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Monthly Archives: October 2011

Today’s guest is someone I’ve known online for sometime but met in person just this last weekend at the JASNA-AGM in Fort Worth, TX: Laurel Ann Nattress, the editor of a fabulous anthology of Austen-inspired stories, Jane Austen Made Me Do It (and I’m one of the authors!). We had a terrific book launch party for JAMMDI, my Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion, and the newest release from another anthology contributor, Carrie Bebris’ The Affair at Lime.

A life-long acolyte of Jane Austen, Laurel Ann Nattress is the author/editor of Austenprose a blog devoted to the oeuvre of her favorite author and the many books and movies that she has inspired. She is a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, a regular contributor to the PBS blog Remotely Connected and the Jane Austen Centre online magazine. An expatriate of southern California, Laurel Ann lives in a country cottage near Snohomish, Washington. Visit Laurel Ann at her blogs Austenprose and JaneAustenMadeMeDoIt, on Twitter as @Austenprose, and on Facebook as Laurel Ann Nattress.

Tell us the story behind the story–how did this anthology come about?

As a long-time Jane Austen fan, I had read all of her novels numerous times, moved on to the movies and sequels, and started my blog, Austenprose, in 2007. While working with Austenesque authors on publicity for their books, I began to see a thread that connected them all together. What if I edited an anthology of short stories inspired by Austen? At that time, there were many sequels and Austen-inspired novels in print, but no short story collections. My biggest challenge was how to get it published. I had no idea, but asked authors Diana Birchall, Margaret Sullivan and Laurie Viera Rigler for advice. Before I could reach out to anyone with my book proposal, I received an email from an agent of an author who I was working with on my blog thanking me for the great job I had done his client publicize the book. I saw an opportunity and immediately wrote back and pitched my anthology. He was an Austen fan too and immediately loved the idea. Within a week, I had my deal with Ballantine. It was just too surreal.

You’ve anticipated my usual question of whether your book was a hard sell, but that’s an awesome story. Congratulations!

My “road to publication” story is one in a million. When I started my blog years ago, I never dreamed that it would culminate into a book, but it did. One hears horror stories of how authors pitching their novels for years and enduring painful rejections and multiple rewrites before they capture the deal. Many times it never happens. The industry can be brutal. After my deal with Ballantine closed, I felt terribly guilty for about five minutes. I had to remember that I had been working diligently for years and give myself credit for developing relationships with so many of the Austenesque authors. I also had to credit the Fates. My number was up and all my stars and planets were in perfect alignment.

The thought of doing what you did (and dealing with people like me) terrifies me: was it really like herding cats?

Oh Janet. You are such a card. Authors difficult? Naw! You are not the first person to liken authors to herding cats. I am a cat lover, so it was not a challenge. 😉

I was all prepared for diva dramatics, but they did not materialize. Sorry to disappoint, but you were a charm to work with, and so were all other twenty-three authors! Luckily, we had many months to develop stories and edit them. I credit my editor at Ballantine for giving a newbie editor the extra time. It made all the difference in getting stories that the authors had a chance to contemplate and refine before they submitted them. We also allowed a bit of time for rewrites. It was the perfect storm.

Lizzy and Darcy … why do they continue to fascinate us endlessly, as opposed to, for instance, Anne and Wentworth? Do you think another Austen couple could be the next big thing?

Lizzy and Darcy are a hard act to follow. I think that they are legendary because their romance is hard wrought and so satisfying. Lizzy goes from disliking Darcy intensely and rejecting his proposal, to being transformed after seeing his great estate at Pemberley! It may sound mercenary, but in Regency times, a man’s estate was a reflection of his integrity and style. Darcy saving her family’s social reputation by finding the naughty elopees, Lydia and Wickham, and then buying off the groom did not hurt either. It’s hard to pinpoint which of Austen’s couples could ever match them. I don’t think it is possible, but I do root for Catherine and Henry Tilney. Northanger Abbey is terribly underrated and I hope that readers will come to love it and the young hero and heroine more in the future.

Who is your favorite Austen couple?

I tend to like the antagonists in Austen oeuvre more that the feature romantic couple. They can be so much more interesting. Brother and sister Mary and Henry Crawford from Mansfield Park are just twisted enough to be intriguing, and Lady Susan Vernon and Reginald De Courcy in Lady Susan are about as far from innocent star crossed lovers as you can get. I guess you can say I like to be shocked by breaches in propriety – all within the realm of proper Austen decorum mind you! If I had to choose a nice couple to root for, it would be Harriet Smith and Robert Martin from Emma. They end up together after a few detours and their personalities leave the door wide open for some bumps in their married life.

Which is your favorite Austen? Why?

I will be presumptuous and assume that you mean my favorite Jane Austen book, right? Oh this is so hard to choose. I could give the politically correct answer and say that my favorite Jane Austen novel is the one I am currently reading, but I won’t, and will go out on a limb and say it wavers between Mansfield Park and Lady Susan. Are you shocked? Oh, I do dearly love to laugh with Pride and Prejudice and get pierced through my soul with Persuasion, but I am one to root for the underdog, so I will stick with my first choices. Both stories have very strong antagonists that are actually the protagonists. I love that dichotomy.

Which biography of Austen would you recommend?

Definitely Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life. Great research and scholarly detail, but told in an interesting fiction-like manner.

Tell us about the pemberley.com contest and the judging process for it.

The Jane Austen Made Me Do It Short Story contest was an incredible challenge for me all around, but it was also great fun too! Jane Austen was devoted to her craft and has been inspiring writers for centuries. A short story contest for unpublished authors was in spirit with her ideals, so I pitched the idea to my editor and she liked it also. We never expected to receive eighty-eight stories! With the help of Myretta Robens at The Republic of Pemberley , we proofed, formatted and posted on the contest board about three quarters of those stories within the last three days! Talk about writers procrastination! The voters narrowed down the list to the Top Ten and my editor and I chose the Grand Prize winner. It was a tough call. I trusted my initial gut reaction to the winning story. The Love Letter by Brenna Aubrey made me cry. It was an incredible debut story that I hope many will have the chance to read.

What’s next for you?

Hmm? That’s a tricky question Janet. If I answered you honestly, I would let the cat out of the bag. Since I like to herd cats, I will leave that to your imagination.

Thanks for hosting me today on Riskies during my Grand Tour of the blogosphere in celebration of the release of Jane Austen Made Me Do It. It was a pleasure.

Enter a chance to win one copy of Jane Austen Made Me Do It by leaving a comment by Sunday, October 23, stating what intrigues you about reading an Austen-inspired short story anthology. Winners to be drawn at random and announced on October 25. Shipment to US and Canadian addresses only. Good luck to all!

Happy Halloween!

My quick surfing of the net and peek into Google Books yielded very little information about Halloween during the Regency.
In 1818, Blackwood’s Magazine entertained its readers with ghost stories from Wales (as opposed to Scotland, where such stories usually originated, apparently). Witches, ghosts, demons, evil spirits, dogs of hell, fairies, corpse candles, and something called Kyhirraeth, a “doleful foreboding noise before death,” were discussed.
This example amused me:

The Rev. Mr Thomas Baddy, who lived in Denbigh town, and was a dissenting minister in that place, went into his study one night, and while he was reading or writing, he heard some one behind him laughing and grinning at him, which made him stop a little. It came again, and there he wrote on a piece of paper, that devil wounding scripture, 1 John iii. ‘ For this was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil,’ and held it backwards towards him, and the laughing ceased for ever; for it was a melancholy word to a scoffing devil, and enough.

Clever fellow, Reverend Tom. Nerves of steel, as well. I believe I would have screamed and run from the room.

It seemed to me that the Regency era people prided themselves on being rational, with no time for such nonsense as ghosts and witches and fairies. I suspect the prevailing view on the occult was similar to Sir Walter Scott’s.
In Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Scott clearly scoffs at ghost sightings and such. He believes in rational explanations for events which are credited to the supernatural.

Here’s an example in Scott’s words:

The remarkable circumstance of Thomas, the second Lord Lyttelton, prophesying his own death within a few minutes, upon the information of an apparition, has been always quoted as a true story. But of late it has been said and published, that the unfortunate nobleman had previously determined to take poison, and of course had it in his own power to ascertain the execution of the prediction. It was no doubt singular that a man, who meditated his exit from the world, should have chosen to play such a trick on his friends. But it is still more credible that a whimsical man should do so wild a thing than that a messenger should be sent from the dead, to tell a libertine at what precise hour he should expire.

Sir Walter is clearly a skeptic. Too bad he didn’t have access to Celebrity Ghost Stories on the Bio Channel.

Perhaps in Wales and Scotland, families practiced old rituals on Halloween during the Regency. Perhaps people told ghost stories by the light of the fireplace at night and carved turnips into jack o’ lanterns, but I suspect Halloween was not celebrated among the Beau Monde.

I’m celebrating Halloween today with a contest! Seven authors, including me, are hosting a Novel Trick or Treat Contest. Stop by my website to start. We’re each giving away prizes to some lucky commenters, but, like all good trick or treaters, you have to visit each of us in turn. Come join the fun!
How else are you celebrating Halloween today?

Today we are delighted to have Rose Lerner as our guest author. Rose burst onto the scene last year with her debut book, In For A Penny (Amanda listed this book as one of her 2010 favorites). Today Rose will talk about her second book, A Lily Among Thorns.

Praise for A Lily Among Thorns:
“I loved it, even more than I loved In For A Penny…most of all for a heroine who is independent, prickly, and wonderful all at the same time.” — Courtney Milan, author of Unveiled.

“Rose Lerner is masterful at bringing out the details that make characters human, in a way that reminds me of Judith Ivory and Meredith Duran. I highly recommend this novel and can’t wait for her next novel.” — Kat Latham, Reader I created him.
Rose is giving away one signed copy of A Lily Among Thorns to one lucky commenter chosen at random.
A Big Risky Regencies welcome to Rose Lerner!
Tell us about A Lily Among Thorns.

My heroine Serena has been fighting for the past five years to build her hotel’s business and to be safe as a woman alone who’s known to have once worked as a courtesan. Then Solomon walks back into her life. She’s had a secret crush on him for years, ever since he gave her the money she needed to buy back her contract at a brothel, and walked away without touching her. But love, and the vulnerability it brings, terrifies Serena at the best of times–and these are definitely the worst of times. On the heels of Solomon’s arrival, she faces a close friend’s betrayal, the threat of losing her hotel, French spies, and a whole mess of other things that could bring her carefully constructed life crashing down around her ears.

What inspired this story?

Traditional Regencies, actually. There was a certain type of alpha hero who was very popular for a while: he never ever expressed his emotions. He barely had facial expressions. And sometimes, he had a deep, broad, and often unexplained knowledge of the criminal underworld. He was generally saved from his own self-hatred and isolation by the unconditional acceptance of an innocent but unconventional young woman. And I wanted to see what that would look like with the genders flipped.

The book grew from there, of course, but that was the seed.

What is risky about A Lily Among Thorns?

Three things. First, Serena is an embittered ex-courtesan. Remember that conversation last year about “unlikeable heroines”? (If not, my post on the subject is here, about how difficult it is as a woman to express anger and not feel guilty about it, and it’s got links to the original Dear Author post and another post at History Hoydens that I loved.)

Plus, Solomon, my hero, is a beta. He’s socially awkward, geeky, doesn’t have a ton of experience with women, and he works as a chemist for his uncle’s men’s tailoring shop. He’s got no problem standing up to Serena when it matters (and since she’s got some issues, that’s more often than you’d think), but he’s perfectly content to stand back and let her run the show in the general course of things.

The third thing is that the secondary romance is between two men, but I don’t want to say too much about that because there are some major spoilers involved.

Did you come across any interesting research when you were writing A Lily Among Thorns?

Oh, tons! I researched the London criminal world, gay clubs, annulments, chemistry, ethnic diversity in London, women’s property rights, who exactly is entitled to be beheaded instead of hanged, drawn, and quartered when convicted of treason, food and kitchens, the Battle of Waterloo…I could go on. If anyone has any questions about any of those things, I’d love to talk about them with you! Here’s two interesting things I discovered:

British people in the Regency did eat plenty of foreign-inspired food, especially French food. But it was much rarer than it would be a little later, or now, to refer to them by their foreign names. So when Solomon says he knows how to make crème brûlée, he calls it “burnt cream.”

And that story about Nathan Rothschild getting news of Waterloo in advance, tricking everyone at the ‘Change into thinking he knew Wellington lost, and then buying up all the consols and seizing control of England’s finances? Totally false. Also, when I was researching that, you would not believe how many scary anti-Semitic websites I found that used it as an example of how Jews control the world. Anyway, if you want to hear more, I’ve got a blog post about it here with lengthy quotes from a Rothschild biography.

I’ve also got a post on Regency chemistry up over at History Hoydens.

This is your second book, but we at Risky Regencies always love a debut author story. Your debut received some wonderful buzz. Tell us about your journey to publication?

Thank you! I was actually having a really tough time with writing romance when I sold that book. I was having a tough time, period. When I was about a hundred pages into my first draft of In for a Penny, I found out my mom’s cancer was back and that she was going to die. I found out she would never get to read the book, and I didn’t write a word for about six months. My mom introduced me to romance novels and she was always the person I wrote for, the person I knew would love my books.

Eventually I forced myself to finish a draft but it was like pulling teeth, and once I was done, I couldn’t bring myself to edit it. I couldn’t even bring myself to reread it. I had a revised first three chapters, though. I promised myself I’d pitch it at the Emerald City Writers Conference, but if I didn’t get any requests for a full, I didn’t have to look at it ever again.

Well, Leah Hultenschmidt requested the partial, and I sent it to her, and I didn’t hear back. I figured, okay, that’s it then. I didn’t revise it, I didn’t send it out, and I didn’t start my next book, either. I thought maybe it was the end of the line for me and historical romance. Maybe the spark was gone. Heck, it wasn’t like anyone would ever want to publish me anyway.

Then about six months later, Leah requested the full. For a minute there, I was actually kind of mad. I still didn’t believe she was going to buy it, and now I had to go through this whole grueling process and it would all be for nothing, right? But when I read the book again, I kind of liked it. Yeah, it needed a lot of work, but I could fix it. So I dived in, cleaned it up, sent it off, even got my groove back enough to start a new book…and it turned out the spark wasn’t gone at all. I just needed to believe that someone might someday read what I was writing. I just needed to believe that someone might love it.

And then Leah called and said she wanted to buy In for a Penny, and the rest is history!

What is next for you?

I’m not sure. I’m almost done with a draft of a book about the 1812 Parliamentary general election. By the local rules of her town, the middle-class heroine’s husband would be eligible for a vote…if she were married. The younger-son-of-an-earl hero is sent to the town to find the heroine a husband, but of course he falls in love with her himself! But it’s not sold yet so I don’t actually know yet if it will be my next book out or when it will be available. I’ll keep you posted!

There’s plenty to comment about from this interview. Rose’s emotional debut story. The risks she took in this book. The research, especially about the Rothschilds. The whole issue of unlikeable heroines. So there’s no excuse not to leave a comment and earn a chance to win a copy of A Lily Among Thorns.

Or ask Rose a question! She’s coming back from a conference today, but will check in during the evening.
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I don’t participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, often abbreviated to NaNo) every year. For two years, dealing with my husband’s stroke has made writing impossible. At other times, like this year, I’ve been in editing mode, which is a NaNo no-no. The goal is 50,000 words of a new novel.

But I’ve done NaNo three times, “won” twice by hitting the 50,000 wordcount mark, but had a blast each time.

I have heard detractors of NaNo say that it’s a waste of time, that participants produce 50,000 words of garbage that are promptly forgotten, etc… What I say is it’s great for people who always said they wanted to write a novel to give it a try. If nothing else, they learn something about the work of writing and themselves. But it can also be a boon to serious aspiring writers.

If you are the sort of writer who strives to get every chapter right before moving on to the next–and I know several successful, published authors who work this way–NaNo is probably not for you. Unless you have a lot of time and are a fast writer, you may not be able to write as cleanly as you like and still reach the 50,000 word goal.

But if you are like me and many other writers, NaNo is the opportunity to get in a good chunk of first draft. IMHO it’s not about writing 50,000 words that can be submitted to an agent or publisher; it’s about generating ideas and learning about one’s characters.

I find the wordcount goal helps me to focus on that, by ignoring things I can fix later: awkward sentences, background research that doesn’t affect the plot, bits of dialogue that don’t feel period, etc… Although sometimes nuggets of “keeper” prose sneak in, they are just a bonus. What matters is coming out with a lot of new ideas I can use in writing the next draft.

Some people don’t have as good an experience with NaNo as they’d hoped. I’ve heard them complain that they started generating pages of blather just to reach their daily wordcount goals. My advice to anyone this happens to is to stop. You need to forget the wordcount at that point, because you may be bogging down on something important. It’s likely you’ve lost touch with your characters.

It’s time to back away, take a walk, have a cup of tea, brainstorm with a friend, do a character interview or a Goal/Motivation/Conflict chart as in Deb Dixon’s book. Anything that will get energy back into the story. If you solve it, you may be behind on your pagecount but you’ll be closer to the real goal of NaNo. IMHO a lesser wordcount and a lot of good ideas are worth more than a winner’s certificate and 50,000 words of a story you’ve lost interest in.

But you also may find that your enthusiasm for the story will rebound and you may end up with the certificate too.

So that’s my tuppence on NaNoWriMo. Anyone heading into it, good luck and have fun!

Elena
www.elenagreene.com
www.facebook.com/ElenaGreene

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So this was made official yesterday:

Megan Frampton writing as Megan Caldwell’s VANITY FARE, about a 40-year-old Brooklyn mother, recently divorced with a son, who starts writing copy for a bakery, discovers a knack for food-related literary puns, and becomes entangle in a love triangle, to Wendy Lee at William Morrow, in a nice deal, by Louise Fury at L. Perkins Agency (World).

And it was inspired, surprisingly, by that mid-nineteenth century (in)famous classic, Wuthering Heights. I have a friend, an old friend from high school, who comes over every so often to watch period dramas and drink wine. One evening we chose Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier. I was in midst pour when I said, “Hey, how about Mothering Heights?”
And the idea for the book was born.
I then giggled a lot, told a few people–including an acquaintance of mine, a literary agent–and they all said, “Wow! You have to write that!” The literary agent was very enthused, which gave me impetus to go on.
Then I employed the Carolyn Jewel method: The “What If?” application.
What if my husband left me?
What if I had to do something to make money?
What if I met a few good-looking men?
What if I had to do things I wouldn’t do in a million years?

I started writing. The book was originally titled Mothering Heights, but we changed it as we got closer to a deal.

So in about a year, a trade paperback will come out, all started by some wine, a good friend, and my ability to rhyme.
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