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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.

Yesterday I turned in revisions for my June 2011 paranormal, My Dangerous Pleasure. I’m already two days behind for NaNoWriMo and will be starting The Next Historical immediately.

So, Carolyn, when are you going to talk about the Regency?

Shut up.

Is that your lame way of avoiding telling anyone you didn’t have a blog post ready because you were busy with revisions and watching election returns?

Maybe.

I knew it.

Nobody likes a know it all.

The truth hurts, baby.

I think it’s time for a poll.

On Monday, Diana put up a great post about piracy with link to a site for commenting on Senate Bill 3804, The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. Here is a link to the text of the bill.

Although I agree there are good reasons behind the bill, I don’t necessarily agree with THIS bill or even with the intent behind it. I also don’t think the bill, should it pass, will be effective.

The effects of book piracy are NOT well understood. The only rigorous study on the subject to date concluded that piracy INCREASES book sales except for the very best selling authors– which is not most of us.

EDITED TO ADD: I know that one of the commenters to Diana’s post referred obliquely to this claim so let me clarify. The study was done by Brian O’Leary of Magellan Research. When I found out his study was $99.00 I emailed him and told him I was sorry I couldn’t afford his study but suggested he contact RWA to talk about getting even better data. He told me he was already in contact with them. Mr. O’Leary was kind enough to send me his study, which I have personally read. The study was based on actual sales numbers as opposed to the made up estimates typically bandied about. Within the parameters of his study, the numbers showed that, indeed, piracy helps the midlist author.

I’ve posted at length at my blog about this (you can go here to read it, but I warn you, it’s a long post. Right now, my position is that authors should demand good solid studies before they spend even five minutes chasing down pirates on their own. Setting aside the ethics of piracy, to date, the good data (by which I mean not the inflated trumped up numbers and conclusions pulled from the ether by companies selling their anti-piracy solution) does not support the conclusion that piracy hurts books sales.

In the very near future I hope to have my opinion changed and informed by rigorous studies by third parties with no financial interest in the results and conclusions.

Book piracy, by the way, goes way back. Publishers have been complaining about this since the 1700’s. That’s why it’s call piracy. Because that was the model they had way back when. If it was new, we’d probably call it something else. The book pirates back then, by the way, were other publishers and Britain itself was a leading pirate of books. Just ask Germany.

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I am in the middle of revisions so this will be a fairly short post. About, uh, Regency stuff. Like uh,

Handsome men!

Google books to the rescue.  I found this bit of dialogue to be very funny. Well done, Elizabeth Inchbald! (1815)

Sadly, searching Google Books for “handsome man” 1800-1820 was an exercise in disappointment, other than the above. Most of the references were misogynistic in the extreme. Alas.

So, who’s handsome?

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As most of you probably know, the English drink tea. Tea was introduced in England after 1650. I’m sure that most of us have read a historical in which the phrase “a dish” of tea is used rather than the more familiar “cup” of tea.  This site tells us that the first tea cups were Chinese in origin and were shallow saucers, and did not have handles. From the same site:

100 years after the introduction of tea in England, handles were not yet seen on tea cups, but English potters had introduced saucers to the bowls. The tea-drinkers thought the saucer was there to pour the tea into to cool it and then they would sip the tea from the saucer. Later the saucer was used to hold spillage and the use of the cup and saucer became the tradition used today with the addition of handles.

Britain Express has a good overview of the history of tea and coffee houses. Tea was taxed by 1676. A hundred years later, we know how that taxation thing worked for the British when they were across the pond. According to this site, the tax rose to 119% and guess what?!  Tea smuggling, that’s what. And guess what else! People put stuff that wasn’t tea in the tea. What’s that thing the French say about change and the same old thing?

Check out The United Kingdom Tea Council for their amazing History of Tea, including the The London Tea Auction
And there’s this from 1826:
My favorite tea ever is Lapsang Souchang. I love the smoky flavor. At work, however, I drink Lipton. It gets my day going.  What about you guys? Do you drink tea? What kind?  If you were a tea smuggler where would you hide your tea?
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First off, we’re all pretending that in the Regency I am Lady Carolyn Jewel. A bit of a bluestocking who sometimes (allright, often) speaks before sufficient thought. Also that the Duke of Hunkdom is secretly in love with me yet valiantly battling his emotions on account of his broken heart from three years ago. He looks like this:

The Duke of Hunkdom

Also in love with me is the Crown Prince of SomeCountryOrOtheria. He too, is battling his emotions on account of he hates his father but loves me.  The Prince looks like this (only more formal in public. In this picture he is thinking of Lady Carolyn, which I hope is obvious to everyone):

The Prince Loves Lady Carolyn

Right. So 21st century Carolyn got up at 4:15am, went to the gym, notebooked revisions, went to work and did NOT get a lunch break, picked up son from school, took him to math, dropped son at home, left immediately for a city 13 miles north through horrific traffic, arrived at a bookstore listened to some writers read, read something herself, yakked about some stuff, drove home and is now blogging. I have revisions to do but I am brain dead.


And now for something completely different.

Maybe you guys already know about this site, but I didn’t: Regency England.  Good stuff there.


Question for you to answer

Who are you in Regency England? 

Or, alternatively, who wins Lady Carolyn’s heart and does anyone buy her chocolate?

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