Author Archives: Janet Mullany

The Book of your Dreams

Updated on March 9, 2013 by Janet Mullany

I hear contradictory theories on your dream book. One is to go ahead and write it. The second is not to write it.

So what do you do when you have that one story roiling around inside you, itching to get out? The characters who’ve been knocking around forever, getting in the way, clamoring for attention (“Me! Me! I wanna be in this one!”)?

Somehow you have to get them out of your system.

The book of my dreams isn’t a historical in the usual sense. I’ve stopped and started it about five times. It’s so unlike anything else I’ve written I don’t know how it would fit in with the general direction I seem to be taking. It’s part time-travel (without the characters actually going anywhere), part romance, part I don’t know what. It’s about an archaeologist in England who has a parallel existence in the first century on a site he’s excavating. So does the woman he’s in love with. One very interesting thing I found out at about the third rewrite was that his parallel character is actually the first century female one—interesting, but it didn’t help much. The latest manifestation of it was a change of locale, with the excavation taking place on one of the lost cities of Maryland, the most famous of which is St. Mary’s City—a fascinating sliver of history you can explore, if you’re into serious time-wasting today. Also, this time the hero/heroine time traveled in the sense that they became another person in the seventeenth century. (I actually came up with this when our local RWA chapter invited a NY editor to do a workshop on query letters and we were afraid we wouldn’t have enough. She commented that this book would be very difficult to write. No kidding, but I think it could work.)

And it would take an awesome amount of research. Aaargh.

Question: can you identify “dream books” in your reading? Do you have one you’d like to write? Or, how about the ever-popular hybrid, hero from book A, heroine from book B, plot from book C?

Do tell.

Janet

I have heard the mermaids singing

Updated on March 8, 2013 by Janet Mullany

My post today is inspired by Elena’s topic yesterday about digging deeper into Prinnyland and it’s also something that’s been on my mind for a time. With no exceptions, everyone who wrote to me about Dedication said how much they liked the older hero/heroine—people seemed to love the idea of a pair of lovers who’d been around the block. And it got me thinking about how fiction treats the, ahem, older generation. The pic here is of the Wife of Bath. I’m not sure how old she was, but the average age during Chaucer’s time, thanks to warfare, the plague, and other rigors of medieval life, was in the early twenties. Aargh. Imagine a world where major decisions were made by fratboys.

First to Emma, where Mr. Woodhouse is described as being not old in years, but embracing the role of elderly hypochondriac with passion. Emma is twenty-one. So is my daughter. Mr. Woodhouse could be younger than me. Oh. My. God. (as we say in blogland). Now certainly, for women at that time, if by a certain age you hadn’t snapped up a husband, you threw in the towel, grabbed an unbecoming spinster’s cap and descended into middle age—just like Miss Bates. And, as I’ve mentioned before, Miss Bates could be the same age, or younger, than Mr. Knightley, who because he is male and rich is far above her on the status scale. Mr. Knightley’s single state is admired, not despised, because it’s seen as an act of generosity toward the nephew who will inherit his estate.

In Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford Miss Matty is described as an old lady. She is fifty-five. No comment. Again, she’s damned by gender, income and circumstances.

So how do older people fare in romance? As you’ve gathered by now I’m not that well read in the genre. I appreciate that we don’t want to read about sagging flesh, wrinkles, gray hair etc. etc. But Sean Connery gets just, well, hotter as he ages (note extraneous pic of Mr. Connery in his prime). I once pointed out to someone in a critique group that her heroine’s wise, loving, cookie-baking, homely mom came of age during Woodstock. (Was there a special ingredient in the cookies to provide the appropriate feelgood warmth of category romance?)

A big hand to my friend Stephanie Feagan whose heroine (named Pink) has a 50-something mom who sports sexy black bras and has trouble with her A/C—the A/C repairman visits. A lot.

Prinnyland, as I remember it, is full of gracious, loving matriarchs who obsess with planning their offsprings’ lavish weddings—strange in an age where most weddings took place in the drawing room and took about ten minutes as far as I can tell. Fathers are too often dead, or if alive, embarrassing (if not to the heroine, certainly to the reader) buffoons, who invariably have screwed up the family finances or have expensive and eccentric hobbies. There also seem to be far too many Lady Bracknell knock-offs. Please, set me straight. Tell me about the many, many exceptions. Where are the hot, older men? And hot, older women?

Oh, and my next book has a subplot featuring the hero’s widowed mom and her wild fling. Her eldest son is thirty. Do the math.

Janet

Posted in Jane Austen, Reading, Writing | Tagged hero's age, Heroes, heroine's age, heroines | 8 Replies

Love me, love my book?

Updated on March 4, 2013 by Janet Mullany

I can’t imagine why anyone reads books by the well-known adulterer Charles Dickens or that spiteful gossip Jane Austen (no wonder Cassandra burned most of the letters).

Yet I frequently hear, particularly from other romance writers, “Oh, I don’t like Author X. I’m not reading her books.” And it always puzzles me. Sure, not buying an author’s book will deprive her of the few pennies of royalties she might earn through your purchasee. Of course, that begs the question of whether it would be morally responsible to borrow said book from the library, read it illicitly in a couple of expensive java visits at your local Borders, or pay a quarter for a copy at the thriftstore. A further ethical question might be raised if you enjoyed the book—oh horrors—what then? Does it mean you, the reader, are tarred with the same brush, or, rather like earnest clerics researching pornography, corrupted without even knowing it? Chances are you might flip it closed with the satisfaction that Author X is indeed confirmed as a Bad Person—”I knew it when the heroine’s kitten drowned and that sweet lisping child fell into the midden”—and feel your point is proved.

Part of the trouble is there’s just too much information on romance authors. And it’s our own fault. We’re all over the place, chatting away on blogs and websites, and thinning the line between promotion of our books and promotion of ourselves, just being just so darned nice all the time. And if that niceness slips into real opinions and passions, it may raise some hackles. I’m not excusing bad author behavior or authors who are rude to people in public (I think most of us have had experience with those), but it seems you can get away with a lot more as a dead literary lion (most of whom were not Boy Scouts in real life) than as a live genre writer.

Is good writing good writing—whatever?

Janet

Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged authors | 7 Replies

Have we created our own cult?

Updated on March 1, 2013 by Janet Mullany

There were four-and-twenty virgins come down from Inverness

And when the night was ended there were four-and-twenty less…

trad. rude song

As long as the plots keep arriving from outer space,

I’ll go on with my virgins.

Barbara Cartland

This topic started off as a conversation with my buddy Pam Rosenthal as part of our meanderings on our workshop at the 2006 Beau Monde Conference. (Yes, the workshop is called Pam and Janet Evening. It’s on writing erotic historicals.)

Virgins.

A dime a dozen in romance-land.

Why?

Granted, they were around. Virginity was by implication an important part of the business deal that upper-class marriage was even in the Regency period–the groom wanted to be sure that his heirs would truly be his, and not the in-laws’ third footman’s. Yet we still have extraordinary plot twists to ensure that the heroine is untouched when the Big Bang occurs–virgin widows, husbands who had to rush off to take part in Waterloo (sorry, honey, not before the big game), couples who didn’t want to marry and so therefore didn’t want to…you know. Or the hero turns out to be her first and last, with diversions in between (guilty as charged). And not just in historicals, where the concept of a virgin heroine is justified, but all through the genre.

Consider also the typical defloration/consummation, where after some minor carnage, the heroine gets to Nirvana with very little effort (and snorts of disbelief from me)…and despite the bloodbath, they keep doing it. Or, we’re told, if she has had previous partners, there (1) weren’t many, and (2) it wasn’t that good, so therefore she holds blank slate status.

Yes, I know these are huge overstatements and I can come up with exceptions too, but why do these conventions exist? Is it the only way we can show that this is IT, the Real Thing, the Big Banana?

Despite the boom in erotic romance and erotica, why are we still so wary of a true depiction of female sexuality?

Thoughts, anyone?

Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged heroines, sex, sex in Regencies, virgin heroines | 5 Replies

A bread problem solved

Updated on February 28, 2013 by Janet Mullany

Bread from happier times, cooling above a pan of water to discourage ants.

I recently suffered a bread failure. A massive, heavy, doorstopper type bread failure. Why? If you check out my post last year, I recommended mixing in a bowl and then transferring it to the beloved (dollar store) plastic containers to rise. A mixing bowl prevents you from dumping in too much flour, whereas a straight sided container makes it difficult to judge random quantities. That was my mistake, and I think the sourdough may be a bit iffy.

So I have these unusable loaves. What would you have done with them in the Regency? Used them. Nothing was wasted. Doubtless I would have given them to the poor who would have obsequiously tugged their forelocks and stored them for the coming revolution when they’d thrown all the cobblestones. Or I would have used them to cook with. Grated bread, or even chunks added to liquids, is a useful thickener. So after receiving much advice on Facebook (use as poultices, get chickens, feed ducks) I went hunting for historical old bread recipes.

Starting off with Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, made Plain and Easy (1747), here’s a Baked Bread Pudding (although she doesn’t specify stale bread):

Take the Crumb of a Penny-loaf, as much Flour, the Yolks of four of four Eggs and two Whites, a quarter of a Pound of Sugar, a Tea Spoonful of Ginger, half a Pound of Raisins stoned, half a Pound of Currants clean washed and picked, a little Salt; mix first the Bread and Flour, Ginger and Salt and Sugar, then the Eggs, and then as much Milk as will make it like a good Batter, then the Fruit, butter the Dish, and pour it in and bake it.

Many recipes I found transformed the humble loaf, the staple food in the west for centuries, into a luxury item with the addition of exotic, expensive spices, such as this Gingered Bread from the Tudor era colored with cochineal and flavored with ginger and peppercorns.

A visit to Gode Cookery turned up A Quaking Pudding from the sixteenth century very similar to Hannah Glasse’s, but flavored with rosewater and walnuts. This is a fabulous site if you’re interested in historical food. Check out the Lombard Brewet, chicken stewed in almond milk, thickened with bread and eggs, or the fifteenth century Payne Foundow, a bread pudding made with wine. You can also discover Divers Pretty Things Made Of Roses & Sugar from the sixteenth century (no bread, a diversion).

But in the end I have decided to make a genuine British Bread and Butter Pudding using the raisin walnut loaves, and letting everything soak a long, long time, and something like this Aragula, Bacon, and Gruyere Bread Pudding (I have no aragula or gruyere, but you get the idea) with the rest. Should be yummy!

Before I ask leading questions, check out AllRomanceEBooks where A Most Lamentable Comedy is priced at ONE DOLLAR!! and you can also buy The Malorie Phoenix. Go grab them while they’re hot and the heroes are sorta like my bread if you know what I mean and I think you do.