Author Archives: carolyn

About carolyn

Carolyn Jewel was born on a moonless night. That darkness was seared into her soul and she became an award winning and USA Today bestselling author of historical and paranormal romance. She has a very dusty car and a Master’s degree in English that proves useful at the oddest times. An avid fan of fine chocolate, finer heroines, Bollywood films, and heroism in all forms, she has two cats and a dog. Also a son. One of the cats is his.

Do you Listen to Audio Books?

Updated on November 17, 2022 by carolyn

First, allow me to apologize for missing two Wednesdays in a row. Crazy times at RWA, but I warned you-all and expected I might not be able to post that week. But last week? I didn’t go back to work until that Wednesday, and I just totally forget. Tuesday felt like Monday, you see…

So, about Audio Books. I’ll have to get you there the long way because I’m going to tell you my story.

There are a few things you need to know first:

1. In the olden days, I was given several audio books on DVD, and I listened to them in the car and I enjoyed that. But I always lose the DVD and … too many steps. Too many things to lose so I didn’t pick up the habit. Besides I don’t take very many long car drives. I’m also really the only person in the house who could listen to the DVDs because everyone else is deaf or hearing-impaired, except my son, and part of my strategy for not having STUFF is the ability to give stuff to someone else.

2. I live where there is sucky internet so by and large, in the medium olden days, it wasn’t possible to download an Audio book unless I wait to start the download very late at night, so again, never got into the habit.

Time passes and authors everywhere are doing well with audio books because of Amazon making it easy for customers to get them. Also: 4G for the iPhone and iPad which is a LOT faster than the internet in the house. On the iPad, I can watch YouTube videos like the one below (which blew my mind for reasons I will shortly disclose) without waiting for buffering every 30 seconds.

The video below, which is the funny, smart, and talented Kevin Gisi telling us How to Be An Insomniac blew my mind because apparently, as I learned from this, you can listen to audio books and set a timer to turn it off. I had no idea.

Normally, if I can’t sleep, I plot in my head so I often find insomnia useful until I have to go to work on way not enough sleep. From time to time, though, I experience plotting-proof insomnia. No fun. But the audio book thing. MY GOD!!! I realize this is blindingly obvious, but it just wasn’t in my world.

Right. So I’m working on getting an audio book for Lord Ruin. This is a wonderful thing at the moment because mostly it involves no work on my part. A good friend of mine’s daughter is an actress, mostly Shakespeare, and she’s narrating the book for me. And while I was at RWA, she and her producer sent me the first chapter to listen to. And it was awesome. They sent chapter two a few days ago and that was awesome, too. There I was lying in bed listening via the iPad and now I want complete audio books to listen to.

A few months ago, the company that did the original audio book for A Darker Crimson contacted the series authors about re-upping– he wanted all the authors’ books so we had to make a group decision. After some dithering around we said sure and my agent took care of all the contract stuff and a couple of months ago, the company sent me a copy of the audio book. On 11 CDs. My reaction then was oh god. more STUFF but now I’m thinking, WOOT! I can rip the CD’s and get it to the iPad!

The Poll

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Now I’m curious. What do you think of audio books? If you don’t listen to them, why not? If you do, what got you listening?

Posted in Former Riskies, Writing | Tagged Audio Books, Insomnia | 13 Replies

Guess Who?

Updated on November 17, 2022 by carolyn

Ammanda cannot be here with you today so I, Risky Carolyn, am filling in for her.

Can you guess who I’m thinking of? Here are some clues.

1. A man who was born in Dublin, Ireland.

2. He’s a Gemini. His characteristics are: Communication, Indecision, Inquisitive, Intelligent, Changeable

3. He died in 1822.

4. College: Cambridge.

5. If you take the first 3 letters of his Christian name, change that 3rd letter to the first letter of a word that is the opposite of “cat” and leave his last name alone, you would have the name of a blond Rock Star from the 80’s who is still touring today.

6. He was once a Whig

7. From 1797 to 1800 he was a member of the Privy Council of Ireland

8. He was involved in an infamous duel and shot his opponent in the thigh. His opponent had never fired a gun before.

9. In 1821, he became the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry

10. in 1822, his half brother became the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry.

11. Byron had these unkind words for him:

Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of [XXXXXXXX]:
Stop, traveller, and piss.

12. Per Wikipedia: In a profile of XXXXXXX published within months of his death, he was reported to have had, prior to his marriage, a son by a maidservant who lived near the Mount Stewart estate, and whom it was rumored he supported.

Leave your guess in the comments.

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged Guess Who!, Not Ammanda, Political dudes | 7 Replies

Multipart Thingee

Updated on November 17, 2022 by carolyn

Craziness reigns at Jewel Central.

I’m working on The Next Historical and I’m in that “This is so painfully bad, why did I EVER think I could write anything?” phase, plus it’s just really hard, this writing business.

My hero and heroine are currently alone in a bedroom and ALL THEY DO IS TALK!!! I keep muttering “shut up, would you?” at the monitor and they keep talking. This happened in Not Proper Enough, and I thought I was going to end up with the World’s Talkiest Romance. I imagined reviewers saying ALL they do is TALK! but actually, by the time it was out there in the world there were a few complaints about too much sex. So, I must have gotten through the talking part. Cross your fingers that Lucy and Thrale will end up smoking hot.

Art

Today I ended up chatting with a really gifted artist, and though illustration and writing are very different, it turns out there are things in common about being a creative sort. Here’s a link to his website: Ricky Watts. The link goes to his illustrations. I bought two prints. Any guesses about which ones? One hint – Poultry is big in my town. BWAHAHAHAHAHA! You’re on your own as to the other.

Challenges in common: procrastination. I did not tell him it is my belief I can out-procrastinate anyone and besides, he had walls full of art that said his procrastination problem is not as severe as mine.

Getting in the zone. Very familiar (but not as familiar as it ought to be, you talkie hero and heroine!). When you come out the end, it can feel like someone else did all that work. I know a lot of writers feel that way. I’m surprised, for some reason, that it happens to artists too.

I do enjoy meeting creative sorts.

Nachos, Spinich Salad, Sweet Potato Fries

Does that sound like dinner? It was! For me, our own Janet Mullaney, and Pam Rosenthal. Janet was all the way in my part of California this weekend. I was supposed to see them in Berkeley on Saturday, but the Evil Day Job was particularly evil and by Friday I’d had too many nights of <5 hours sleep. I slept until 11:00 AM Saturday, long past our meeting. Goodness. Janet and Pam drove to my town Sunday instead and we shared the meal noted and talked about writing and publishing and writing and it was really lovely to see them both.

To Be Read, and Wished-I-Hadn’t-Read

My digital TBR is getting out of control. But that doesn’t stop me from buying more books. I have Meljean Brook’s Guardian Demon in my Kindle and part of me doesn’t want to read it because then it will be over and I won’t have it to look forward to with such delicious anticipation. I love that series. I love her writing. I do know I have to save the book for when I have a block of time, hopefully this coming weekend.

I did read a book that someone in an RWA workshop (I have the conference on audio and am listening to workshops) said was edgy and risky so I bought it immediately and by about 1/3 of the way through I knew exactly what would happen next and I was in fact right every time. That, my friends, is not edgy or risky. It can’t be if I know what will happen, why it happens, and don’t even care. This book had nearly 900 Amazon reviews and most of them are raving. The author was consistently mistaken about the difference between your and you’re. I was skimming by the middle in case I was wrong about what would happen but I wasn’t so I dnf’d.

What’s in your TBR and any books in your Wished You Hadn’t Read pile?

Well. I think this is a blog bost! I need to get back to Lucy and Thrale and see if I can get them to stop talking.

Posted in Former Riskies, Reading, Risky Book Talk | Tagged art, Conversation, Dinner, Giant Chickens | 2 Replies

Ideal Homes – NOT what you think edition

Updated on November 17, 2022 by carolyn

I’ve been writing historical romance for quite some time. You’d think I’d know EVERYTHING by now. But I don’t. I know that shocks you, but it’s true. Like most authors who set books in the past, I have a good grasp of the basics of my era (The Regency, doh) and a decent big picture of the Regency era. That’s never enough, of course.

With every book, I’ve either run across something I didn’t know or hadn’t seen before, or else needed some specific detail not in my research library or collection-O-Links. In Not Wicked Enough, for example, I ended up with a need to know about doorknobs. Really, really specific information. I found it, too, from a kind gentleman who is a member of a Doorknob collectors group. For Indiscreet, I had to go big and wide — Turkey in the Regency era. One of my first posts (possibly NSFW, as the post has naked women paintings) for the Riskies was the result of some of that research.

Sometimes I come across something while I’m doing something else ::cough::procrastinating::cough:: and I end up with a fact that I just have to use. Chimney ornaments and chimney glass in Not Proper Enough.

My current project is no exception. Yesterday I came across an amazing website. Before I send you off there to have a look, here’s how it came about: I was writing The Next Historical (Sinclair Sisters Book 2!) and I needed my heroine to call on my hero’s fancy Mayfair house which in Lord Ruin, I’d said was on Charles Street. So I went to Google maps and entered Charles Street, London England — not specific enough to be useful. I made up a street number (25) and THEN I had good results. I switched to Street View and uh-oh. Those houses were cute and clearly close to period, but they were small. I needed a mansion. For some reason I then searched for something like “historical regency interiors charles street” clicked on images and voila! 137 Charles Street is Dartmouth House and the street view is awesome. It’s also now a hotel/wedding location so there were lots of pictures of the interior, including some historical pictures.

In the middle of that Googling, I ended up at a site that was NOT on point as it turned out. Including the word “Regency” in a google search even with other words to filter out the not-even-close stuff, typically hits Real Estate sites. What I thought was one of those had a very interesting, atmospheric picture of Montague House, which I decided to look at. I like to pretend I can buy an English mansion. The website name was Ideal Homes, so, hey!

Since the picture is copyrighted, and since you should go look, here’s a link to the page I landed on. But come back! There’s more!

Obviously, 1) totally awesome 2) Not about buying or selling Real Estate. Oh, ho ho no!!

But what is this site?

Using a generous selection of old photos, old maps, and historic documents from the rich and unique archive and local history collections of Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich, Lambeth, Lewisham, and Southwark, Ideal Homes explores the origins and significance of suburbia as revealed through the history of South London. The site is hosted by the University of Greenwich and was funded by the New Opportunities Fund.

I clicked the link A-Z Galleries

Carolyn About Faints: Historic Maps

People, this site is the motherlode for historical researchers. Then I randomly clicked around the South East London boroughs and wow. I am SO grateful to the UK for getting the funding out there to put this kind of resource out there for people. And grateful to the University of Greenwich for doing this. Here’s the about page. While I understand why they’ve called the website Ideal Homes, I’m not sure it was the best choice from a Google-Fu point of view, but I don’t care! I found it! It’s awesome.

Anyway, I wrote my scene, inspired by Dartmouth House (and unable to get Montague House of Blackheath Park out of my head) and when I was all done, I realized my heroine could not go to the hero’s house after all. So yeah. I’ll save most of it for when she DOES have to go.

But it was one of my better writing days.

My hero needs a rather run down estate and I think I’m inspired!

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency, Research, Writing | Tagged Awesome things to do with lottery money, Houses, Inspiration, Mansions, maps | 3 Replies

The Plot Thickens … Or Does it? The Plot Poll!

Updated on November 17, 2022 by carolyn

There are a lot of Regency plots out there. Some I love, some not so much. What do YOU think? I’ve listed a few. Let me know how much you like the plot!

For the purposes of answering, assume the book is well written and you find the blurb interesting. I totally get that a great author can rock any of these plots. What other plots do you love, love to hate, or hate like poison? Tell me in the comments.