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Author Archives: Laurie Bishop


I’m always a little sad when I realize the end of summer is coming. Well today it is here, since it is October first, but the sun is shining today (after an awful, cold, rainy Friday) and I can hear the birds through my open window. And…it is quiet. Or still quiet, I should say, since Saturdays in a small city never stay that way.

I plan to take a walk down by the river and check out the locks close and personal. I love the sound of the water coursing over the dam, the call of the gulls, the peaceful, meditative nature of it. But for now, I am thinking about the Regency and considering what would be different…or the same.

Birds. Crickets. A distant baby’s cry. The sound of the river… There is no traffic at the moment, but if there was, it would be the clop-clopping of horses’ hooves up the street on cobblestone, or perhaps it would be a more muffled thudding in dirt or mud. I would hear the jingling of harness and the occasional call of the drivers to their team (I say occasional, as I am trying to keep it as peaceful as it is now!). There would be the smell of horse instead of exhaust, whiffs of coal or wood smoke, perhaps the hot metal smell from a nearby blacksmith’s forge.

My heroine might well be gazing out the window and thinking of a walk, just as I am. She would have a book in her hand, or be writing a letter, but the warm day has called to her. Since this is a small city, she’d don a proper walking dress, but if she were like me she would choose to wear what was comfortable over fashion and seek a walk to satisfy her soul rather than to be seen.

Times change. People, not so much. Not at their center. Surroundings, attitudes, fashion, beliefs, laws, and habits change. Not hearts.

When we write, we rely on what has not changed…and we try our best to understand what has. Unlike writing contemporary novels, we cannot speak to witnesses to gather information. We cannot visit the places where the characters dwelt. Oh, we can go to the geographic location, certainly, and it will yield clues–but it will not be the same. Roads have changed or gone out of use and grown over. Buildings have vanished, and something new may or may not be standing in their steads. Erosion and war has altered the landscape. New flora will be growing that did not exist at the time of the story, and old varieties will have vanished.

I think of roses and the many beautiful varieties that exist now, the hybrid teas, tall and straight-stemmed with those artfully folded petals of such substance…and then think of the old roses, the ones on short, weak and bending stems, the blossoms a soft ball of delicate petals in unformed arrangement, exuding an intoxicatingly sweet scent. They were beautiful…beautiful in their own way, bending their lovely wild faces toward the earth, heavy with dew.

But we can understand the beauty of the rose of whatever form. We can understand human nature. We understand the human heart.

Not much of substance in this today, I am afraid. But this is what I am thinking on this lovely day at the end of summer, as the last roses fade.

Laurie

Posted in Writing | Tagged | 4 Replies

Here’s the cover of my October book, WHEN HORSES FLY, and I hope I can upload it and have it come out at a reasonable size….

The story takes place near Beachy Head on the southeastern coast of England…the castle is fictitional, of course, although I had some inspiration from Hastings Castle, only my fictitional one is not a ruin.

A link to the official Hastings site:

http://www.visithastings.com/attractions/default_castle.asp

And another:

http://www.discoverhastings.co.uk/discover_hastings/index2.html

Here are a few pictures of Beachy Head, The Seven Sisters, and the coast:

A long look down from the top of Beachy Head…the site of more than a few suicides…

And finally, a shot of Birling Gap, which figured in smuggling history among other things.

Laurie


In reading the last post about favorite places, I thought of how long it has been since I have gone to a magical spot just for me. I love historic places, and they are great food for the muse.

I’ve been to a few places in the past that I loved. Here is one: The Genesee Country Village and Museum. It is a living history museum in Mumford, N.Y., just 20 miles from Rochester, and its focus is the 19th century.

url: http://www.gcv.org/index.shtml

More than a historic village, it has activities, classes, scheduled events, gardens, a nature center, an art gallery, and a carriage museum. But in my particular experience, the stand-out event was the day I attended a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg.

The Union troops mustered in the town square. It was a hot July weekend, and I remember with a little of the thrill I felt then when the sky rumbled overhead. The men cheered–and soon we were standing in a pouring torrent.

I took shelter on the front porch of one of the houses with other visitors and waited for the event to start. We heard the approach of the confederate troops from the edge of town and the distant sount of musket fire…the battle grew closer, and then the union troops were retreating through the town in front of us, in the pouring rain and the fog of black powder smoke, the soldiers nothing but hazy figures, running, reloading, firing, calling out, falling–and of course as they do in reinactments, getting up and running again–but I ignored that part. It felt eerily as though I were really there in Gettysburg.

It did not pour on any of the days of battle (July 1-4, 1863) but it was overcast with some thunder and light rain. But something about the scene that day seemed so utterly real to me. It is something the hazy photographs I took do not quite bring back, but the memory of the feeling I had is more than enough.

Has anyone else had such a transporting moment? I wonder how many of us are historical site buffs who read and write Regencies? I’d be willing to bet most of us are…

Laurie

Hello! This is Laurie Bishop. Great cover, Cara!
I’ve been reading everyone else’s comments and trying to decide how I would qualify what makes a Regency risky. I find it isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. But since I have to come up with something 😉 , to me a risky Regency is one in which the heroine, and/or the hero, do something extraordinary for their sex/time/station—or must act in an unexpected way to address their dilemma. Also, in addition to this, they must do or be in this way without violating the attitudes of the time.Hence the trickiness.Let us say that I want my heroine to be courageous and able to take command to save the family estate. She might come to the traumatic conclusion that she must ruin herself by becoming the mistress of Snidely Whiplash; and she can acknowledge this by having all of the appropriate thoughts and feelings about what she feels forced to do. But…she will not use language that a gently reared young lady does not use, and she will otherwise behave with all the decorum within her power that she has been raised to use. And she will not know something that a gently reared young lady does not know.

Of course, if she is not a gently reared young lady, we have a different bucket of peas. She will have the perspective of a farmer’s daughter, a soldier’s daughter, or what have you. And that can be quite different. Even middle class daughters were different than the daughters of the highest peers. In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the Bennett daughters walked to town alone. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s daughter would never been allowed to do such a thing.

In my first Regency, THE BEST LAID PLANS, the heroine was a very independent-thinking American heiress who was not raised in high English society. She was therefore allowed to be a little outrageous—and was a ball to write!

Laurie

WHEN HORSES FLY Oct. 2005
LORD RYBURN’S APPRENTICE Jan. 2006
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