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Posts in which we talk about reading habits and preferences

REGENCY AUTHOR UPDATES

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Risky Regencies is your trusty Regency Emporium, serving all your Regency needs. Our readers asked for author updates, and so what do we have for you today? Author Updates!

So grab a cup of tea, pull up a cozy chair, and find out what Regency authors are up to…

VICTORIA HINSHAW tells us she’s been recharging her batteries — thinking, playing with lots of different ideas for plots and characters, and catching up on all the reading she missed while writing three books a year for Zebra. She has a Regency historical in the works, and has also been working on a fictional biography of Princess Charlotte. (I’ve noticed a couple other Regency writers have been going the nonfiction route in one form or another — hmm…is this a trend? Or just three individual writers making individual choices?)

What Victoria Hinshaw was too modest to mention (but we know anyway — ha!) is that her 2005 books have been doing extremely well with the recent contests. ASK JANE (Zebra Regency, April 2005) finalled in several prestigious contests, and won the Golden Quill Award for Best Regency. (That’s the contest our own Elena won in the historical category — so we know it’s a good contest.) 🙂 And with her August release LEAST LIKELY LOVERS, Vicky is competing against Diane and Cara for the Booksellers’ Best Award. (And we still like her! How’s that for professionalism?)

JENNA MINDEL reports, “Here’s what I’m up to now…I’ve been working on a contemporary Inspirational romance set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.” She’s also a RITA finalist for her Regency Miss Whitlow’s Turn!

DOROTHY McFALLS “feels blessed to have landed firmly at Venus Press.” She’s obviously been very busy, with FOUR titles out this year, all different subgenres! Lady Sophia’s Midnight Seduction, a short erotic Regency; Neptune’s Lair and its sequel Marked, which are paranormal erotic suspense; and The Huntress, contemporary mainstream. Wow! Plus her Signet Regency, The Marriage List, is a finalist in the National Readers’ Choice Award. For details on all these projects, visit http://www.dorothymcfalls.com

JO ANN FERGUSON is still writing Regencies. She just turned one in to her editor at Signet where she’s writing as Jocelyn Kelley. She’s been writing the medieval series “The Ladies of St. Jude’s Abbey” as Jocelyn Kelley for the past two years. A Moonlit Knight came out in May and My Lady Knight is scheduled for January 2007. Then she returns to Regencies when the Regency-historical trilogy “The Nethercott Tales” are published by Signet Eclipse. For those of you who enjoyed the Priscilla Flanders mystery series from Zebra Regency, look for these books about the three Nethercott sisters that have suspense elements along with ghostly paranormal. The first book in the series (with a working title of The Mistress School) is scheduled for July 2007 to be followed by Gentleman’s Master. She’s also still writing for ImaJinn as J.A. Ferguson. In 2006, she’s got Luck of the Irish (a leprechaun story), Sworn Upon Fire (an alternate world futuristic), and The Wrong Christmas Carol (an angel Christmas story) coming out.

ANDREA PICKENS/ANDREA DaRIF has been busy with a new series for Warner Forever, the “Hellion Heroes.” The first book, The Spy Wore Silk, is out in March 2007. This is what she says about it: “At first blush, Mrs. Merlin’s Academy for Select Young ladies is the very pattern card of a proper boarding school. But looks can be deceiving, along with music, art, dancing, and the social graces, the students–all streetwise orphans chosen for their toughness and intelligence–are being molded into an elit fighting force. England’s secret weapon. When a critical government document is stolen from Whitehall, the student known only as Siena is given the assignment to keep it from falling into enemies’ hands…”

So, what have your other favorite Regency authors been up to? Check here every Sunday to find out! And if there’s a certain author you’d love to have an update on, let us know!

The Riskies

Posted in Reading, Regency | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Replies

Author Updates

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Ah, writing. Not always the smoothest-sailing of careers, but one that has many perks — such as an excuse to put a picture of Wentworth in one’s blog post, because he’s writing, and therefore not off-topic at all.

With the demise of Signet and Zebra’s traditional Regency lines, most of their Regency authors had decisions to make regarding their futures. (Certain course changes were made, some large, some small). Santa recently asked what we Riskies were each working on now, and what certain other Regency authors were currently writing. (Answers are coming, Santa!)

This made me wonder — are there any other particular Signet or Zebra Regency authors that any of you are curious about? We Riskies are exceedingly well-connected — we all have vouchers for Almack’s, after all (although I’m not sure how certain persons got one — I suspect blackmail was involved). So if you all let us know which traditional Regency authors you want updates on, we can use our extensive networks of spies and informants to obtain this information for you.

So — which authors do you want updates on? Please share!

Cara

Posted in Reading, Regency, Writing | Tagged , | 3 Replies

Happy Father’s Day

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So, tomorrow is Father’s Day, and I still haven’t found a gift for my dad. He is the hardest person in the world to shop for–he already owns every electronic gizmo there is, plus every DVD and CD he might want he’s already bought for himself. I wonder if people in the Regency had this problem? Oh, yeah–they didn’t HAVE Father’s Day then. Lucky them. 🙂

Besides scanning the Internet for possible gifts, I’ve been trying to decide on a good theme for this post. In college, I once wrote a paper on fathers and daughters in Shakespeare. To borrow from that idea, here is a selection of fathers from Jane Austen:

From Mansfield Park, there is the uncle/father figure Sir Thomas Bertram. Now, he benevolently takes Fanny in and raises her alongside his own offspring, but Sir Thomas is really pretty distant in her life, a fearsome figure of authority. He is not outwardly affectionate, and is definitely highly concerned with outward appearances, but in the end he does acknowledge that he should have really spent more time overseeing his children and not left them to his lax wife and crazy Mrs. Norris.

From Pride and Prejudice, of course there is Mr. Bennet. He spends most of his time reading and hiding out in his study, which really who can blame him, but he also comes across as a bit careless to his family’s ultimate fate. With Elizabeth he is concerned and loving, but with his three younger daughters he lumps them together as the “silliest girls in England” (and again, who can totally argue with him?)

From Sense and Sensibility, I guess you can say there is Mr. Dahswood, who dies at the beginning. Yet it appears he loves his wife and daughters and wants to provide for them, hence he makes his son promise to take care of them. That the son breaks that promise isn’t really his fault, I guess…

From Emma, there is Mr. Woodhouse, the invalid. It’s said “she loved her father, but he was no companion to her.” He sees no fault in his daughter, and they spend a comfortable life together indulging each other in their whims and self-delusions.

From Northanger Abbey, we see Mr. Morland, a respectable, well-enough-off clergyman, with “considerable independence, besides two good livings.” But he is not much of a presence, probably because he has two livings and ten children. His wife appears equally distracted, leaving Catherine lots of time to do stuff like roll down hills and read horrid novels.

There is also General Tilney. He is very wealth-obsessed, boasting, annoying, and preoccupied with himself (when not meddling in his children’s lives). I sometimes wonder how Catherine is going to handle having him for an in-law…

And, from Persuasion, Sir Walter Elliott. He spends all his time reading the peerage and probably looking in the mirror. He loves his daughter Elizabeth, who is like a reflection of him in female form, but is quite indifferent to Anne and probably to Mary. “Vanity was the beginning and end of his character.”

And that is my thumbnail sketch of fathers to be found in Austen. They’re kind of a pitiful lot when looked at like that, aren’t they? 🙂 I thought of many other things that could go into this post–fathers in romance novels, fathers in the real-life Regency (btw, the picture is George III, Queen Charlotte, and their Six Eldest Children by Johann Zoffany. Thanks for the tips on uploading pics to Blogger!). But I really do need to get to the shops and find a gift for my own dad, who luckily is no Mr. Elliott or General Tilney. What are some of your favorite examples of fathers in books or histories? Or comments on Austen fathers, either fictional or Rev. Austen himself?

Happy Father’s Day!

Posted in Jane Austen, Reading, Writing | Tagged , | 8 Replies

Talk to Me!

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First off, may I just be so bold as to say “great minds think alike?” Amanda has a post on her blog about Bloomsday, also, although the smarty-pants actually finished the darn thing.

Me, I made it to the second page.

Elena had a post awhile back about giving up on books–I think most of us agreed that we didn’t used to, but time was too short, and there were too many books to read, to waste time on a book that wasn’t grabbing you. I think Joyce’s Ulysses is just too smart for me (I really admire, however, the premise behind Bloomsday: Ulysses recounts a modern-day traveler’s odyssey through Dublin on June 16, so Bloomsday celebrants relive Ulysses’s progress. Here in New York City, Symphony Space hosts a 12+-hour event to celebrate. So happy Bloomsday, everyone!)

But back to where I was attempting to go with this, albeit in a most Framptonian circuitous manner. I gave up on a book recently, one much less erudite (with less crudity) than Joyce’s because it was too slow. Was it me, or the book? The book was published in 2002, which means the author wrote it sometime in 2000 or so. I think that in that time, readers have come to want a different style in their romances. Instead of long, descriptive narrative, now most top-of-the-charts romances have tons of dialogue. Instead of love stories that take at least six months to begin and culminate, we’ve got stories that can take place over the course of a few days to a month. Is our attention span that much shorter?

Personally, I like the dialogue-heavy books. And I have a theory about how this sea-change happened: Julia Quinn. Julia Quinn writes amazing dialogue, light, witty banter that reveals loads about the character speaking, and she doesn’t spend a lot of time on description. Her books are a breath of fresh air.

Are the newer romances an improvement over the slower ones? Do you value dialogue over narrative? Which authors would you like to see stretch out their prose? What do you think of my theory?

And is this post itself too long?

Megan
www.meganframpton.com

Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged | 9 Replies

Flavors of Dark

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I’ve kept thinking about our discussion last week’s post about Prinnyworld vs. the real Regency, also about news I had that a particular publisher was looking for “dark” stories, and it’s led me to wonder what dark means to different people.

“Dark” requires torture, but what sort?

The first darker books I read were some of Mary Jo Putney’s, stories like PETALS IN THE STORM (heroine raped by the men who just killed her father) and THE RAKE (alcoholic hero). Later, I discovered Laura Kinsale, whose stories are usually dark: FLOWERS FROM THE STORM (hero a stroke victim put into an insane asylum), SHADOWHEART (hero raised by his father to be an assassin). What some authors do to their poor characters…

My own darkest book was LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, the dark elements being the grim reality of the lives of foundlings and the bad first marriages of the hero and heroine. I put in a lot of lighter elements, though, this is “Little League” dark compared to Putney or Kinsale.

So there’s the sort of “Real World Dark” that draws upon real world elements, like poverty or war or sexual abuse. Things we still read about in the news.

My other darker book was SAVING LORD VERWOOD, in which it seemed everyone wanted to kill the hero. It was dark in a Gothic sort of way: deranged villain, eerie setting (north coast of Cornwall, where there are so many cliffs to throw people over). Despite the attempted murder plot, this book felt lighter to me than LDM. I think “Gothic Dark” is somehow less grim than “Real World Dark”, just because these elements are further removed from our lives and everyday news.

Then “Gothic Dark” shades over into “Paranormal Dark”, which often taps into the angst of the accursed and those who love them. My favorite paranormal Regency is Karen Harbaugh’s THE VAMPIRE VISCOUNT. This sort of story provides a delicious roller-coaster of emotion, a thrilling touch of horror. It’s so different from our ordinary lives that I think it is more escapist.

There end my musings… These flavor categories are just for fun, and I don’t mean to imply any of them is better or worse than the others. What do you think? Have I missed some flavors? Do you have favorites? Which authors do dark better than anyone else?

Elena
LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, Golden Quill Best Historical Romance!
www.elenagreene.com

Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 9 Replies
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