Jo here, wherever here is today. Ottawa, I think. Charlie's still in the tux.
Writing is a weird business.
In my unpublished fantasy novel, the ordinary people call the Magickers "weirders."
Anyway, when I was answering some interview questions about To Rescue A Rogue (on shelves now, selling briskly, get it while you can!) I rembered something strange. I killed Lord Darius Debenham at Waterloo, you see, and both I and my readers regretted it. I wasn't sure how to bring him back, however. Amnesia seemed too obvious, and anyway, it's a serious medical condition.
So time went by and I wrote another Rogues book, Christmas Angel, and then another. The more time past in the fictional world, the more difficult his absence was to explain. The strange memory that popped up was that in my desperation I'd played with the idea of my misfit mage, who passes time exploring portals to other places, checking out earth in the middle of Waterloo. Very nasty. Dare lands on him at point of death, and Quiriniac takes him home to save him. I even wrote some of this and was intrigued by the idea of Quiriniac returning Dare to Regency London and being loose among the ton for a while.
I found the little bit I wrote and I've put it up on the web. Click here to read it.
Another strangeness is this castle which appears on the stepback cover of TRAR. I wasn't at all sure what it is or why the art department put it there. The slightly crooked tower roof is particularly, well, weird. I only just realized that the art department is weirdly psychic, and it's Castle Cruel. As in The Ghastly Ghoul of Castle Cruel, which is the Gothic novel Dare and Mara work on in To Rescue A Rogue.
It starts out as The Captive Corpse of Castle Cruel, but as Mara quibbles, how can a corpse be kept captive? And why? Unless it threatens to rise. Hence the Ghastly Ghoul of Castle Cruel, 'a rhyme, began, to boot."
Unless ghoul and cruel don't rhyme in American. Tell me it aint so!
We could all try to make posts in rhyming doggerel.
Blogs all around, some witty, some trenchant,
For being inflammatory, others have penchant.
One day there'll be Pulitzers for the cleverest posters,
Or perhaps silver cups for the classiest hosters,
But we are the Wenches with cats, dolls, and Barbies,
And no one could claim that any are harpies,
So we'll go as we have, and we'll blog as we will,
And hope that occasionally, we give a mild thrill.
Have a go! Reply in rhyme. The best will win a book when I get back home. I can't access my files of cover images so I'll put a link instead.
A link to a page about my current and recent books.
Jo