Word Wenches

Snow Day Reading

Wednesday, and Susan Sarah here....

We had a few flurries yesterday—actually a series of “snowbursts,” where it snows like crazy for about ten minutes, blizzard-style, barely covering the grass, and then clears up. I sat in my office watching this beautiful storm, and wishing for real snow. It’s in my DNA, this love of snow, I guess—I grew up in northern Upstate NY, so a winter without snow (as too often happens in Maryland) just doesn’t seem right to me.

The weensiest bit of snow here yesterday….

So I started musing about what I would do if I was truly snowed in…and the answer came to me: read. Read, read, read. I’d wallow in books and stories, and plow through that TBR pile in my bedroom (and stacked elsewhere in my house) like a Bobcat plowing through snow.

All this yearning, of course, is bubbling up in me because in reality, I can’t lounge around reading yet: I’m still in the deadline throes…getting closer, but still in that long, dark Deadline Tunnel, hardhat firmly on my head, light switched on…there’s a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel—the merest translucent sunlight beam ahead…

But I digress. Where was I – oh yeah – that irresistible, deep yearning to dive into the sheer treat—and really the necessary indulgence -- of reading. The urge grows the longer I stay away from it, since I have to deprive myself of good reads when I’m heavily into a writing phase. I can’t read fiction when I’m writing it, certainly not anything similar to what I'm writing, though sometimes I can read way outside my own genre. By the end of a hard day’s writing, my brain has had enough wordswordswordswords anyway. A little tv, a little music, a little knitting, something like that is okay, and helps the brain recuperate for the next day's onslaught of words, but it’s nearly impossible for me to cozy down with a good book when I'm in late stage writing until the manuscript is done.

But if I =could= be peacefully snowed in, ahh, that would be wonderful -- with the writing done and the house neat, the kids off at college, and nothing else immediate to be done, I’d curl up with a soft afghan and the dog (if there’s an afghan on a sofa with a warm person under it, the dog will be there, trust me)…what would I read?

This is similar to the Desert Island question -- if you were stranded, what books would you want to have with you?  The usual answers might include the classics we’ve read and loved and want a chance to read again. My Snow Day list includes books that I’ve been saving to savor, and yearning to read.

Here are a few that I’m looking forward to reading – some are new, some have been in the stack for a while, some have dust on them but I’ll get to them…but first I have to finish my manuscript – and then, best scenario, a quiet few days to read them!

First, of course, are all the wonderful new Wench books! See the sidebar to the right…there are two or three there that I haven’t read, though I’m happy to say I’m almost caught up w/ the Wenches. 

As for my TBR pile, I’d need a pretty big snowstorm to get through all of them, but I’d love the time and opportunity to start working my way through this stack….

The Water Devil, Judith Merkle Riley (finally, the sequel! We’ve waited for years!)
Innocent Traitor, A Novel of Lady Jane Grey, Alison Weir (I have an ARC of this and can’t wait to find time for it)
The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield (this looks truly fascinating)
Avalon, Anya Seton (gorgeous reissue, and a book that I'd love to read again)
Forever Amber, Kathleen Winsor (I cannot resist a beautiful reissue w/ gorgeous cover)
The Thorne Maze, Karen Harper (I love historical mysteries, and I want to catch up on this wonderful Elizabethan series)
See Delphi and Die, Lindsey Davis (Marcus Didius Falco! I adore this series. I have two more Falco books to read before this one, but at the moment my husband has them in his stack…)
Marrying Mozart, Stephanie Cowell (stunning cover, and looks like a fabulous story)

Your turn! If you were snowed in -– or if you’ve had enough of snow and ice, and want to be somewhere warm, what new or current books would you take with you to that warm, sunny, isolated island…or to your favorite warm, cozy reading nook?

I’m looking for more suggestions after I plow through my own list....

~Susan Sarah

Lady of Fortune

by Mary Jo

Okay, last week was my turn to sit on a shady porch on a sunny island, reading and watching the waves roll in.  This week is Pat’s turn, so I’m filling in for her.  But while Pat invited you to a beach party with virtual drinks, good books, and buff beach boys, I’ll be doing some promo.  Feel free to jump back to Pat’s post. <g>

I’ve had an unusual run of reissues in the months since we started the WordWenches—something like four if you include the Faery Magic anthology, which I most certainly do.  Now it's five.  Lady of Fortune is unusual in that it’s the only one of my books that has never been reissued, not even once.  And it’s not a major release now—it’s coming out in a hardcover large print edition from Thorndike Press, so it will mostly show up in libraries. 

But I’m happy that it is indeed available.  Partly this is general authorly love for all our book children.  Plus, the book is now available for completists who want to have copies of all my books.  (If you’re interested, here’s the Books A Million URL:  http://tinyurl.com/2wkh9x  )

So what about the book itself?  Lady of Fortune was my second book, so it has all the early Regencyisms of semi-omniscient points of view that are on display in The Diabolical Baron, my first book.  (Which was reissued earlier this month in the Dangerous to Know compendium.)  LoF was also written when Signet defined a Regency as anywhere from the French Revolution to 1830.

There were fewer rules in those days, and I had a very tolerant editor who didn’t mind that my book was set in the 1790s.  I plunged in merrily—and ground to a screeching halt when I realized how little I knew about the French Revolution.  The generalized knowledge I had wasn’t much use when it came to writing a book, so it was research time, and a good lesson in writing was learned.  In all subsequent books, I've had a research phase before starting to write the actual story. 

My heroine, Marie-Christine D'Estelle--Christa to her friends--is a young French countess who has taken refuge in Britain after losing her mother and brother as the family attempted to escape the Reign of Terror.  Christa’s older half-brother was an English earl, so she is taken in by his uncle, the new earl.  But when she comes out of mourning, she find that her step-uncle has a distinctly unavuncular interest in her, so she flees to London and finds work as a lady’s maid.

Annabelle, the young lady who hires her, happens to have a handsome naval captain brother called Alex, and any good romance reader can probably figure out roughly what happens from there.  <G>  But there’s a cast of thousands—scheming young social climbers, cowardly fops, temperamental French chefs, and so many secondary romances that an exasperated RWA contest judge told me that I didn’t have to pair off everyone.

Lady of Fortune is about as close to a romp as I’ve ever gotten.  And the book was long.  My 75,000 word Signet Regency was sent around 120K words.  (You might have noticed that brevity is not one of my virtues.)  I was trying to figure out how to cut a hundred plus pages when my beloved editor decided to put LoF into the new Signet SuperRegency program for books that were historical romance length but traditional Regency voice.  So every one of my rambling sentences and redundancies is there, preserved for posterity. <G>

Incidentally, one of the launch SuperRegencies was Edith's wonderful Love in Disguise, the first in a terrific trilogy.  I was in great company!

I didn’t like my original cover.  The hero looked like a hunchbacked vampire and the couple are about to receive grievous injuries as they topple the bench over.  No one had heard of me at that point, so the book didn’t sell well.  It vanished into the ranks of Ghostly Books past.  (Though I did send a faux galley version to a Wenchling who recently celebrated a Round Number Birthday.)  Which is why I’m tickled that Lady of Fortune is available again.  Authors love all of our children, after all!  Even the clumsy, verbose ones. 

If you’re still with me, I’ll make it worth your while by giving away a signed copy of the new large print hardcover.  To qualify, leave a comment about this blog between now and Thursday night, midnight Pacific Coast time.

Mary Jo

Characters & Continuity

by Susan/Miranda:

Janga asked:
I would love to see you blog about writing connected books. How do you keep straight details concerning recurring characters? Do you know your characters so well that you remember? Do you keep characters bios to which you refer? Or what? And do you ever get tired of a character before your readers do?

This is an excellent series of questions, Janga, and with it you’re my book-winner. (I’ll email you separately for your address.)

As I run a rough mental bibliography of Wench books through my head, I’m guessing that all of us have written connected books of one kind or another.  Sometimes the connection is a family of characters.  Sometimes it’s a group of school-friends grown, or colleagues brought together by circumstance.  Sometimes the books are so interwoven that, if read together, they make one large story, while other series are independent of one another, joined together only by overlapping characters.  You name it, and I think we Wenches have written it.

The trick of any series, of course, is keeping the readers’ interest form one book to the next.  We’ve all read books (NOT by Wenches, I’m sure) that have long, tedious passages of back-story, or worse still, characters that spout soap-opera updates: “Oh, didn’t you know that two years ago Lord Peterboo married Lady Faretheewell soon after the scandal with the wild boars was revealed and Sir Henry shot himself, the villain?”

I’ve always liked writing connected books.  I like the chance to tell a “bigger” story, and I like the different points of view.  I like being able to see families change and grow through historical time.  And, like most writers, there are characters that you just don’t want to let go without having their own story told.  You want them to have a happy ending of their own.

My first series revolved around a Colonial Rhode Island family, the Sparhawks.  More correctly, I should say that it “evolved”; I wrote one book, and my editor suggested I write the next about one of the brothers.  Then came sisters, another generation, and a generation after that, until I’d written eleven books in all. Being a new and clueless writer, I also wrote them out of order –– one book in 1702, then the next during the War of 1812 –– with a number of unrelated single-titles scattered in the middle.  As you can imagine, this led to all sorts of confusion, both my readers’ and my own, and I lived by the elaborate family tree of the four generations, my only hope for keeping them all straight.  (It’s on my web site, if you’re curious: http://susanhollowayscott.com/images/Sparhawk_FamilyTree.jpg)  Even then, I still would have readers ask me “What about Johnnie’s story?”, and I’d have to admit that I’d completely forgotten about Johnnie’s existence, let alone his story.  OK, so Johnnie died.  End of story.

Since then, I’ve mostly limited my historical romance series to three books at a time –– a mini-series, I guess, instead of a season-long event.  My current series, loosely called “Love on the Grand Tour”, follows two sisters and their governess touring Europe in the late 18th century (before Napoleon’s shenanigans had such an impact on tourism) The first book is THE ADVENTUROUS BRIDE. I begin them knowing not only how each love story in each book will end, but how the last book’s “big pay-off” will be an ending for the series, uniting all three books into one story.  It’s satisfying, yet it’s also manageable.

But now my historical novels are turning into a series, too. With these books, Janga, I really must tend to my character continuity, because all my characters are based on real people.  I can’t adjust history for the sake of plot convenience.  I use a program called Stickies on my computer that creates multi-colored post-its on my desktop, and that’s where I stow all the important info.  I have Stickies for the dates of historical events, each character with their birth-death dates, their parents, spouses, and children, their titles and houses, break-downs of scenes by chapters, even favorite descriptive quotes I’ve come upon through research.  I sort the info by color, too, which makes my desk-top look a little like an Easter basket, but somehow it works.

With the success of DUCHESS, my editor, agent, sales reps, readers, booksellers, even my cats, wanted me to stick with the late 17th century English court setting.  DUCHESS begat ROYAL HARLOT, which will soon beget books about Nell Gwyn and Louise de Kerouelle, Duchess of Portsmouth (all newly under contract to NAL, yayyyy!)  In these three books, the link comes not from the three individual women, but from the fact that each was a mistress to King Charles II.  In other words, one hero, many heroines, and (I hope) never a dull moment.

What do you think of series books?  Do you like the “community” of interlocking books, or do you find the complexity annoying?  Do you wait until you have the entire series before you begin reading, or doesn’t that matter?  And if you’re a writer as well, how do you keep the continuity in your series books

A nice guy to read but I wouldn't want to live with him

Sunday is here and so is Edith. Coming here after the great Gellis is a challenge, so I will not try to meet it. Let's get trivial.

I just finished revisions (I hope) for a new book. I brushed up my hero and heroine, explained a few things I had left up in the air, changed a few POV's and then, done, and suffused with relief (even if the editor is right, revisions are never fun) I got to thinking about heros and heroines in general.

Now I know you've been asked who your favorite hero in fiction is. And been asked to confess which heroine you'd like to be in order to "be" with him.

But I'm asking who you would like to spend a week with: in Reality. In our Reality. hah, That makes it different, doesn't it?

Because after I thought about it, I realized that the most fascinating fictional gents, the most daring and darling of them that I adore, are guys I wouldn't want to spend an hour with in real life.

Since I basically read Historicals, there would be the omnipresent conflict between a man's idea of a female's place then and who I am now. Yes, I know the movies did it with Hugh Jackman as a Victorian
hero come to life and to America in the present day. (KATE AND LEOPOLD)

It worked fine for our modern heroine and for him. But she had to go back to his time. I like it here.
Well, if I don't like it so much, at least all my family and friends are here, and so is modern medicine. Capped teeth and implants. Contact lenses. Central heating. Sushi outside of Japan. M &M's.

And when I thought of my favorite fictional men coming alive to live here and now, I saw that though they might come to enjoy it, it would never work for me.

I Love Mr. Rochester, and he's great for Jane.
But can you say: "Autocrat?"
He sulks and frets and broods too, and even if he did had a mad wife in an attic, it would be no fun to live with a grouch.
The man is simply not sunny.

Mr. Darcy? Lord, but the man is mannered! There'd be trouble ahead, because I am not.

Not naming names here, because now I'm talking about modern day historical novels.

Most of the men I adore in Historical Romances have no jobs, and no creative hobbies either. They work at being irresistible and perpetually ready for sex. Nice. But after that? They pot around all day inspecting their estates and riding to hounds. When they're in a city they like to gamble and drink and ride around in spanking new curricles. Great. But for our day?

"What did you do today, Dear?"

"I was drinking with my pals, then we went to the track and I dropped a bundle, and how do you like this new sports car I just bought? Want to go to bed?"

And if he was more straight laced than that? What would he be prepared for? It would be like having a retired man around the house all the time. I'd forever be nudging him, trying to get him to do something more interesting than getting his hair cut.

As for all those dashing lads who consider near rape fun, especially while their heroines faintly cry "ah no" as they submit? Maybe that was OK in their day, and their novels. Not in reality. When I say
"no" I mean it.

And those heroes who are fixated on sex? Flattering, but let's get real.

Let's not even discuss the lusty pirates and Vikings.

Now, your turn. Prove me wrong. Please.

What character out of a Romance Novel would you like to meet in our here and now, because you think it might last - here and now? And tell me why. This could be interesting. Trivial. But interesting.

Roberta Gellis, H.W.W.!

The Word Wenches would like to thank Roberta Gellis for being our guest blogger!

Having been graced by the presence and wisdom of the very queen of medieval fiction -- and a great little blogger, too -- we would like to present this award in gratitude....

~Now you are officially an Honorary Word Wench - and you may add HWW after your signature!

~Please feel more than welcome to return to Word Wenches at any time, and please feel free to promote your new books here!

And as a sincere token of our appreciation, please accept this virtual Sword -- may its magic remind you of your special day in Wenchland...

luv from,

the Seven Wenches and Sherrie the Whipster

Interview with Roberta Gellis

Jo: Welcome, Roberta, and thank you for being a guest on Word Wenches. We have a throne all ready for you!

I know Roberta doesn't remember this, but at my first Romance Writers of America conference in Boston umpity-ump years ago, I chased the poor woman down a hall after lunch, desperate to get her autograph. I couldn't believe I was in the presence of one of my favorite authors. So it really is a thrill to be Roberta's host here today.

Roberta, you've written many kinds of fiction, including SF. What drew you to historical fiction, and was it the first fiction you wrote?

Roberta: It started with King Arthur and his knights when I was about nine and eagerly read all kinds of historical fiction from then on. My parents were very obliging and would take out for me any books in the library that I wanted, if, technically, I was too young to read them. (That was how I read FOREVER AMBER when I was about ten; and, no, it didn't corrupt me. I found the sexual parts terribly boring and skipped them to get tothe really interesting adventures and the plague scenes.)

As I grew older and learned history, I became more and more dissatisfied with many of the books I read because they were "telling lies." Not the kind of lies Lawrence Block meant in his book about writing fiction, [Telling Lies For Fun And Profit] but unnecessary inaccuracies about the time and place and the way people would act in that time and place. I guess I started writing out of frustration. I wanted books that would satisfy me. And yes, historical fiction was the first fiction I wrote.

Jo: Speaking of first fiction, were you the sort of child who wrote stories, or did you come to it later? If you were writing as a child,do you remember the first story you wrote?

Roberta: My mother told me that I wrote stories when I was about six, but I don't remember that at all and (thank God) we did not find any embarrassing bits among my mother's papers. I do remember telling stories, usually ghost stories, to my friends in the neighborhood, but I have no specific memories of what I said.

Jo: I know it should probably be a long essay, or even a book, but can you tell us a bit about your writing career and its many turns?

Roberta: Actually there isn't that much to say. I was lucky---and I mean lucky, because I was totally ignorant---in finding an agent almost immediately. Believe it or not, I looked up Agents, Literary in the yellow pages of the phone book. Since I lived in New York at the time there were actually two listed. I called the one named Snell for the most excellent reason that I had worked for a company named Foster D. Snell. And these people were not crooks (again, believe it or not). Stella Snell
sold my first two historical novels (BOND OF BLOOD and KNIGHT'S HONOR) to Doubleday in 1964. Do you remember the 60s at all? Perhaps you are too young.

Jo: :: Laughs:: Flattering, Roberta, but that was the time of my misspent youth.

Roberta: In the late 60s God was Dead, and History was Irrelevant so no one was reading historical novels. Although KNIGHT'S HONOR was bought by one of the book clubs, neither book sold worth a damn. Then Stella died and I looked for another agent. I could not sell another novel for over ten years, until THE HAWK AND THE DOVE was published (darn, the author's name has escaped
my mind). [Kathleen Woodiwiss.]

Roberta: Then my husband saw an ad in Writer's Digest for a historical novelist who had published a novel. I said that must be a book packager, who took 50%, and my husband said that 50% of something was better than 100% of nothing. So that was how I came to work with Lyle Kenyon Engel.

He was a book packager; he did take 50%; but he got double the going rate of royalties (so I ended up with the same royalties anyone else got) and he got much higher advances. And somehow he talked the publishers into doing all kinds of advertising. I always said that Lyle could sell ice to Eskimos in the middle of the artic winter.

I worked with Lyle until he retired but by then the historical market had died again so I was looking for something else to write. I ended up doing a couple of romantic suspense and a couple of soft science
fiction novels. For me, the historical market has never recovered. I write long, complex, history-driven books without much sex and I would much rather write fantasy and mystery (which I enjoy enormously) that turn out books like DESIREE.

Jo: That's the novel you wrote recently in the Roselynde series.

Roberta: Yes. It's not a bad book, but because of length restraints it leaves out much that made the Roselynde Chronicles good books.

Jo: The Roselynde Chronicles are particularly beloved because they give such a rich portrayal of medieval England. Can you talk about the process of coming up with the idea, choosing the period, setting and characters and anything else to do with them?

Roberta: I didn't come up with the idea for the Roselynde Chronicles. In a sense, Lyle did---but he wanted me to write a series like Golon's Angelique----you know, the sweet young thing who has a new lover in every book, lays children like eggs, and if you count up the years at 50 is as fresh and dewy as she was at 15 with no stretch marks and all her teeth.

I told him I wouldn't do that but I could do two books about the same medieval woman with two different men. After that if the publisher wanted more books I'd provide other romantic pairs with the original woman as a character that held the series together. The period was my choice. By then I had a MA degree in Medieval Literature and most of the course work for a Ph.D. I had concentrated on the 12th century in my graduate work and I had no intention of wasting either my studies or the library I had collected. So, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the 12th century it was.

Jo: Roselynde and Alinor were reissued a couple of years ago. Are the other books is the series going to be reissued soon?

Roberta: No, unfortunately. Harlequin had contracted to reissue the whole of the Chronicles in the ill-fated Signature Select line. (With a name like Signature Select I should have figured it was doomed from the beginning.) When the line was dropped, they had issued ROSELYNDE and ALINOR and said they would find another place for the other books, but decided against reprinting them. So far, no one else has indicated any interest in republishing JOANNA, GILLIANE, RHIANNON and SYBELLE. I have thought from time to time about getting them done by an epublisher that does POD, but obviously my agent is not in favor of the idea and I haven't worked up the energy to do it on my own.

Jo: Your recent fantasy fiction has been based in history, too, in particular, the Tudors. Tell us more about those books.

Roberta: That's really too general a question, but I can state the basic idea Mercedes Lackey and I had. We were not going to do alternate history, which is usually what is done in historical fantasy. We were going to relate the known events of history as accurately as we could and bring in the fantasy in other ways. When I started to research the events of the reign of Henry VIII and Mary, I discovered that although all the serious historians agreed on what happened, none could agree on why it happened. There we had it. Mercedes and I felt with so much flat disagreement among serious historians, the addition of elves (the Sidhe) would not do much more damage.

Jo: And, of course, you've written the wonderful medieval mysteries set in a whorehouse with a sleuth who's a madam. Only Queen Gellis would dare! I love Magdalen and Bellamy. Did you have any trouble persuading Tor to go with that storyline?

Roberta: No---or at least if there was, I don't know anything about it. I actually wrote the entire book of A
MORTAL BANE before Lucienne [Roberta's agent] tried to sell it. The reason for my choice was simple. I was a bit tired of all the religious women detectives (and men too) in historical mysteries. I needed a setting in which a medieval woman would have complete freedom and in which she would come in contact with a lot of different people. I could have chosen someone with a business of her own but I felt that
would keep her too busy to be solving mysteries. A whorehouse seemed ideal and it has worked very well.

Jo: Do you have a different writing technique for mysteries and fantasies?

Roberta: Other people have told me that my voice is different in the mysteries and fantasies, but I must admit that I am unaware of any difference in technique while I am writing.

Jo: What are you working on now?

Roberta: I am finishing the Tudor series with Mercedes. After that, I hope to do a fifth Magdalene book.

Jo: Thank you, Roberta.

Roberta's recent books are: BY SLANDEROUS TONGUES (with Mercedes Lackey), Baen, Feb. 2007
CHAINS OF FOLLY, Five Star, April 2006
ALINOR, Harlequin Signature Select, May 2006
ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT, Baen, March 2005, 0-7434-9890-9

You can find out more on Roberta's web site

Now, it's your chance to ask Roberta a question, and/or tell her your favorite of her books. And there'll be a draw from among all who post a comment or a question to this entry during Saturday, Jan 27th. The winner will get a signed book from Roberta.

What do you think of the current state of historical romance?

If you, too, remember the '60s, what do you think of the changes in historical romance since then?

What happened to medievals? Why don't they seem to be popular in romance anymore?

What do you like about the middle ages as a setting for romance?

Why do you think historical mysteries are so popular now?

Jo :)

Beach Party Book Talk

It’s Friday, and I’m not Mary Jo!  Sorry ‘bout dat.  Mary Jo is out snorkeling, or at least lounging beachside, in the sunny Caribbean, while I’m stuck in chilly St. Louis taking her place. But never fear, Pat Rice is here, and we’re gonna play!

All right, let’s slap on some suntan lotion, snuggle down in our beach chairs, and signal the waiter to bring us our favorite daiquiris. I don’t care if you’re reading this with your breakfast, we’re having daiquris this morning. Call it your breakfast fruit. Now adjust your umbrella, admire the peaceful waves, and let’s talk books.

I know I just blogged on historical politics, but there’s nothing worse than publishing politics, so I’ll warn you now, that rather than start any wars today, I’m on my best behavior. I’m only talking good books.  The rest of y’all can do as you please.

My memory isn’t strong enough to come up with best all-time favorites unless you want to repeat discussions of JANE EYRE and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.  And I’ve promised to be good so I won’t wallop GONE WITH THE WIND.  So what I choose to do on this blissful sunny day with daiquiri in hand is to discuss recent reads, since they’re conveniently stacked on the table beside me, and I won’t get charged with favoritism by choosing one book over another. Of course, this also means you’re stuck with my current reading material which isn’t necessarily historical or romance, but that’s life.

Let’s start with Deb Smith’s CROSSROADS CAFÉ.(www.deborah-smith.com) I adore Deb’s Southern women’s fiction style. I’ve lived in various areas of the south most of my life, and I’m well accustomed to tales starting out “Y’all know that old-timey barn down by the Rooster Café?” and proceeding from there in lovingly detailed description.  You sip your iced tea, wave away the mosquitoes, and sink into another time and place. Deb can do this even when she’s talking about a spoiled movie star whose way of life is literally brought to a screeching halt and a Yankee who is waiting for a good excuse to off himself. And she can do it with a down-home sense of humor and pragmatism that shines like jewels throughout the book.  Despite the subject matter, this really is a feel-good romance with a wonderful, uplifting ending.  Savor, and don’t get too sunburned while you’re devouring the pages.

The other book sitting on my table waiting to be filed in my library is Sharon Shinn’s DARK MOON DEFENDER,(her site hasn't been recently updated but here it is: www.sharonshinn.net)  the latest in her Twelve Houses series. It isn’t necessary to read them in order, but it’s more fun simply because her characters are so marvelous that you’ll want to get to know them in full detail.  This one is hardcover, the older ones are probably out in softcover, and the library ought to have them. Remind me some time to have a discussion on how writers get paid, and why British libraries pay authors, but today is for lounging about being lazy and not having complex discussions. Just let it be said that when you find a favorite author, buy their books so publishers will keep publishing them.

The hero of DARK MOON DEFENDER is Justin, an all-around military jock who enjoys being tougher than everybody.  He doesn’t need anyone. Women are soft and useless—except for his few female companions, and they’ve grown on him lately.  And talk about politics!  Shinn develops entire worlds, including complex hierarchies with intrigue and corruption, that often reflect current events in strange and wonderful ways. And the heroine is innocently dropped right in the middle of it—into Shinn’s equivalent of a nunnery.  This world has psychic magic, but the nunnery scorns it and Justin’s mates use it, so the conflict starts right there. Watching this tough man succumb to a seemingly soft woman who sets him on his head when she turns out—in her own steadfast manner—to be even tougher than his mates is simply a joy to behold.

And you’ll notice I talk about characters and not plot. Sorry, but that’s how I approach my own books.  I adore reading about people. The plot is there just to see how the characters deal with it and learn from it. So even if both of these books have lots of plot and action, they’re steeped thoroughly in character.  And good writing. Writing that sings. Which is why they’re still sitting here, so I can flip back to certains scenes and admire their construction.

So, all this talking has made me thirsty, and I need to refill my glass.  Tell me what you’re reading, good, bad, or indifferent. And tell me WHY you like or dislike it. That’s the really fun part. I want to know what our readers are looking for in a book.

Oh, and if you want to comment on what I’m currently writing, I just posted a couple of blogs at www.patriciarice.blogspot.com where readers get to tell me if I’m right, wrong, or just bad. Later, I’ll post a poll on my website but I don’t want to work any harder today!

Visiting their world

       From Loretta:
      My 1820 Annual Register arrived yesterday courtesy Kenny’s Bookshop of Galway.  What I want to do is sit down and read it.  But I can’t because I need to work out the details of the plot of my new book (yes, I am Outline Girl).  Oh, right, and there’s that tome on Venice I need to study.
      Luckily, the blog offers the perfect excuse to indulge my curiosity about the world my heroes and heroines lived in and share my discoveries.  Here are some samples from the Annual Register and elsewhere of what was going on during the last couple of weeks of January in 1820.
      First, as Susan/Miranda pointed out, on the 22nd, Lord Byron celebrated his 32nd birthday.  The relevant volume of Byron’s Letters and Journals (Marchand, ed.) does not offer a birthday letter or diary entry but here’s Marchand’s translation of the note Byron wrote in Italian to his lover, the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, a week later:

My Love--You are mistaken--I remember nothing of it--and I beg you not to do anything similar without reason.--You have no debts with me if not of Love for which there ‘remains in credit’ for the whole of the present day R.i 1000,000,000.  B
       Evidently she sent him some money, which he returned with the note, asking if she was mad.
      From the 1820 Annual Register entries for January:
      25.  Tuesday’s Gazette.--DEATH OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE DUKE OF KENT.
       Whitehall, Jan. 24.
      Yesterday morning, at 10 o’clock, departed this life, at Sidmouth, after a short illness, his royal highness Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathern, his majesty’s fourth son, to the great grief of all the royal family.
      The Lord Chamberlain issues orders for the Court’s going into mourning:
       The ladies to wear black bombazins, plain muslin or long lawn, crape hoods, chamois shoes and gloves, and crape fans. (This image is of 1817 mourning attire, courtesy Regency Library and Moonstone Research.)

http://www.regencylibrary.com/ 

Undress.--Dark Norwich crape.
      The gentlemen to wear black cloth, without buttons on the sleeves or pockets, plain muslin or long lawn cravats and weepers, chamois shoes and gloves, crape hatbands, and black swords and buckles.
      Undress.--Dark gray frocks.
      
      Elsewhere, on the 27th--in ARCHES COURT, Doctors’ Commons.  George Norton, esq., brings a suit “to annul his marriage on the ground of his own impotency!” [Exclamation point theirs.]  The lawyers scrambled for precedents.  The judge wondered, among other things, how George had failed to notice he was impotent before he got married and why he didn’t mention this as a possible impediment when he got his marriage license, and what made him decide to bring up the matter seven years later.
      Meanwhile on this day, in the Court of Chancery, the Lord Chancellor was “occupied until eleven in his private room” with “a motion for an injunction to restrain the earl of Coventry from encouraging the marriage of his daughter, who is only 17 years of age, with Mr. Gresley, who is not 20 years of age, a student of the University of Oxford, and son of Sir George Gresley; and also to restrain the young people from having any communication or correspondence with each other, during the minority of the lady.”  Yes, both fathers were fine with the marriage, but apparently the plaintiff--someone named Atherly (no other identification provided) is a joint guardian of the daughter, and doesn’t approve.
      Hmm.  Why was Atherly a joint guardian?  Was this perhaps a natural daughter of Lord Coventry?  Was she really Atherly’s daughter, adopted by his lordship?
      Does this sound like a possible story line to you?
      Then, on the 29th, at 8:35 p.m., King George III breathed his last.  “His majesty expired, without pain,” according to the five physicians in attendance.
       Interestingly, for some days before his father’s death, the new king, formerly the Prince Regent, had been suffering from “a violent cold, which settled in his lungs.”  Since inflammations of the lungs could be fatal in those days, England very nearly lost him, too, in this eventful January.  Some believe this would have been no great loss, and I do sympathize with that point of view.  I am not sure, had I known the Prince Regent personally or had I lived in his time, that I would have liked him.  And probably the same goes for Lord Byron.  For one thing, they both could have used lots and lots of therapy.  But if they had had what we consider treatment--injesting antidepressants instead of wine and/or laudanum--they might not have been so interesting.
      To me, anyway.  After all, I didn’t have to live with them.  Instead, I reap the benefits of what they contributed to the world.  In the case of King George IV, this includes some of the most beautiful as well as the most extraordinary architecture in England.  In Byron’s case, this includes some of my favorite poetry, most especially Don Juan, and the joy of reading his amazingly vibrant letters and journals.  In the course of my research, I read a lot of letters and journals of the early 19th C (see my blog Is he for real?, regarding boring letters and biographies).  His are most certainly far above the common run.  I can hear his voice, and there is no other like it. 
      Yesterday, at the library, I read an introduction to a book on Venice in which the author said that he hated Byron but was forced to put him in the book (it is a collection of views of Venice by various famous persons) because he was a major figure of the time period for that particular chapter.  The author, on the other hand, thought the world of Ruskin.  Well, I knew we were not going to see eye to eye, so I put that book back on the shelf.
      What about you?  How personally do you take the past and those who lived there?  Does it give you any insight into yourself and your world?  And the dangerous question:  Should artists and royals be judged by normal standards or do we put them in a special category as, say, different species?

Here's A Toast to Rabbie

Wednesday, and Susan Sarah here....

The first time my husband and I went to Scotland (without kids, thanks to a wonderful cousin), we took a wee day tour from Edinburgh up into the Highlands with a coach company called “Rabbie’s Tours.”
“Who’s Rabbie?” I asked the driver.
He looked at me as if I was a looney. “Rabbie Burns!”

Well, I’ve learned a good deal about Rabbie Burns since then. Robert Burns was one of Scotland's "favorite sons," an 18th century poet and songwriter---and as part of my acquaintance with the memory of the good Mr. Burns, I’ve attended several Burns Night Suppers, and hosted my own as well.
Burns Night is a Scottish tradition, held on the 25th of January–-or as near as one can get to it. I’ve been to Burns Nights in February, even as late as March, though the ideal is January 25th in honor of Robert Burns’s birthday. While not everyone in Scotland, or elsewhere of Scottish descent, celebrates Burns Night, it’s a widely known annual event that honors a man who wrote poetry and ballads, a brilliant, bold writer who was as much a rebel as a romantic with his pen.

Why raise a virtual glass to Robert Burns on the Word Wenches blog (I mean, besides the fact that it’s Wednesday, and I needed a fresh blog)?  Robert Burns is a fascinating example of a late Georgian gentleman, not a titled peer but a man of the educated upper working class so highly respected in Scotland, and one of the literati of his day; born in Ayrshire, he spent much of his life in the Lowlands and chiefly Edinburgh, and he worked a stint as an excise officer--even wrote some of his verses while lying in wait for smugglers along the Solway coast.
  He flourished during an age of revolution and enlightenment, and his writings, admired in his lifetime, helped establish the romantic revival of Scottish culture and national pride at a time when the Scots were perhaps at their lowest ebb. He wrote brilliant poetry and songs that celebrated the romantic, noble heart of the Scots and of all mankind, and he wrote a lot of bawdy and downright hilarious verses; and he loved women (literally and often)...and besides, any historical romance writer worth the ink in her pen would have to stop to take a second look at Rabbie Burns -- check out that portrait!   ;)

Burns was born in 1759, and grew up in a time when the Scots needed a Robert Burns far more than they needed another Bruce or Wallace.  The time for martial heroics had passed.  In a larger sense, Burns's poetry and songs helped to heal and restore Scottish pride and uplift the Scottish spirit after his countrymen had taken one of its worst beatings in centuries, with the devastation at Culloden in April, 1746 and the general humiliation of the Scots under the English--including the forbidding of the tartan until 1782--in the years that followed.
Burns wrote of Scottish freedom with fire and fervor, perhaps in response to the political upheavals of the 1790s. In his imagined address given by Bruce at Bannockburn, the lines still ring with a rebel's natural passion:
Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots wham Bruce has aften led
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victorie!
Robbie Burns was well qualified to write romantic love songs and poetry as well.  He loved women, often... and to give the man credit, he seems to have understood women and respected them to a greater degree than many of his contemporaries--though that respect and appetite gave him a roving eye, and he said himself that he was "a miserable dupe to love."
There was Nellie, when he was 15, who encouraged him to write his first poem:
And whilst that virtue warms my breast
I'll love my handsome Nell.
When he was 16, there was Margaret, to whom he proposed--
Peggy dear...My fair, my lovely charmer!
And Allison, to whom he proposed –
And by thy een sae bonie blue, / I swear I’m thine forever, O!

Robbie goes to dancing school, affording him many opportunities to research his love songs, and eventually resulting in the birth of Bess, the first of twelve children of different mothers, one of whom, the long-suffering and generous-hearted Jean Armour, he married. Of his darling Bess, he wrote:
Welcome, lily bonie, sweet, wee dochter!
Tho' ye come here a wee unsought for
He helped found the Tarbolton Bachelors Club as its president. One of the rules stated that each member must be: “a professed lover of one or more of the female sex." No Hellfire Club for these wholesome, idealistic, lusty young Scottish gents, no dark catacombs and lechery, just true admirers and cravers after their opposite gender.
Robert Burns understood love in all its forms, joyful and sad, frolicking and profound.  He understood passion...very well...and he experienced the full gamut of love and life himself.  Even though he died far too young, his songs and his poetry reflect a genius ability to express emotional richness.
Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae weary, fu' o' care!
The ritual of the Burns Supper was started by his close friends a few years after his death, and the format is very much the same today, including the various whisky toasts, the welcome to the Haggis, and so on.
Even today, the traditions of a Burns Night Supper are set, a series of recitations, addresses, toasts and songs. Burns is liberally quoted, though not all the verses and pieces recited are by Burns. Creative interpretation and original material encouraged, and most all is delivered very tongue-in-cheek -- after all, one of Burns's most enduring qualities was a rollicking sense of humor.
The guests are treated to a very fine meal, the highlight of which is the serving of the haggis, and each of the several courses is accompanied by frequent toasting with whisky.  In general, the stages of the dinner are:

Piping in the guests– in grand style, with bagpipes if you can find a piper, but a CD will do.
The Selkirk Grace, which Burns wrote:
Some hae meat and canna eat
Some canna eat that want it
But we hae meat and we can eat
Sae let the Lord be thankit

Piping in the Haggis: the haggis is carried in on a silver platter to bagpipe music, and the whisky glasses are filled in anticipation of lots of toasts.
Address to the Haggis: the reciting of "To A Haggis"  a long, and very funny, exultation by Burns which begins:
Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face
Great chieftain o' the pudden race!

Toast to the Haggis: raucous cheers and raise glasses when the haggis is sliced, steaming hot, and served to all (and even I, the non-meat eater, must at least taste...and really it's not bad at all! Sausagey-like. Think Kielbasa, which can be used as a substitute when true Haggis cannot be found).

The main course is then served: a wide variety of traditional Scots fare might be served, but always include neeps ‘n tatties (turnips and potatoes). As the meal is finishing up-– often with a lovely dessert such as sherry trifle–one or two of the guests might perform a couple of Burns’s songs (he wrote a gazillion of them, among them Flow Gently Sweet Afton, Green Grow the Rashes O, and A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation).

The Immortal Memory Toast – a fairly substantial address to the memory of Burns, which can be a mix of biography, poetry reading and even singing, can be a heart-wrencher as well as funny, and should wrap up with a rousing toast to Robert Burns. I’ve given the Immortal Memory a few times myself. One of my addresses posed the question, Why does Robbie Burns Rate a Supper? And after running through the facts of his life, and the long, long (long) list of his true loves and the scrapes he got into, all of the above either funny or heart-wrenching, it seemed that nothing explained adequately why he got a supper in the first place (though perhaps, because his friends began the tradition, they remembered many a raucous supper in Rabbie's good company) -- but my examined conclusion was that it was because he wrote about food a lot – haggis, whiskey, puddin’, fricasee, stew, ragout – so a supper for Rabbie is a perfect tribute.

The Toast to the Lassies: one of the male guests stands to address the ladies with a touching, reverent, brilliant...okay often bawdy...tribute to the female gender, and the whisky glasses are raised once again.  My husband has been asked to give the Toast to the Lassies this year, so I’d better duck.

The Reply to the Laddies: one of the female guests stands to respond in kind. This can be bawdy, irreverent...okay and often points out the finer qualities of the male gender. But not always. And this year, it’s my turn to give the Reply, so my husband better duck if his Toast isn’t adoring (he won’t let me see his address beforehand, but that’s okay, I won’t let him know what I have planned either!).
Then it's time for "Auld Lang Syne," either sung or listened to, and glasses are raised in final toast as the planned part of the festivities wraps up. Often things end with a final toast to Robert Burns, usually with a quote from the great man himself.

My last year's Immortal Memory Tribute ended with this quote from "Scotch Drink" (Gie him strong drink/until he wink/that's sinkin' in despair), where Burns talks about the virtues of whisky:
Food fills the wame, an' keeps us livin
Tho life's a gift no worth receivin
When heavy-dragg'd wi' pine an' grievin
But oil'd by thee
The wheel's o' life gae down-hill scrievin
Wi' rattlin glee.

So here's to the wheels o' life, and here's to Robert Burns!

~Susan Sarah

p.s. -- My last week's blog, "The End," has a winner!  Nina's name was chosen at random!  So NIna -- if you're reading this, send me your address and I'll send you a wee buik. :)

The Politics of Romance

It's Tuesday, it must be Pat Rice .

Susanna poses an intriguing question about how authors approach their political beliefs in their writing. I was thoroughly tickled and pleased with the intelligence of our readers on Edith’s blog about the weather—hardly a political topic on the face of it but apparently a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.  Weather, who woulda thunked it?

Admittedly, the opinionated Irish in me never met a political argument she couldn’t jump into with both feet and fists flying. But as an author, I have two major responsibilities—first, to my readers to give them a wonderful, romantic story that will warm their hearts, and second, to my publishers, to produce a book that will earn out all that nice money they advance me against book sales.  Politics can easily infringe on both responsibilities.

But politics are part of history, part of the lives of our characters, and a major driving force of the world around us, as much as we might like to think otherwise.  I would happily write wonderful tales skewering the wrong side and promoting my side, and all my friends who agree with me would cheer me right on.  But such a book would only present half a picture, wouldn’t it?

As often as I scream that 90% of the human race are bloomin’ idgits, the truth is, every person, like every villain, is the hero of his own tale.  Every one of us sees the world from our own unique perspective and strives to move about in that world in a manner that we think socially acceptable to the people around us.  So if I’m writing about the real world, I have to give each character his or her own unique perspective, whether or not it agrees with mine. It would be a boring place if everyone thought like me! 

Don’t get me wrong—my opinions are strong and my themes will reflect them, but I prefer that readers think about them and make up their own minds.  The human race being what it is, it’s destined to repeat history unless we learn from it.  So I use history as a platform to present my arguments.  Readers who want sex and a love story will get great heaping mounds of it, because I sincerely believe love makes the world go around and loving our neighbors is the path to peace.  So that's always going to be my dominant theme.  Readers who want history will get it as accurately as I can portray it, given that I’m currently writing history mixed with fantasy. But it’s my choice of subjects that give me away to readers who dig deeper.

Which leads me to why I’m writing about the era of the French Revolution.  The only part of it that Americans seem to know about is the Bloody Terror, which was a horrific eighteen months of out-of-control judgment wrought by men with their own political agendas who would be called terrorists today.  The Revolution was far, far more than that.  In actuality, the first two years of overthrow were nearly bloodless, brought about by the economic bankruptcy of an entire nation.  I won’t go into all the details of what led to the educated middle class standing up as one and shouting for change, but what they saw was a gap so huge between rich and poor that anyone with a modicum of compassion would cry to end it. It’s that microcosm of history that fascinates me,stirs my imagination, and gives me story ideas to chase.

But as Susannah and other wenchlings have asked, how does a writer keep her own personal opinions out of the story? I can only speak for myself.  Obviously, I have an opinion on the Revolution and what it reflects today.  But my opinion is pretty irrelevant in the scope of things. I’m just a romance writer.  That’s what authors have to keep firmly in the front of their minds. We are not preachers. So what I’ll be trying to portray as I satisfy my intellectual curiosity about this piece of history is both sides of the coin—rich and poor, powerful and not.  And since I have little sympathy with greed and stupidity, I’m portraying the “wrong” side of the debate by using my very sympathetic, but haplessly arrogant, heroes <G>, who just happen to be living in isolation, unaware of the harm they’ve caused until confronted with it. Each individual will have their own take on problems and must learn their own lessons, even the “good” guys.  I’m hoping readers will come away with the feeling of a rollicking good story with a bit of something meatier to think on, if they like.

I think it’s a perfectly entertaining challenge, for instance, to match a suffragette with a hero who thinks women are good for only one thing.  Romance is about resolving conflicts, after all.  It may be tough to sympathize with a guy this thick-headed <G>, but if an author does her job properly, the reader will see why the hero believes what he does. And by sympathizing with his plight, we’re made to see the opposite side of the coin, aren’t we?  Seeing both sides of an argument is what we need to do to resolve our issues. Understanding,  and not proselytizing, is really what an author’s job is all about.

How many readers prefer to leave today’s world behind and disappear into the imaginary ones of romance? And what about those of you who prefer historical fiction—do you want a real slice of life with big, problematic issues, or do you just want the personal issues that lead up to the bigger issues?  I know as a writer and reader, I prefer social issues to politics every time. How much do you think one reflects the other? Or is that an essay question? <G>

Roberta Gellis Here Saturday!

Yes, it's really true!  Jo will be interviewing the one and only Roberta Gellis this Saturday, and we'd love to have you join us.  Roberta writes everything--medievals, Napoleonic era, fantasy, science fiction, mysteries, romantic suspense . . . something for everyone.  She'll be checking in throughout the day replying to comments, so please drop in and help us make Roberta feel at home. 

Finding the, Uh, Good Parts

From Susan/Miranda:

Romances are love stories.  They follow the relationship between a man and a woman from that first meeting to the all-important happy ending or HEA (Happily Ever After in romance-writing parlance.) And somewhere in the middle, or the end, or maybe even on the first page, will be at least one love scene.

“Love scene”: how can two little words be so loaded?  Readers expect them, editors demand them, many writers dread them.  Used books fall open to them. They’re the scenes that non-romance-readers ridicule the most, and often with good reason, too.  They can bring out the purplest prose (His throbbing manhood!  Her furled petals of femininity!), or embrace words that used to get your mouth washed out with soap.  They can turn heroes into raging bulls ready to perform all night and then some, or reduce them to such paragons of sensitivity and consideration that it’s a wonder the poor guys can perform at all.  They’ll make heroines writhe, moan, weep, cry out, thrash their heads, flail their limbs, and see bright stars explode across the velvet night-sky. 

But that’s nothing compared to what love scenes can do to writers.  Ideally, love scenes should flow from the story, a natural extension of the relationship between the hero and heroine.  In reality, they’re often the hardest part of a book to write.  Balancing emotion and passion while finding a suitable vocabulary can be a mind-numbing challenge.  It’s establishing that elusive “comfort zone” not just for the characters, but for the writer as well.  Add to that the pressure (especially for newer writers) from publishers to write more and more explicit sex, and you have a good many writers moaning, writhing, and thrashing their own heads over their keyboards.

Writing historical love scenes can be even more difficult.  Yes, I know, I know, sex has been around as long as people.  The 1960s didn’t invent sex any more than the 1660s did.  But even the most jaded 18th century rake wouldn’t have been exposed to the level of general sexual information that’s commonplace to us today.  (Surely the members of the Hellfire Club would be stunned by the wonders of the internet, and likewise stunned that it’s available to inquisitive wives and daughters, too.)  But how do you write a love scene that’s both faithful to your historic time period, yet sufficiently satisfying to sophisticated modern readers?

For once research, that cure-all for every historical quandary, comes up short.  In the past, "sex" meant gender, as in the Fair Sex.  "Making love" was more courtship than consummation, and "sleeping together" was, well, sleeping.  Only English men mention sex in their private journals and diaries, and then it’s usually sex as sport or conquest, with emphasis on how often and how impressive the performance was. Giacomo Casanova was more forthcoming (a LOT more forthcoming) with details, but then he was Italian, and hardly representative of the stalwart English lords who currently predominate historical romances. 

English ladies remain mute on the subject in their own writings, or use so many allusions to Venus or Cupid that it’s impossible to tell exactly what happened.  (Be honest: before the professor explained it, did you realize that the “little death” you kept reading about in that Elizabethan Poetry class meant an orgasm?) Even Fanny Hill was really a man, and besides, I can’t see any of us referring to a man’s “sweet dart of love” or worse, the “engine of maiden’s destruction” without earning a big, fat, red-penciled query in the margin of the manuscript.

In some ways, it’s been a relief for me to write novels like Duchess and Royal Harlot.  No one expects Lady Castlemaine to use euphemisms, and she doesn’t.  (whoo-boy, but she doesn’t.) But I still have to wrestle with the love-scene-beast in my Miranda Jarrett historicals, and it never gets any easier.  Every couple is different, and finding that magical, elusive mix of love and passion, tenderness and hotness, humor and devotion and discovery is as rare in writing as it is in life.

So what about you?  If you’re a writer, do you find love scenes a trial or a joy?  If you’re a reader, how much information is too much?  Do you look forward to love scenes as the best part of a love story, or would you rather writers could once again close the bedroom door?

The two pictures illustrating this blog are details from a pair of paintings by William Hogarth (1697-1764) from the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Aptly named “Before” and “After”, the paintings show that sometimes one (or two) pictures really are worth the proverbial thousand words.

Is it Warm in Here, Or is it Just Me?

I love History, I expect you do too.

Back in school, History was all dates and numbers. I hated it. Then I began to read Historical fiction, and I fell in love.
This is because History is three parts mystery and one part fantasy. This is especially true if you research centuries back. The truth becomes elusive because:

a) History is written by the winners. I once wrote a book about the two lost princes in the Tower of London (THE CRIMSON CROWN.) I ended up with twenty four books on my desk . (This was pre-internet.) They were in two even piles. Twelve said their uncle Richard Third done them in. Twelve said he didn't. Dealer's choice. (I used to be one of Josephine Tey's converts. But now I think Richard done it.)

and b) The earlier in history, the fewer people who could write about it. Myths and folk tales only give us glimpses of what was or might have been.

and c) Few people who could write took the time to describe the everyday commonplace facts of their lives. We still don't know for sure what kind of underwear females in the Regency era wore. So we are certainly in the dark about simpler facts earlier in history.

Historical details are hard to discover, and events of the slow moving kind are near impossible.
I bring this up because the weather is so dramatically weird this year, and everyone is saying it's Global Warming, caused by us. Warm here, cold there, and stormy where it oughtn't to be.
I don't doubt we're doing vast harm. I saw the movie, and think all those gasses we're releasing are certainly doing a number on our lives and our planet.
But the warming part?

I always wondered why the richest men in medieval Europe, kings of great realms, built huge stone houses for themselves. I am a castle louse: wind me up and I infest a castle. I love them. But castles are cold. Even in summer. No amount of tapestries on the walls can warm them. And they didn't have many fireplaces. Few people love comfort as much s Royals do. I never could understand why great kings spent a fortune happily building themselves vast igloos.

Ancient Kings in Scandinavia had long low wooden houses where many people lived and the hearths were roaring all winter. So why did the later kings of Europe lock themselves up in refrigerated castles while their serfs were comfy in their little thatched huts, huddled up next to their pigs?
It wasn't just for defense. There's evidence that it simply wasn't as cold back then.
I've read articles!
Carbon dated wood from the era shows the life of trees and hint that it wasn't always frigid in winter.
One article I read showed illustrations from early Books of Hours that depict nobles in front of a castle, cavorting in their shirt sleeves, as it were, filmy gowns and light tunics, tossing snow balls at each other, gleeful and amused by the snow.
Later books picture them swaddled in furs.
It has been postulated that there was a little ice age hundreds (not millions) of years past.
And so a little era of warming makes sense too.

The earth is a living thing, always changing. I worry that one day our beautiful planet will finally notice the itching from all the pestilent little creatures on it's skin and will wriggle and stretch and shake us off. We can help by stopping ourselves from poisoning it. We can save myriad creatures from extinction, including ourselves.
But History also implies that our planet is ever changing, no matter what we do.

So should we be terrified by our changing weather? Or has this, at least, happened before?
I wish I knew.

What do you think?

As things were.

Hi, it's Jo here.

First the great news. Lady Beware is finished, it’s in New York, my agent and editor love it, it’s off to be copy edited, and given that it’s a June book, it’ll probably boomerang back on me next week to go over that. Which is why I’m playing now.

It’s my tradition to play with genealogy over Christmas. Of course that didn’t happen this winter, but for the past week I’ve been poking around, mostly in censuses, looking for pieces of the puzzle.

That’s what it is to me – a complicated jigsaw puzzle. There are unlikely to be any dramatic revelations or hints of royal blood on either side. The Beverleys go back to itinerant labourers in Yorkshire and the Beadles were dock and brickyard workers in Kent; the Dunns and Carrs were much the same in Ireland.

But I love censuses and the feel of peeping inside lives in the past. Of course this is also great for a writer of historical fiction. For most censuses, a person has to subscribe to search for records, but the Mormons has the 1881 censuses for the US, Canada, and and Wales up on their genealogy site. As a result, they’re free everywhere. (Some other sites are ancestry.com and findmypast.com.)

For years I’ve been meaning to look at a typical English village through this window, to see what’s there. This year, I decided to do it. I’m not posting the whole thing here as it turns out to be rather long. I’m giving my thoughts. If you want to read more plus the census details,
it’s on my website here.

But I offer this to those of you who are writing historical fiction set in the past in as a way to gain greater insight, especially for those of you writing about England from afar. Of course 1881 is long after any periods I use, but I doubt Burton Pidsea had changed that much in 100 years.

I knew nothing about Burton Pidsea. I simply searched the census for a John Brown born between 1790 and 1810, reckoning that would cut the numbers down. Burton Pidsea sounded promising, so I picked that one – a shoemaker.

On genuki.org.uk, I found this description of the place in the 1820s, at a time much closer to my fictional periods.
"BURTON PIDSEA, a parish in the wapentake of Holderness, and liberty of St. Peter's; 4 miles E. of Hedon. A neat and pleasant village, the houses of which are well built, and afford an extensive prospect of the surrounding country. The church is a small building… patrons Dean and Chapter of York, with a lofty tower apparently of great antiquity. The incumbent is the Rev. Jonathan Dixon, vicar; here is likewise a Methodist chapel, built in 1820. Pop. 378."
Go to the Genuki page.

I recommend genuki for researching historical locations in the UK. You can go here for a picture of the above mentioned church, which is typical of parish churches in villages around .
Picture of Church

This site has pictures of modern Burton Pidsea.

And this interesting site provides a google map. If you click on satellite, you’ll see the geography. It looks as if geodaisy will do this for any place, which is great.

There are many 19th century town and village directories on line, which also give an idea of a place, and also of the trades and professions of the time.
Here's one.

What I learned from this.

That I didn’t pick the best village. This one is very agricultural and doesn’t have that many tradespeople. In this census, we find three shoemakers, four bricklayers, a joiner and wheelwright. (BTW, a carpenter builds houses, a joiner makes furniture.) Two more wheelwrights, two innkeepers, a grocer, a schoolmaster, two market carriers, a butcher, two tailors, a shepherd, two blacksmiths, three jobbing gardeners, a cowkeeper (which might mean a dairyman) a corn miller, a retired surgeon (did he do any doctoring if necessary?) a rector. The range of trades seems strange to me, with too many of some and none of others. The bricklaying family produced sons who spread out through Yorkshire.

The people who have servants are:
The rector, the large farmers (servants in addition to farm labourers), the wheelwrights, the grocer, the innkeeper and the butcher. (Two servants and a large family. Butchers were known for healthy families because they ate well. Today’s frowning on meat didn’t apply back then when it was a luxury for many.)

The retired surgeon and his widowed sister have one servant.

Emily Baxter, widow of a prosperous farmer, has a cook/housekeeper and a housemaid.

Mary Ann Ford, an annuitant has a female servant.

The large Wilkinson family (7 children and the possibility of more because the youngest is only 8 months) has three men designated as servants and two daughters as “servants at home.” As he’s listed as an agricultural labourer, the male servants seem unlikely. More likely to be lodgers. The two older girls could be kept at home to help their mother.

The widowed schoolteacher’s younger daughter is designated as housekeeper.

People weren’t as settled back then as we assume -- as I assume, at least. The labourers in particular don’t often stay in one place. Less than half the households in the 1881 census had been there in 1861 in any form. (This might not be true of some of the married women. It’s hard to be sure of them unless they have an unusual name. Hyena? Who thought of that one?)

For example, Daniel Blanchard, one of the wheelwrights, was living in Sproatley in 1861.

William Poulter, an agricultural labourer, was born in Cambridgeshire, a long way from Burton Pidsea,. In 1861 he was 17 and living with his widowed mother in his place of birth, Ickleton, one of six children which she supported by taking in laundry. An 18-year-old daughter was working in a paper factory, and William was working as a labourer. Now, in 1881, he’s a recent widower (his youngest child is one year) with five children. Some families don’t seem to get a break, generation to generation.

A couple of other things. It looks as if most people married someone of about their own age, and many were still together at an older age, so they weren’t dying off to a dramatic extent. Some women have born many children, and some appear to have had children into their forties. I’m suspicious about the rector’s wife having a one-year-old at age 55, however. I suspect a transcription problem. I think she’s 35.

Note John Brown at the grand old age of 90. No, people didn’t die of in their thirties as we are sometimes told.

And finally, something I’ve noticed before. Despite our image of the extended family, older people did not live with their married children. Unmarried children frequently lived with their parents until they married, and if a married child lost their spouse a retired parent, especially the mother, would move in to help. But many, many people 60 and over live alone or as couples. Often their children would be in the same village and available to help, but I don’t find the multigenerational model in general use.

So, do any of these details surprise you?

Do you already use genealogical resources for finding out about the past, or even about a specific location you're using in a book?

And have you ever heard of someone called Hyena before?

Jo

Celebrate Romance! And other writing conferences

by Mary Jo

This blog started out as something of a public service announcement, when an organizer of Celebrate Romance asked if we’d be willing to mention their upcoming conference.  Since CR is unique in being a conference organized by and for romance readers, and at least four Wenches have attended them, It seemed worth doing.  Then I started thinking about conferences in general.  More on that below, but first:

“Cebrate Romance is 10 years young this year.  We are  looking for readers who love their romance novels and want to meet others who share the same passion.  The conference will be held in Kansas City, MO this year on March 2-4.  We will be meeting at the Sheraton Suites hotel on Country Club Plaza.   We have a lot of entertaining activities planned.   There is an optional activity on Saturday night that will give you a chance to enjoy some of the best barbecue that Kansas City has to offer.  The advanced booktrade offers everyone the opportunity to obtain books that they'd had a hard time finding in their home city.  Visit our website at http://www.crspring.com/ for more information   The website contains the schedule and contact information. “

As I understand it, CR began when avid romance readers from internet groups decided to get together so they could meet in person, talk about books, and generally have a fine time.  The fact that they’ve been doing it for ten years proves it’s a success. <G>  CR quickly became a destination for authors as word got around that it was a chance to introduce your books to serious readers who would go online and tell THE WORLD if they like your stories.  Plus, writers are treated like royalty.  What’s not to like? <g>  A good time is had by all.  Take a look at their site if you think you might be interested, particularly if you’re within driving range of Kansas City.  (Incidentally, I’ve been to a couple of conferences in KC, and it’s a great town to visit.) 

As I said above, CR may be the only reader generated romance conference, but there are plenty of other genre cons out there, and they all have their own nature. 

RWA conferences, both regional and national, are attended mostly by writers, both published and aspiring.  There is an emphasis on professionalism, and well organized sessions are about aspects of writing and publishing.  Generally appointments are available with editors and agents.  For the editors and agents, there’s the hope of finding a great new writer, and for the aspiring writers, it’s a chance to meet publishing professionals.  And even for multi-publisher authors, there is immense clothing anxiety before the national conference!  Since writers don’t get out much, many of us worry about what to wear. <g>

A nice feature of RWA national is the literacy signing.  Literally HUNDREDS of authors participate, signing books donated by their publishers.  Tons of money are raised for literacy, and really, you will never see as many authors and piles of books in one place!

Breaking into publishing is never easy, but good things can happen at RWA conferences.  A friend of mine had an interview with her dream Regency editor, who said to send in her manuscript.  My friend had a copy of the ms. with her, so she marched down to the hotel mailing room and sent it off to NYC.  The editor bought the book, and my friend went on to publish something like 45 Signet Regencies before she retired. 

Romantic Times conventions have a lot of business-oriented workshops, but at heart, they’re a great big party. <G>  All aspects of the business come together—readers, writers, booksellers, aspiring cover models, etc.  There are sessions about writing, but also a cover model pageant, a costume ball, maybe a vampire ball. (Some amazing costume makers come.)  I remember the year—Ft. Worth, I think—where a couple got married at the convention, and several gorgeous hunk male models pulled their carriage out of the ballroom. <G>  RT is unique, and great fun, especially for extroverts.  http://tinyurl.com/y8utm6 

General writer conferences are different since they usually deal with all kinds of writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, playwriting, etc.  The Pike’s Peak conference (where I’m speaking in April) is one such:  http://www.ppwc.net/ppwc07.html#schedule   Lots of variety and lots to be learned.  It’s also a reminder that romantic fiction is only one small part of the publishing business. 

Sff conventions, called cons, have a flavor all their own.  Dress is casual in the extreme—in some cases, downright disreputable <g>—but there are also people in fabulous costumes: elves and characters from Star Trek or Lord of the Rings, or Xena, Warrior Princess.  There are multiple tracks—not just writing, but movies, “filking” (which is sff folk music), media, gaming, etc.  Sometimes whole families attend, with kids shooting off to the game room or the manga sessions. 

There will usually be a fabulous book room, with sff and related books both old and new, and a dealers’ room with costumes, jewelry, weapons, and other fun stuff.  A friend who was raised in the “fandom”—that is, the fan community—assures me that it isn’t actually necessary to read sff to be part of the community.  <g>  It’s a very tolerant community, and lots of fun. 

A new wrinkle in just the last year or two are cons held by authors for their fans.  Sherrilyn Kenyon fans sold out October’s K-Con in New Orleans in hours and could have had as many as 100 readers if there was room.  (http://www.dailyinquisitor.com/sherrilyn/ )  Suzanne Brockmann had a fan gathering in Atlanta this past summer, timed to tie in with the RWA national conference a few days later.  The success of these ventures suggest that there will be more in the future. 

One thing I’ve no experience in is mystery conferences, so I asked some mystery writer friends, all of whom have attended genres other than mystery.  They are Denise Dietz ( http://www.denisedietz.com), Lillian Stewart Carl (http://lillianstewartcarl.com/) and Annette Mahon (http://annettemahon.com/) and they have lots of years of writing and conference experience.   

They say that mystery cons like Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime and Malice Domestic are FAN conferences.  Since Malice focuses on traditional and cozy mysteries, it tend to have more females.  (The Agatha awards presented there for best books are teapots. <G>)  Authors attend, of course, but very few wannabees.  Mystery conferences usually cost only half as much as romance, because romance gatherings usually include more meals. (Sff cons are even cheaper.)

Mystery cons are, for the most part, *very* laid-back. No dress code (lots of jeans and tees). There is much more "dress up," sequins and makeup at rom cons.  Sff is even more laid-back, except for the fabulous costumes. 

Mystery cons have an all-night poker game <vbg>.  Bouchercon has an annual basketball game. 

Annette adds, “Also, mystery cons have auctions, which are a big part of most mystery cons and I've never seen at romance ones.  The conference people pick a charity and then the authors donate things, usually having to do with their books.  Characters in a future novel are popular.  as you know, Deni has offered pet names and I've put up a quilt that can be autographed by favorite authors.” 

There are cliques and politics all over. (This is true of all groups, of course!)

So there’s a swift survey of writing conferences, and they are held just about everywhere, should you have the desire to attend. What’s my personal favorite conference?  Novelists, Inc.  Ninc is a group of authors of popular fiction—one has to have two published novels to qualify for membership.  Conferences tend to be small, laidback, and very much we’re-all-writers-together in atmosphere.  We share war stories (and even top bestsellers have plenty of them!) and listen to experts in interesting things like penjak and criminal techniques, and generally have a good time.  It’s the only conference where I don’t go home exhausted!

Note how often I use the word 'fun' in describing these events.  It's great to get together with people who share your enthusiasms, and the world is full of groups who demonstrate that. 

So what about you folks?  Many of you are writers, and all are readers?  Have you been to writing conferences?  Would you like to?  Share! 

Mary Jo

Is he for real?

      
  From Loretta:
 
  Once again I was torn between two reader questions, so I flipped a coin.  Nina wins a book with this one: 
      “To those who have put 'real' people in their historical romance novels, where do you draw the line on accuracy? If you need Wellington or Castlereagh in London, do you make sure he was actually there at the time? (other than the grossly obvious like June of 1815)”
      As indicated in my concern about the title for NOT QUITE A LADY (and I could totally relate, of course, to Jo’s wanting that comma in LADY, BEWARE)--I am nerdy to an extreme degree.  I try to stay close to the facts.  That doesn’t mean I always adhere strictly to them.
      The nerd reads really boring biographies of fairly obscure personages.  Henry Salt, British Consul-General in Egypt 1816-27, is a case in point.  Though he makes only two brief appearances in MR. IMPOSSIBLE, I felt compelled to order Elibron’s two-volume facsimile of the 1834 edition of THE LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY SALT, ESQ. F.R.S. &c. by John J. Halls.  The excess verbiage and convoluted style is common in books of the period, and it paints a saintly picture of the man, but Salt’s letters are there, and they do give a sense of his personality.  The extent to which I took liberties is hard to pin down.  Several people might read the same book or the same memoirs and come away with a different image of the subject.  There’s evidence elsewhere for the character I created but my version is, I hope, a bit wittier than the letters suggested.
      Still, for most of us, this is a fairly obscure historical figure.  The average reader doesn’t come to my book with a preconceived idea of him.  It’s not like trying to put, say, Abraham Lincoln into a story.  In that case, I would tread very, very carefully.  This is how I feel about Wellington, too.  I would absolutely try to get all the historical data right.  He’s a gigantic figure, too well-known, too much written about.
      Because it maddens me to read books with historical figures (or even famous fictional characters) who do not ring true, I try to avoid the big names and bring in lesser-known personages, like Ali Pasha in THE LION’s DAUGHTER.  Yet I don’t simply use the name and make up the character from whole cloth.  I may put my words into his mouth but I try to get the character as the historical references paint him.
      With the understanding, of course, that the various references will not all paint the same picture of the same man or woman.
      Historical truth is an elusive thing.
      In fiction, the big question the author must ask herself/himself is, Will it destroy the suspension of disbelief?
       Thus, even though the explorer Giovanni Belzoni does not come on stage in either MR. IMPOSSIBLE or LORD PERFECT, he is referred to often.  Because he’s well known to those familiar with the world of Egyptian archaeology, it was all the more important to get the details right.  And anyone who’s read either of those books since viewing last year’s BBC production, Egypt: Rediscovering a Lost World (which I highly recommend, by the way) will understand that I exaggerated nothing in my references to this larger-than-life figure or my descriptions of the dangerous world that was Egypt at the time.
      Salt’s secretary Beechey is also a real guy.  But here I took a liberty.  He had gone back to England by the time of my story.  However, since it was a question of months, rather than years--and no other substitute would do--I kept him in Egypt.
      No easy answers.  How far to stretch the truth is a judgment call, as is the case with historically accurate language...and, basically, everything.  Writing a novel is one judgment call after another.
      Thackeray’s Vanity Fair does not offer a strictly accurate picture of Waterloo.  Does this spoil the book in any way?
      An Infamous Army is regarded as a model of historical accuracy about the same battle.  Does this make Heyer’s book better than Thackeray’s?
      I think they are both marvelous works, and that’s all about the art of the storytelling.
      What do you think about historical figures in books?  What do you think works and doesn’t work when authors put real people in amongst their make-believe ones?

Find-A-Wench

Did you know that if you want to read every post by one of the Wenches, all you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of one of her posts and click on her name?  When you do that, it will bring up all her posts in a new window.  No more wandering through a maze of posts to find the ones you want.  Just the click of a mouse and you're there!  As a reminder, we've also added this tip in the sidebar on the left.

The End

Susan Sarah back again....

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been telling my husband and kids –- I may look like I’m here, but I’m not really here: I'm in Scotland. But they see a shadowy figure, muttering under her breath, walking around in socks that don’t match, in a slouchy sweater that belongs to one of several males in the household (been wearing it for days and he’s not getting it back soon)...she wanders down to the kitchen for a cup of tea and drift upstairs again, ignoring all but the most crucial domestic issues, and she's never quite sure how many college kids are in the house (still on winter break! acckk!)...they're up at all hours, and so is she, the wandering, mumbling author-in-residence on a deadline.

Well, it's not that bad but getting close. I’m in the throes of finishing a manuscript. This book desperately needs to be finished so that I can once more live a normal life. The Deadline Tunnel is looking pretty long on this one before I see light again. There's a point where it feels like the book will never end and I’ll be wandering, muttering, and wearing this same sweater into infinity. And I so very much want to type “The End”....

To be honest I’ve never actually typed “The End” on any book I’ve ever written. Yet writing the last line of a book is a wonderful feeling.

Recently I took a break from my own book to browse through my bookshelves looking for a blog idea for today...and found myself checking out last lines of other novels. And Susan Miranda, who is a good pal (and owes me an idea for the Mondegreens anyway *g*)  suggested that I post them as a game on the blog.

So here are some ending lines of novels. See if you can guess what books they come from!

A few general hints: the quotes are the last lines of books we've probably all read, or can easily recognize. They're from classics of either literature, or classics of their genre, and the authors’ voices are clear enough that even if you haven’t read it, you can probably make a good guess. Since you all are a widely read and very intelligent bunch, you’ll probably whip through these in no time.

It's a bit like literature class: name these last lines of assigned novels for 5 points. No peeking, the clock is ticking -- soon you'll have to put those pencils down!

But YOU have all day, and no red pencils or grades to dread. Have fun!

================

1.Then shouldering their burdens, they set off, seeking a path that would bring them over the grey hills of the Emyn Muil, and down into the Land of Shadows.

2. But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.

3. And the ashes blew toward us like the salt wind from the sea.

4. They said that among the world's kings, he was the mildest and gentlest of men, most kind to his people, and most eager for praise.

5. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.

6. "My Master," he says, "has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly,--'Surely I come quickly!' and hourly I more eagerly respond,--'Amen, even so come, Lord Jesus!'"

7. It was undoubtedly better to be the seventh Duke of Sale than a sweep’s apprentice, but he was much inclined to think that to have been plain Mr. Dash, of Nowhere in Particular, would have been preferable to either of these callings.

8. "After all, tomorrow is another day."

9. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.
=======

I will post the answers in the comment section around midnight tonight, Wednesday.

Then I’ll choose a random name from among those who have posted a list of answers (you don’t have to get them all right, and try to answer each one) –- and I’ll send the winner an autographed copy of one of my own books.

This will be a novel that I've actually finished at some earlier date -– a reminder to myself that I’ve gotten to the last line before, and I can do it again!

This would be a fun game to play again, using themes like Historical Romance Favorites, Classic Historical Fiction, Classic Mysteries -- and of course, Books by Word Wenches!

Good luck!

~Susan Sarah

Book Titles

Maggie asks: "I have a question about book titles. How successful are you in naming your own books, or must you submit to editors' titles? Is it a group consensus thing? Have you ever had a title assigned to you that you absolutely hated? And since you Wenches are so prolific, can you remember all your titles? *g*"

From Pat Rice:
Because I have a power saw running in the front room and a carpenter opening and slamming the door until my concentration has quit in defeat, I will pick Maggie’s brain again for a topic.  I’m just not up to French prisons prior to the revolution right now. <G> Not certain I ever will be, but remind me sometime to talk about how we pick our book subjects and how we choose to fictionalize them.

(I swear, I wrote this over the weekend while I was avoiding the computer, and I didn't see Loretta's column until I posted at 7 this morning, so Maggie gets two books this week!)

But titles are a fun gripe all authors love to harp on.  When I first started out, I thought titles were an important clue to the book’s heart.  I would carefully select something momentous said within the depths of my huge novel (romances were over 150k words back then), something literary (often Shakespeare), or something unbearably romantic. They were so memorable I don’t remember them now.  Which is fine, because whatever they were, they were far more intelligent than LOVE’S FIRST SURRENDER, which was what ended up on my first book. And even the publisher acknowledged the total gagginess fifteen years later when they reissued it as SURRENDER, which makes no sense at all but didn’t cause barf to happen.

Then I moved to a much bigger publisher (so big they had to call me Patricia Rice instead of Pat Rice to fit their ideas of grandeur, I guess). They preferred more tasteful titles: LADY SORCERESS, LOVE BETRAYED.  They even used a title I chose—INDIGO MOON.  Of course, the editor soon realized that though I told her it came from TAMING OF THE SHREW, it actually resulted from my wacky memory picking up on a modern version of the bard’s famous lines about calling the moon blue.  I don’t think another of my historical titles have been used since. Maybe wisely.

I fared better when I drifted into contemporary romance.  I had an utterly brilliant editor who accepted my titles of GARDEN OF DREAMS and BLUE CLOUDS, meaningful titles that made me smile happily, especially when I hit the NYT extended with one. Finally, I was on the way to the top.

And then all the publishers in NYC went into a feeding frenzy, houses got bought and sold, editors disappeared, imprints were rethought, and when the dust settled, we were back to finding “commercial” titles.  I have nothing against commercial if it sells my books, but the mega-mergers required mega-money and commercial got to be a little desperate. Book titles needed to sound “familiar”—so they’d stand out from the rest of the crowd, I guess. (Is there a little graphic symbol for irony?) Oddly enough, sometimes it even worked. ALL A WOMAN WANTS—a historical, mind you—soared to the tops of several lists, on the wings of the rip-off, I’m convinced. 
So these days, titles are essentially chosen by committee.  The author turns in her suggestion—my next historical started out as MYSTIC MAIDEN.  The editor, if she likes it, runs it past the committee.  In this case, the editor was quite happy with the MYSTIC part. (I’m not dumb.  She was thrilled with MAGIC for the prior series, and if I’m going to be stuck with the same word on a half dozen books, I want it to be a good one.) But she thought an island of supermen needed a male-oriented cover, which meant a male title.  And faster than I could think, she came up with three strong titles using the word Mystic, ran the entire concept past the committee, and I had a gorgeous cover before I’d finished the copyedit. So the maiden has now become the MYSTIC GUARDIAN, and I had to go back and change references to my hero to include his new title. For that gorgeous cover, I’ll accept commercialism!

As to remembering titles—forget it.  I’m lucky to remember the title of my current WIP, or as Nora Roberts so famously calls it, POS (please don’t ask for a translation on a family oriented blog, but the first two letters stand for “piece of…”).  When I try to blog about books I’ve read, I have to go to my personal library to find the title and author.  Forget Amazon. If you can’t remember title or author, you can’t find it there.  Search functions are limited that way.  If I go into my library, however, I know right where the book is. I think I keep a library as my outmoded title and author research function.

Given that GUARDIAN will be my forty-fourth book and I also have over a dozen short stories and novellas in anthologies, I’m lucky to remember that I’m the author if someone tells me the title. Which probably brings us to the subject of pseudonyms, which fortunately, so far, I haven’t used. But I’m thinking about it.  Numerology being what it is, I want one rich in power so I can just call the next title Book #1…

I think I’ve admitted that I’ve bought Terry Pratchett for the first time because of his title WYRD SISTERS.  Has anyone else bought because of a title? Or at least picked up the book because the title told you something that caught your interest? Any suggestions on what words or phrases will get your attention? I’ve got this great list of commercial words I consult…

Bed Time

From Susan/Miranda:

That sly creature to the left is Barbara Villiers Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland (1640-1709).  Barbara was the mistress of King Charles II for nearly fifteen years, and as this portrait indicates, life was never dull when Barbara was around.  She’s the heroine of the book I just finished last month (Royal Harlot, to be released in July).  Considering how every other novel and history shows Barbara in a negative light, if not as the out-and-out villainess, I figure she owes me a bit of blog-inspiration in return.

And so, with Barbara in mind, I’ll write about beds.

I write on my bed.  I don’t even own a desk, let alone an office or a study.  I write  on a laptop, either in my car or on the bed.  Scattered round me I’ll have open research books and sleeping cats, Diet Pepsi, and perhaps a bag of M&Ms.  I know, I know, this breaks every ergonomic rule for writers, and orthopedists everywhere would look away in horror.

Yet no one would have looked askance if I were an English lady from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century,  (Especially not orthopedists, because they hadn’t been invented yet.)  Those ladies loved their beds.  Not only for the obvious reasons that Lady Castlemaine did –– her bed was her fortune, so to speak –– but because ladies did a great many other things there, too.  They read, and wrote letters, and took tea, and read lessons and prayers with children, and received friends while in their beds. 

A lady’s bed was like the throne of a king or queen, a splendid, costly, decorative piece of furniture to reinforce their social status.  Beds could be a cozy refuge in a drafty chamber that depended on a distant fireplace for heat.  They could display not only the lady herself, in her beribboned bed-cap, but also her skill with a needle, if she’d been the one to embroider the bed’s hangings.  A lady could be “brought to bed of a fine son”, a popular 18th century expression for childbirth, but she’d be mystified by “going to bed” as a twenty-first century euphemism for sex. 

Our lady’s bed would be more properly called a high bedstead –– the wooden frame itself, standing about two feet high or higher.  Tall posts, often elaborately carved or painted, stood at each corner of the bedstead, and supported the flat frame, or tester.  Curtains hung on horn or metal rings from a rail in the tester, and could be drawn close for warmth and privacy.  Over the curtains hung a narrow decorative valance, with a headcloth hanging down at the head of the bedstead.  The bedsteads and curtains grew more complicated with each generation, until a noble lady’s bedstead could have gilded woodwork, crests or shields, heavy silk tassels and swagged fringe along the valences, spangled silk curtains, carved urns on the posts, and plumes on the headboard.  (Bedsteads with curving high canopies that today we think of as vaguely “colonial” would have been called called field bedsteads –– a descendant of the folding beds used by army officers on campaigns, with the arching canopies inspired by their tents.)

The bed itself was what we’d call the mattress: a giant, flat pillow, stuffed with feathers and down.  The casing was called a bed tick, made of sturdy linen to prevent the feathers from escaping.  Beneath the feather-bed would be a mattress stuffed with hair or wool, with a straw-stuffed paliasse beneath this for additional height. These layers rested on rope “springs”, a loosely woven criss-cross inside the bedstead that needed frequent tightening with a crank-like device called a bed-jack (the forgotten meaning behind “sleep tight”.)  On the bed were sheets, a long pillow called a bolster that supported the pillows in their pillow-biers (cases), linen sheets, a woolen rug or blanket, and a coverlet.  With so many expensive components, it’s easy to see why the best bedchamber's bedstead and “furnishings” are often among the first items listed in inventories, and why they’re specifically mentioned in wills, left from one generation to the next.

Bedsteads look short to modern eyes, leading to the incorrect conclusion that people used to be much shorter.  (Some were, true, but for the record, George Washington, Charles II, Peter the Great, and Thomas Jefferson were all over six feet tall; Princess Mary of Orange was 5’10”.)  Instead people slept in a sloping, half-sitting position, their heads and shoulders supported by the bolsters and pillows.  This was considered healthier, and probably was, too, in a time when nearly everyone suffered from chronic bronchitis from wood smoke.

So were these old beds comfortable? I’ve tried out a few, and to my contemporary bones, I’m afraid I’d have to answer a resounding NO.  They’re lumpy and unresiliant and creaky and  sink down into a perilous valley in the middle.  I doubt most of us would sleep at all, let alone enjoy all the other activities that our characters do.  As evocative as the experience would be, I don’t think I’d find much happiness writing on one with my laptop, either.

But for the Countess of Castlemaine and her king –– ahh, her smile says it all, doesn’t it?

What about you?  Do you make your bed the minute you jump from it, or do you use it as a respite throughout the day?  Or do you have any "bed-lore" of your own that you'd like to share?

What's in a title?

       From Loretta:
      You may be asking yourself, “What’s she doing here again?  Isn’t this Sunday?  Doesn't she know what day it is?  Or did I sleep through the week?  If so, I want some more of those drugs.  What day does she post, anyway?”
      I’m still the new Thursday girl but today Edith is Otherwise Engaged, and I volunteered to step in, because for some reason, I seem to have more than usual to say this week and hardly had to steal any ideas at all, except from the perfectly legitimate Commenters Question Compendium.
      To continue the discussion about naming things...
Maggie Robinson asked:
     <<I have a question about book titles. How successful are you in naming your own books, or must you submit to editors' titles? Is it a group consensus thing? Have you ever had a title assigned to you that you absolutely hated? And since you Wenches are so prolific, can you remember all your titles? *g* >>
      Titles can be another banging-your-head-against-the-wall experience.
      It was easier in the beginning, as so much was.  Ignorance--in this case, of commercial/marketing concerns--is bliss.
       My sense now is that there was more leeway in titling the traditional Regencies, though this may have had more to do with my publisher at the time than the genre.  My first two books, Isabella and The English Witch, came out under the original titles.  The third, Viscount Vagabond, involved some discussion with my editor, as I recall.  It may have started out as The Vagabond Viscount.  But the last three, The Devil’s Delilah, Knaves’ Wager, and The Sandalwood Princess, appeared in the names I’d given them.
      Things changed when I moved into historical romance.  My original title for The Lion’s Daughter was The Black Queen.  Because the plot revolved around this chess piece, see?  That title idea was squelched on several counts, including its not “sounding like” a historical romance and the possible racial overtones (???!).  I soon realized that the editor was absolutely right (she always was, actually), and racial overtones or not, the title would conjure a host of wrong meanings for potential book buyers.
      I learned some funny things during the process of renaming.  For one, the publisher liked titles with possessives.  So titles containing an apostrophe s or an “of” had a better chance than those that didn’t.  Titles focusing on the hero were preferred ...but not always.  Captives of the Night started out as The Golden Prince.  Well, that sounded to editors like a fantasy novel, so it was back to the drawing board, or baptismal font or whatever.  And once we’d settled on Captives, I was delighted.  It remains one of my favorite titles.
      Lord of Scoundrels involved no discussions.  The title, like the story, came to me without struggle, and proves that things that come easy aren’t necessarily inferior, because this book has proved popular.
      The Last Hellion--another title I quite like--was not the original.  It was Prince of Rogues.  As I recall, at the time, the publisher wasn’t liking titles with the word “Prince” (see The Golden Prince, above).   I am not sure whether this had to do with the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and Is He Again? or a worry that readers would expect a medieval, or associate the name with large canines, but “Prince” wasn’t acceptable.
      My first three Carsington books were with a different publisher.  Either this or an improved naming ability may explain why they were published under the original titles, all of which I really liked, especially Mr. Impossible.
      The naming ability petered out when it came to the book now known as Not Quite a Lady.  I had a dozen titles, none of which satisfied me or anyone else.  Example:  The Truth About Charlotte.  My agent suggested Not Quite a Lady, and this worked for everybody, even me...except for one little qualm.  In 19th C England, either you’re a lady or you’re not.  Lady Charlotte Hayward is a lady, and if she opened a bawdy house or took to highway robbery tomorrow, she’d still be a lady.  But for American readers, “lady” has a different meaning, denoting behavior rather than a position in the social hierarchy.  I did not raise this issue with those involved in the title discussion because I knew they would only groan (inwardly if not outwardly) at my excessive nerdiness.  And it is a good title, suggesting exactly what it needs to suggest.
     (So does the cover, I think--and anyone who’d like a free, signed cover flat need only send me a SASE.  For details, please email me at [email protected] )
      So in answer to your question, it’s mostly a group consensus thing, except when you nail it the first time.  And sometimes the things that worry the editor or marketing department make you scratch your head.  But I have found that in this case, as in, say, revisions and even--sometimes--the copy edit, it pays to listen and ponder even the suggestions that seem completely deranged.  Once the Temperamental Artistic Ego simmers down, one sees the rhyme and reason.  At the moment I can’t think of a time when editorial suggestions didn’t make for a better title or a better book.  So the idea of “submitting” to an editorial or marketing command is alien to me.  There is definitely a collaborative effort in the making of a book, and with very, very few exceptions, I’ve benefited from the wisdom of other members of the team.
      Oh, and not being prolific, I can remember all the titles with no effort whatsoever.
      Do titles matter to you when you’re choosing books?  Have you ever bought one solely because the title was irresistible?  Have you a favorite title?  Are there books you’d re-title if you could?
      

Diving deep and resurfacing

Here are the CBKs, plus Christmas Mouse, partying together recently. Yes, the two that have moved away came home for the holidays.

I’m posting my Saturday words early, because I’m off soon for a weekend retreat where I’ll be doing level one reiki. The Queenswood Centre is run by nuns and does all kinds of spiritual and healing energy work. Isn’t that wonderful?Visit their site. I’ve been wanting to do this for over a year, but the four times they offered the weekend last year I 1) had family here, and 2) 3) 4) was out of town. Their program looked like a conspiracy to keep me out!

(My mind turns to a weirdness I just encountered on the web. I use Skype telephone to keep in touch with far-flung family. Skype It’s internet phone and Skype to Skype is completely free. Skype to land lines costs a bit, but it was free in North America last year. Now they’re charging – the huge amount of $17 a year.*G* So I was signing up when I got a message from them that seemed a bit alarming. “We are about to introduce innovative and disruptive new elements…”

I though, that’s honest, at least. But then, the system comes from Scandinavia, so I reckoned it had lost something in translation.” I mentioned it to my husband, who laughed and said that in tech-speak, disruptive means that it’ll make challenges for the competition. I ask you. Lost in translation, indeed! But I’ve wandered off my point.)

My real point is that I sent off my latest book on Wednesday, and I truly need a tranquil break for body and mind. Lady Beware (lovely cover!) was challenging in places – aren’t they all? – but finishing it over Christmastide was really hard, but it doesn’t matter how all that goes, I have to end with an exhausting deep immersion. It’s my process.

I think I’ve mentioned that I don’t pre-plot my books, but this doesn’t mean the plots are simple. Alas. I keep saying the next one, the next one. Raucous laughter from all quarters.

I keep notes, I go over and over as I write, trying to keep all the details straight from continuity (houses, dress, horses, dates etc) but also the flow of emotions, not just of the principals but of any characters of any significance. Then there are the things that happen that they’d remember and the ones they’d forget. Jokes to be referred back to. Word plays to return, if they’re that sort of character, etc etc.

I do my best, but in the end I have to read it through, concentrating ferociously, submerging myself in these people’s lives as if I was there with all senses on high alert. It can’t help but be exhausting. Because it’s intense, I try to do very little else, and I’ll stick at it for 18 hours or so a day.

Then I slowly come back to the world, in a daze. And going to a reiki retreat just now is absolutely perfect. The only sad thing is that the labyrith will be covered with snow. This picture is from the Queenswood site.

This seems in the right spirit. All this means, however, that I won’t be able to respond to comments tomorrow. I will when I get home on Sunday evening. In the meanwhile, some of the other Wenches will help out. See you later, hopefully invigorated in all aspects.

Jo

Playing with history

by Mary Jo

We Wenches all write historical novels so we’re at least history buffs, and several of us are Certified History Nerds.  <g>   In our way, we’re doing our best to counter the general historical illiteracy common among Americans.  (If you’re a regular visitor here, you’re probably a history buff, too,)  Many of our posts contain insights about the past or illuminate interesting information about things like grand dairies, or holiday customs. or the lives of servants. 

But there is another class of folks who love to use history as play.  I was reminded of this a few days ago when I received a  catalog from an outfit called Museum Replicas Limited. ( http://museumreplicas.com/webstore/Home.aspx )

It’s full of cool costumes and weapons and other bits and pieces of the past, reproduced at affordable prices.  There are musketeer tabards and cup hilt rapiers, Viking tunics and Roman centurion armor.  Highwayman coats and wizard’s cloaks and reindeer hides (from reindeer killed to feed Lapps rather than hunted for sport or raised by factory farm methods.)  And pirates and their accoutrements are popular now, not surprisingly. 

My weakness is the gorgeous sweeping cloaks.  There’s a snow queen hooded cape made of faux fur that would have suited Tilda Swinton in The Chronicles of Narnia.   I lust after a burgundy velvet cloak that is supposed to be Regency, though I have my doubts about the detailing.  But what fun to sweep it around one’s shoulders and go grandly to a ball!  I have a friend who has a real Victorian velvet cape that’s similar, and so gorgeous that she risked getting mugged for it. 

For some people, costumes are just the beginning—they actually live their history.  We’ve all heard of Civil War and Revolutionary reenactors who stage mock versions of famous battles.  The Battle of Bunker Hill is refought every year in Massachusetts.  A serious re-enactor won’t even take along an apple for a snack if it’s a variety that's no available in his time period.  Nor it is always a “him.” For some women, re-enactments are an opportunity to release their inner warrior.  (Nor is the idea of women dressing as men to go to war historically inaccurate.)

There are societies that go even further back.  Perhaps the oldest and best known is the Society for Creative Anachronism, which focuses on 17th century and earlier.  The group I had some personal contact with is the Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia,    http://www.markland.org/descriptions.php  , which is focused in the Mid-Atlantic area.  I think the Battle of Hastings, between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans, is their totemic event.  They regularly re-enact the battle, and they will do it twice so the Saxons can win the second time.  <g>  (I might add that my information is not particularly up-to-date, and we were never members, but we hung out with members, and it was great fun.  If any Marklanders read this, I hope they’ll forgive me any errors.) 

We once attended one of the winter solstice feasts.  A feature of the feast was to be able to go up and grasp a spear (or was it the pole of a banner?) and swear an oath for the coming year.  This is a lot more dramatic than just writing new year’s resolutions!

The high point was when a determined young lady came up to the spear and swore she’d see the next year in as a bride.  This appeared to be news to her long-term boyfriend (a doctor), but indeed they were married in a Markland themed ceremony later that year.  My companion had rented a Viking horned helmet and looked so cool that he was promptly incorporated into the wedding procession. 

What I particularly liked was how much fun everyone was having.  In this kind of group, it’s usual to create a persona for oneself, with appropriate garb and back story.  A computer programmer by day can become the wizard Gandalf by night.  (There was a strong overlap between Marklanders and the local science fiction and fantasy community.)  A mild-mannered lawyer might become the warrior queen Boadicea.  One can buy costumes as places like Museum Replicas, but the talented can make their own garb. 

In a busy mundane world, it’s easy for fantasy and imagination to be and play to be squeezed out.  This is why I admire people who put time and energy into visiting worlds not our own.  Whether your preference is to be a Union soldier at Gettysburg, a staunch Saxon foot soldier, or a member of the Klingon Battle Fleet, playing with history (and fantasy worlds) can enrich your life.  Do you have some form of historical play you love?  Tell me about it!

Mary Jo

What's in a name?

       From Loretta:
      
      RevMelinda asks:  <<have you all blogged on character names and how you choose them? (my lamentable memory). You and Loretta both have heroines named Leila (my younger daughter's name) and I bet all of you wenches have heroines (or villains) named Sophia (my older daughter's name). I'd love to know whether your characters spring fully-named and formed from your brows or whether that's a head-banging task too!>>
      I don’t remember whether we’ve blogged on character names or not--and it hardly matters.  As you’ve seen, we Wenches never hesitate to gang up on a question.
      I particularly like this question because it corresponds to one I got from a reader--a librarian--not long ago.  She wanted to know about my choosing the maiden name of Usignuolo for Lord Dain’s mother (in Lord of Scoundrels).  Being a librarian, she looked it up, naturally, and wasn’t sure why I chose the word for “nightingale” for a guy like Dain.  Here’s my answer:
      “Somewhere (can’t remember where), I came across it as a Florentine name.  I would have made a list of names from that part of Italy.  Then, to decide among them, I consulted A Dictionary of Surnames by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges. It’s listed as an Italian cognitive of ‘Rossignol’, a French name explained thus: ‘nickname for a person with a good singing voice, or ironically for a raucous person.’  It was the ironical meaning that decided me on this name. I saw Dain as making a great deal of noise, from the time he was born.”
      (Oops, I just noticed I never answered her question about his nose, but I’ll get to that eventually, I hope.)
      The above is an example of the head-banging process.  As clearly as I saw this particular hero, it took me days of studying my various name compendiums (or is that compendia?  Ah, dictionary OKs both, whew.) to get his name.  With titled gentlemen, this can be a very involved process, on account of how, the higher up the nobility ladder they stand, the more titles they tend to have.  And he was a marquess.  Yet when I saw the right name(s) for him, I knew they were right.  OTOH, in the same book, the heroine’s name came quite easily.  She was Jessica Trent, right from the start, unlike some other heroines, who’ve gone through several names changes in the course of the manuscript.  Daphne, of Mr. Impossible, started out as Chloe, yet her brother was Miles Archdale from the get-go.  And Rupert was Rupert instantly.  I don’t know why.  It’s part of that mysterious side of writing.
      The heroes’ titles come from places, for the most part, as is normally the case with actual titled persons.  The Carsington surname, too, comes from a place--a body of water in Derbyshire, where the family has lived, presumably, for generations.  But I chose “Dain” because of its meaning and its associations--“nickname for a worthy and honourable citizen, or for a haughty and self-important one” per the Dictionary of Surnames, and words like “deign” and “disdain.”
       Leila is another example of a name fraught with meaning.  It’s a name I’ve always loved, no matter how it’s pronounced or spelled.  For Captives of the Night, however, the name for me was associated with Derek and the Dominoes’ Layla, and the kind of emotion that song expresses, which for me corresponded to the intensity of feeling between my characters.  The name also corresponded to elements of the story itself:  the hero and heroine having to meet only at night.  According to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of First Names, the names derives “Probably, through the Moors, from Arabic (‘darkness’ or ‘night’), it has been to some extent popularized by Byron’s Mohammedan child in Don Juan and by his unfortunate heroine in The Giaour.”
      This would make the name a bit modern for my heroine, though only by a decade or so.  I do try to avoid names that are too modern, just as I try to avoid too-modern terminology.  Luckily, the 19th C penchant for classical names--from history and mythology--offers lots of leeway in giving my characters interesting names.
      This is a topic upon which I could discourse endlessly.  Each book involves a long process of name-choosing--a process I am beginning now, as I assemble cast and plot for a new book.
      But names are interesting and fun, I think, for most of us.  We all choose them at one point or another--for our children, our pets, and--for those of us who write fiction--for our stories and sometimes, in the case of pen names, for ourselves.  And we all have preferences when we read:  some character names we love and some we don’t.  What about you?  How much do names matter?  What do you like and dislike in names, real or fictional?  Would a rose by any other name--say Daylily--smell as sweet to you?
      

Further Adventures in Booksigning

Woden's Day, and Susan Sarah here.

Edith answered MaryK’s question about booksignings, and I thought I’d follow up with a few thoughts of my own – which means MaryK gets another free book (please contact me through my Sarah Gabriel website so that we can arrange that)!

Booksignings can seem glamorous, as Edith pointed out, and while they’re never that...trust me...they are often delightful, a fun couple of hours to meet readers and spend some time with author friends. OK, so delightful doesn’t always happen either. As a result, now I try never to do booksignings by myself. Been there...done that.
Sometimes they can be very odd experiences, too, straight from the Twilight Zone (who was that weirdo, kind of thing) -- and other times, they’re just a hoot.

Take my very first booksigning, for instance.

I was an innocent and wet-behind-the ears little newbie author, and my first signing for my very first novel, THE BLACK THORNE’S ROSE, was scheduled with a friend who’s a well-known author. The bookstore was one at my local mall. Of course I invited everyone I knew–family, friends, even our pediatrician (one kid had an ear infection that week, so we saw the doc). It was a Sunday morning, and the bookstore opened at eleven that day. I showed up early, very excited, not quite sure what to expect–would I sign until the pen ran out of ink (haha--OK, I wasn’t that wet behind the ears!!), or would I even sell one copy?

I arrived to discover my well-known author friend already there, along with the bookstore manager and a few employees, waiting for me. They were holding roses, and looking frantic.

We were locked out of the store.

The security gates were down, not only securely locked, but jammed shut. Neither keycode nor key, or any amount of rattling those iron bars, was going to open that bookstore.
Just inside the gates, on a strategically placed table, sat my first historical romance, neatly stacked, and my friend’s new books as well. The manager had arranged the table the night before with piles of books, posters, an empty flower vase, empty candy dish–and all of it sat tantalizingly out of reach.
The bookstore manager called the mall manager, who sent security, who called a locksmith. We waited.
Customers began to show up at the bookstore to shop, and others came to support the two authors signing that day–the other author had told her friends, family, and colleagues too. A crowd gathered outside the store. My parents and sisters were there, my husband and sons, some close friends, even our pediatrician came by with his wife. Some of them, bless their hearts, had made the trip just to get autographed copies of my book. Some of them didn’t know either author, but thought the whole situation was pretty funny, so they stuck around.
We took pictures in front of the gates. We posed with family, friends, and readers. We waited further for the locksmith (apparently a busy Sunday, lock-wise), and we took more pictures–clowning around, clinging to the gates, posing with roses in our teeth.

Finally some people went downstairs to the other bookstore in the mall, bought copies of both authors’ books, and brought them upstairs to be signed. The bookstore manager had a great sense of humor about all this, and finally the locksmith showed up to open the store.
By the time we got inside, two hours had passed, but we stuck around longer to sign books. And we had a great time– a booksigning never to be forgotten!

Certainly that was better than sitting at a table giving directions to the bathroom, as Edith pointed out too –- this happens at nearly every mall or chain store signing I've ever been to. And being locked out of the store was better than watching the bowl of chocolates I brought dwindle down as people walk by and snatch candy without so much as saying hello, let alone picking up a bookmark or, gasp, even asking about your book.  And being locked out by security gates was better than being a sitting duck for people who have their own stories to tell–often long-winded, often odd, and often I’m assured it’s a better story than any one I could think up on my own (NOT).

But posing with roses in my teeth outside the gates of a locked bookstore isn’t nearly as much fun as a booksigning where a reader arrives having already read my other books, and eager to buy the new one, or another reader tells me how much one of my stories meant to her personally, or brings her friends to recommend my books to them. That positive connection with readers, even one or two people, is worth all of it–worth sitting there conspicuous and ignored, worth any number of directions to the bathroom.

Booksignings are not the easiest aspect of an author’s career, and even though most people may ignore you, and snatch chocolates, or feel even more embarrassed to approach you than you are to be sitting there -– at nearly every signing there are angels sent to comfort the conspicuous author, in the form of wonderful readers.

That’s why we sit there–not to sell the books, but to meet you all. So if you see an author sitting at a table, please go up and talk to her or him! Don’t be shy, and don’t worry about whether or not you can afford to buy that book that day. We know you may buy that book another day–and hopefully buy our other books in the future. That connection with readers is why we sit there waiting.

So come on by!

What sorts of experiences have you had at booksignings yourselves, either as authors, or as readers?  What’s it like on the other side of the table, as you approach the author (Or walk past her)?

Susan Sarah

Writing Process

  Keira asks: “Would it be possible for you to blog about your writing processes and your daily schedules? <snip> A few days ago, I finished reading "Write Away" by Elizabeth George. She is a proponent of detailed outlines. In her book, she describes in great depth how her process works for her.”

From Pat Rice: When creativity is draining rapidly into the current Work in Process, a question about process is the best way to go.  Keira, start figuring which of my books you’d like to have for saving me from more brain drain!

Process, like most of life, is something that’s always in flux.  It’s best to “go with the flow” as we said in the seventies.  Fighting change stifles creativity, so what I call my process now has gradually mutated from my process when I first started out, and I’ll pray my process in the future will be a lot easier. (Okay, so my flow is an ocean and not a river, you get the picture, right?)

Currently, I keep a file labeled simply “ideas.” All those weird questions that occur to me, usually beginning with “what if,” are typed into a document and labeled in my computer file.  My head is always occupied with characters, but they need situations to put them into action.  Often, one of these ideas will simmer in the back of my mind until characters start taking it over.  Other times, I’ll have a character demanding a story and nothing in the file works. Or is marketable.

Either way, once the characters make themselves known, I start brainstorming what I can do with them.  Sometimes they’re a mere nugget in my mind when my fellow brainstormers are ready to hold a “cauldron.” (or a tomato, or a lettuce leaf, whatever. It's all goes into the stew) By the time we leave our retreat, I’ll always have a pot of goals and motivations and a plot for the characters.  Other times, we can’t get together soon enough, and I play with brainstorming on my own.  This isn’t always easy and often takes weeks, sometimes months, but I simply sit down and start writing everything I know about my characters and the situation they’re in.  I’ll list what I think are their goals and motivations and conflicts.  They may change over time as I put the characters through their paces, and even when I have a full summary of what I think happens, things change as I write. Obviously, outlining won't work for me!

Throughout the creative process, I’m researching.  With my current historical series, I have stacks of books on the era I’m writing about. Since my books will follow the path of history in sequence, I concentrate on the exact events that occur in the year my characters are living.  I’ll read biographies of people who affect these events.  Most of this research is fairly general, trying to get a rough grasp of the society and what might be involved as my story progresses, but the events gradually weave their way into the summary I’m creating.

Detailed research waits until I finally sit down and start writing.  I’ve learned there’s no point in researching all costumes in the year 1790 if my heroine is going to end up wearing sackcloth and ashes most of the time.  Or in the case of my historical fantasy, the hero wears the Greco/Roman/tropical garb that suits my made-up island.  So I have books on costume, and books on guns and ships to be consulted as needed, but not before.

The actual process of putting the story onto the page isn’t easily defined.  Since I don’t do detailed outlines, there’s a lot of trial and error in the beginning.  The first book in a series requires a lot more world building than the following books.  But the following books are forced to fit into the parameters created in the first.  All of this requires a lot of head banging. <G>  I’ll think I know a character, but once I start applying words to a page, unexpected things fall from my fingers.  My summary might say “Mariel has the ability to swim like a fish beneath the sea.”  But when I start writing her story, I have to start answering questions like, how does she breathe there? Does she prefer the sea to land? What would it be like to have this ability in an age and time when they still burn witches?  Would she go to church?  What holds her to her home when she has the ability to swim anywhere? That’s when the magic happens.

It’s the magic that keeps me writing. Writing is a lonely, frustrating job, but the moment a character takes over on the page, comes to life and starts thinking on his or her own, that magic is worth every minute of headbanging.  It’s no wonder we call our books our “children.”  The process is often much the same—inspiration, gestation, the agony of squeezing the story into the world, and the joy of watching it grow and develop a personality of its own.

There’s not a lot of room in this blog to go into more detailed explanation, and every writer is different, but this is my basic process.  If any of our readers have more specific questions, I’ll be happy to try to answer in comments, and if the answers are too long, we’ll add them to our master question list.  If we choose to blog from a question you ask, you’re entitled to a free Wenchy book. 

Free copy of Dangerous to Know!

And the winner of the Dangerous to Know giveaway is Kathleen!  I'll send a signed copy when she contacts me.  Congratulations!

Mary Jo

Of Mondegreens & Marshmallow Peeps

From Susan/Miranda:

We usually speak of significant words on this blog: emotional, educational, historical, twenty-five-dollar words, words that can make or break both your current masterpiece-in-progress and commuter-escape-read, as well as plump up SAT scores.

But words can be silly, too, and that’s where I’m going today.

I recently ordered the full eleven-volume set of 17th century Englishman Samuel Pepys’s complete unedited diaries from an internet used-book-seller.  When the UPS man thumped on the door, I gleefully (yeah, I know, I know, Nerd-o-rama) announced that my fifteen pounds of Pepys had finally arrived. At once my teenaged daughter appeared to watch over my shoulder as I slit open the large box.   

“Oh, Mom,” she said with disgust.  “It’s just more books.”

. . . . and not, as she’d hoped, fifteen glorious pounds of glistening, sugary, neon-yellow Marshmallow Peeps.  (For more about Samuel, see my Twelfth Night blog from last week; for more about the marshmallow kind, well, just wait another week or two, when the Easter candy appears in the stores. )

Hearing Peeps for Pepys is a mondegreen.  Like malaprops, mondegreens are word-gaffes based on misunderstandings, a lyric, word, or expression heard incorrectly with often hilarious results.  I’ve only learned of the term this week, thanks to Susan/Sarah (yes, THIS is the sort of nonsense writers discuss among themselves!) though of course I’ve been aware of the effect for years –– as has anyone who thinks the last line of “Silent Night” is “sleep in heavenly peas,” or that two-liter bottles of Coke are the “cheerleader” size, or that modern life makes for a “doggy-dog world” rather than a “dog eat dog” one, or that the American national anthem is an early example of multiculturalism: “Jose, can you see…”

The word “mondegreen” is in itself an example.  In a 1954 essay in Harper’s Magazine, writer Sylvia Wright coined the term based on her own experience:

“When I was a child,  my mother used to read aloud to me [and] one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.”

The actual last line is “And laid him on the green” –- reason enough for Wright to say of future mishearings, “I shall hereafter call them mondegreens.”  The name has stuck in popular culture, if not yet in formal dictionaries of grammar.

Many of the most famous mondegreens seem to come from music lyrics. Currently there’s a TV ad that features a couple of nimrods downloading the Clash’s 80s hit “Rock the Kasbah” as “Stop the Catbox.” Yet how many of us really believed the words to the old Credence Clearwater song weren’t “There’s a bad moon out tonight”, but “There’s a bathroom on the right”?  Or that the gospel classic is “He’s Got the Whole World in His Pants"? And my personal favorite: the Elton John song “Tiny Dancer” morphing into “Hold me closer, Tony Danza.”

Closed-captioning on TV has also provided a lush new source for mondegreens.  San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll has made a cause-celebre of recording these and other mondegreens (His site is called "Mondegreens Ripped My Flesh": http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/mondegreens.shtml)  A few choice ones include a “meteorologist” who somehow became a “meaty urologist”.  During a broadcast of the Olympics, one team was converted from “Hungarian swimmers” to “Hung Aryan swimmers.”  And of course there’s the best-selling memoir “My Sergei”, aka “Mice Are Gay.”

So now it’s your turn.  It’s Monday: what else do you have to do, anyway? Any and all examples are welcome!

Site Improvement

Good news!  We installed a new widget, and from now on whenever you click on a link, it will open in a new window.  No more clicking the "back" button to return to the Wenches!  Now our page will still be there, no matter how many links you click on.  Major cool.   

On Book Signings

Sunday, and Edith here!

Sherrie passed on a question that Mary Kennedy asked about how authors feel about book signings. I had to answer it.

>>>I'd like to know how authors at booksignings would like signees to behave. I've only been to one book signing, and it was horrible. I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything - just got my book signed and left. The bad thing is that I was the only one there with two tables of authors. Now I have a phobia of book signings!>>>

A phobia? Because the authors mobbed you? Covered you with kisses and hugged you near to death? They should have.

A booksigning is a chance for an author to meet readers, sop up praise and humbly but enthusiastically explain the mental processes which led to the birth of the book in front of her/him!

Wonderful, right?

Only it doesn't always work that way. You'd be surprised at how many authors have a phobia about books signings too. One of my author friends likened them to hooking: waiting for a customer, humming "Ten cents a dance."

I can't speak for other wenches, but can confidently say that sometimes, if you're not into whips and chains, or being a self-flagellator, or on the brinnk of hanging yourself, there is no better way to experience pain, loss of ego, and experience a day in the life of an earthworm, than to be an author at a book signiing. (Unless of course, you write about Da Vinci's secrets or are named King or Roberts, that is.)

Mind, some signings are superb and fulfill all technicolor dreams: with lots of avid readers in attendance, flowers and fresh water for them and the author's throat, which is needed because so many readers ask so many questions.

Not all signings are like that.

Many are like the one you attended. Two tables of authors - one reader. (And you didn't ask directions to the restroom? That's what most authors expect at that kind of signing.)

I remember some particularly interesting ones.

Like a group signing at a Convention, when I sat next to a very popular author, who had leagues of fans lining up to adore her. They got so thick they had to lean over me to get to her. I had more breasts in my face than Casanova in his wildest dreams. It was not fun. The only thing said to me was: "Could you move over so I can put my books down for her to sign?"

Ah, yes.

Yet there was the time a reader came to see me from three states away, with some of my old books or me to sign.

There was the day when a tiny bookstore in a mall set me up at a bridge table in front of it. I sat there with my pile of books. Because there was a treasure in the book, I had put a little pirate's chest loaded with golden foil covered chocolate coins on the table too. Aside from a sneaky little boy who kept coming by and snitching coins, not much was asked of me except for directions to the restrooms, of course.

Author as bathroom maven: Oh the humanity!

But there was a golden moment in it for me too. See, the mall was on the main street of Hicksville (really) and that street was called "Broadway." They had a marquee in front of the mall with my name on it. When evening came, my husband took photos. The next day he showed them to me, so I could see, as he said: "my name in lights on Broadway." Oh my. The memory of him, and that moment, is still hearwarming.

Then there was the time that a persistent questioner at a signing kept me talkiing for another half hour. He came up to me at the end and said, "Sounds interesting. I have to read something you wrote someday."

There are so many stories! Good and bad. I'm sure the other wenches have their share too. But as to the question?

What should you do at a signing?

Talk to the author, even if you don't know him/her from a hole in the ground. Ask anything. Say "Nice Cover" or "Looks interesting" or whatever comes to mind. If they seem a little stiff, it's because
they're trying not to look too eager.

And remember, if you do know the author, anything - anything - you say will be appreciated.

You are, after all, why we're there.