "The Rancher's Secret Baby". And readers who like those tropes will pick up those books.

A trope carries a promise to the reader. Readers love certain tropes and will return to them again and again. (Me, I'm a sucker for a mail-order bride story.)  But the thing about tropes is that they are also clichés to some extent, so a good writer needs to twist the trope in some way to make it fresh.

When I first started writing romance, I didn't know about tropes — not consciously anyway.  My first book, Gallant Waif, was, I suppose a bit of a Cinderella story. My heroine, Kate, was newly orphaned, home from the war, and in dire straits. The hero's grandmother effectively acts as the fairy godmother, throwing Kate together with the grandmother's wounded, reclusive grandson. Two people recovering from very different war wounds . . .  But when it was reviewed I was startled to see that some people were calling it a "Beauty and the Beast" story. I didn't see it that way at all.

In Conversation with Christina Courtenay

Nicola here. Today it is my very great pleasure to welcome back to the blog one of our favourite Wench guests: Christina Courtenay. Christina is an award-winning author of historical romantic fiction and in particular time slip and time travel romance in the great tradition of Barbara Erskine and Susanna Kearsley so it's no wonder her books are an auto-buy for me and will appeal to a lot of Wench readers too! Her latest novel, Echoes of the Runes, is set in the present day and in the vivid 9th century world of the Vikings, and she is here today to tell us more about the book.

Christina, welcome back to the Wenches! Echoes of the Runes is getting some wonderful reviews and rightly so! Please tell us about the book.

Thank you, that’s very kind of you to say!  Echoes of the Runes is a Viking timeslip/dual time novel set mostly in Sweden, both in the present and the past. It tells the story of Ceri, a Welsh noblewoman who is taken hostage by a Viking, Haukr inn hvíti (“the White Hawk”), in 869AD. Back in the present day, an archaeological dig at her late grandmother’s home leads Mia Maddox to uncover secrets of the past which will influence her life in ways she could not have imagined. As the present begins to echo the past, and enemies threaten, they will all have to fight to protect what has become most precious to each of them.

The Most Precious Jewels

By Mary Jo

The idea for this post came from chatting on our private loop about jewelry with special meaning for us, and it sounded like a fun blog topic.

Personally, I've never been particularly interested in classic jewelry like diamonds and strings of pearls.  I like bright shinys, but the jewelry that interests me most is usually old or ethnic or funky--and the pieces generally come with stories.