Word Wenches

Weather--everyone talks about it...

by Mary Jo

“Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.”

Actually, the latter is no longer true.  Now that it’s widely accepted that pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere can change the climate much faster than is convenient, a lot of people are trying to do something about the weather. 

But talking about the weather—ah, now that’s one of humankind’s favorite topics.  And it's infinitely variable--Edith recently blogged about the weather, and I'll bet ever Wench could come up with a completely different post on the subject.

On a social level, commenting on the weather to a stranger is a way of showing mild, benign intentions.  “Cold enough for you?”  “Yup.”  (That’s a transcript of a very common conversation in the corner of Upstate New York where I grew up. <g>)

Then there’s the ever-popular “Hot enough for you?”  “Yup.”  These are terse remarks, but they can easily be expanded to any length.  This social aspect—using weather to make a connection with someone else—is quite significant in human interactions, I think. 

Weather is stereotypically the topic one falls back on when struggling to converse with a person one has nothing in common with.  And there is –always- something to be said about weather.  I grew up in the inappropriately named temperate zone, where the winters were long and the summer, though brief, could get pretty hot.  There was always something interesting going on weatherwise.

After college I moved to San Francisco.  It was June, and one day was much like another.  Yet my coworkers happily talked about how variable Bay Area weather was.  Such was the predictability of the weather that in the weeks after I moved to San Francisco, I was assured that it never rained at this time of the year.  This was repeated even when water was falling from the sky. Nope, couldn’t be rain, not in summer.  Just heavy fog.  It was a triumph of belief over reality. <G>

I once read a story about a family who became totally exasperated by the winter weather where they lived—Michigan, perhaps.  (The story might have been a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book.  It was a lot of years ago.)  So the family bought a trailer and went searching for the perfect place to live.  After numerous adventures all over the country, they reached Santa Barbara, California, and it was indeed perfect.   Sunny, warm, and beautiful all year round. 

The family settled down.  It wasn’t long before they all realized they were bored out of their minds.  They didn’t have weather, they had climate.  So they packed up and moved back to Michigan, where they would never run out of weather to  talk about.

While weather as conversation is fun to riff about, for a novelist, weather is an aspect of worldbuilding.  I think that a disproportionate number of my books are set in spring, because the growth of love is nicely symbolized by the earth’s blossoming and renewal.  But there are plenty of exceptions. 

Whatever the season in the book, it’s important to think about weather and how it affects our characters.  These days, most of us live fairly well protected from nature.  In the past, weather was far more intimate--literally in one’s face.  Dirt roads because so muddy in winter that travel could be impossible, meaning your characters might be imprisoned in the country for weeks or months on end.  Very claustrophobic!

Snow might come in around badly hung windows and collect on the bedroom floor, where it won’t melt because the air is too cold.  Water might freeze in the washbasin, and getting out of a bed into a freezing room is so not fun.  Icy drafts whistle across rooms.  (I grew up in a pre-Civil War farmhouse, so this is not all just imagination on my part!) 

In the Gilded Age, American heiresses who married English aristocrats were horrified by the levels of creature discomfort in their new stately home.  (As Edith said in her own musings on weather, castles are some of the most uncomfortable structures ever built!)

Spring was a great release, the first strawberries an exquisite pleasure.  I’m lucky that I grew up on a farm, for that made me more aware of nature’s power and cycles.  Likewise, living in England made me more aware of the natural cycles of produce.  I try to incorporate this awareness in my historical settings.  In the U. S., a bad frost in Florida might mean that the oranges will come from California and cost more, but it’s not a serious inconvenience.  But historically, bad weather that ruins a harvest can produce great hardship, even starvation. 

Not all writers think to question what the weather is like in other parts of the world.  Britain is much farther north than most of the U. S., so summer days are much longer and winter days are much shorter.  Someone who has always lived in the Sunbelt might think it reasonable for characters to boff in a field in March in Scotland.  Er…the boffers would need to be pretty hardy.  <g>  It's important to understand what the weather might be like during a scene, to help make the action seem real.

For a writer, it’s useful to always ask questions about the physical environment.  What season is the book set in?  When will the flowers bloom—and did that species exist in your time period?  When are crops planted and harvested?  Thank heaven for the internet, which makes such information readily accessible! 

Is it necessary for an author to find out exactly what the weather was like in a given place on a given date?  I know writers who do so, but personally, I think that such detail isn’t necessary unless one is writing about a specific weather-related event, like the last London Frost Fair in 1814, when the Thames froze over and carriages could cross business set up shop on the ice.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Thames_frost_fairs

Do you notice weather when you’re reading a book?  And if so, does it make you raise your eyebrows or nod approvingly?  One thing I think most of us will agree with—there’s nothing like a good book and a roaring fire when the weather outside is frightful!

Mary Jo

Foreign ways

       From Loretta:
      Dipping into the Questions Compendium again...
      
      Kim asked:
      "Are there odd or bizarre traditions that you've come across while doing research for a book?"
      I could write a book about the Albanians alone.  Luckily for me, others did.  In researching THE LION’S DAUGHTER, one of my most useful resources was Edith Durham’s HIGH ALBANIA.  She focuses on northern Albania, which at the time included parts of what is now Serbia.  The book remains in print, a testimony both to its quality and the scarcity of material on the subject.  It's also online:
      http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/durham/albania/albania.html
      Edith Durham was one of those intrepid Victorian women travelers who really knew how to write--like Lucie Duff Gordon and (yes, surprise!) Florence Nightingale and, of course, Amelia Edwards, three of many sources for Egypt when I was writing MR. IMPOSSIBLE. 
      Though all of these women lived in the Victorian/Edwardian era, their accounts remain useful because the places they visited had not changed in centuries, at least as far as culture and social life was concerned.  In Egypt, for instance, the monuments they would have seen and what they understood about them would have depended upon the time they visited.  But the locals these visitors encountered and the customs they describe were the essentially the same as in the first quarter of the 19th C.  In Albania in particular, because it was so isolated a country, the customs remained in place well into the 20th C, and in some areas, are still in place.  The Sworn Virgins, for instance.
     At the time Durham visited, 1908 (and for a time afterward), Albanians in many parts of the country were betrothed at birth, and the marriage happened when the girl was about sixteen, though she might be younger (as I believe was the case with my paternal grandmother).  “The husband is bound to take her, no matter what she is like, or fall into blood with her family.”  (By “blood” Durham means blood feud, part of an elaborate code not unlike the Norse codes of justice one encounters in, for instance, the old Icelandic sagas.)  The girl may--but it requires much courage on her part--refuse to marry the man.  In that case she must swear before witnesses to remain virgin all her life.”
      These Sworn Virgins were the only women who had the same rights as men.  They dressed in men’s clothes, had their own homes and land.  “He knew one who was forty now.  Her only brother had been shot when she was ten....I asked if the men ate with her. (Men and women ate separately.)  He slapped his thigh and said:  ‘Of course!  She has breeches on just like mine and a revolver.”  And these women are usually referred to using the masculine pronoun.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sworn_virgin
      http://www.jolique.com/gender/crossing_boundaries.htm
      They still exist, by the way.
      Alice Munro wrote a short story, “The Albanian Virgin,” that originally appeared in the New Yorker.
       Here’s another interesting tidbit:  “To be without a moustache, both in Montenegro and Albania, is held to be peculiarly disgraceful....When I mentioned...that my brother was clean shaven, I was told not to repeat such disgraceful facts about him.”  (The photo is of a very old bridge in Shkodra, in northern Albania.)
      I noticed a similar prejudice against men without beards in early 19th C Egypt.
      One interesting practice was mentioned in another book by someone else.  I think I know which book it was but am not positive--and the notes are buried somewhere deep in the basement archives, because twenty minutes' searching didn't turn them up.  Nonetheless, the detail remains vividly imprinted on my brain, and you won’t have any trouble understanding why.
      According to the author, at some point shortly before the wedding night, one of the senior men would take the groom aside and draw a picture in the dirt, explaining how to consummate the marriage.  So far, nothing unusual.  But, interestingly, they didn't leave it all to the young man.  To make sure the groom got things right, one of the married women would mark with rouge the appropriate area of the bride's anatomy.
       On to the Egyptians, and a classic source, Edward Lane’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE MODERN EGYPTIANS.  “The libidinous character of the generality of the women in Egypt, and the licentious conduct of a great number of them, may be attributed to many causes...”  But most of the blame, according to Lane, lies with the husbands, who keep the women locked up but let them listen behind their screened windows “to immoral songs and tales sung or related in the streets by men whom they pay for this entertainment.”  Furthermore, “ghawazee, who are professed prostitutes, are not unfrequently introduced into the harems of the wealthy, not merely to entertain the ladies with their dances, but to teach them their voluptuous arts; and even indecent puppets are sometimes brought into such hareems for the amusement of the inmates.”
     I am not sure that qualifies as odd or bizarre but it certainly was news to me.
      This happens all the time when one does research.  I found out, for instance, that Carnivale in Venice, in Byron’s time, started shortly after Christmas and went on until Lent.  That's some party.
      I’m sure everyone’s come across curious traditions/customs in the course of reading. 

Have you a favorite--or at least some you found particularly surprising or interesting?
      

Forbidden Fruit

By Susan/Miranda:

No, no, it’s not Monday.  You haven’t mislaid the weekend.  It is Wednesday, usually the day for Wench Susan/Sarah.  But she and her entire family have been leveled by the flu, and so I’m filling in for her instead.  Hope you’re feeling better SOON, Susan!

Anyone who’s considered sending a book to a publisher for consideration knows about submission guidelines.  No matter how this sounds, they have nothing to do with S&M; instead they’re a quick outline of what works and what doesn’t for that particular publisher.  Some are obvious: how long a manuscript should be, or the preferred font for legibility, of course a publisher specializing in Inspirational Romance won’t have much interest in vampires.  But other guidelines are harder to understand.  This publisher only wants settings limited to the English middle ages and Regency.  Another wants no American westerns, while a third specifically rules out sheiks as heroes.

But there are other taboos, too, that aren’t written down.  Some editors will freely admit that they don’t like, say, red-haired heroes or those with beards.  Others won’t tell a writer outright, but she’ll find out when she gets the cover, and her hero has miraculously become clean-shaven and dark-haired because “marketing says that works better.”

In fact, marketing or the sale reps are almost always either the fall-guys or the voices of reason, depending on your point of view.  They’re the ones that decree that your modest, fine-boned heroine ends up looking like Pamela Anderson on the cover.  They’re the reason that writers are warned away from heroes who are actors, gymnasts, or criminals, and encouraged instead to make them doctors, lords (anyone in the peerage goes to the head of the character class), firemen, and military officers.  As has been discussed on this blog earlier this week, older heroines and virgin heroes are uncommon.  English country houses are always in favor, while ancient civilizations, Asia, and Africa are as off-limits as the recent historical past of the twentieth century.

This is not to say that a talented author with a good sales record won’t be permitted to push the envelope into brave new worlds.  Even a rat-catcher makes a great hero in the right hands.  It does happen, and it’s a great thing for writers and readers alike when it leads to a fresh, unforgettable book.

Yet most writers have an unwritten story or two that they either have been told not to write just yet (like never), or perhaps haven’t even dared to propose.  It’s a favorite late-night topic in the bar at writers’ conferences, kind of like fishermen with the ones who got away.   I’ve heard of writers who wished they could write a book from the point of view of the characters’ pet animals, or one set among the bull-dancers in ancient Knossos, or a love story between prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. 

Then there’s another whole crop of unwritten stories that readers maintain they’d love to see, but never find on shelves.  Sometimes it’s an unusual setting, or a sequel that will tie up the loose ends left in another book.  Other readers clamor to read more of a kind of book that’s fallen out of fashion –– Westerns, say, or antebellum stories of the old plantation South. 

And sometimes, too, the “forbidden” breaks through to become a new trend.  A generation ago, there were no books with heroes and heroines of color, and now there are books specifically written for African-American and Latina audiences.  The paranormal elements that are so popular in romance today would have been relegated to fantasy and nowhere else. 

So what's your secret "forbidden fruit"?  What stories do you wish you could write and sell, or find for sale in a bookstore? 

Or, for that matter, which ones would you rather never see written again?  Would you banish  the current crop of novels piggy-backing on Jane Austen's characters, or strike from the shelves forever the bare-chested, time-travelling Scottish lairds with impenetrable, unreadable dialects and too-short kilts?

Sex and History

Hi, Pat Rice here, back from sunny Puerto Vallarta---

Going away for a week, baking my brain in the sun, and coming home to 9 degrees and snow has created a recipe for muddled blogging, I’m here to tell ya.  After digging out from an avalanche of business-that-must-be-dealt-with-now, I’ve managed to skim a week’s worth of blogs and glance at a few comments, and man, y’all have been busy!

Since I rather obviously have spent no time whatsoever thinking about what I’d write today, I thought I’d riff off the general tenor of comments and blogs over the week.  There seemed to be some concern over the narrow parameters of historical romance in the market today, accompanied by Roberta’s insights into the business, and some hesitation over inviting historical heroes into our living room.  (I hear Kasey Michaels chuckling up her sleeve over that one since she did just that with her Regency time traveler mysteries!) 

Admittedly, we’ve gone through a very strange period where mass market has eliminated the highly-researched small category Regencies and replaced them with super-sexy Regencies where historical detail is questionable at best.  I cannot begin to explain the mindset behind that phenomenon, other than that the sexy, historical-lites sold better than anything else, so as usual, publishers bought them to the exclusion of other eras.  And, as usual, this has resulted in a glut that’s soured readers on the whole market.  Gee, who woulda thunk it?

The result, however, has been that clever historical writers have opened up whole new markets that weren’t there before.  We have our wenchly Susans and Lady Layton, among others, writing wonderfully detailed historical fiction in every conceivable era about powerful women through the ages.  We have other authors like Roberta Gellis and Mary Jo and moi using history to create fantasies. Roberta Gellis, Karen Harper, and a whole host more have developed wonderful historical mystery sleuths.

In other words, we’ve driven a wedge straight through the historical market and opened it up all over again!  All these different books have whetted readers’ tastes for wider markets (and from the comments I’ve skimmed here, our wenchlings have a varied taste already), and publishers are now scrambling for the next big historical romance wave. 

I’m of the same school of those of you who have said you can forget about unwashed characters and no toilets if the author opens an exciting, character-driven world.  I buy books by author more than anything, so I’d follow any of the wenches through any era.  I do have a fondness for certain settings in certain time periods, for some weird reason.  I prefer England in Georgian and Regency times, American settings for later decades, for instance. But that doesn’t prevent me from wandering around, reading about ancient Rome (actually, I prefer England, Egypt, and Peru, but that’s another story…) or medieval Venice.

But I will admit that I prefer the heroes of these different eras to be intelligent and thoughtful, no matter how brutal their surroundings.  I don’t think I could write about a guy I wouldn’t invite into my own home.  I’m not saying I’d marry them—some of them deserve a good swift kick in the rear occasionally, and I’m not one to do that.  But I can’t think of a single wenchly hero I wouldn’t enjoy sitting down to dinner with.  So maybe the problem with the Viking hero or the gladiator hero is that our preconceived notion is that they’re violent and uneducated and maybe even a little bit stupid? 

My question is—did historical romance create this portrayal that these long ago guys were all barbarians? We know perfectly well that there were Vikings who were brilliant navigators and Romans had immense stores of scientific knowledge, so there’s no reason we couldn’t write strong, intelligent heroes from these periods.  Did romance reduce them to sexy thugs for prurient reasons?  <G>  Would you want your gladiator or Viking to be a man of reason?  Or was the whole point of those earlier books to put the heroine in the control of a barbarian who didn’t know better, so she could surrender to her sexuality without guilt? 

Of Virgins & Experience

By Susan/Miranda:

In comments posted on my recent blog “The Good Parts”, Francois asked, "Is there a book where the heroine is more experienced than the hero? Please please please. Just one so that I know they exist."

Oh, sure, I thought, there must be ONE such couple in all the zillions of historical romances out there.  Yet though I thought about this a good long time, I couldn’t come up with a single book with a virginal hero and experienced heroine.

Fortunately RevMelinda’s memory is longer and better than mine, and she came up with two: Jo Beverley's Forbidden and Mary Balogh's No Man's Mistress.  Mary Jo also came up with another: Seducing Mr. Heywood, by Jo Manning (Jo Manning is also the author of a splendid non-fiction biography -- My Lady Scandalous: The Amazing Life and Outrageous Times of Grace Dalrymple Eliot, Royal Courtesan), and I'm sure that you far-reaching, far-reaading Wenchlings will be able to come up with a few more.

Still, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit this week, having just finished reading the copy edits for my two July books  (no, that’s not supposed to happen in publishing, but still, stars do collide, and when both copy-edits were due on the same date, take-out for dinner was the result in this house.) 

The first book, a Miranda Jarrett historical romance called Seduction of an English Beauty (next in the series that began with The Adventurous Bride) features a young English lady traveling in Italy with her governess, who falls in love with a dashing Roman.  There are certain things that set this story apart from the current run of historical romances –– for one, it’s set in eighteenth century Rome; for another, one of the hero’s friends is a castrato, surely a first for Harlequin –– but it also has more traditional aspects.  The hero is charming and rakish, with many women in his past.  The heroine is a beautiful, with a taint of scandal to her name, but a virgin nonetheless.  At the heart, it's a love story: the couple overcome obstacles, fall in love, go to bed, and marry.

The second book I’ve been editing this week was Royal Harlot, a historical novel written by the other evil twin, Susan Holloway Scott.  No true love here: Barbara Villiers (1641-1709) made her own way in the world, and had a high old time of it, too.  She was in love with the man who took her virginity (at fifteen, yikes), had her heart moderately broken by him, and then it was off to the races.  She married a good honest fellow, and broke his heart, too, so badly that he had to retreat to the Continent. She became as close to a female libertine as can be found; love and sex were not necessarily connected in her mind.  Yes, she was Charles II’s mistress for a decade and the mother of six (!) of his illegitimate children, but neither of them were faithful to the other, or particularly bothered by the infidelity, either.  Barbara’s other lovers ranged from actors to earls, street acrobats to young officers, from much older men to much younger, and for the most part, she thoroughly enjoyed herself. 

But she’d never find a place as the heroine of a historical romance.

Oh, there are heroines masquerading as Fallen Women, working undercover in a brothel to discover an Important Secret, or pretending to be Ruined for some useful plot development.  There are the occasional widows, too, or ladies who’d fallen in love once or twice, but been jilted at the altar. But most of the time, as the hero eventually discovers, the heroine is in fact a virgin (even among the widows.)

Is virginity the ultimate “gift” to the man the heroine loves –– proof that he’s the only one for her, ever?  Is it a sign of her loyalty even before she’s met him?  Is it the rare reward for his perseverance (for the course of romance-love seldom goes smoothly, or else these books would be twenty pages instead of four hundred)? 

Or is it because in a contemporary world where very few brides are virgins and half of all marriages end in divorce, modern readers find irresistable the dream of innocence saved for the one man who will be the true love for life a wonderful ideal?  Or is it irresistable because it's so long ago as in a fictionalized historical past?

Just don’t expect the same in return from the hero.  The current crop of heroes tend to be gentlemen with lively pasts and mistresses galore.  It’s expected of them, as, in fact, it often was of gentlemen in the past.  There were women you dallied with for sport and to prove your manhood, and there were ladies you married.  And if you wanted to be sure your heir was yours (in theory, anyway), you made sure your bride was a virgin.

But why is the double standard alive and well in historical romances?  What is it about the fantasy of finding true love and great sex the very first time with an experienced male?  The historical precedent is part of it, but real-life gentlemen in the past did in fact occasionally fall in love with and marry their much-experienced mistresses. 

And why, too, are historical romance heroes so loath to be younger and less experienced?  (I do recall an anthology, In Praise of Younger Men, that included a novella by Jo.) Why are the older, wiser heroines so few and far between –– especially since so many of the readers (and the authors) are aging like all good baby boomers are doomed to do?  Certainly this is a big fantasy for men –- the young greenhorn tutored by the worldly older woman –– but why don’t we get the story from Maggie May’s perspective more often?

I don’t have any answers to these questions, but I bet you all do, or at least some good, strong opinions.  Do you like the convention of the younger virginal heroine and older experienced hero?  Or would you like to see more variety?

(And congratulations, Francois: You've earned yourself a book for your question today!)

Photography, the Unkind Mirror

Hello Sunday, hello from Edith!
I'm riffing on Mary Jo's recent blog today.
In her last blog she wrote about having Cinderella moments and that started me thinking. We've all, I think, had our share of them. At least, I have, in my mind. But seldom in my photographs. A least, not until years have gone by and I've lost my mental image of the moment, so I've nothing to be disappointed about when I see the photographs. In fact, after years have passed, I'll often find the rejected photos in the back of the album and think they're not so bad, after all.
But I've almost never been happy about photographs of me after they are first taken.
Because:
1) I always look too fat, no matter what I looked like at the time.
2) I NEVER look the way I thought I did.

The exception is that I liked my wedding pictures, because I hardly recognized me.

But now publishers want an author's photo inside the back cover of her book. No escape, unless she wants people to think she is so hideous they will drop the book in shock if they see her. The spy novel author Adam Hall used to pose in silhouette, sort of lurking iin the shadows, with his big dog. I thought that was way cool. Romance authors can't do that.

Some Romance authors use pictures that are ten years old. I think that's craven. Three years is my limit. Some go to cosmetic specialists and Vogue-ish photographers, and come out looking lovely, and absolutely nothing like themselves.

I have taken to having my pictures took with my dog. But not in shadow. She always looks good. (How come dogs always look fine in their photographs, and we don't?) But part from loving her to pieces, I have a valid reason for it. See. actors know that a dog or a child will always upstage them, and I say Hoorah! for that. The eye goes first to the infant or the pet, and the mind goes "awww..." before it goes on to look at the human in the picture.
I know no other way of diverting attention from my flaws except for maybe wearing a helicopter beanie, or a deely bopper: a headband sprouting two wobbling stalks with jolly tinsel balls on their ends.

How about you? How often have you caught Cinderella moments on film? Are you usually satisfied with photos taken of you? And does an author's photograph influence you in any way?
'fess up, please. What image do you like to see in the back of your books, author-wise?

Google Books

Jo here, assisted by Pirate Davy, talking about research. It does seem to be a bit of an obsession around here, doesn’t it?

(But first. A diversion. Back in September, 2006, when I was traveling I blogged about the trickiness of rhymes in English and American accents and challenged the readers here to reply in rhyme, offering a prize. Then I forgot! Mea culpa. Maya reminded me the other day, and I went to look. There were some good efforts there, but I decided Maya herself deserved the prize for length and ingenuity. So, Maya, e-mail me and we’ll arrange your prize.)

Back to research. It comes with the territory, doesn’t it? We write about something we haven’t and can’t experience – the past. Certainly visiting locations is useful, but there are changes. Some are minimal, as in parts of Bath. I visited Bath for a conference connected to my work back in the early ‘70s. Tough assignment, but someone had to do it! I remember being astonished at seeing Georgian slums. Yes, there were a lot of decrepit old houses there back then. Mind you, there are pretty run down Regency houses in Brighton now. And those houses, in once-fashionable streets, are small! Seeing that is useful.

Excuse the tip-tiltedness. Here are some pictures.
http://members.shaw.ca/jobev/dhpics2.html

Most places, however, are considerably changed and one needs a strong and versatile imagination to see
places as they were 200 or more years ago. It’s a real trick to go to one of the great castles and visualize
it vivid and alive, full of people, with walls brightly painted and hung with cloths and banners and sounds of chatter, laughter and music.

Which is why the words of people from the past are so valuable, and why my blog today is about Google Books.
http://www.google.ca/books?hl=en

There’s been some kerfuffle about this project because people with work still in copyright worry about their work being on the Web. I’m not sure that was ever a real issue, but it certainly isn’t now. What is available through this service is access to the content of books that would cost a fortune if one could find them; the sort of books that are hard to get liberal use of, even if one finds a library that holds them.

Free and downloadable. A miracle!

From an article I read a while back, I gather the breakthrough is a new way of scanning old books. With flat-bed scanners, most old books are impossible short of taking them apart. However, someone invented a scanner that’s like a very thin slice. The book sits over it, hardly open at all, and the machine scans the two pages. Brilliant.

I went to Google Books last week in the faint hope of finding something about nuns in the 18th century France. Yes, I’m working on a new book. It’s Georgian. It has a nun and a rake, and it starts in France, about which my historical knowledge is thin. I don’t know why the muse does this to me. When I realized what they had there these days, I almost swooned. Travel guides from the mid 18th century, right where my book is set. Ones that neatly explain the complex coinage of France at the time. Ones that explain the even more complex posting system of the time. The roads belonged to the king and there were laws about everything, including how many horses you had to use depending on the number of wheels on the vehicle and passengers inside. Who knew?

And various sources are in firm agreement that because of winds and tides one sails to France via Calais and from France via Boulogne. Again, who knew?

So needless to say, I haven’t written as much as I might have of the book because…. well, who could with all those lovely books to look through?

If you go to advanced search, you can set the publication dates, which is where the things like travel guides and such turn up. I was looking in the mid 18th century, but just now I put in 1600-1700 and still turned up 2,780 books!

But more in my periods, we have Rosabella: or, A mother's marriage, by the author of The romance of the Pyrenees, in which “Mr. Egremont, with a most graceful bow, pronounced himself most happy, that, even through his own individual suffering, his long panted for introduction to Miss Frederick had been accomplished.” They don’t make ‘em like that anymore – sentences or heroes!

But this is one I found most useful.
The gentleman's guide, in his tour through France, wrote by an officer in the Royal-navy. 1770

There’s also a “Historical, genealogical, and classical dictionary” from 1743 which looks like an interesting addition to my “bookshelf.”

And “A journal from Calcutta ... to England, in the year, 1750. To which are added, Directions by E...” almost tempts me to set a book then and there.

So, your mission, should you choose to accept it – go to Google Books, search, and bring back the name
of the most intriguing title you find published between 1740 and 1840. Just for fun, because research is such fun.

Happy hunting,

Jo

Lady of Fortune winner!

by Mary Jo

Stephanie--you're the winner of a signed copy of Lady of Fortune!  Send me your address privately, and off it will go. Congratulations!

Also--Kathleen, you won a copy of Dangerous to Know, but I never heard from you.  Are you out there?  Is so, please let me know!

Mary Jo

Cinderella: The Devil Wears Prada and other makeover fantasies

By Mary Jo

First of all, Happy Groundhog Day!  This is one of my favorite holidays—no decorations to hang, no presents to buy, no cards to send.  It’s all about the marmot. <g>  (For the record, groundhogs are also called woodchucks, and, my favorite, whistlepigs.)

On to my topic of the day.  Most of us are more or less average looking, but we clean up well for special occasions.  Which is why makeovers in books, magazines, and on tv are such fun.  It’s also why Cinderella is one of the most popular fairy tales.  Cinders says that even the most humble among us can become special and beloved with a little makeover from a fairy godmother.  What’s not to like? 

(Well, one can not like the impossible standards of beauty modern women are held up to. Here's an interesting video clip showing how unnatural beauty is created:
http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca/bblank.asp?id=6895  But that's another story.)

My Regency era books almost always have a makeover scene because I enjoy them so much.  (Note: this has nothing to do with personally wanting to mess with make-up, stylists, and wardrobe, because such things have always bored me.  But I like the idea of the transformation.)

I made over my heroine, Caroline, in my very first book, The Diabolical Baron, and did the same to Abby in my most recent, The Marriage Spell even though they were very different characters.  A lot of the heroines in between also got made over, whether they wanted it or not. 

It’s said that clothes make the man.  This may be even more true of the woman.  Since female power has historically been tied up with being attractive and desirable, it’s not surprising that we enjoy makeovers.  There is power in beauty.  (The dark side of the princess fantasy is that generally the princess is passive, valued for her looks and title rather than any inherent intelligence or  competence.  But that’s also a topic for another day.)

Such scenes are also powerful on the screen, where the visual nature of the medium gives it great impact.  Which brings me to The Devil Wears Prada.  (Warning—spoilers!) 

Though I've not read the book, I knew the general story line of the movie.  A young Northwestern journalism graduate turns down Stanford Law School to go to New York to work as a journalist, but the only publishing job Andrea Sachs can find is as second assistant to a legendary and monstrously difficult fashion editor named Miranda Priestly.  (This is the point at which one mentions that Lauren Weisberger, author of the book on which the movie is based, worked as an assistant to Anna Wintour, legendarily difficult editor of Vogue.  But surely that's just a coincidence....)

I wasn’t entirely sure I’d like the movie since two hours of watching people be mean isn’t my idea of a good time.  But in fact, TDWP was great fun.  A lot of this was due to the buoyant good nature of Anne Hathaway, the young actress who plays Andy Sachs.  Plus, the usually likeable Meryl Streep does a wonderful (and Oscar-nominated) job as Miranda Priestly, who can drive officefuls of people to terror without raising her voice.

Anne Hathaway has a history of makeover movies—the concept is at the heart of The Princess Diaries, where a gawky San Francisco teenager discovers that she is the heir to a small but prosperous European country, and Julie Andrews is her grandmother.  (Julie Andrews!!!)  A posse of stylists and makeup artists rapidly turn Mia into a sleek, lovely young woman who looks like our idea of a princess.   

The Devil Wears Prada has a more subversive agenda in mind.  Andy is smart and hard working, and deals well with the fact that her tall, size six self is considered a fat frump in an office full of fashionistas.  (The comfortable black shoes that attract sneers are exactly the sort of shoes I wear. <g>)  But hard work alone isn’t enough to help her perform impossible tasks such as getting Miranda out of Miami when the city is shut down by a hurricane. 

Frustrated and exhausted, Andy has a talk with Nigel, Miranda’s long time art director, and realizes that there is more that she can put into the job: she can really do fashion rather than sticking with her undergraduate wardrobe as if she’s just a tourist passing through the business on the way to a better job.   So Stanley Tucci takes her down to the magazine’s sample room and starts looking for clothes that will fit a “fat” girl. 

With a new wardrobe and salon makeover, Andy blossoms, looking so good that Miranda’s first assistant, Emily, can’t stand it.  Andy also gets ever better at her job—the sequence where she manages the impossible by getting copies of an unpublished Harry Potter for Miranda’s twin daughters is a hoot.  The impossible Miranda starts to prefer Andy to Emily, and decides to take the upstart assistant to the Paris fashion shows, a prize Emily has been craving all year. 

Paris brings Andy to her Black Moment as she sees the person she has become, and doesn’t like it.  She walks away from the job and a potential future in fashion, and finds a job as an investigative journalist.  A review that I read when the movie came out said with disappointment that Andy returned to the frumpy nerd she’d been at the beginning, but that’s not true.  She might be wearing her old clothes, but she’s putting them together in a more stylish way.  She also moves with the confidence of a woman who knows she can be glamorous when she needs to be.  The old Andy has learned from her year in fashion hell, and is now comfortable in her own skin (and jeans) as she moves into the future with the kind of work that she truly loves.

So The Devil Wears Prada goes beyond The Princess Diaries in showing that appearance isn’t everything.  Naturally this works for romance readers—we want our heroines to look great, at least when they make the effort, but even more important, we want them to be good and lovable women.  We want them to be like smart, kind Andy, not just an anorexic clothes horse.  (And let’s face, on the whole, it’s easier to be good than glamorous. <g>) 

So how do you feel about Cinderella?  What are your favorite makeover scenes?  And have you ever had a magic, Cinderella moment yourself?

Mary Jo, who has figured out that wearing black and burgundy all the time is an easy way to get "a look."

Something completely different

       From Loretta:
      Today I ordered new eyeglasses.  If I could have got away with not doing it, I would have, because I love my 1960s glasses.  But I am getting blinder and it takes extra time to put new lenses in old frames because they have to go far away to a special place where one ancient person still knows the arcane secrets of those old frames.  This would mean I’d have to live with contact lenses for a couple of weeks.  Though I am very, very young (in my mind, anyway), the days have long passed when I could read comfortably wearing contact lenses.  Especially old maps and old books.  So I chose new frames.  Sob.
      Normally, getting something new is not a traumatic experience.  In classic Gemini fashion, I love change.  I get a new hair style about every six weeks, and my hair has been every color in the hairdresser’s palette.  Not completely.  Once it was a little bit blue, and another time a little purple.  But yes, it was completely orange for a memorable six weeks or so.  I listen to a college radio station in order to hear new and different music.  And I love giving away last year’s clothes and getting new stuff, as my credit cards will attest.
      But I have been so attached to those cat’s eye glasses.
       Still, it has been a really long time.  Five, six years?  More?
      Time for a change.
      And the new ones are pretty cute.
      Which brings me to today’s subject:  Trying something different.
      Some months ago, I had an interesting email exchange with historical romance writer Michelle Styles, who lives in the UK.  Reading her signature line, I was astonished to discover the title The Gladiator’s Honor.

http://www.amazon.com/Gladiators-Honor-Harlequin-Historical/dp/0373294174/sr=1-1/qid=1170342850/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-7840416-0080423?ie=UTF8&s=books

  It turned out--wonder of wonders--that she was writing historical romances set in ancient Rome for Harlequin Mills & Boon.  I told her I was intrigued, and she very kindly sent me her book.  At that point I was deep in deadline frenzy, then revisions, then copy/edit--and well, you all know the drill by now.  Then the holidays came.  And finally, finally, the other day, as I waited for my husband in the dental surgeon’s office, I began the book.  Unfortunately for my husband, there was a very long wait.  Fortunately for me, there was a very long wait because I was completely captivated by the book.
       It was different!
      Ancient Rome.  Not England.  Not early 19th century.
      And because it was set in ancient Rome, the author was able to tackle subjects that relate to that specific time and place, yet resonate in our own.  The “honor” of the title is a crucial theme in the book.
      And because the hero is a gladiator, he’s all big and muscle-y, plus tall, dark and, you know, Italian.  And because he’s a gladiator, he’s dangerous.  Hot.  Yes.  Don’t go by the picture on the cover.  But you know all about not going by the cover, since the Wenches have compl--er--explained about covers.  At length.  Repeatedly.
       So I wondered, How many of you would want to read this book?  A lot of you?  Would you like the complete change from the familiar settings?  Can you see ancient Rome-set romances becoming a big thing?
      We’ve been hearing a lot of complaints from both  readers and authors about how narrow the historical romance genre has become, squeezing writers out and into other genres.  We’ve heard publishers saying that readers choose with their pocketbooks--and readers saying they don’t get a choice anymore.
      Don’t get me wrong.  I love early 19th century England.  I loved it before I started writing and it’s one of the reasons I started writing Regencies.  I am endlessly fascinated by mundane details of the time period, as last week’s blog attested.  That doesn’t mean that this is all I want for my leisure reading.  In fact, I’ve found it’s better for my writing to avoid similar types of books, especially when I’ve got a work in progress.
      But since so much historical romance is set in late 18th and early 19th C England, I have ended up reading other kinds of books:  mystery primarily, and some fantasy and non-fiction--and, of course, Wenches' historical novels.
      This time, though, I didn’t have to worry about being influenced by the author’s approach to the time period, and I wasn’t fussing about her interpretation of history and critiquing, say, the language.  My sense was that she got everything right, but since I know so very little, Hypercritic wasn’t at work.  Nor was Envious Author thinking, Now why didn’t I think of that?
      Because it was completely different.  I could sit back and enjoy it as a normal reader would.  And I am pretty sure that normal readers would enjoy this book.
      What I was thinking was, We need more of this.
      We need more that’s completely different.
      I’m pretty sure a great many of you think so.
      But my question is, Would you buy a romance set in ancient Rome?
      Or in the world of the Vikings?
     Or 16th century Venice?
      If you had a vast array of settings to choose from, what would you actually pay actual money for?  If you really could vote with your pocketbook, in other words, what would you vote for?