Word Wenches

What We Are Reading This Month

Andrea/Cara here. From dragons and demons to cozy country tea shops and literary sleuthing, the Wenches have been enjoying some fascinating reading peregrinations during the month of April, so without further ado, let's take a peek inside the covers!

Pat
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson is a lovely leisurely immersion into a contemporary English village. It’s women’s fiction. The protagonist is a retired Major. He’s recently widowed, set in his ways, as is the village and most of his friends and his son. There’s no sex, no violence, just a gradual exposure of human flaws as the Major comes to know a Pakistani shopkeeper and introduces her into his stuffy society. Little by little, he must face his own prejudices and shortcomings until in the end, he becomes a true hero, one much more heroic than the father he worshipped. If you want to just sink into a book and visit another place for a while, give this one a try.

I also enjoyed a couple of contemporaries but didn't have time to write full descriptions: Twenty-nine and Half Reasons by Denise Grover Swank—romantic mystery; fast-paced. The heroine has a right to be innocent, but she’s not helpless. I get a bit tired of the clumsy stupid "heroines" in some cozies, so this one was a fresh outlook. I always like Beth Ciotta's gentle romances, and Beauty and the Biker, Impossible Dream book #1 looks like the start of another great small town romance series.

Brief Encounters

by Mary Jo

Recently I saw an article in the Sunday feature section of the local newspaper about a book called When Strangers Meet: How People You Don't Know Can Transform You.  Written by Kio Stark, a writer and teacher, the book is the text of a short TED talk  she gave; you can listen to it here directly.

Her basic thesis is that brief friendly interactions with strangers enrich our lives and create a better sense of community.  (This is particularly valuable in a world of people who are glued to their electronic devices!)

The reason the article so delighted me was because I've been talking to strangers my whole life.  I come by this habit honestly--my mother did it, my big sister does it, and I do, too.  

Five Centuries of Style

Nicola here! A couple of weeks ago I went on a family visit to my native county of Yorkshire. It was a great opportunity to catch up with the places I used to love visiting as well as with family and friends. When I was a child one of my favourite local places was a house called Lotherton Hall near Leeds The name itself sounds exactly the sort of place you would find in a Bronte novel and I remember wandering through its rooms lapping up all the historical displays and soaking up the atmosphere. It was one of the places that fostered my love of history.

When I went back a few weeks ago I barely recognised the place. It now has a bird garden, a café and a shop, an adventure playground and beautifully landscaped gardens. It was an absolute delight rediscovering it.

Inside the house there was an exhibition called “Fashionable Yorkshire: Five Centuries of Style.” Each exhibit not only showed the clothes that women wore but through them gave an insight into the lives of those women. They reflected the period they were made in and provided an insight into the women’s place in society. Yorkshire women have always been renowned for their sense of style – my grandmother was a good example – so this was particularly fascinating.

Where’s her perfume?

Pat here:

I’m slowly realizing that it’s the little things that add up when writing. So much of my writing is intuitive that I don’t always understand what I’ve done until I go back and read the book. Take, for instance, my heroine’s perfume in THEORY OF MAGIC. I usually give my characters scents, and normally they’re just convenient additions to the sensory build-up of love scenes.

But in this case, I have a blind hero. So the heroine’s scent becomes a very important part of the book layering. If she’s not wearing it, he can’t know where she is unless he hears her voice or recognizes her footsteps. So he needs to notice if she’s not wearing it and wonder why.

Good George's Day

Susan here – on a holiday weekend, with lots of family around, lots going on and not a lot of time, so a quick posting today, an older blog refreshed and appropriate to the end of this week, when St. George's Day will be here again! OK, so not quite a holiday here in the States, but an interesting day marked in the UK, and St. George has a special place in my heart, detailed below. 

When in April the sweet showers fall, that pierce March's drought to the root and all ...
-- Chaucer

April is a month particularly filled with holidays and days of note - April Fool's Day, April 15 - Tax Day, and this particular April, Passover and Easter as well. There's also National Library Week, Earth Day, Arbor Day, Shakespeare's Birthday, believed by some to be April 23 (Talk like Shakespeare Day is April 23 - same as St. George's Day), and - April 30, Eeyore's Birthday!  

"May I come in, St. George?" said the Boy politely, as he paused at the door. "I want to talk to you about this little matter of the dragon, if you're not too tired of it by this time." -- Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon

April 23 is Saint George’s Day in England, where he has long been regarded as England’s chivalric patron, synonymous not only with dragon-slaying but chivalry as well.
How did an ancient martyr of the Church (who never saw a dragon in his life) become the most recognized symbol of chivalry and knighthood in England and nearly anywhere? I tracked that question with others in my art history doctoral dissertation years back, when I studied the images and iconography of the hero in English medieval art — St. George being the best known of an interesting collection of military saints and dragon-slayers. Images and mementos of knights and dragons still decorate my home and office, and the research for that project taught me a lot about the nature and character of the hero archetype...which came in handy for writing novels.

The original George was a 4th century Christian martyr in central Turkey, most probably a soldier who served under Emperor Diocletian. George defended his religion and suffered the consequences, for he was arrested, dragged by horses and beheaded (among other gruesome tortures); documents in the Vatican apparently referring to his death are dated 23 April, 303; that became his feast day. There were other military saints, like Julian and Mercurius (and the Archangel Michael, in a class by himself), but St. George rose to fame after he supposedly appeared in the sky over a crusading French army and saved the day.

The story spread and grew, and before long his legend was conflated with other myths, such as Perseus and Andromeda, and other slayers of monsters/rescuers of damsels. In England his feats became connected with pagan rites of the cycle of birth, growth and resurrection—and the dragon-slayer so venerated in medieval England was born.

His image is well known even to us today, and he is depicted in countless examples of medieval art. His cult grew by leaps and bounds as chivalry gained deep footing in medieval society. He was declared patron saint of the famed Order of the Garter in 1348, and his red cross on a white ground was included in countless heraldic emblems; later it was incorporated into the British Union Jack. By the time St. George appeared in the wildly popular Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ tales, his fame was assured.

As knighthood and chivalry flourished, George—being a saint, after all—served as the pinnacle of those ideals. He exhibited all the best qualities of chivalric behavior, especially toward women -- he was polite, considerate, and romantic yet chaste (our ideas of chivalric heroes have changed some by now, ahem). Partnered with the Virgin Mary in art and or with the princess saved from the dragon in literature, George was the perfect medieval knight, revered, prayed to, emulated.

“St. George the English knight/Over your ffomen geve you myghte” went a popular English prayer, and “St. George!” was a common war cry; the French response, particularly during the Hundred Years War, went something like “It would stick in my throat if I cried ‘St. George,’ because I’m a good Frenchman.” So fans of St. George took political sides, too.

As for dragon-slaying and chivalric behaviors, George was not the first, but he was the best known—the mythic type of the dragon-slayer so familiar to us today owes a great deal to the storytellers who embellished his story over the years. In parts of England every April 23, while the holiday isn’t a big deal anymore, there are mock dragon-fights by reenactors and kids line up to take a whack at paper dragons with a lance to rescue the princess.

Chivalry isn’t dead by a long shot, not in stories at least, and St. George and his myths helped foster and keep that alive for a very long time – until romance writers mustered forces to carry on the tradition of great romantic, chivalric heroes!       

What heroes do you particularly love who are dragon-slayers, real and figurative, in myths, books and movies? Happy St. George's Day! May the dragons in your life always be strong yet cuddly, generous and protective -- and may the same go for your heroes!

~Susan

AAW - The Unexpected Character

Susanna here, and this month's Ask A Wench question actually comes from me, because I'm curious.

One of the hazards of writing the way I like best, without using an outline, is that I can sometimes have characters wander right into a story without any warning, like an unexpected house guest, leaving me to wonder who they are and what they're doing. My first was Mrs. Hutherson in Mariana, an unassuming older woman who turned up with a plate of baked goods to welcome my heroine to the village and when, having decided I already had enough baked-goods-delivering villagers, I wrote her out of that scene, she promptly turned up again in another one, stubbornly refusing all my attempts to erase her from the plot until at last I gave up trying, let her stay, and watched her change the whole book for the better.

The Bright Art of Quilting

by Mary Jo

Quilting is a very ancient skill, probably dating back to ancient Egypt and introduced to Europe by returning Crusaders.  It's wonderfully practical for warmth, or protecting a knight from chafing armor.  

These days we usually associate quilts with lovely cozy bed coverings, but they've also evolved into a beautiful form of craftwork.  A friend of ours is a honcho in the Baltimore Heritage Quilters Guild and she always notifies us of the guild's biennial quilt shows.  It's a treat to visit the shows, which are held in sprawling school gymnasiums, and only held every two years because it takes time to create new work.  (I blogged about the last show two years ago--the quilts are too pretty not to share!)

As the Mayhem consultant said when we visited the show, there weren't many of the cuddle-under-in-winter type  quilts.  Most were beautiful art pieces of various sizes, like modern tapestries designed to be hung on the walls.  There were hundreds of quilts, and the show was so visually dazzling that it was impossible to take it all in.  

All that is goldfish ...

Joanna here, talking about Regency Goldfish. 

This goldfish posting is a classic posting from seven years ago, rather than something new. I do apologize. But you're caught me at a perfect storm of personal challenges including, but not limited to, taxes; galleys suddenly due on the next book; buying a new car; (having banged up the old car in a permanent way); speaking at a conference; and flitting up and down the northeastern states in airplanes that tilted and bobbed like rubber ducks in a bathtub except with occasional lightning which we do not see so often in well-regulated bathtubs.

Onward, then, with my scattered apologies, to a retread post.

 * * * * *

You've probably asked yourself, from time to time, if there are any Shakespeare quotations about goldfish. 

Did Shakespeare say, "That which we call a goldfish, by any other name would be as bright"? 
Or insult some catiff with a, "Thou wimpled, reeling-ripe goldfish-lickler!" 

He did not. 
Goldfish didn't make it to England till nearly a century after Shakespeare's death. We got Shakespeare's take on dogs and cats, camels, carp, marmosets, mackerel, and whales . . . but not goldfish. 

I shall offer you my take on goldfish instead —

Goldfish
The Carp Who Made Good. 

The carp is a wide-spread, useful and reasonably  tasty fish that's been domesticated for a couple millennia in China.  While the Chinese were raising carp for the table, they'd noticed a common mutation that threw an orange or gold fish in among the ordinary ones. 

After centuries of noticing that, about a thousand years ago, the Chinese set down to the serious business of breeding these bright-colored fishes as garden ornaments.  The women of the imperial court doubtless engaged in a little friendly rivalry as to the beauty and vigor of their particular line of goldfish.  They'd bring them inside in big porcelain basins to enjoy.  Especially favored courtiers would be invited over to watch the fish swim, this being before TV and Wii.

When trade routes opened in the 1600s, goldfish were freed from their splendid isolation in the Mandarin's garden and went travelling the world.  Japan first.  Then southern Europe, coming in through Portugal.  Then just about everywhere.

The Japanese Kanji characters for goldfish are 'gold' and 'fish'.  'King yo'.  In Dutch, goldfish is goudvis.  French, poisson d'or.  Spanish, carpa dorada.  Goldfish tend to be called 'goldfish'. 

When goldfish hit Europe, it settled a bit of an artistic conundrum.  Chinese  paintings had been arriving in Europe with representations of goldfish.  "Pooh," said some.  "Mythical animals." 

Turned out it wasn't artistic license. 
It was fish.

Legend has it goldfish were brought to France as a present for Madame de Pompadour.  In Russia, Prince Potemkin gave goldfish to Catherine the Great. 

Goldfish were the Tiffany trinket of the Eighteenth Century.

Joanna here, talking about Regency Goldfish. 

This goldfish posting is a classic posting from seven years ago, rather than something new. I do apologize. But you're caught me at a perfect storm of personal challenges including, but not limited to, taxes; galleys suddenly due on the next book; buying a new car; (having banged up the old car in a permanent way); speaking at a conference; and flitting up and down the northeastern states in airplanes that tilted and bobbed like rubber ducks in a bathtub except with occasional lightning which we do not see so often in well-regulated bathtubs.

Onward, then, with my scattered apologies, to a retread post.

 * * * * *

You've probably asked yourself, from time to time, if there are any Shakespeare quotations about goldfish. 

Did Shakespeare say, "That which we call a goldfish, by any other name would be as bright"? 
Or insult some catiff with a, "Thou wimpled, reeling-ripe goldfish-lickler!" 

He did not. 
Goldfish didn't make it to England till nearly a century after Shakespeare's death. We got Shakespeare's take on dogs and cats, camels, carp, marmosets, mackerel, and whales . . . but not goldfish. 

I shall offer you my take on goldfish instead —

Goldfish
The Carp Who Made Good. 

The carp is a wide-spread, useful and reasonably  tasty fish that's been domesticated for a couple millennia in China.  While the Chinese were raising carp for the table, they'd noticed a common mutation that threw an orange or gold fish in among the ordinary ones. 

After centuries of noticing that, about a thousand years ago, the Chinese set down to the serious business of breeding these bright-colored fishes as garden ornaments.  The women of the imperial court doubtless engaged in a little friendly rivalry as to the beauty and vigor of their particular line of goldfish.  They'd bring them inside in big porcelain basins to enjoy.  Especially favored courtiers would be invited over to watch the fish swim, this being before TV and Wii.

When trade routes opened in the 1600s, goldfish were freed from their splendid isolation in the Mandarin's garden and went travelling the world.  Japan first.  Then southern Europe, coming in through Portugal.  Then just about everywhere.

The Japanese Kanji characters for goldfish are 'gold' and 'fish'.  'King yo'.  In Dutch, goldfish is goudvis.  French, poisson d'or.  Spanish, carpa dorada.  Goldfish tend to be called 'goldfish'. 

When goldfish hit Europe, it settled a bit of an artistic conundrum.  Chinese  paintings had been arriving in Europe with representations of goldfish.  "Pooh," said some.  "Mythical animals." 

Turned out it wasn't artistic license. 
It was fish.

Legend has it goldfish were brought to France as a present for Madame de Pompadour.  In Russia, Prince Potemkin gave goldfish to Catherine the Great. 

Goldfish were the Tiffany trinket of the Eighteenth Century.

Confessions of an Award Ceremony Organiser!

Nicola here, and today I am talking about award ceremonies, those amazing, glittering, special occasions that always run like clockwork, right? Hmm…

I love a good award ceremony. The glamour, the excitement in the air, the love in the room… And hopefully no mistakes when it comes to announcing the winners! A couple of weeks ago I was in a taxi heading across London to the Romantic Novelists’ Association 2017 award ceremony in the beautiful location of the Gladstone Library in Whitehall Place. When I arrived and threw open the doors to make my entrance… The room was empty because it was three o’clock in the afternoon and the awards didn’t start until six and between now and then an awful lot of things had to happen. In fact it was a transformation worth of Cinderella!

Of course, all the planning starts a long time in advance. The room was booked last year, the refreshments ordered, the seating plan organised, the trophies engraved and the photographer engaged. So really it was a question of bringing it all together: Decorating the room, greeting the guests and ironing out any little issues along the way. And there, of course, is the fly in the ointment, because something unexpected is always going to happen whenever you organise a big event.

Down the rabbit holes of research

Anne here, and today I'm talking about the rabbit holes of research — you know, those endless branching warrens of internet fascination.
They start in a completely innocuous fashion — well, all cunning traps do, don't they? — as a simple quick look-up. But you end up surfacing several hours later, blinking stupidly at the clock, unable to fathom where the time went. But it was all so fascinating . . .

In my rough drafts, I will often insert XXXX for something I need to look up later, some detail which will be necessary eventually, but is not vital to the story now, so I type XXXX and keep writing.

My heroes and heroines for instance will, in an early draft, often enter a room dressed in "XXXX Regency-era clothes 1818" — and the story continues. They often live in XXXX street and drive around in XXXX's, too, and in some cases they even eat XXXX. There's no end to the versatile XXXXs.

The Plot(to) Thickens!

Andrea/Cara here, talking today about the craft of writing a novel—to whit, I’m delighted to announce that I’ve just come across a Momentous Discovery that’s made it easy-peasy. No more angsting over those piddling little inconveniences like character development, conflict and plot development. I have THE SECRET (she says with an evil chuckle).

And how, you may ask, have I stumbled on this magical Gift from the Muse? Lucky you—I am about to share it!

You simply have to go by The Book . . .Yes, yes, I can see you squirming, asking WHAT BOOK? Well, the answer is about to be revealed. (Those of you holding your breath may now exhale.) The name of this astounding tome is PLOTTO: The Master Book of All Plots!

A friend of mine recently gave me this Wondrous Resource after The New York Times Book Review ran a story on its recent reissue. It is—how shall I put this—absolutely, um, mesmerizing in a weirdly fascinating sort of way. Allow me to explain.

PLOTTO is the brainchild of William Wallace Cook, a pulp fiction writer of the early 1900s who earned the title of “the man who deforested Canada." He once said, “A writer is neither better not worse than any other man who happens to be in trade. He is a manufacturer.”