Back to Top

Monthly Archives: September 2007

Today we have as our Risky guest Jane Lockwood, whose first erotic historical, Forbidden Shores (Signet Eclipse), is released October 2. Your comment or question through Monday will enter you into a drawing for a signed copy of the book; the winner will be announced here on Tuesday.

Janet: Jane, welcome to the Riskies. I feel as though I know you already! Tell us about the book.

Jane: Forbidden Shores is about three people who each fall in love with the one person of the three who cannot love them back. I think I tend to see love as a catalyst, a powerful force that can be destructive as well as healing. Generally everything I write starts off with people who are quite happy as they are until they fall in love. Then they kick and scream as everything changes. It’s set against the background of the abolitionist movement and takes place mostly on a Caribbean island; Clarissa, the heroine, actually quotes from The Tempest at one point, and Hero #2 (March) is the enigmatic, powerful ruler of the island, a sort of Prospero figure. And if you were really going to explore the analogy, Allen, Hero #1, is Caliban. (Oh, and by the way, it’s much more explicit than the cover or back cover blurb suggests.)

Janet: What was your inspiration?

Jane: A brilliant book called Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild about the British abolitionist movement. Abolition was a hot, polarizing issue in Georgian England and full of conflict and sacrifice and passion, and I knew I wanted to write about abolitionists after I read it. I originally intended to set the book in England but my editor thought Quakers collecting signatures for petitions in the rain not nearly as sexy as sex on the beach of a Caribbean island.

Janet: So you had to deal with the issue of slavery in the book.

Jane: It was very painful and difficult to write about. Slaves working on sugar plantations were treated inhumanly and shamefully. I certainly didn’t want to go into lurid details, but I didn’t want to tone it down, and neither did I want to idealize the slaves who appear as secondary characters.

Janet: OK, let’s talk about something safer–sex. You have a menage a trois–was that difficult to write? And since there are so many erotic romances with menages, how did you make yours different, or dare I say, risky?

Jane: After diligent research–[unseemly snorts of laughter]–I didn’t want to make it too slick and multi-earth-moving. It’s part crazy lust but it also represents the desperation of all three not getting what they really want and knowing that this is as close as they can get. So there’s a fair amount of clumsiness and reluctance, but the heroine, whose idea it is, has the best time (my editor’s suggestion).

Janet: What’s the hardest thing about writing erotic romance?

Jane: I think you could have phrased that a little better. Really, finding other things for your characters to do; making them believable as people.

Janet: Is there any sort of sexual practice you’d feel uncomfortable writing about?

Jane: In this book, with its context, any sort of master/slave sex play. I guess I’m expected to say “no non-consensual sex” but I think once your characters are experimenting and exploring they may well do things they don’t want to do–or think they didn’t want to do.

Janet: Did you do any special research?

Jane: Not as much as I would have liked. For the sea voyage, I re-read a wonderful book by Eric Newby, The Last Grain Race, that gives an incredible portrait of life below decks on a sailing ship. Newby, who died last year, was the travel writer for the Observer in England, and in 1939 he sailed on a grain ship from Dublin to Australia on a ship that’s now a restaurant in Philadelphia, the Moshulu. I also re-read The Wide Sargasso Sea, a book I find unsatisfying because both voices are Jean Rhys’s (even though she has a wonderful voice). As well as some books on the history of the Caribbean, I found a couple of great websites: the Antigua & Barbuda Museum and Brycchan Carey’s Links and Web Resources for Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation. I visited Bristol, now my favorite English city, and its wonderful (free!) museums. And I borrowed the wording for a manumission from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.

Janet: What’s your favorite part of the book?

Jane: The chapter where Allen does his own laundry (a big no-no for a Georgian gentleman) and then climbs the mast of a ship (talk about phallic symbolism!).

Ask Jane questions about Forbidden Shores or writing erotic romance. I’ll make sure she’s here to answer them!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 33 Replies

BTW, I’m starting this post with something totally unrelated to my topic, but I wanted to share this pic! I found it on a film costuming blog I sometimes visit, and it’s the first glimpse of the Keira Knightley film The Duchess! Even though I wish they had cast someone else as Georgiana, I’m always excited about a chance to look at 18th century costumes.

And now for my regularly scheduled post! A few weeks ago I read a fun book by Maureen B. Adams, Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolfe. While not exactly deep. ground-breaking scholarship, I loved the way it illuminated this aspect of the writers’ lives, their very different relationships to their pets, and how their dogs provided not just companionship and distraction, but grounding during times of intense creativity and psychological upheaval.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel Flush seemed to be a sort of conduit for her own emotions when she was confined to home as an “invalid”; in letters she often ascribed her own feelings to Flush, and thus made them safe to express. But he also made her feel more empowered when he was kidnapped by a band of evil dognappers and she went out herself and got him back! (I HATED those dognappers). Luckily for Flush, he got to end his life in Italy, running around the piazza with all the wild Italian dogs.

Emily Bronte’s mastiff, Keeper, was weird dog for a fascinatingly weird person. He was enormous and often bad-tempered, fighting with the village dogs and such. But he wandered the moors with Emily at all hours, and was sweet as a kitten when she subdued him by beating him up when he got on the parsonage furniture. (Her sister Anne had a small spaniel, Flossy, who it seems was allowed to get on the furniture with impunity…) Keeper stayed close to Emily as she was dying, followed her funeral cortege to the church, and then spent the rest of his life lying outside her empty bedroom door.

Emily Dickinson also possessed a very large dog (“as big as myself,” she wrote in a letter), a Newfoundland named Carlo that her father bought her for protection. He was too gentle for that, but he proved an excellent, laid-back, affectionate companion for the Very Intense poet. In my Google searches, I found that the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst even has Carlo Look-Alike Contests once a year!

Edith Wharton, on the other hand, had a pack of very tiny dogs, Papillons and Chihuhuas and Pekinese. Link was the last one, and he often sent invitations and letters in his own name to Edith’s friends and guests. They traveled everywhere with her, a little, dancing, yapping pack.

Virginia Woolfe’s attitude toward dogs seems to have been more prosaic than Wharton’s! They weren’t like her “babies,” they often ran off or got into trouble, but they were still an important part of her life. Most of them seem to have been large hounds or mutts, but there was one expensive spaniel, a gift of her lover Vita Sackville-West. Woolfe even wrote Flush: A Biography about Barrett Browning’s dog!

So, if you love pets and poetry as I do, this is a fun book! I showed some of the illustrations to my own dogs (Victoria the Pug, and Abigail the poodle) and they enjoyed it immensely. Though they now want to travel all over Europe with me, as Wharton’s dogs did. 🙂 I suppose I can’t say my dogs are my “muses”–I’ve never written a story about a bluestocking poodle falling in love with a French poodle comte, for instance. But they ARE a huge comfort when I’m blocked in a story and feel like I Will Never Write Again, or when I’ve gotten a bad review and am feeling down. They sit on my lap and give me kisses, assuring me that they love me and think I am a great writer and fabulous mommy no matter what that nasty reviewer says. I couldn’t do without them.

Do you have your own pets? Or know any good Pets In History stories (I always love those!)?

Happy Saturday! Take your dogs for a nice long walk (maybe not your cats, though–my cats would never let me put a leash on them, but they are excellent companions and comforts, too)

Megan is swamped and unable to blog today, so here is a little nonsense for a Risky Regencies Friday.

A Google Alert came in to my email. I google alert many things– my book titles, my author names, Gerard Butler. Today an alert came in for Diane Perkins. It led to a blog by Elisa Rolle who led to a website that promoted Italian books. (I can’t make that link work anymore, though. You can give it a try) This month the releases were by these authors: Jeanne Savery, Sophia Nash (my pal), Diane Perkins, Sara Blayne, Lois Greiman & Sandra Heath

Diane Perkins! My alter ego!

I had to go back through my records to see that, yes indeed, The Marriage Bargain by Diane Perkins had sold to an Italian publisher. So here, Risky Regencies Readers, is the Italian bookcover and what the website said about the book:

785. Diane Perkins – Contratto di nozze (The Marriage Bargain)
Un matrimonio per interesse può diventare un amore per sempre?
Emma Chambers accetta di sposare Spencer Keenan. All’apparenza sembra un ottimo affare per entrambi: Emma otterrà completa libertà, Spencer avrà chi si occuperà della sua tenuta. Ma quando il giovane viene gravemente ferito in un duello, Emma è al suo fianco per assisterlo: la timida fanciulla che ha preso in moglie per convenienza è diventata la donna che ha sempre sognato. Riuscirà ora a convincerla del proprio amore e a farsi concedere una seconda possibilità?
Nota di MarchRose: Un tenero e commovente romanzo regency sul tema degli amanti separati dalle vicende della vita che si ritrovano ad anni di distanza, più maturi, diffidenti ed amareggiati ma anche più forti ed appassionati. La Perkins, che scrive anche sotto il nome di Diane Gaston, è un’autrice molto abile e sensibile, capace di creare personaggi sfaccettati e davvero credibili dal punto di vista umano, le cui vicende riescono a coinvolgere emotivamente in profondità il lettore.
Livello di sensualità “caldo” (warm)

Nice, huh?

Do you Google Alert something? Care to ‘fess up?

Here’s how to set up your very own Google Alerts

Cheers!
And do not forget to join us for our Jane Lockwood interview on Sunday. Doesn’t Jane look familiar????

Last weekend I went to an amazing historic house in Virginia, Montpelier, the home of James Madison.

One reason I loved it so much was that the house is under major reconstruction. One notable owner of the house was the Dupont family, who bought it in 1900. The last Dupont to own the house left it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation with instructions that the house was to be restored to Madison’s time. This was a bit of a problem. The Duponts had converted the original 22-room house to a 55-room house (with real plumbing). So the trick was to get from this:


to this (illustration courtesy of Montpelier Foundation and PartSense Inc.):
and this is how things look from the outside at the moment:
Inside, I found it absolutely thrilling. The rooms are down to lathe and some original plaster as the house is restored to its former 1820s glory. Tiny fragments of original materials have been found (one amazing find was in a rodent’s nest, which had become a time capsule thanks to a scrap of paper with Madison’s handwriting, plus some fabric and wallpaper). Everything is being re-created as it was in Madison’s time, using historically-correct materials and tools. There’s a huge amount of documentation too, as Jefferson, Monroe and Madison were all building at the same time and exchanging letters and ideas.

The house is in a beautiful location at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, only two hours from Washington DC but it feels like another world. It also has beautiful grounds, with some trees dating from Madison’s time, including some cedars that were brought as a gift when Lafayette visited.

At one point we were standing in a room that frankly looked a mess–it was the original dining room, and our docent said something like “Imagine the greatest political conversations of all time when Lafayette, Jefferson, and Monroe visited Madison.” I got shivers down my spine.

You can see a blog of the restoration of Montpelier here.

Try and visit the house before restoration if you’re as fascinated by historic construction and restoration as I am. It’s due to open officially in about a year’s time. But the docent also told us that one room will be left in its current lathe-and-plaster condition for visitors to see how it looked before.

Do you have a favorite historic site? Tell us about it!

Enter to win copies of my books at longandshortreviews.com this week, and meet my dirty-minded alter ego Jane Lockwood this Sunday!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Replies

First, this post is NOT about the relative merits of romances called “sweet” versus romances called “spicy”. It’s about how the terms themselves. I’ve disliked the designations of “sweet” versus “spicy” (or sometimes “hot”) for a long time. Somewhere online I recently saw “sweet” equated to “clean” and decided I wanted to blog about it.

I realize the industry needs an easy way to describe the level of sexuality in a romance, especially since some readers (unlike me) have strong preferences one way or the other.

But I still don’t like the terms.

“Sweet” can translate to “cute” or “safe”. It doesn’t do justice to the fiercely clever characterizations and witty dialogue in a Jane Austen or a Georgette Heyer. Or to romances that have dark themes but don’t happen to take the characters to the bedroom.

“Spicy” or “hot” makes me think of Buffalo chicken wings but my bigger concern is this: that I’ve seen “sweet” romance defined as romance that focuses on the emotional development of the relationship–implying others focus on the sex alone. “Spicy” or “hot” just don’t do justice to the body/mind/soul sort of lovemaking you find in a Laura Kinsale or Julia Ross.

It’s hard to think of better terms though. I can come up with definitions but it’s hard to come up with single words that don’t either imply “sweet” romances are uptight or “hot” romances are trashy. “Clean” vs “dirty”? “Chaste” vs “sexy”? See what I mean? At least both “sweet” and “spicy” can be thought of as good things.

But two terms aren’t enough anymore.

All About Romance has a Sensuality Ratings Guide that defines levels from “Kisses”, “Subtle”, “Warm”, “Hot and “Burning”. Their definitions look useful and pretty optimal to me, despite the lingering chicken wing connotations.

So what do you think? Are you content with the old definitions of “sweet” vs “spicy”? Do you have other ideas to suggest?

Elena
www.elenagreene.com

Follow
Get every new post delivered to your inbox
Join millions of other followers
Powered By WPFruits.com