Word Wenches

Treasured Timeslips

Nicola here. As the UK goes into a second lockdown, I’ve been inspired by Christina’s recent post about the Keeper Shelf to turn back to my bookshelves and find solace in old favourites. It was only as I was sorting out all my timeslip books that I realised what a collection I had gathered over the years and in a spirit of nostalgia I thought I would share my favourites and ask for your recommendations. At this time of year, with the spooky goings-on of Halloween, the darker nights and chilly days, it feels a perfect time to read tales of the supernatural. Perhaps it’s the old idea of the veil between the two worlds of the living and the dead being at its thinnest around All Soul’s Day (which is today). Certainly it feels like a good time to slip between time periods, to travel back – or forwards – to a different or alternative world.

Susanna Kearsley: Hail and Farewell!

by Mary Jo

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

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

 

Doing Murder (Again)

The Death of King Arthur, by James Archer (1860), public domain work via Wikimedia Commons

Susanna here. All week I’ve been remembering a vintage post I wrote nearly a dozen years ago, on my now retired Not-A-Blog. I called it, “Doing Murder”, and it went like this:

*****

“I’ve been taken to task several times now for killing off characters readers are fond of. Not in every book, but in enough of them that people sometimes comment on it, and it was the rare review for Every Secret Thing that didn’t make note of the body count.

In my defense, I have to say it’s not a thing I like to do. For starters, I’m the kind of person in my private life who rescues worms from rainy sidewalks, and who captures spiders in a cup and puts them back outdoors instead of squishing them (except the spiders who were always in my bathtub when I lived in Wales, but they were big enough to carry me outdoors, and I did warn them first...) So I’m as sad as anybody when I learn I have to kill a character.

The Deadly Hours

Susanna here.

One of the many things my fellow wenches have supported me through has been the writing of my first ever novella—a project that took fully as long as any of my novels! That novella, Weapon of Choice, is part of a linked series of four novellas that make up the book THE DEADLY HOURS, a joint effort of love between Anna Lee Huber, Christine Trent, C.S. Harris, and myself, to be published by Sourcebooks and Poisoned Pen Press this September.

Here’s the (I think) beautiful cover, and the official plot summary:

The Greatest Gift

Susanna here.

I know our Christmastide posts are officially ended, but I always have a hard time letting go of the holidays, so I hope you’ll indulge me for one more short post on the unexpected treasures that we sometimes get as gifts.

Here’s one of mine.

A Happy New Year!

Nicola here. Farewell to 2019 and to the "twenty tens!" As we enter a new decade, the Word Wenches would like to thank you for your continued support for the blog and wish you a very Happy New Year. Together, the Wenches and our blog readers form a community that loves chatting about history, books, writing and life in general. We look forward to many more discussions in the years ahead!

A hundred years ago in 1920, the new era was greeted with excitement in western society. In the wake of the First World War, the "Roaring Twenties" were known for a period of economic prosperity and cultural development. In London the decade was ushered in with a number of very smart black tie events as well as some less formal partying! A hundred years on we are in a very different place but who knows what this new era will bring? As long as there are new books, old favourites and friends to talk to here, we'll be good! Wishing you and your loved ones all good things for the new year and the new decade!

Good Swig at the Thatcht House

Susanna here, carrying on our Christmastide with a song from the era I’m currently writing about—the late 17th century.

As some of you know, I love using songs in my own stories, and I’ve been known to spend an enjoyable research hour or seven mucking about on the Bodleian Library’s Ballads Online website…but this particular song, although it is found there, didn’t come to me as a result of my own research.

It came via Twitter, three days before Christmas, in a random tweet that crossed my timeline, authored by historian and writer Emily Brand:

“Can we all agree to forget the Victorian Christmas & embrace the Restoration Christmas this year?” she wrote. “Features: - The finest young wenches that ever were seen - Cake & ale - Widows giving out mustard - Young maids & men getting together on the village green to shake their bums”

Now I confess, the Cake and ale would more than likely, on their own, have been enough to reel me in. But add the Restoration (which I’ve always loved)? And wenches? Wenches?!

Reader, I was well and truly hooked.

Ask A Wench - December

Susanna here, with this month’s Ask-A-Wench post, in which our question is—appropriately enough for the season—“What Christmas stories have you been reading lately?"

Every year I settle in with my holiday comfort reads—Dinah Dean’s The Cockermouth Mail, and the paperback novelization of The Gift of Love (a wonderfully sappy romantic TV movie from the 1970s based on O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi) and, if I’m not in the middle of writing a book myself, Rosamunde Pilcher’s Winter Solstice. This year, I added a book I’d bought last year and saved as a treat—Happy Christmas, by Daphne du Maurier.

Susanna's TBR

Susanna here, and once again, I didn’t have anything to contribute to this month’s What We’re Reading post. That’s because I’m deep in the middle of writing a book, and I don’t read much fiction at all when I’m writing—partly because I’m so buried in nonfiction research reading I don’t have a lot of free time left, and partly because I learned long ago that, if a writer has a strongly individual storytelling voice, it will start to creep into and influence mine if I read while I’m working.

Case in point: way, way back in the day, when we were on our honeymoon (which was actually also a research trip for my novel Season of Storms only he didn’t entirely know about that), my husband brought along a copy of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to read on the train. I wasn’t actively writing the novel then, but I did have my ever-present notebook with me, in which I jot down things that I observe and lines of dialogue and bits of scenes. I started thumbing through the Steinbeck, too.

The Boy Inside The Man

Susanna here.

Eight years ago, when I was writing The Firebird, I did something I’d never done in a novel before.

One of my readers, Lee Ann Ray, had written to me asking whether Robbie McMorran—an eight year old boy in The Shadowy Horses—would ever get his own story. At the time, I’d thought to myself, “But he’s only eight (or, as he would have corrected me, eight and three quarters)—too young for a book of his own.” Then I realized that he had been eight and three quarters way back when I’d written that book in the mid-1990s, which meant that in 2011 he would have been in his mid-twenties—and even older by the time I wrote a new book and it actually got published.

The more I thought about it, the more I could see how Robbie’s gift of second sight could work to bridge the past and present in the story threads that were developing for what would be The Firebird.

So I gave him a try as the modern day hero of that book.

Five Tips For Writing Haunted House Tales

Susanna here, and in the spirit of the season I’ve been thinking about tales of haunted houses—and not only as a reader, but a writer. I’ve been thinking of the stories—what it is that makes one work for me, and when I first began to fall in love with them

I’m fairly certain it was Edward Mulhare’s fault.

A Memorable Read

Susanna here. I’m in a different time zone this weekend, on the west coast of Canada at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference—the highlight of my writing year.

This has been a busy day—I’ve moderated a panel session on world building, taught another on mining your own life for story ideas, coached some other writers through blue pencil sessions, and am now having a short break before tonight’s dinner and this evening’s “Shock Theatre” radio-play-style entertainment, in which I’ve been given a
speaking part.

This will, then, of necessity, be a shorter post.

But I’ve been thinking of something all day, and I thought it might be a good discussion topic here.

What We're Reading

Susanna here, considering it more than a little ironic that I should find myself in charge of this month’s What-We’re-Reading post, since having been caught in the whirl of activity that accompanies seeing one child off to university (in Europe, since my children never do things by halves) whilst fighting the lure of the ever-present Research Rabbit Holes that keep opening up for my current novel, and trying to pack for a Very Rapidly Approaching trip to Scotland, I’ve had no time for reading anything you’d want to hear about.

Fortunately, my fellow Wenches have plenty of suggestions for your bedside reading stacks:

Anne here.

I had the very great pleasure of a pre-read of Mary Jo Putney's Once a Spy for an interview on the wenches on September 25th. I read it and thoroughly enjoyed it — Mary Jo is so good at weaving love stories and action together. If you missed the interview, it's here. 

Sharon Shinn is a fantasy author I really enjoy, and I subscribe to her newsletter so when her new "Echo" series came out, I grabbed them as soon as they were available. Shinn writes very appealing characters, and her world-building is superb-- and fascinating.

In this world, aristocrats have "echoes" — creatures that are exact copies of themselves, that imitate every movement, but who don't speak or apparently think. The echoes appear soon after a baby is born — first you have one baby, then a blink later there are four, though only one is crying. It's a fair bit to swallow, but fun to imagine, and Shinn makes it work.

Echo in Onyx is the first in the series and the story is told from the point of view of Biranna, a young country girl who comes to the city in search of work, and ends up becoming maid to Lady Marguerite, who is one of the candidates for a royal marriage. I devoured it and went on to do the same for the following books in the series.

Andrea here.

I had been hearing such good things about Bringing Down the Duke, by Evie Dunmore, that I moved it to the top of my TBR pile. And oh, am I glad I did— I just loved it! Dunmore that a very familiar trope—the stiff, reserved gentleman who’s vowed never fall victim to love finding his heart won’t listen to his head—and gives it freshness and depth. At first blush, the characters appear familiar too. There’s the brilliant but destitute heroine, who is forced to work as an unpaid governess for her odious dumb-as-dirt cousin when her country vicar father dies. Desperate to escape, Annabelle finds an ad offering a scholarship to Oxford—the catch is, she has to spend some time working for a group of women agitating for women’s voting rights by approaching important men in government (the year is 1879) and lobbying them to consider the issue. She unwittingly picks the infamous Duke of Montgomery—again, the stereotypical cold, aloof, imperious aristocrat—as her target, and, well, things immediately get VERY interesting! The dialogue is wonderfully witty and clever. But it’s the depth and complexity of the characters that made the book so special for me. Their vulnerabilities, and conflicts are revealed beautifully, and the book becomes much more than a funny romp of manners as they slowly help each other overcome their fears and discover the redemptive power of love. I highly recommend it!

On a totally different note, I've also have been reading the biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (the book on which the musical is based.) I knew Hamilton was a very influential thinker, but I hadn't realized just what an extraordinary person he was, and how many facets of shaping country he was involved in. It’s beautifully written, and the story of his life is quite remarkable. You get a wonderful look at colonial America, and the other fmaous personages of the day. (Hamilton was a protege of George Washington, and despite their butting of heads at times, they remained friends lifelong friends.) It’s history at its best—combining a picture of the era as well as a portrait of an absolutely amazing individual. Again, highly recommended!

Nicola here.

I’ve been waiting with bated breath to get hold of the new Robert Harris thriller, The Second Sleep. He is one of my auto-buy authors and never more so than when he is writing a historical novel. I admire his skill at creating tension and page turning quality allied with some really elegant prose. So as soon as I got the book I plunged in. It’s hard to describe the plot without giving away a massive spoiler from the very start so I’ll just say that in the year 1468 a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, is sent to an isolated village in Devon to oversee the burial of the parish priest. Once there he untangles a series of mysteries that lead him to question everything he has learned about the past, which in turn has a profound effect on his life and his future. Everything is not as it seems in this “medieval” world… 

I liked Christopher very much and there were some interesting other characters and some good twists in the story. The sense of atmosphere is very strong. It’s fair to say this is a book I thought about for a long time afterwards. With its themes of memory and history and religion it was very powerful and I found it quite dark and disturbing. In the end, though, for me it couldn’t quite live up to some of Robert Harris’ other books and I was a bit disappointed. If anyone else has read it I would love to know what they think!

My non-fiction read this month was Lovell Our Dogge: The Life of Viscount Lovell, closest friend of Richard III and failed regicide by Michele Schindler. I’d say this is a must for anyone who is interested in Richard III and the events around his life and the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower. It’s a very well-written book that reads like a novel and I was completely engaged. It’s astonishing that there hasn’t been a biography of Francis Lovell before when he was so closely involved in such a significant period of history. Francis does, of course, have a walk on part in a number of historical novels set in this period, such as the Sunne in Splendour, but it was fascinating to read the real story of this historical figure.

Last but not at all least, after all the recommendations here, I picked up a copy of The Work of Art by Mimi Matthews and enjoyed it very much indeed! It’s a really beautiful love story and I enjoyed the depth and richness of the characters and their relationship. Wonderful and satisfying!

Mary Jo here, and in a fantasy + romance mode.

Firstly, I want to enthusiastically endorse Anne's recommendation of Sharon Shinn's new Echo trilogy. Shinn is an amazing world builder and her stories always have good romances, and these books are no exception. I read all three on my recent vacation, and wish there were more!

My own recommendation this month is for Sorcery and Cecilia, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevemer, friends and fantasy writers in Minnesota. Think Georgette Heyer Regency with magic.

Set in 1817, this is an epistolary novel as cousins and best friends Cecilia and Kate exchange letters after they're separated when Kate is packed off to London for her Season and Cecy is left home and bored in the country. Each author writes one of the main characters. (I think Wrede is Cecilia and Stevemer is Kate, though I won't swear to it.) Magic is part of their world, including a Royal College of Magicians.

The book is light and funny as the young ladies meet young gentleman, worry about their wardrobes, and find themselves involved with magic and annoyingly bossy men who are nonetheless appealing. <G> There are mysteries to be solved, social events to be attended, and budding romance. Great fun.

I first read this book years ago and enjoyed it thoroughly, and recently I found that the authors had written two more books in the series. The second book is called The Grand Tour, and it starts with the double wedding of Cecilia and Kate and their men. Their husbands are best friends and both former officers of Wellington's in the Peninsular Wars. They take off on a joint honeymoon and get drawn into uncovering a perilous plot that threatens the peace of Europe. As one does. <G>

A good part of the fun of this book is that even though both couples are madly in love with their mates, they are learning how to be married. (Since Cecy and Kate are traveling together, they aren't exchanging letters; Cecy's contributions are part of her later deposition with the Royal College of Magicians, and Kate is writing in her day book. The effect is the same as in the first book).

The third book is The Mislaid Magician and is set ten years later. Cecy and her husband are up north looking for a missing German surveyor/magician while Kate and Thomas ride herd on all their magically inclined children. In this book, the husbands also exchange letters.

All three books are bundled together in a box set. My favorite is the first, but they're all good fun, and the authors are pretty darned good at their Regency details!

Pat here.

I am beyond tired of publishers limiting genre fiction to certain parameters that have worn thin. I love romance and cozy mysteries, but right now, I can’t find a single original story. So when PopCo by Scarlett Thomas popped up after I bought a new iPad, and I couldn’t remember reading it, I gave it a go. If you read the opening, you’ll understand my level of desperation that I kept slogging through that morass.

Because it contains a lot of interesting Information (I researched codes and ciphers for Devilish Montague, remember) about logic, math, and code problems, I took my time with it. Probably the first quarter of the book is getting to know the thoughts of the protagonist, who is a very human confusion of hopes, doubts, and fears.

Essentially, the protag works for a major toy company designing new toys. At the last minute, she’s included in a month-long retreat where other people from the company—oddly, not all toy designers—are immersed in how to market toys, particularly to teenage girls. Our heroine has an extremely odd background of family code-breakers and mathematicians and treasure hunters, so creating toys is just one more fun fantasy for which she’s paid very well.

Except as the retreat continues, she comes to realize they are creating brainwashing techniques in the name of profit. And then all the odd things happening in her life, in the company, with all her new-found friends, start snowballing until she finally realizes what she wants out of life. It’s a very odd book with all the puzzles explained by the end and with a happy-in-its-own-way ending. Read it just for the sheer pleasure of reading.

There you have it — our round-up of Wenchly reads and recommendations. Now, what are you reading this month?

Being Away and Coming Home

Anne here, and I've just arrived home after traveling and attending conferences and writing retreats for the last three and a half weeks. And launching a book, so if this blog is a little scatty and unfocused, I hope you'll forgive me.

The first conference was the Romance Writers of America conference in New York. I flew from Melbourne to Los Angeles and stopped in LA for a couple of days, because the 16+ hour flight is long enough without continuing straight on to New York, which would be around 21+ hours flying time, not including waiting time. So I like to stop in California for a couple of days and work, and walk in the sun to reset my body clock a bit. 

The New York conference was brilliant, not so much for the workshops etc — I was only able to attend two, both of which were excellent — but for the meetings with my editor and agent and others who work for my publisher. I came away from those meetings feeling valued and very positive. And of course my book came out while I was there, which was very exciting — and busy.

It was also lovely meeting up with friends from the USA and Canada, as well as some from the UK, Ireland and even some Australians who live in far flung parts of the continent and that I don't often get to see.  And as well there was a small group of lovely French readers and writers who we've met before at US conferences, and who are involved with running the French Romance Conference.

Four of the Word Wenches — Susanna, Mary Jo, Andrea and I — also appeared on a panel discussing "Surviving and Thriving."  Here's a bit of what I said: 

It's tempting, when you first start writing, to want to shut yourself away and concentrate on writing, writing, writing. And marketing and promo and obsessively watching your numbers. But getting out and about, mixing with all kinds of people, visiting new places and experiencing different things is what feeds your muse and your writing, and keeps you fresh and happy. 

Understand the things you can control -- your writing, how good it is, how much you write, how frequently you publish -- and make that your priority. You can't control sales numbers -- and marketing, promo, etc. can eat up your time, money and energy and drive you crazy to little effect.

Historical Novel Society North American Conference 2019

Susanna here, still settling back to life in the workaday world after a wonderful time at the HNS North American Conference, held this year at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center at National Harbor in Maryland—a beautiful setting, although I have to admit the whole sensation of being in a community enclosed within a glass dome where everything was aiming to look old yet had a futuristic edge felt so surreal at times it had me thinking "Logan's Run" on more than one occasion :) But with so much natural light, it was all but impossible to get the usual hotel fatigue that comes with conferences. The hotel staff was wonderful, the food was superb, and the booksellers friendly. On top of which, the conference committee did an outstanding job of organizing everything, so those of us attending only had to worry about which of the many interesting sessions to choose.

Anniversary Winners

Here are the winners of the Wench 13th Anniversary #giveaway.

 

Each wench will contact her winner individually to obtain a posting address.

 

Thanks so much to everyone who left good wishes and participated in the discussion and the competition. Thanks also to all those who've followed us in the past. We hope you'll all continue with us on into the future. 

 

Wenchly readers are the BEST!

 

Andrea's winner:  Vicki W.

Mary Jo's winners: Molly M. and Ghazal M.

Pat's winner: Pat--Annette N.

Susan's winner: Nancy M.

Jo's winner: Kareni

Nicola's winner:  Lucia 

Susanna's winner:  Margot

Anne's winners: Theo and Shelley

 

(The flowers are mostly Australian native flowers, arranged by Swallows Nest Farm in Tasmania. Photo used with permission)

It's our Wenchiversary!

By Mary Jo and the rest of the Wenchly Crew

Has it really been thirteen years since we cautiously launched the Word Wenches blog? Indeed yes, and so much has changed in the world, in publishing, and in us. We've lost beloved Wench sisters Edith Layton and Jo Beverley, entered into new genres and new forms of publishing, and we've expanded to having Wenches from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US so we can truly say that the sun never sets on the Wench Empire!

Here is the very first Word Wench blog post, also written by me. (I thought I was better at not volunteering!) Here is also a link for the first month of blogs, as we felt our way into this new enterprise and learned how to use the blog site's tools.

And we're still here, musing three times a week on books, history, travel, and other intriguing topics. Blogging is work even if we each only write one about every two weeks. When on deadline, there can be a mad scramble to swap dates, whip off something very quickly, or republish an older post. But we've kept blogging all these years because, basically, we like doing this.

We like connecting with our readers. We like being able to do quick, low stakes riffs on things that catch our attention. We LOVE telling readers about our new books, or new authors we've discovered.

For our first anniversary, we did a three part series on Getting Naked With the Wenches, and very popular it was! Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

 

Two Truths and a Lie

Susanna here. This week I'm in New Orleans, at the first ever Booklovers Con, enjoying the time spent with old friends and new ones.

Today I'm one of a group of authors taking part in a reader game of Two Truths and a Lie, wherein people try to guess which of the statements we make are the false ones. In preparation for the game, I had to come up with twenty truths and ten lies (I found the truths a lot harder, for some reason...), and without using any of those same ones here, I thought it might be fun to play a small game of our own here on the blog.

I'll share three of my writing habits. Tell me, which one is the lie?

Fantastic History

Susanna here.

I don’t read much fiction while I’m writing, so I don’t always have anything to offer for our monthly “What We’re Reading” posts, but I’ve been trying to tidy my files and I came across a not-so-old piece in which I was asked to choose five of my favorite historical fantasy novels.

This is one of my favorite genres to read in, so choosing a handful of titles was hard. Since I know a lot of other writers working in this category, I tried to keep my recommendations unbiased by only choosing books by writers from outside my own group of friends (although I’ve met Meljean Brook at conferences over the years, and might have waxed rhapsodic over her stories more than a few times…).

Here are five of the books I love best, in that sub-genre.

Ask A Wench: First Sentences

Susanna here, with our Ask A Wench post for this month.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Andrew Pyper, author of The Homecoming, for a session at my local library, and while doing my preparation for that interview I came across an article he’d written for the Globe & Mail in 2012, called Crafting the Novel’s Crucial First Line.

Here’s an excerpt:

“no writerly preoccupation is more universally shared – or has been the cause of more agonized hours staring at the blank page – than the First Line…
How we begin a book is widely considered to be a matter so crucial, so decisive in determining whether a book soars or stalls, so elusive and mysterious, it's often spoken of in terms closer to spell-casting than sentence making…
There are no rules as to how to do it, other than one. A first line cannot, under any circumstances, be dull.”

*******

I’m a sucker for a good first sentence.

By Carriage on the Continent

Carriage In A Landscape, by Gerard ter Borch

Susanna here, back at the bottom of another research rabbit-hole.

This one’s entirely unintentional. I started off by looking up the land routes into Genoa, which led me quite by accident to Mariana Starke—or, more specifically, the Fifth revised edition of her comprehensive guidebook, Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent.

Being published in 1829, it’s about a century too late for my needs, but it’s still a fascinating read, and when I’m trolling the Internet, coffee in hand, for good primary sources, I’m easily lured down rabbit holes by fascinating reads.

Transported By Words

Susanna here, just back from the sunny south and the wonderful Tucson Festival of Books, where I had the privilege of sitting on two panels—one called "Keeping History Fresh" (pictured above), with Susan Meissner and Kristina McMorris, moderated by Anne Spieth, and another called "Transported by Words", moderated by Victoria Marie Salajko, in which R.O. Kwon, Shobha Rao, and I talked about the use of setting in fiction.

The Woman In The Lake

Susanna here, inviting you to join me in wishing a very Happy Book Birthday to THE WOMAN IN THE LAKE by our own Nicola Cornick!

This is its American birthday, actually, which will be followed on March 7 by its British birthday, so we will be keeping the celebration going here at the Word Wenches (any excuse for cake, really).

It’s a dual-time novel, linking the lives of two women together over centuries through one lovely but ill-fated gown…

***

‘I see it all again: the silver moon swimming beneath the water and the golden gown billowing out about her…’

1765: Lady Isabella Gerard asks her maid to take her new golden gown and destroy it. Its shimmering beauty has been tainted by the actions of her husband the night before.

Three months later: Lord Eustace Gerard stands beside the lake looking down at the woman in the golden gown. As the body slowly rolls over to reveal her face, it’s clear this is not his intended victim…

1996: Fenella Brightwell steals a stunning gown from a stately home. Twenty years later and reeling from the end of an abusive marriage, she wonders if it has cursed her all this time. Now she’s determined to discover the history behind the beautiful golden dress…

***

I always find covers so interesting. For the American edition of THE WOMAN IN THE LAKE, the cover artists have focused on the historical part of the dual-time story…

…while for the British edition of THE WOMAN IN THE LAKE, the cover focuses on the modern-day thread of the story...

Which cover do you like best?

And when you’re reading a twin-stranded story, with modern day parts and historical ones, do you like one part better?

First Loves

Susanna here, and with Valentine’s day approaching, I thought I’d share some of my earliest romantic reads—ones that captured my heart in my youth, and continue to hold it.

They’re not all historical, but they all hold pride of place in my bookshelves.

And while it’s not, by any means, a full list (there would be too many titles!), here are five of my “first loves” that, after all these years, remain my favourite comfort reads:

What We're Reading in January

Detail of a portrait of Madame Pompadour by François Boucher

Susanna here.

Welcome to our monthly What We're Reading post!

I’ve been reading mostly primary documents and very old letters in indecipherable handwriting, but unfortunately I can’t share any of them here because I don’t have permission to, so instead I’ll share the books that are currently on my nightstand, waiting to be read…

Letting My Characters Lead

Susanna here, sitting in my writing room and waiting for my characters to lead me where they will.

I remember once listening to a famous Canadian literary writer (and no, I won’t name names) say adamantly, during a radio interview, that characters were mere creations, and as such, were under the complete control of the writer at all times, with the writer firmly laying out what the character would say and do, and the character falling into line—and so any writer who claimed that their characters took on a life of their own was a liar.

Celebrating a special Birthday Week

Hello, Melissa here!

This is a special week for us Wenches.  We have, not one, not two, but three wonderful birthdays to celebrate this week!  

 

We celebrate Anne on January 14th, and then on Jan 17th we have a double birthday.  Joanna and Susanna share a birthday.  How special is that?  Please join us in wishing the three lovely ladies a very happy birthday, and share our cake with us!  This one is a white cake with buttercream icing.  Do you have a favourite?

 

Nae Fash, Nae Fear

Fishermen at Sea, by J.M.W. Turner

Susanna here, with a true-life New Year’s tale for you, from Aberdeen (well, properly from Footdee—pronounced “Fittie”—which is like a little early 19th century fishing village tucked within the city, by the harbour).

So much of the news always seems to be negative, but even our forebears did their best to look for the positive. I came across this little gem in the Aberdeen Herald for Saturday, January 6, 1844 (courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive, of which I’ve been a member for several years). Rather than trying to paraphrase or summarize it, I’m going to simply transcribe the entire article for you, because I don’t think I could possibly improve on the original.

My Gift To You

Susanna here, running around as usual trying to get everything finished before Santa comes tonight, and, as usual, failing miserably.

I had the best intentions of cleaning my house this year, and instead it looks like something from the TV show Hoarders. I’ve yet to excavate my kitchen table from under the piles of papers and books so we can eat dinner on it—and come to that, I’ve yet to get to the grocery store to buy the turkey to actually cook for our dinner.

A Very Wenchly Winter Party

Susanna here, still trying to figure out what time zone I'm in, having only just got back from a two-week-long research-and-business-and-more-research trip to the UK, the second week of which took me to London, where I had the very great pleasure of spending time with old friends and meeting new ones.

Wednesday, November 14 was the date of the annual Winter Party held by the UK's Romantic Novelists' Association (of which I've proudly been a member for the past decade) and just before the party my American publishers, Sourcebooks, very generously hosted a special afternoon tea event where not only was I introduced by fellow Word Wench Nicola and interviewed by Honorary Word Wench Christina Courtenay (who took the photo of the table, above), but the icing on the doughnuts provided afterwards even matched the pink of my jacket!