The winner of a copy of Rogue in My Arms is…Alison! Congrats! Please send your snail mail info to us at riskies AT yahoo.com
The winner of a copy of Rogue in My Arms is…Alison! Congrats! Please send your snail mail info to us at riskies AT yahoo.com
Well. How’s everyone doing? I still want to be Venetia when I grow up.
Venetia and Damerel have met and he is, of course, doomed. My goodness, but those two are really suited to each other. Sigh.
Chapter 8 pits Damerel and another of Venetia’s admirers, young Mr. Denny. The VERY young Mr. Oswald Denny. I couldn’t help admiring Oswald’s passion even while I was laughing at his complete mistake of everything with respect to Venetia’s feelings for him. Such a teenage boy. Venetia, I do think, could have handled Oswald better. In this, I think, she was quite naive (see question posed at the end).
How much of himself does Damerel see in Oswald? Do you think the comparison is apt? And yet, as Heyer notes, Oswald sees more clearly than Edward Yardley. Is Heyer saying something about youth or making a sideways stab at Yardley being more or less a pompous @ss. After all, if Oswald can see that Venetia and Damerel are head over heels, why doesn’t Edward Yardley? (Because he is P.A., that’s why.)
In this week’s chapters, Damerel and Venetia seem pretty solidly in love, though they don’t quite fess up to each other or themselves, and there’s way too much of the book left for them to just go on like this. I thought the brother would show up, but in these chapters, that doesn’t happen.
Instead, disaster strikes in the form of the unexpected arrival of the absent brother’s wife (!!) and her horrible mother. There is no better foil for Venetia’s goodness and nobility than this awful woman.
And what is the result of placing Venetia in the clutches of this woman? Well, it becomes absolutely positively plain that Venetia must do something. Anything would be better than staying. Heck, marrying Edward Yardley would be better than staying at Undershaw.
One of the results is some of my favorite bits of this book. Damerel, in the grip of very strong emotion;
You remained, and always will, a beautiful, desirable creature. Only my intentions were changed. I resolved to do you no hurt, but leave you I could not!
And then just a little later:
When you smile at me like this, it’s all holiday with me! O God, I love you to the edge of madness, Venetia, but I’m not mad yet– not so mad that I don’t know how disastrous it might be to you– to us both! You don’t realize what an advantage I should be taking of your innocence.
Holy Mackerel!! Or, as I like to say, ::swoon::
At the conclusion of Chapter 8, Venetia is about to do the unthinkable: go to Damerel’s house alone. She is aware of the impropriety, but she trusts him and needs his advice. And you, know, there really isn’t anyone else for her to turn to. No one in her circle of acquaintances is suitable to hear her tell the truth about her situation and the choices she sees open to her. Only Damerel will do. And she’s right.
What did you-all think? Favorite scenes? Observations? Spill.
On Twitter, some of us were debating whether Venetia is naive. I would agree that naive is perhaps not quite the right word. So what is?
Opine in the comments.
Our Risky Regencies Read Along of Venetia, spearheaded by Carolyn, is turning out to be a great fun. It was a new idea and I’ve been enjoying it immensely.
There are a couple more new ideas that have also captured my interest in the last week.
The first is a new blog started by friends of mine, Kristine Hughes and Victoria Hinshaw. For those of you who write in the Regency and Victorian time periods, you probably have Kristine’s book, Writers Guide to Everyday Life in Regency and Victorian England. (If not, she’s selling that and more on CD-just follow that link). Victoria Hinshaw is the author of several traditional regencies.
What Kristine and Vicky have in common is a love of research, especially researching Georgian/Regency/Victorian England. They also have a great sense of fun, so when they told me they were starting a blog, I knew I’d love it.
The blog is called Number One London. It launched on March 20 and here’s what they had the very first day:
Curiosity Corner – a recurring feature, this time a portrait and the task is to guess who it is.
Announcement of a Writer in Residence program – you could be awarded a stipend to spend two month to a year in Stratford on Avon! (have I got your attention now?)
Sharpe in India
All you ever wanted to know about franking a letter
Waterloo Bridge
Archive CD books online (you know I was excited about that one!!)
So check it out! I’m betting it will be almost as fun and educational as Risky Regencies.
Next new thing is from YouTube via ABC Nightly News.
Remember the remake of We Are The World debuted during the Superbowl? I was watching ABC news and Diane Sawyer did a story of another version of We Are The World done by ordinary people from all over the world. It was the idea of Lisa Lavie, a singer, who chose 57 other singers from YouTube and asked each of them to tape themselves singing We Are the World. Then she spliced them all together.
Here is the result:
These everyday people, from all over the world, were simply fantastic.
(for an interview with Lisa Lavie with Diane Sawyer, look Here.
Next Monday I’ll have something new to announce! A new book (well, an anthology) and a book giveaway. And more!
What’s new with you? Any new experiences? Tell us!
The Riskies are happy to welcome to the blog for the first time Celeste Bradley! Leave a comment for the chance to win a copy of Rogue in My Arms…
“There’s passion, adventure, non-stop action, and secrets that make the pages fly by” –RT Book Reviews
Celeste: Hi Risky Regencies! So nice to be here!
Riskies: Welcome! Tell us about Rogue in My Arms and the whole “Runaway Brides” series…
Celeste: This has been so much fun to write! All daddies, all the time. The Runaway Brides trilogy had the working title of “Three Lords and a Baby.” One day a tiny girl, Melody, is dropped off on the steps of Brown’s Club for Distinguished Gentlemen with nothing but a note claiming that her father is a member of the club. Since most of the club’s members are long past the sowing of their oats, the finger seems to point to the youngest three members, Lord Aidan de Quincy, Sir Colin Lambert, and Lord Jack Redgrave.
In the first novel, Devil in My Bed, Aidan forces himself to face his past and find the woman who broke his heart more than three years past. Madeleine Chandler is running from her own past so fast that she runs right back into Aidan’s arms, at least long enough to get his help in leaving the country. One small lie about having Aidan’s baby doesn’t seem too high a price to pay for temporary sanctuary, until the love she thought was lost returns tenfold. Now with so much more to lose, how can Madeleine confess the truth?
In the second book, Rogue in My Arms, Sir Colin Lambert is searching for the stunning actress Chantal, who rejected him so soundly that he has never looked at another woman since. If he can offer her his new title and wealth, and make their child legitimate, surely she will wed him now? But Chantal has disappeared and Colin must hire saucy theater seamstress Prudence Filby to help him in his search. However, plain and common Pru is really a lady in hiding, protecting her young brother from greedy relations who would steal the inheritance he will receive when he comes of age. Now out of work and broke because Chantal fled town without paying her, Pru and her brother join the search for the flighty actress.
The journey takes them from London to Brighton to Bath, a mad race to catch up with Chantal before she weds another. On the way they encounter scoundrels, players and bandits, along with a string of other lovelorn men hell-bent to find Chantal! When Pru realizes that Colin is a man she could truly love, she can’t bear that he still adores the selfish Chantal. When Colin realizes that Pru is so much more than he first believed, he realizes that he must make a choice. Wed the woman he loves and doom his child to permanent illegitimacy, or try to make a family with the mother of his child?
Rogue in My Arms will be released March 30th! And the third novel, Scoundrel in My Dreams is in progress at the moment. It will tell the poignant story of Lord John “Jack” Redgrave and his journey back from the trauma of war and the discovery of a love he never knew waited for him at home. It will be released in Fall 2010…
Riskies: And what was the inspiration behind this series?
Celeste: I was pondering fatherhood, actually! What makes a man a father? Is it blood? Is it simply a protective instinct? Motherhood is simple and biological–we must love our children. What if any man could learn to be a father, whether the child was his or not? These three men each suspect that Melody is theirs. Yet when they eventually learn the truth, should that change the love that has grown in them? Can letting one little girl into a man’s heart expand it enough to heal old wounds and allow him to love again?
Riskies: Did you come across any interesting or surprising research for these stories?
Celeste: Always! I loved learning about Bath, England. So much fascinating history, dating from Roman times. The story didn’t lend itself to including all the great facts I discovered. I had to be careful it didn’t become “Colin and Pru Go To Bath” because it really could have! I’m going to have to set an entire novel there someday.
In Devil in My Bed I think I enjoyed learning about dumbwaiters the most. I found a lot of 1800 news articles about tragic accidents involving people climbing into dumbwaiters. They would try to use them to get into locked rooms, or to spy on their neighbors, or to escape a bill-collector at the apartment door. Doesn’t that inspire a string of stories in your head??
Riskies: What’s “risky” about this book?
Celeste: Well, I always take risks. I’m notorious for being far-fetched and “history-lite.” I love the Regency era but I can’t resist playing with the facts. I once wrote a book about the Prince Regent clambering through the storm drains with my hero and heroines, but since he would have been close to 80 at the time, I blithely snipped 20 years off his age and went for it. In Rogue, I think the riskiest thing I did was to dispense with a lot of overwrought conflict about class distinctions. As accurate as that might have been to the time, it would have made my characters seems shallow to a modern reader. Besides, money and rank cancels a lot of social errors, even now!
And my love scenes are pretty risky! Of course I have included, as always, my most beloved moment–a bathing scene!–and my favorite device–kidnapping! A Regency novel without a kidnapping is like Star Trek without the Enterprise.
Riskies: LOL! And what’s coming up next for you?
Celeste: I’m very excited about the release of Rogue in a couple of weeks, of course! I’m currently finishing up the third novel, Scoundrel in My Dreams, for publication this fall. I’ll be at the Romantic Times Convention in Columbus in April, and at RomCon in Denver in July. Details are here at my website.
And as I write this I’m on a plane to New York to meet with my agent and publisher about something really new and exciting! Something I can’t tell anyone about yet! It’s killing me to keep quiet, but updates will be on my website very soon.
I’d also like to add a note about my favorite cause, which is Literacy. I believe that most of the evils of the world could be cured with education and the empowerment and tolerance that comes with being well-read. This is a women’s issue as well, since two-thirds of the world’s under-educated are women. A clearinghouse of literacy projects exists at ProLiteracy.org. If you’d like more information, visit this website and join the effort to prevent ignorance and intolerance worldwide!
Yesterday, I got word that I got a job writing back cover copy for–yes–romance novels! How awesomely cool is that?
And then I felt mildly okay about myself that I was such a punster, because that kind of wordplay will come in handy when writing those big font lines that entice the reader.
Like:
He Was Mad . . .
Lord McCrazypants has been shut in his castle alone for nearly ten years. Distraught after the death of his beloved pet snake–a rarity in his native Ireland–Feargal slithers around his castle, looking menacing, fiercely handsome and muscular, despite not doing anything but the aforementioned slithering. And then he discovers his inner snake . . .
. . . But She Was Crazy For Him
Miss Uprightly British detests Ireland. The only good thing? No snakes. So when Miss Brit gets accidentally sent to a castle inhabited by an insane lord with a passion for the no-footed reptiles, Miss Brit hisses. But when she finds the lord is handsome and muscular and has a way of making her blood run cold, she knows he will slither his way into her heart. And she will shed her prissy skin.
Heh. I have, unfortunately for him, passed on my love of puns and wordsmithery to my son; he’s ten, and his class did a long study of the War Between the States. His essay on it was titled “This War Is Anything But Civil.” My poor husband just sighed, remembering how I’d told him I’d written a paper on Hamlet titled “Hamlet: A Not So Great Dane.”
So anyway, not much else to add; I’ve been writing every day, adding a new freelance job to the already busy mix (see above), and enjoying Spring. More on the new job, the writing and all that kind of stuff in future Fridays. Meanwhile, wanna take a stab at writing some back cover copy yourself?