Monthly Archives: July 2009

The Riskies Welcome Back Nicola Cornick!

Updated on July 4, 2009 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Risky Regencies is thrilled to welcome back Nicola Cornick, to tell us all about her new trilogy from HQN! (Out May, June, and July) For more information on these and upcoming stories, you can check out her website here–and be sure and comment on today’s post for a chance to win a copy of The Scandals of an Innocent!

Thank you so much for inviting me to visit the Riskies today. It’s always such a pleasure to visit this blog! Amanda very kindly invited me along to talk about my new Regency series, The Brides of Fortune, the first two books of which are currently in the shops. And as this is Risky Regencies I thought I should focus on what is risky and different in these stories!

The idea for the overall Brides of Fortune trilogy was sparked by something I read in the newspapers. Even though I write historical fiction I get a lot of my ideas from contemporary papers and magazines. That in itself is a risky if rewarding approach because you have to make sure that in taking a modern idea and adapting it to a Regency context you aren’t doing anything anachronistic. But the more I research, the more I realize that there are so many themes and ideas that are fundamentally the same now as they were in the Regency period and perhaps throughout history. One of these was the idea of the rights and laws associated with the title of Lord of the Manor. This sparked the Brides of Fortune series. A couple of years ago I read about a village in England where someone had bought the title of Lord of the Manor and then discovered that he could impose lots of ancient taxes on the villagers. He started to charge them for walking their dogs on the village green and for parking their cars when they went shopping. Naturally there was uproar with the villagers rebelling. I thought this would be great idea to explore in a Regency series and so the Brides of Fortune trilogy was born! Sir Montague Fortune imposes an ancient tax on the villagers that means that every lady has to marry or lose half of her dowry. Penniless gentlemen come flocking to the village and so Fortune’s Folly becomes the marriage mart of England!

The first book in the series is called The Confessions of a Duchess and it tells the story of Laura, Dowager Duchess of Cole, who featured in my previous book for HQN, Unmasked. After Unmasked came out I had so many emails from readers asking for Laura’s story that I couldn’t resist. Confessions of a Duchess is set four years after Unmasked and Laura has retired to live quietly in the country with her young daughter Hattie. Then her former lover, Dexter Anstruther, comes back into Laura’s life and turns everything upside down. Dexter and Laura parted on bad terms and now he has to marry a rich heiress to save his family but despite knowing that he has to marry for duty, Dexter finds it hard to resist his attraction to Laura. There are so many secrets keeping them apart and so many reasons why they cannot be together, not least that Laura is eight years Dexter’s senior and she thinks that to have a toy boy lover is totally scandalous! I absolutely loved writing a book with an age difference between the hero and heroine. Laura is quite a risky heroine – she’s a former highwaywoman for a start and as Dexter works for the government to keep law and order, he’s not that thrilled when he finds out!

This month the second book is out and it is called The Scandals of an Innocent. The trilogy heroines are all friends and this is Alice’s story. Alice is a former housemaid who inherited her late employer’s money so she is struggling with the snobbish attitudes of some members of society towards her – they look down on her socially even though they’d quite like to have her fortune! One of Fortune Folly’s penniless adventurers, Miles Vickery, decides to blackmail Alice into marriage and sets out to seduce her. Miles is an out and out rake, a real scoundrel, but Alice is determined to reform him so it is a battle of hearts. I have to confess that Miles is probably my favorite of the trilogy heroes! Although I love heroes who have integrity and a strong code of honor, I am a total sucker for rake heroes and Miles is a very, very bad boy indeed. He totally does not want to reform and fights really hard against it but Alice is no pampered society miss, she’s got a tough background, and she’s not going to just let Miles walk in and take what he wants! The risky thing about this book… Alice’s rose tattoo! Tattoos for women were rare during the Regency period and not at all the done thing for a respectable female. In her fabulous series about Mrs. Merlin’s Academy for Select Young Ladies my fellow Word Wench Andrea Pickens also has heroines with tattoos, which perfectly fits the racy ambiance of her lady spies! In Alice’s case it’s yet another thing that marks her out as deeply unrespectable!

And for book 3, The Undoing of a Lady, the risk I took, I think, was to create a heroine, Lizzie Scarlet, who is so outrageous that I suspect some readers may feel she goes too far. Lizzie starts the book off by exercising her droit de seigneur over the hero and goes on from there! It can be difficult to write a young heroine who is a bad girl and yet who still commands a reader’s sympathy. My editor described Lizzie’s characterization as “brave” which made me very nervous! Hopefully to understand Lizzie and her background will be to love her. She is right on the edge of control – just when you think she couldn’t possibly behave in a worse fashion she goes off and does something even more shocking. But I loved Lizzie to bits and felt enormous compassion for her (after all, being the half sister of the wicked village squire and his even more appalling brother is no picnic!) So I hope that readers will love her too. And she does have a very, very strong man as her hero – he needs to be!

I hope that in Fortune’s Folly I have created a “Regency world” that readers can step into. There is an e-book prequel to the series, The Secrets of a Courtesan, which is available to download from e-harlequin. It sets the scene and introduces some of the characters and is also a steamy love story! And I deliberately left a few story threads loose at the end of The Undoing of a Lady because I don’t think I wanted to let go of the Fortune’s Folly trilogy completely. I have a sneaking feeling I will want to go back there sometime and find out what has happened to a few of the characters! In the meantime I’m working on a new series for HQN. The first book is set in London and the Arctic. Now that really is risky!

RWA Festivities!

Updated on July 4, 2009 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

If you’re going to the RWA conference in Washington DC (only about 10 days away now!) be sure and join the Riskies (Diane, Amanda, Carolyn, Janet, and Megan) for a drink and a “coze” before the awards ceremony on Saturday! 4:00 in Harry’s Pub at the Marriott Wardman hotel. Hope we see you there!!!

Self-Evidently

Updated on July 3, 2009 by megan

“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”

Happy Official Holiday for the Fourth Of July, Even Though It’s Only The Third!

There are certain inviolable rights that we take as Life Assumptions; I’m talking, of course, about knowing–and owning as part of one’s self–certain pop culture touchstones. Recently (i.e. yesterday), I was reminded of a truth I’d suppressed: That Carolyn Jewel, our newest Risky, had never seen North And South, the BBC mini-series based on an Elizabeth Gaskell book. It’s not set in the Regency (it’s Victorian), but it is otherwise perfectly suited for a historical romance fan.

Because, you know, it’s set in a historical period and is a romance.

Anyway, Carolyn will doubtless rectify that gap in her life soon, thanks to pressure from me and many other N&S fans who are on Twitter, but it got me to thinking about pop culture assumptions, and then into the Venn Diagram of romance novel assumptions. There are some people who grew up without TV (like me), and I don’t have that common vernacular of forty-somethings who grew up on a diet of ’70s television. There are romance readers who’ve never read Nora Roberts (also like me), or Lord of Scoundrels (NOT like me), or seen Romancing the Stone (me, again), or liked Ghost (guilty), or any of a countless other shared experiences that weren’t so shared after all. Just like we all know Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, and Watergate, and chia pets, and Frankie Says Relax, we all assume we’ve read Nora, or seen certain iconic romantic movies or share the same opinions and assumptions about our books (for example, I am always startled when someone doesn’t love Lord of Scoundrels; I can accept it, but it stuns me for a minute or two).

What Romance Pop Culture Touchstone have you never experienced? Which of your Romance Pop Culture Touchstones are inviolable when it comes to discussing romance with others?

And happy Truth-Holding Day!

Megan

*See how concerned Richard Armitage is that Carolyn hasn’t viewed his John Thornton-ness?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Carolyn Jewel, Loretta Chase, Megan, Nora Roberts | 9 Replies

What’s in a name, Part X

Updated on July 2, 2009 by Janet Mullany

I am Everard Dominic Benedict Ashford Alexander Artichoke FitzGrennan, Duke of Hawkraven, known and feared as Satan’s Elbow, but you may address me as…Cuddles. Top Ten Things, Rules of Gentility

Part X, because this is something we write about again and again–how to find names for characters that don’t sound hideously 21st century, that somehow represent a quality of the character, and lend themselves to different forms of address. How would your hero’s mother, sister, mistress, best friend, etc. address him? (Other than as “sir,” of course.)

This is something on my mind at the moment because I’m considering changing the hero’s name in a book that’s pretty much written. For one thing, his nickname, a shortened version of his title, is a sort of fish. And yes, he’s a retired naval officer, but even so… His first name is pretty much nonedescript because no one ever uses it. Everyone close to him uses his nickname, even the heroine. As far as fish names go, I can think of better ones–Hal, short for Viscount Halibut–but there are also minor characters called Henry and Harry. Not that he has to have a fish name–I’m trying to get away from the fish motif, you understand. And it bothers me that somehow, in not having the right name, I don’t have the proper handle on the character. Eeek.

So I did a bit of research on favorite names and it’s a small but level playing field in the 18th-19th century: lots of Johns and Williams. There’s a list at thinkbabynames.com but I’m not sure how accurate it is in relation to usage then or or now, and some are specific to the US. For a list of popular English girls’ names in the eighteenth century, there’s some good information in Female Names over the Centuries.

I like old-fashioned interchangeable male/female names like Evelyn and Joslyn. (Did you know that John Wayne’s real name was Marion Michael Morrison and he adopted the nickname Duke in his youth?)

The book Bad Baby Names by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback,was reviewed in the NY Times by John Tierney:

By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg (including Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut and Ima Hooker).

The authors also interviewed adults today who had survived names like Candy Stohr, Cash Guy, Mary Christmas, River Jordan and Rasp Berry. All of them, even Happy Day, seemed untraumatized.

A contest that followed the review for the worst modern name came up with this winner:

Iona Knipl. The judges chose it because, in addition to being an embarrassing pun, it also set up an inevitable reply from people imagining they were being wittily original. I called up Miss Knipl and asked her how many times she had heard someone meet her and reply, “I own two.”

As for names that seem to have implicit meaning, if you read Chuck Shepherds’s News of the Weird, you’ll know that the name Wayne has unfortunate connotations and the column has regular Wayne updates.

So I won’t be renaming my hero Wayne.

Here’s a short story I wrote in 2001 at the writing site Toasted Cheese, all about the different forms of names and what they can say about characters.

The hero in A Most Lamentable Comedy is called Nicholas Congrevance, because I like the first name and his surname is a French Arthurian name I came across that seems suitably foreign and exotic. The heroine was originally named Mary, which I found a very stultifying good girl name (although her first appearance in The Rules was as a very bad girl indeed) so I changed it to Caroline, and she took off. The book is released July 23 and you can order it with free shipping from bookdepository.co.uk. And don’t forget the contest at my website!

Compulsory promotion over, what are your favorite names in fiction and in real life? Is there an interesting story behind a character’s name in one of your books?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged A Most Lamentable Comedy, Names, News of the Weird, The Rules of Gentility, Top Ten Things, Wayne | 10 Replies

Travels in Syria – Virtually

Updated on July 1, 2009 by carolyn

When I started writing my October historical release, Indiscreet, I didn’t intend for the story to be set anywhere but in England. But my heroine, Sabine, had been so terribly wronged, she and her uncle (and guardian) had to leave the country. Well. Where would they go? Europe smack in the middle of the Napoleonic wars would be a bit dicey.

For some reason my brain brought up the Ottoman Empire, as mentioned in previous posts here. Syria happened to be a province at the time and Aleppo, one of its most famous cities, had a crucial location and role in the period. This city was a main stop for caravans going to the Orient or back toward the port city of Iskenderun. But Aleppo (Haleb, as it is more accurately spelled today) isn’t the only fascinating place in Syria.

The Roman city of Serjilla is one place I’d love to visit.
Picture courtesy of traveladventures.org

Then there’s the castle of Bagras, of which Wikipedia has this to say:

Bagras or Baghras is the name of a town and nearby castle in present-day Turkey, in the Amanus Mountains.

The castle, properly known as Gastun (or Gaston, Guascon, Gastim) provided a base for a force to cover the Syrian Gates, the passes between İskenderun and Antioch. It was built in two levels around a knoll, the fortification resembling Armenian work, and with water supplied by aqueducts.[1]

It was built about 1153 by the Knights Templars[1] and held by them or by the Principality of Antioch until it was forced to capitulate to Saladin on 26 August 1189. It was retaken in 1191 by the Armenians (under Leo II),[1] and their possession of it became a major point of contention between them and the Antiochenes and Templars.

After much negotiation, it was finally returned to the Templars in 1216. According to the Armenian chronicles, it withstood a siege by the forces of Aleppo at about this time.[2] After the fall of Antioch to Baibars in 1268, the garrison lost heart, and one of the brothers deserted and presented the keys of the castle to him. The remaining defenders decided to destroy what they could and surrender the castle. Despite the loss of the castle, Hethum II of Armenia and Leo IV of Armenia soundly defeated a Mamluk raiding force in the nearby pass in 1305.

In America, we tend to think of England has having some real but the UK has nothing on a country like Syria (Some very interesting information at that link). And with vistas like this:

There’s also the water wheels in the Syrian city of Hama. When Syria talks about history, don’t be surprised if they’re talking about the Iron Age. Here’s a great link to a website that had pictures of traditional costumes You probably won’t be surprised if I tell that I wasn’t very far into my research before I wanted to visit Syria.