Author Archives: Janet Mullany

Reading and squiggles

Updated on April 25, 2013 by Janet Mullany

One of the unfortunate effects of e-readers is that you can no longer press a book you’ve just finished into someone’s hands and tell them they absolutely must read this but they’ll be in trouble if they don’t give it back. It also makes spying on fellow commuters’ reading a lot less interesting. So, I have two books on the go at the moment, my usual reading pattern. One is on the kindle for the commute and the other is my bedtime reading.

Now the one on the kindle is sort of weird. It’s a romantic contemporary by an English writer and it’s not quite as strange as the one by another English writer where h/h would suddenly fall into a liplock and then resume polite conversation. Many times. There’s a lot of food in this one and people politely offering tea/coffee which seems to be a characteristic of English fiction.

And, segueing effortlessly into the next topic… Charles Dickens is always writing about food too.

Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated himself to three, and so on, till in a week’s time he had got through the necklace — five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister, who was an industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried her eyes out at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I needn’t say, didn’t find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner — baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it — the child, who wasn’t hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly there was the devil of a noise, like a small hailstorm. (Pickwick Papers)

George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens comments:

As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-century comic paper. But the unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing that nobody else would have thought of, is the baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it. How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn’t. It is something totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is created.

My other reading–after that somewhat long squiggle on the edge of the page–is Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, which is terrific. I could go on and on about this book and Dickens’ strange life, but one thing that surprised me is that even his contemporaries didn’t like his portrayal of women.

They’re either dumb and pretty (begging to be killed off or humbled), saintly (sometimes the same) or straight out of a melodrama (much writhing and breast-beating, doubtless must die as Bad Girls do). Even a tough girl like Lizzie Hexham (Our Mutual Friend), whose occupation is fishing corpses and other flotsam and jetsam out of the Thames, has to be warned that she is in moral danger when she is pursued by Eugene Wrayburn. Really, Mr. Dickens? You don’t think a working-class girl (with impeccable and inexplicable good diction) wouldn’t know about the birds and the bees? Or, horrors, see a liaison with a rich bachelor as an opportunity?

So what are you reading?

And don’t forget, Carolyn’s contest is still open, affording the delightful prospect of reading about hot demons.

Posted in Reading | 6 Replies

Horn Tooting and Evolution of a Sale

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Janet Mullany

I blogged a few months ago on a post called Where do you get your ideas? about how a story starts for me, and I’m very happy to announce that that book, now called Chained, has sold–details were thrashed out by the agent and editor while I traveled to Atlanta–a great way to start the RWA National Conference! Or rather, an almost completely different version of that book has sold.

Then, the story was called, tentatively, The Story of Miss O. I renamed it Chained as I realized the story was about the English abolitionist movement. Here are the pics I found of the hero and heroine (courtesy of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s portraits of Russian aristocrats), although being my characters, they do not look nearly as cleaned-up and glamorous:

Now the editor liked the idea, she particularly liked the naughty goings-on that occurred in a carriage in chapter three, but she glommed onto something I was hoping to avoid because it involved real research, and gasp, I have a deadline of the end of the year. This year. My original story started off in England and after a while and many more naughty goings-on in a variety of locations, the action moved to a Caribbean sugar-producing island, where, um, more of the same took place, and then they sailed for home, by which time the hero/heroine are not speaking to each other. This is a two-month voyage. That’s a long, long sulk. This is not terrific plotting. It bothered me. I was afraid I’d write a book that contained something like this–Two months later, as they stepped onto English soil again… And I wasn’t really sure how it would end.

My local RWA chapter, bless their hearts, had a plotting session at one of our meetings. To a woman, they said I should have a raging mob with pitchforks and the hero performing heroic deeds to win the heroine. Um, yes, I said, but the English abolitionist movement wasn’t like that. It was housewives boycotting sugar, and earnest Quakers distributing pamplets and getting names for petitions–the Georgian equivalent of envelope-stuffing for a political campaign.

The editor–who of course zoomed in, eagle-eyed, on the terrible weakness of the original plot– told me she wanted it set on the Caribbean island, with the story beginning on the voyage out, and could I send her a couple of paragraphs on how I would rewrite it. Later that day, if possible, certainly before the weekend (this was the Wednesday of the week before National). I produced a cold sweat instead, went home, and thought about more sin in the sun and less about earnest Quakers in appalling weather. I thought about raging mobs. Raging mobs with machetes…a slave revolt. I sent an email to the editor the next day, she liked it, and she and my agent began thrashing out the stuff we writers are too timid to attempt. Less than a week later, the day before the conference started, we had a deal.

So now all I have to do is rewrite and write and go to see “Pirates of the Caribbean” because I can write it off as a legitimate business expense! Chained will be released in (probably) Sept. 2007 under the name of Jane Lockwood for NAL’s Heat line.

And now I really must write!

Posted in Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged Abolitionists, Jane Lockwood | 5 Replies

An excerpt with obligatory flashback

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Janet Mullany

Here’s an excerpt from something that may or may not ever be written. (Warning: there is a flashback that may injure the tenderhearted)

Time passing.

Ben spent a lot of his life watching time pass, looking interested or uninterested as they talked on about their concerns or business. He’d learned long ago that they didn’t necessarily expect an answer and sometimes not even a response, but a look of quiet concern and interest would do the trick.

And when an upward inflection indicated an agreement was necessary, the words came automatically. “Very true, my lord. Exactly so, sir. Indeed.”

And meanwhile his mind would wander where it would as his hands dealt with buttons and folds and all the niceties of milord’s dress.

Time passed. He waited for the time when his life, his real life would begin, a life that had started some twenty years ago, when first he met Marie.

He, wasting time (they’d say) or exploring (he’d say) his lordship’s library, with the buzz of a bee against the mullioned windows, the comforting rich smell of leather and beeswax, shafts of light with dust dancing like he was in church. But this was better than church, and with the added excitement of getting caught. Running his hands over the spines of leather books, daring to take one down and open it to pictures of strange lands and creatures, and row upon row of words. Or this, spinning the great globe, watching continents and seas blur into brown and blue and green, the surface smooth beneath his fingers, sunlight dancing off the golden bonds that held it in place..

Another hand, small and clean, reddened by daily immersion in soap and water, stilled the globe.

“That’s where you come from, Ben.” Pointing to a great brown mass like a pear upside down.

“No, t’aint. I come from here. I always been here.”

“No you don’t. Here. Africa. That’s what they says in the kitchen.”

He looked at their hands together on the globe, hers so pale and his dark, dark as the ink that named the continents and countries and cities and that he couldn’t read.

“I always been here,” he repeated. “I was born in this house, I was.”

“Silly,” she said and she touched his hand with one of her delicate fingers. The globe shifted at the movement.

The globe revolved again at her touch, and she moved it just a little more, and more again, halfway round the world.

“Here,” she said. “Here’s London. That’s where I was born.”

He looked at the familiar triangle of Britain. Yes, London. He could read that. You watched it on the milestones when milord and milady traveled to town with the servants and where he saw all sorts of people, strangers and foreigners and some even like himself.

“I’ll go back to London.” She tossed her head and removed her hand from the globe to take some of the weight of the folded linens she carried. “When I’m a grown woman, I shall be maid to a great lady and dress as fine as she, and eat meat three times a day.”

He darted in and kissed her rosy cheek. “And I’ll marry you.”

She shrieked and giggled and ran off, shoes slapping on the wooden floor, her fair hair tumbling out from under her linen cap. Her shoes were a little too big for her, just as her gown was a little too faded and short.

Posted in Writing | 2 Replies

Able was I ere I saw Elba

Updated on April 18, 2013 by Janet Mullany

On this day in 1814, the Treaty of Fontainebleu deposed Napoleon and sent him into exile to the island of Elba. He escaped just under a year later, set sail for France, and in one of those unexpected twists of history, returned to power. No one’s quite sure how he managed to escape, but Napoleon was a man of great energy and industry, and although contemporary cartoons depict him as a disconsolate exile on a rocky island, that was artistic license.

Now one of the many differences between the rest of us and the Corsican Monster is that if we were living in a castle in this sort of scenery, we’d grit our teeth and stay put. But not Napoleon. Apart from plotting his escape, he was quite busy as Emperor of Elba, carrying out social and economic reforms. He had a personal escort of 1,000 men, a household staff, and 110,000 subjects.

But it was a time of great misery for Napoleon, the man who’d once had almost all of Europe at his feet. The Treaty of Fontainbleu also sent his wife and son to Vienna. Napoleon was so distraught he attempted to commit suicide with a vial of poison he carried, but the poison was old and only made him sick. Shortly after his arrival, he learned of the death of the former Empress Josephine.

It’s possible his English guardians on the island aided, or at least turned a blind eye to, Napoleon’s escape plans. The restored French monarchy was proving unsatisfactory, which meant that once again the balance of power in Europe was threatened. This is discussed in this fascinating article, A Sympathetic Ear: Napoleon, Elba, and the British, which also explores the phenomenon of Napoleon as tourist trap.

British seamen proved to be keen visitors. Indeed, Napoleon had embarked for Elba on April 28th, aboard the frigate HMS Undaunted, whose captain, Thomas Ussher, wrote home on May 1st: ‘It has fallen to my extraordinary lot to be the gaolor of the instrument of the misery Europe has so long endured’. By the end of the month, the man whom Ussher could not even bring himself to name had become his ‘bon ami’, and had given him 2,000 bottles of wine, and a diamond encrusted snuffbox. In return Ussher presented Napoleon with a barge, which he flatteringly reserved for his own exclusive use.

Napoleon landed in Cannes on March 1, 1815 and declared:

I am the sovereign of the Island of Elba, and have come with six hundred men to attack the King of France and his six hundred thousand soldiers. I shall conquer this kingdom.

As he progressed through France, soldiers sent to attack him instead joined him, so that he made a triumphant return into Paris on March 20. There’s a great first-hand account of his arrival here.

So, if you’d gone to visit Napoleon on Elba with the expectation that he’d probably give you lots of wine and a diamond-encrusted snuffbox, what would you take him as a gift?

Now onto shameless self-promotion. If you’re in Maryland, I’m going to be signing tomorrow at the Catonsville Historical Society, 7 – 9 pm in the company of some excellent authors. Looks like there will be some wine too!

Posted in Research | Tagged Napoleon Bonaparte | 2 Replies

Important tax info for writers

Updated on April 4, 2013 by Janet Mullany

New for 2012. Gratuitous use of photos of scantily clad men online may incur a penalty. Please consult your hot tax advisor, fireman, cop, or male stripper for more information. Or, call the IRS and request a “special” phone call. They’ll know what you mean. It happens all the time.

A couple of years ago I posted information on Schedule OMG.HEA, and here’s the updated version for 2012. Remember, just like the contemporary hero with his well-stocked wallet, there’s nothing like being ready.

Turn to the Subgenre Definition pages beginning on page 17 and pick your subgenre. You may pick only one. If you write in a variety of subgenres, choose 21, Indecisive wallower, 22, Overachiever, or 23, I’m just a girl who can’t say no. Enter in Box A.

Take your zip code, divide it by the number of pages completed in your WIP and enter the number in Box B.

On the following lines enter the following numbers from the first fifty pages of the book:

Times your h/h have sex. If you are writing an inspirational, you should enter 10.
Times your h/h have sex with another person(s) or being(s) (including, but not limited to, shapeshifters) and multiply by five. If you are writing an inspirational, you should enter 50.
Heroic hair-raking within the first fifty pages.
Mentions of hero’s eye/hair color.
Mentions of heroine’s eye/hair color. Note: if colors for 2 or 3 change, please refer to Publication CE.AA.2012.

Enter your total for Box B.

Note: If your score is less than 2, please make sure you are writing within the correct genre. Refer to Publication WTF.2012 for more guidance and complete the appropriate Genre Form.

Now turn to your most recently published work. Enter its ISBN, page count, and predominant font family used on the cover in Box C.

Please check the appropriate box if your cover contains the following:

Historically inaccurate shirt.
Mullet.
Green or blue eyeshadow (hero or heroine).
Chandelier with lightbulbs instead of candles.
Physically impossible stance.

Write the total number of checked boxes on the next line. On the following lines:

Instances of egregious photoshop art, add 10 for each.
*Extra nipples, limbs or digits (hero or heroine), multiply each by 10 and enter.
Glaring typo on your back cover blurb, enter 20.
Mantitty, enter 50.

* Unless you are writing paranormal romance and this is purely representative.

Enter your total for Box C.

If your cover art contains none of the above, please refer to Publication WTF.2012 as you may be writing a different genre.

The totals for Boxes B and C, plus the ages of your children and/or pets and your agent’s and editors’ heights in centimeters.
Multiply by 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375
Multiply by 10 to make a nice big fat number and round off to the nearest thousand. This is your estimated tax for 2010.

Please feel free to share your tax expertise with the rest of us. It’s never too early.

Posted in Frivolity | 2 Replies