Back to Top

Monthly Archives: February 2011

So finally I was able to open up my current document and do some writing. It felt good, and I want to do more of it.

But then there’s this whole job thing, so we’ll see about that.

Anyway, meanwhile, a friend recommended a book that sounded really great, so I got a copy and started reading it on my lovely subway commute (I should just start calling it the LSC, since I am so appreciative of it, since I get to read). It is great. It is phenomenally up my alley.

But it’s secondary food.

Let me explain. Back in college, I had a friend who was the result of a German woman marrying a Japanese man. A made in World War II relationship. My friend, let’s call him Mr. Axis Power, told me how in the beginning of their marriage, his mom would cook all sorts of things–German things, of course–for her husband. She’d ask him how it was, and he would say, “It’s good, for secondary food.”

This baffled her. She kept trying, doubtless serving all sorts of delicious schnitzels, and roesti, and big meat dishes. Still–the only praise she received was “good for secondary food.”

Eventually, the two figured out the problem; for him, being Japanese, rice was primary; all other foods were secondary.

So back to me. For me, romance is primary; all other genres are secondary. I am loving this book, but it’s not compelling me to read as it would if it were an equally fantastic romance. It’s good–for secondary food.

And so my next book after I finish this one (The Devil You Know by Mike Carey, btw) will be a palate cleansing primary food, a romance carefully chosen from the stack.

And hey, any day where I can equate books and food is a good one, right?

Megan

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 9 Replies

First some news–my next book about Jane and the Damned is coming out in October and now has a title, Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion. I’ve also seen the cover but I can’t show it to you yet. Cool! This illustration is my favorite still from the book trailer of Jane and the Damned.

Following last week’s post about the pros and cons of different historical periods it seems only natural (to me anyway) today to delve into subgenres. Lucky us, we have so much choice in the sort of books available and the merging of once-discrete subgenres. It can be confusing! So here’s a field map to some scenarios and how they’d play out.

Hero wears

  • Quietly elegant clothes made by London’s top tailor. You know, the exclusive one only the Big Guys know about.
  • Pants so tight you really don’t notice anything else and a shirt that unbuttons all the way down
  • Subtly scented oil
  • Quietly elegant clothes made by London’s top tailor but cut to accommodate the wings or any other little (or big) extra(s) and/or martial arts weapons

Heroine wears

  • Demure sprigged cotton, bonnet, gloves, the whole shebang
  • Red satin with a dozen tiny buttons down the back etc.
  • Subtly scented oil
  • The usual sort of Regency stuff but with many hidden pockets for stakes, knives, martial arts weapons

They go for a walk in the woods.

  • He picks flowers which she and her chaperone squeal over with delight
  • Not much walking going on here
  • Even less here
  • A possible declaration of love is thwarted by an attack by the creatures of darkness

He retires to the library to

  • Sigh gently over a half-composed poem and figure out how best to serve the needy and poor on the estate
  • Above, pants optional. Some of those tenants are very needy.
  • Enter the orgy room through the false bookcase (note: they’re all false. No time for reading in this world!)
  • Plan strategy to eliminate creatures of darkness

Hero and heroine ride together in a carriage

  • When the chaperone falls asleep, they allow their hands to touch for one precious, poignant moment
  • Athletic goings-on strain the framework of the carriage
  • Above, but chaperone, coachman, and postilions join in
  • Fierce fight as creatures of darkness or whatever swarm over the vehicle

When they arrive in London, the heroine agonizes over whether she’ll receive

  • Vouchers for Almacks
  • Invitations to soirees full of hot, young, single Dukes
  • Invitations to orgies
  • Invitation to summit to fight off creatures of darkness, which are now becoming tedious to me and will catch a mysterious virus and slink back to whence they came

The heroine becomes pregnant after

  • The marriage night, thank you very much
  • About page 35 but she doesn’t realize it until everyone else has, including the exasperated reader
  • Pregnant? I don’t think so
  • Hero assures her the creatures of darkness are vanquished. But wait…

Your suggestions?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 3 Replies

OK, let’s see if I can pull off this post. If not, I blame it on whatever little beastie went after Amanda’s computer. My intention is to bring this around to the Regency era. (waving of hands.)

Country Living

I live in the country, and the other day, I tweeted the picture you see here. (Blogger isn’t letting me add images right now so I’m off to fetch the embed code from my flickr account . . . BRB) snowonSonomaMountains_20110219_1

OK! I took that picture from the deck of my house this past weekend. What I was thinking at the time was that there was SNOW on the mountains. SNOW! Around here, we call them the Sonoma Mountains, even though everyone knows they’re really just hills. The snow level has to be down to 1500-2000 feet for there to be snow on the Sonoma Mountains.

I tweeted the picture thinking everyone would be all, OMG, that’s SNOW on the Sonoma Mountains and that one or two people who live where there is actual weather would tell me to grow a pair. (Hey, I stood on the deck in my jammies and slippers and took that picture! It was kind of cold. Sort of.) I just looked up the elevation of my town. It’s 12-400 feet. That morning, the house was about 30 minutes and 1500 feet of elevation from SNOW and 30 minutes and let’s say 12-400 feet of elevation from the Pacific Ocean.

Instead of the comments I expected, many people on twitter said they wanted to move in with me. Because, as I had actually forgotten in my excitement over SNOW!! on the Sonoma Mountains, our house has a spectacular view. In fact, most of that side of the house is sliding glass doors that look onto variations of that view. Mostly without snow, I should add.

Which Got Me To Thinking

If you live in a city, it’s easy to get divorced from nature. In the US, most of us aren’t getting our food from a garden or the farm, or the neighbor’s farm. We get eggs from the store, not chickens. Our meat comes from the meat department, not from the butchered pig we raised.

When we eat a delicious melon, we don’t save the seeds so we can plant them and eat the same melon again next year.

When we go outside at night, we can’t see the stars and for many of us, we can barely see the moon.

We have declining variety in our food because we stopped saving seeds to plant.

A few stories

We have chickens at our house, and my son has grown up on fresh eggs from chickens that roam around during the day eating what comes naturally to chickens. Eggs from chickens like this taste different. They look different — the yolks are an intense golden-yellow-orange. They behave differently in recipes.

Then a coyote ate the chickens — during the day! and we had to buy store bought eggs while we waited for the weather to warm up enough for us to buy new chicks, and then for the chicks to turn into hens and then for the eggs to get past the tiny pullet stage . . .

The first time my son saw scrambled eggs from store bought eggs, he wanted to know what was wrong with them. Because they were anemic looking. They were pale, pale, yellow instead of a strong yellow. They didn’t taste all that great either. Compared to real eggs.

Fresh vegetables from a garden are kind of the same experience.

Not Lambchops!

When I was a kid, my folks had one of our lambs slaughtered and my mom fed us lamb chops shortly thereafter. We all sat there, in silence, staring at our plates. No one moved to so much as pick up a fork. We were all thinking how we’d watched that lamb gamboling in the field. My mother sighed, took away the lamb chops and fed us Cheerios for dinner.

She could do that because my father was a physician and she had been to the grocery store to buy food. We didn’t need those home grown lamb chops for survival. It’s astonishing when you think about it.

The Regency!

And all that got me to thinking that if you don’t have electricity, you know what dark is. You know there are degrees of outside dark at night and how incredibly bright a full moon is. You can see the stars at night.

Even if you, in the Regency past, do not yourself farm, you are aware of the seasons of farming and what that means for the food that can be easily put on your plate at a given season. Your mode of transportation is your own two feet or powered by an animal who must be fed, watered and cared for.

In the developed world of the 21st century we’ve gotten very far from nature, and every now and then, I get reminded of that.

Since I write stories set in the past, I think it’s a good idea for me to occasionally take a few moments to think of all the ways I am divorced from nature and all the lore we no longer know– because we have no reason to care exactly when the full moon is, for example — and that people in the Regency did know.

Not that I’d give up my civil rights, vaccinations or my iPhone. But it’s interesting to think about.

What do you think we miss most from that past? What modern invention could you least do without? Let’s take medicine off the table on that last one because everyone chiming in with “Antibiotics!” and “Emergency Room Staff” would get dull pretty quickly.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 8 Replies

Note from Amanda: Thanks to my computer choosing last weekend to have a Complete and Utter Meltdown, I was not able to post Elaine Golden’s guest blog! She has graciously agreed to reschedule for today–and is offering a giveaway as well! Welcome to the Riskies, Elaine…

One of the things I love most about writing historical romance is the research. Oh, I don’t particulraly care about poking around in dusty tomes, but I do love to learn little tidbits about how things were, how people thought and lived differently than they do today. I’ve been known to get lost randomly flipping around in an encyclopedia, or the modern day equivalent by following curious links in Wikipedia. I even keep a Historical Trivia page on my blog filled with odd historical facts (as well as blurbs and excerpts!).

The old author’s adage suggests to “write what you know.” Research is an essential tool to understand the dynamics of the era, and to present a story that will immerse readers in the culture and trappings of an historical romance.

The Internet is such a vast resource for historical research. There are wonderful bloggers who share their knowledge of the era, digitized maps and images and period publications, and there are endless photographs from tourists and travelers. So very many resources available at our fingertips!

And such interesting things I have discovered as I research the Regency era for my Fortney Follies series published by Harlequin Historical Undone!
–The British Regency nearly began 22 years before the Regency Act was passed on February 5, 1811. The reigning George III suffered several bouts of mental illness during his reign and in 1789 Parliament almost passed the Regency Act after a great deal of debate. Only a swift recovery from the King at that time stopped things. I blogged about it earlier this month on the Harlequin Blog.

–When researching the origin of the Regency phrase “in the pink” I discovered the phrase’s origins–and a whole lot more. Dod you know the color pink was considered a “masculine” cover until the 1940s? I blogged about all things to do with pink on my site…

–The Prince Regent loved Brighton and taking the waters there. And he had a favorite bather, a local character named Martha Gunn. I’ve also blogged about bathing in Brighton, Prinny, and Marth on my site!

Earlier this month Diane Gaston posted some great links on Regency research. In addition to those wonderful sites, some of my own favorite Internet links include:
The Online Etymology Dictionary: Not a traditional dictionary, but an explanation of the origin of words and what they meant at various points in time. Ever wonder if a word is historically accurate? What it meant to the Regency hero or heroine? You’d be amazed at how the meaning of a word can change so radically over the centuries!

–Historical Map overlays with Google Maps: Match historical avenues and parks to today’s view of the world!

Do you have a fun bit of Regency trivia to share? Favorite website for Regency research?

Comment on this blog post for a chance to win an electronic copy of my debut Regency romance, An Imprudent Lady! I’ll select two winners at random at 6 pm Pacific time on Wednesday, February 23…

And do check out other Undones! These short sexy romances are perfect when you have limited time but want a great romance to read. Michelle Styles generously shares this month with me, offering a sexy Roman-era romance with The Perfect Concubine

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 17 Replies

Today is Presidents’ Day, a National Holiday celebrating the birthdays of our two greatest presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (No, it is not just an excuse for some really good sales!).

I decided to look into how Washington and Lincoln might “intersect” with our England, if not just the Regency and to tell you things I learned that I didn’t know (or remember) from my American History school textbooks.

Washington, as we all know, was Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, leading the American victory over Britain in the Revolutionary War. The pivotal battle in the American War of Independence was the Battle of Yorktown, when Washington’s army defeated Cornwallis’s British Army. Cornwallis died in 1805, but certainly his life affected the Regency.

Things I didn’t know:

  • Cornwallis wasn’t just a bad guy, as I thought in elementary school. In fact, he took leave from the Revolutionary War to be at the side of his dying wife.
  • Cornwallis wasn’t perfect, though. He did not exactly approach the defeat of Yorktown as a gentleman. Instead, he feigned illness and sent his second in command to formally surrender his sword to Washington.
  • He did redeem himself in the eyes of Britain, though, going on to become civil military governor in India and Ireland and bringing about significant changes. In Ireland he helped to bring about the Act of Union, and in India, Permanent Settlement.
  • Half of Washington’s army at Yorktown were French soldiers under the command of Rochambeau.
  • Washington, who could not tell a lie, sent fake dispatches to Cornwallis’s superior in New York, convincing him that the American attack would be on New York and not Yorktown.

Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809, a year before “our” Regency time period and his leadership during the American Civil War made him one of our greatest presidents, but, in looking into how his life might have intersected with Britain, I discovered things I did not know.

Things I didn’t know:

  • Lincoln was almost involved in a war with Britain.
Confederate president Jefferson Davis sent two special commissioners to Great Britain, James M. Mason and John Slidell, to England and France as part of a plan to involve Great Britain into a war with America. As they were crossing the Atlantic, an American Captain, Charles Wilkes (who turned out to be a Confederate spy, which shows how convoluted this period of US history was), stopped the British ship on which they were passengers and, with no authority from anybody, had the two commissioners taken into his custody. Known as the Trent Affair, all of Great Britain rose up in outrage at this illegal act. War fever was at high pitch and British men were enlisting in the army in great numbers to sail to America and right this wrong.

  • Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert was instrumental in averting this war.

The Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, wrote a harsh ultimatum to President Lincoln, basically threatening war. When this letter reached Queen Victoria for approval, she sought her husband’s advice. Prince Albert, ill with the fever that would take his life soon after, rose from his bed to draft a less volatile missive, one that would not provoke war. It was his last political act.

  • Lincoln was almost involved in a world war.
During the time of the Trent Affair, Russia was the enemy of England and France. The Czar of Russia sent a fleet of warships to New York and his admirals had instructions to report to President Lincoln if Great Britain did indeed declare war on the US. Who knows what the outcome of that war would have been for the world? Russia and the US on one side; the Confederacy, Great Britain, and France on the other.

Thank goodness Queen Victoria listened to her husband.

Ain’t history grand? What historical facts have surprised you recently? What are you doing this Presidents’ Day?

I have a new contest on my website.
Blogging at DianeGaston.com

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 11 Replies
Follow
Get every new post delivered to your inbox
Join millions of other followers
Powered By WPFruits.com