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Monthly Archives: August 2006

Tomorrow will be the first anniversary of the Risky Regencies!

A little history for those who may have joined us more recently. About a year ago, I went to the RWA conference in Reno, where I roomed with Cara and Amanda and met Janet and Megan in person for the first time. Each of us was looking forward to releases of Signet Regencies within the upcoming months. Each was also well aware that the writing was on the wall for the line, though no announcement had yet been made.

Soon after the conference, we decided that starting this blog was better than donning blacks and mourning the demise of Signet Regencies, that this would be a fun way to share our passion for the Regency while searching for new publishing “homes”. And it has been. One of the nicest things for me has been working with this talented and highly individual group of women, including our newest member, Diane.

The idea of calling ourselves the Risky Regencies stemmed from the fact that many of us did things in our upcoming books that felt risky to us. My September release, LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE is a Super Regency. It’s longer and more complex than anything I’d written before, which led to some serious midnight-oil-burning as the deadline approached. It also deals with more serious issues than I’d tackled in previous books. And it’s sexier.

My first traditional Regency, which came out in 2000, was on the “sweet” side. In my second full-length Regency I wrote my first sex scene. Some readers loved it; others castigated me because “ladies didn’t do that in the Regency”. Over the next few books, my stories kept getting sexier (blame my characters did it, I have no control over them!) and I continued to get a mix of rants and raves from readers.

So I was pretty nervous when LDM finally came out. Now the problem child has made me proud, winning the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Regency of 2005 and the Desert Rose RWA’s Golden Quill in the historical romance category.

Meanwhile my fellow Riskies have earned all sorts of awards, as this week’s posts amply prove. So many different books have been honored this year, and so many of them have been ours! It says to me that readers want variety, and the Riskies have been offering just that.

As we near our one-year anniversary, I’d like to ask the visitors what you think of our blog. What have you most enjoyed? Anything you’d like to see more of?

In a spirit of nostalgia, and as a thanks to our visitors over this past year, I’d like to send an autographed copy of my first book, LORD LANGDON’S KISS, to a visitor chosen at random from comments on this post. Sometime this weekend I’ll announce the winner.

To my Risky friends and visitors, thanks for a great year!

Elena
LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, Golden Quill, Best Historical Romance
www.elenagreene.com

Diane sort of outed me last week (that is, outed my announcement!) but I’m going ahead with it anyway because, well — because I want to. And I’m that sort of person this week. I wanted to eat that chocolate cake and I did. And I don’t regret it. (I feel a new proud era of strong womanhood dawning already.)

I am strong! I am powerful! And I’ll eat chocolate cake if I want to!

Come on, everyone! Say it with me! We are strong! We are victorious! And we’ll eat just as much chocolate cake as we damn well please!

There now. Don’t you feel good? Don’t you feel powerful?

Now — on to my announcement!

Don’t you love bookstores? Don’t you love fondling all those beautiful books, and smelling them, and buying far too many? Don’t you just love the booksellers who make all that indulgence possible?

Even better, don’t you love the booksellers who talk to you about books, who recommend interesting new authors you’ve never tried, who totally understand your book buying habit? (And encourage it? And maybe — just maybe — are proud and strong chocolate cake eaters themselves?)

I remember discussing how wonderful McCaffrey’s Dragonsdawn was with one bookseller….and analyzing the state of the Regency market with another. There are booksellers who can tell you what picture book would be great for a 4-year-old boy who loves bees, and booksellers who can relate personal anecdotes about Larry Niven or Anne Stuart.

This is why I was so excited to learn that the bookseller judges of this year’s “Bookseller’s Best Contest” named My Lady Gamester the Best Regency of 2005!

My fellow finalists are all fantastic writers, and so I am thrilled and honored to be named the winner. Even better, this means that a bunch of booksellers (drawn from a pool located all across the country) read my book in the first round, and liked it well enough to name it a finalist…and then another bunch read it in the final round, and liked it well enough to vote it the winner!

So now there are booksellers who know my book…booksellers who like my book…booksellers who might just mention my book to their faithful customers…booksellers who are undoubtably confident chocolate-cake eaters themselves, and proud of it!

Yes!

Cara
Cara King — My Lady Gamester
“Booksellers’ Best” Award for Best Regency of 2005
!

This week some of us will be doing Announcements. Nice things have been happening to the Riskies and we want to share our good news with all of you.

Last Monday, I broke some of the good news from the RWA conference, but that really didn’t give it the attention it deserved, so we are going to toot our own horns just a little this week.

Of course, I’ve had lots to toot about. My A Reputable Rake winning the RITA for Best Regency Romance, brought me lots of emails from friends happy for my good fortune. This is truly a great honor and I am overwhelmed at receiving a RITA in only my second year of eligibility. My Rake was a truly a risky regency- a lady running a courtesan school right in the heart of Mayfair- but it won!

I’m also so happy that The Mysterious Miss M won the National Readers Choice Award for Best Regency. Before Mills & Boon bought Miss M through the Golden Heart contest, editor after editor from other publishing houses rejected the book, saying that readers would not accept my prostitute heroine. I always believed readers would love Maddie as I did and I felt the NRCA, judged by readers, finally proved it!

Life has a way of bringing a person back down to earth, however. As soon as I got home from the conference, there was a little family stuff to deal with. Nothing serious, but it needed me to rise from my laurels and do something! Then Melanie, my Warner editor phoned me about my revisions. LOTS of them. Major rewrite of Blake’s story, now titled Desire in His Eyes and slated for release sometime in 2007. And, of course, there is the next Mills & Boon/Harlequin Historical to write by the end of October. And the persistent congestion I was experiencing was a little sinus infection (much better now).

Last week blogger wouldn’t let me post photos, but this week is kinder, and I wanted to show off the real joy in this business – the people. The friends. So here are some photos from the conference.

Me, accepting the RITA. (for more on this moment, see my Wet Noodle Posse blog)

And the awards themselves, with lovely flowers sent by my friends.

Right after the RITA ceremony, the Mills & Boon folks took me in search of champagne for a toast to our good fortune. Here we are after our long and arduous search for bubbly. From Left to Right: Sheila Hodgson, Karin Stoeker (editorial director), Jenny Hutton, me, Joanne Carr

While we were on our search for champagne, I missed the annual Wet Noodle Posse photo with other WNP RITA winners Stef Feagan and Dianna Love Snell (The WNP are the Golden Heart finalists from 2003. We’re still together–except me, I’m still looking for champagne)

This is a photo of me with Kathy Caskie and Sophia Nash–now both Avon authors and my friends from Washington Romance Writers. In 2003 Kathy awarded me the Golden Heart for what became The Mysterious Miss M. This year Sophia awarded me the RITA!

Here am I with my dear friend Julie Halperson. Years ago, Julie and I met in a creative writing class at our local community college. She’s been a writing friend and critique partner ever since, with me through this whole journey.

Two more great friends from WRW. Mary Blayney (Poppy’s Coin in J.D. Robb’s anthology Bump in the Night)and Lavinia Klein, a double Golden Heart finalist in Long Historical this year.

And my wonderful Sisters of the Moon, my critique group including (R to L) Karen Anders, Blaze author; me and RITA; Darlene Gardner, Superromance (A Time to Forgive, July 2006); Lisa Dyson, about to break in at any moment!

And finally, three friends who came to the Literacy Booksigning. These are my high school classmates, Wayne, Sandy, and Peggy, who were surprised to learn at our high school reunion in June that the shy, studious Diane became a Romance Author. They were dear enough to come see me at the signing and were so happy for me. It was very touching.

The friends are the greatest reward! I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Cheers!
Diane

I blogged a few months ago on a post called Where do you get your ideas? about how a story starts for me, and I’m very happy to announce that that book, now called Chained, has sold–details were thrashed out by the agent and editor while I traveled to Atlanta–a great way to start the RWA National Conference! Or rather, an almost completely different version of that book has sold.

Then, the story was called, tentatively, The Story of Miss O. I renamed it Chained as I realized the story was about the English abolitionist movement. Here are the pics I found of the hero and heroine (courtesy of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s portraits of Russian aristocrats), although being my characters, they do not look nearly as cleaned-up and glamorous:


Now the editor liked the idea, she particularly liked the naughty goings-on that occurred in a carriage in chapter three, but she glommed onto something I was hoping to avoid because it involved real research, and gasp, I have a deadline of the end of the year. This year. My original story started off in England and after a while and many more naughty goings-on in a variety of locations, the action moved to a Caribbean sugar-producing island, where, um, more of the same took place, and then they sailed for home, by which time the hero/heroine are not speaking to each other. This is a two-month voyage. That’s a long, long sulk. This is not terrific plotting. It bothered me. I was afraid I’d write a book that contained something like this–Two months later, as they stepped onto English soil again… And I wasn’t really sure how it would end.

My local RWA chapter, bless their hearts, had a plotting session at one of our meetings. To a woman, they said I should have a raging mob with pitchforks and the hero performing heroic deeds to win the heroine. Um, yes, I said, but the English abolitionist movement wasn’t like that. It was housewives boycotting sugar, and earnest Quakers distributing pamplets and getting names for petitions–the Georgian equivalent of envelope-stuffing for a political campaign.

The editor–who of course zoomed in, eagle-eyed, on the terrible weakness of the original plot– told me she wanted it set on the Caribbean island, with the story beginning on the voyage out, and could I send her a couple of paragraphs on how I would rewrite it. Later that day, if possible, certainly before the weekend (this was the Wednesday of the week before National). I produced a cold sweat instead, went home, and thought about more sin in the sun and less about earnest Quakers in appalling weather. I thought about raging mobs. Raging mobs with machetes…a slave revolt. I sent an email to the editor the next day, she liked it, and she and my agent began thrashing out the stuff we writers are too timid to attempt. Less than a week later, the day before the conference started, we had a deal.

So now all I have to do is rewrite and write and go to see “Pirates of the Caribbean” because I can write it off as a legitimate business expense! Chained will be released in (probably) Sept. 2007 under the name of Jane Lockwood for NAL’s Heat line.

And now I really must write!


Have you ever seen the movie Topsy-Turvy? I LOVE this movie, which is a terrific behind-the-scenes look at Victorian theater life via the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. But I’m not here to talk about the music, or the costumes, or this great ‘rehearsal’ scene that revolves around the correct pronounciation of “corroborative.” I’m here to talk about another scene, where Gilbert (played by the great Jim Broadbent, who should have received an Oscar nod for this role, IMO) goes to have a diseased tooth extracted. There’s much screaming and cursing and kicking, as the dentist clamly chats away–“You know, my wife and I went to see Princess Ida, and we felt it was rather too long…”

I thought about this scene on Thursday afternoon, as I prepared to go in for my own emergency dental surgery. Luckily, I had nitrous, numbing agents, and lovely painkillers for after. But I do still hate to visit the dentist. So, I distracted myself by looking up facts about historical dentistry to share with all of you! (Just in case your next hero is going to be a dentist or something…)

Dentistry has been around as long as people have had teeth. Clay tablets from Sumeria, dated from between 5000 and 3000 BC, speculate that tooth decay was caused by the gnawings of a tiny worm. Despite this rather yucky theory, early civilzations still had surprisingly advanced dental knowledge. They even filled or extracted diseased teeth, and splinted loose teeth. Egyptian mummies have been found with teeth made of ivory, or even transplanted human teeth. And the ancient Greeks even figured out that sweet foods add to tooth decay.

In medieval England, dentistry was practiced by barbers, until the 17th century. George III had his own dentist, William Green. And in England and France, women practiced dentistry, such as a Madame Silvie, who made and fitted artifical teeth and also made snuff-boxes and tweezer cases. In 1771, John Hunter, an English anatomist and surgeon, published A Natural History of Human Teeth. In 1799, Joseph Fox was appointed dental surgeon at Guy’s Hospital.

I also found a couple of interesting letters from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra from September 1813 (from Jane Austen’s Letters, Deirdre Le Faye, ed.), where she details a visit she made to the dentist with their nieces Lizzy, Marianne, and Fanny. The dentist, a Mr. Spence, is obliged to extract two of poor Marianne’s teeth. “When her doom was fixed,” writes Austen, “Fanny, Lizzy, and I walked into the next room, where we heard each of the two sharp hasty Screams.” In Dr. Johnson’s London, Liza Picard has an even lovelier account of how one extracted teeth: “The fearsome instruments designed to extract teeth usually wrenched them out sideways, once they had been loosened by careful hammering. Pulling perpendicularly without damaging the surrounding teeth and gums seems to have been beyond an eighteenth century dentist, even when he flexed his muscles, put the patient on the floor, and took his–the patient’s–head between his–the dentist’s–knees.”

There WERE some methods of cleaning teeth at the time. There were various powders and pastes on the market, which (much like Crest and Aquafresh today) makes great claims to brilliance and whiteness. But they were also made of things like gunpowder, lead, pitch and beeswax, which could wear away enamel. Pierre Fouchard (1676-1761, often called the “founder of modern dentistry”) recommended urine as a good cleaner. (BTW, those are some of his instruments in the pic. They look just like the pliers in my toolbox here at home). It was a common practice to scour the teeth with the end of a wooden stick, though I think this would leave splinters. And the wealthy sometimes had pretty little gold-handled brushes. There were also false teeth and even transplantation, should cleaning fail (I even came across a tale of a young and destitute Emma Hamilton, dissuaded from selling her teeth to make some money. Instead she went with a less repuatble method of fundraising, but one that preserved her looks a bit better!)

In the end, Jane Austen said she would not let Mr. Spence “look at my teeth for a shilling a tooth and double it!” Very sensible of her.

BTW, if I haven’t bored you enough here, I found an interesting (albeit rather “technical”) article in The British Dental Journal about an archaelogical dig in the 1990s concerning a church in Kent. This is the dental history of one of the unfortunate “specimens” found in the vault, a Viscount Whitworth, who died in 1825 aged 71. Now, I think I’ll go take one of those pain pills. All this thinking about teeth has made mine ache again. 🙂

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