I’m continuing to immerse myself in research for my hero’s military background. I didn’t want to break from it even during my Easter travel, so I brought along THE SPANISH BRIDE by Georgette Heyer. It’s the fictionalized account of Brigade Major Harry Smith and his bride, Juana, whom he married after the siege of Badajoz, and their succeeding adventures from the Peninsular War through Waterloo.

A review on the inside cover from The Sunday Times states “Altogether, it is an exceedingly able reconstruction of historic events, in which the love story, though delightful enough, takes second place.”

This was probably a necessary warning to fans of Heyer’s Regencies that this book is not one of them. Personally I think the review is spot-on; I found the descriptions of military life far more interesting than Harry and Juana’s romance. There was plenty of story conflict in terms of the war but not much romantic conflict. Apparently it was love at first sight, and neither cared much for culture differences. Harry spoke fluent Spanish; Juana adjusted readily to the army life. The story is peppered by minor marital spats followed by passionate reconciliations, all of which would have been merely annoying had they not been brief. In fact, a few times I felt Juana was behaving like a melodramatic teenager before I remembered that she was indeed only fourteen when they married and just seventeen by the time of Waterloo.

Anyway, even though the circumstances were more exciting than usual, Harry and Juana’s story isn’t the stuff of a romance novel. That cover quote made me think about what people think of as a love story. Some diss romance for being unrealistic. I’ve always thought it was because they don’t believe in happy endings. But maybe it’s the other way around. I know many happily married couples whose stories (met at a party, dated, fell in love and decided to marry) are just not that interesting to anyone but those close to them.

Maybe some people think a romance novel is all one long romp in a flowery meadow and there’s no conflict worth following. Maybe they don’t realize that romance authors try to give their characters deeper problems to solve than most real life couples face. And these problems are not only external, such as the hazards of war Harry and Juana Smith faced, but something that challenges the relationship. Admittedly, some authors fall short, relying on misunderstandings or cardboard villains to keep things going. It’s probably one of the toughest challenges in writing a romance: to come up with two people who are perfect for one another and a powerful and believable problem that their love will have to overcome.

What sorts of conflicts do or don’t work for you? If you have read THE SPANISH BRIDE, what did you think?

Elena
www.elenagreene.com

Welcome to the Riskies, Delle!

Thanks so much for inviting me to be a Risky For a Day! I love reading your blog, and it’s a real pleasure to be a part of it. I’ll have a signed ARC of my latest release, Aphrodite’s Brew, plus a little chocolate gift (not an Easter Bunny) for one of you at the end of the day. Just be sure to send me your email address so I can arrange shipping with you!

And while I’m promoting, let me drop a few lines about the Royal Ascot, which I’m coordinating this year. There’s lots of new information, so be sure to check it out on the Beau Monde website. It’s a fabulous contest, a great place to try out your Regencies, with terrific prizes, wonderful critiques and comments, and wonderful editors for the final round. Save money by entering electronically, or be traditional and send a paper entry. Unusual and cross-genre Regencies are encouraged, and fimalsts whose entries are outside the gsub-genres the final round editors would buy will be provided with an extra read by an editor who acquires that sub-genre. And all non-finalists’ names will be put into a drawing for several 50-page critiques for non-finaling entrants.

Enough of the soapbox. Onward to the questions now.

I’ll join you briefly on your soapbox before we both jump off to also encourage people to enter. I’m one of the writers who first published as a result of the contest! Now tell us about Aphrodite’s Brew.

Aphrodite’s Brew is what I call my piece of fluff, although it really isn’t all that fluffy. I meant for it to be a Regency Romp, emphasis on the Romp. Comedy bordering on slapstick. Not a book to be taken seriously, just one to be fun. But by the second draft, my characters started to take on more angst, more depth, and the book had a different tone and blend than I had originally planned.

It’s just an ordinary restorative tonic for women that Sylvia, Lady Ashbroughton, makes and secretly sells to finance her beloved step-daughter’s entrance into society. She has no notion it has an entirely different effect on men. But the bachelors of the Ton are suddenly and eagerly rushing giddly off to Gretna Green and committing the unthinkable atrocity agaist bachelorhood .

Word has it a love potion has fallen into the hands of the match-making mamas. The gay blades are all doomed. Val–Lord Vailmont, a man of science and reason who scoffs at magic, witchcraft and the like, vows to prove to his superstitious friends they are being duped. A wager ensues, and the embittered widower who has vowed never to marry again sets out to hunt down the perpetrator of the hoax. The clues lead his straight to Sylvia, and one look in her silver-green eyes sets his soul spinning as if he has just encountered a witch.

Sylvia needs no handsome earls prying into her life. If Val learns of her secret trade in potions, she will be ruined and her beloved stepdaughter will be deprived of her Season. Worse, the earl could uncover Sylvia’s most shameful secret—her weakness for handsome men like him. So she protects her fragile heart from him by concocting an old family charm to wear in a locket. But neither logic nor charms can combat the stubborn love that sweeps them into a whirl of unbridled passion.

And, from somewhere in the mists of time, a forgotten, nameless god is laughing.

I have a great video for Aphrodite’s Brew, full of my own art work. Check it out— I hope you enjoy it.

How hard was it to incorporate paranormal elements in a novel set in the early industrial/late enlightenment period?

I think it’s both easy and hard. Regency readers and writers often show great attention to detail and accuracy, sometimes to the point where we are almost writing non-fiction instead of romance. Paranormal, on the other hand, calls for suspension of disbelief on a large scale. But that’s the very premise of Aphrodite’s Brew: pitting fact and reason against mysticism, the unreal, ethereal elements no facts or logic can explain. The Regency period is perfect for this because it sits squarely between the ancient world of faith and belief in things ethereal and the modern world of science and rationality. I chose my two characters to represent the duality. Val doesn’t believe in much of anything that can’t be rationally explained, but Sylvia has roots deep in the past, perhaps, I’ve hinted, all the way back to the pre-literate ancient Celts. To me, this premise is like England itself, a modern industrial, literate land surrounded and deeply ingrained in its own long history.

What do you love/hate about the Regency?

I don’t hate anything about it. The Regency was what it was, flaws and all. I think it’s easy to look back on the past and criticize. It would be hard to go back from the present and live in the past, but if we were born there with no knowledge of what the future would bring, we wouldn’t think it so bad. Just as in today’s world, we’d see things that ought not to be, and perhaps try to change them. And we’d look back at the previous generations and wonder how the could stand their primitive lives. There were things like slavery and lack of rights for women I would not want to live with, and I not be at all keen to go back any time before Pasteur. But if I didn’t know what germs were, and if my expectations of life were lower, I doubt I’d be overly worried about the things that are such issues for me today.

You’ve had a rather tortuous path to publication–what advice do you have for those struggling toward publication?

I noticed you said tortuous, not tortured. I had to go back and look to be sure, because either would fit. Part of my struggle had to do with coming to recognize I have stories to tell that may not be what New York wants to hear or publish. I suspect I always knew that to some degree, but it was difficult for me to accept the choice I really had, to either write the stories that are highly commercially viable, and hope to sell them even if they aren’t stories I want to write, or write what speaks to me even if it has a smaller audience. I’m afraid I still haven’t completely resolved that one. I’m still looking for the middle ground. To put it another way, I’m still trying to find MY story that is also THEIR story.

I think I would advise authors to know their market, yes, but more than that, to really analyze their own goals for writing. Find out what it is you REALLY want from your writing career. Would you write anything your editor or agent told you to write (assuming you got such a directive) even if it happened to be a subject you hate? What would you do, how far would you go to get published? Or are you like the fellow who used to sit on the other side of my cubicle wall, and refuse to change a single word of your story, even knowing you would pass up publication for your decision? Do you fall in between? Find out by ruthlessly examining yourself where you fit. It’s perfectly possible you will be one of those perfect fits in the genre of romance, writing story after story you love, and selling it to editors and readers who love it too. But if not, try to understand where you fit, and if your story doesn’t fit THEIR story, how much are your willing to bend? Or conversely, how can you find the stories that are perhaps different enough to blaze a new trail through the forest of fiction?

A risk is a risk is a risk. The question is, are you willing to pay the price?

The Riskies question: do you–or your editor– consider you took a risk with this book?

To begin with, it was originally written as a traditional Regency with a paranormal plot, mixed heavily with comedy. Sex was added in the second draft because it needed to be there. At the time, this mix was a pretty hard sell. Traditional Regencies didn’t have sex for the most part– wow, has that changed! The tone is strongly Regency. The comedy was almost slapstick in places and definitely pokes fun at the characters. And paranormal wasn’t often done. The book has been rejected for all of the above by various editors. One loved it, but didn’t want any fantasy elements in her house’s stories. One didn’t want sex in Regencies. At least one reviewer has actually taken this book seriously, and that really blows my mind. Humor is hard, and never so hard as when the reader doesn’t get it. Mostly, though, this book didn’t sell to the big houses because it was thought of as a traditional Regency. Three editors attempted to buy it, but in every case it lost out because they saw it as a traditional Regency, at the very moment their Regency lines were coming crashing down. It is a very strange feeling to have several editors all gushing over a book they can’t buy.

All that, though, made it a perfect book for Samhain. As a smaller press that publishes both electronically and in print, they can attract just exactly the right audience. Traditional Regency lovers are learning to find the stories they love in e-books. And they’ve changed enough with the times that a more sensual story is very welcome, as long as it actually makes sense with the times. Paranormal has become so popular, it has become an asset, not a liability. So I guess part of the risk has to do with timing.

What’s next for you?

Another risky book. Sins of the Heart, which won the Royal Ascot and several other contests (but was written after I decided I didn’t need any more Golden Hearts) is an adventure Regency romance. Its setting is risky– a small town in Cornwall, not the ballrooms of London. It’s as much about spies and smugglers as it is about deceit and betrayal. And maybe it’s not as risky as the one that will follow it because I’m straying into the dangerous territory of religion. One of the strongest characters in Sins is a charismatic Cornishman who, like most commoners of Cornwall, is a fervent Methodist who sees no contradiction at all with his frequent dabbling in the Free Trade. I haven’t started this book yet, except in my head, and maybe, if I write it, I’ll keep it to myself. I’m enamored with the conflict between Davy’s rigidly moral, sometimes authoritarian conscience and the Frenchwoman spy he was forced to rescue off the very beaches of France. She is everything he doesn’t believe is right, but he can’t stop thinking about her.

After that, more risky stuff. Currently I have a series planned around the Laughing God in Aphrodite’s Brew. The next is Gilding Lilly, a Cinderella-Ugly Duckling sort of story in which beauty doesn’t win out, after all. There are also two minor characters in the first book who you probably wouldn’t think worthy of their own romance, and they aren’t– yet. They’re beautiful faces on shallow people. In Lilly, they begin to let slip things that show they aren’t so shallow, but are caught in a trap the don’t understand and can’t escape. It will take another book before they grow enough to be the hero and heroine we want to root for, and finally when they have at last struggled and grown so much, they will need their own story.

I’m also doing something completely off kilter for me, Siren, a very sensual historical fantasy of the sea. You can see the video for it on YouTube even though I haven’t yet finished the book. It was my first video, but I’ve very proud of it. I think I’ll be very proud of the book too.

You see, I love writing risky stuff. And I think I’m finally getting the idea that I don’t have to write what I don’t want to write. Yes, true, I’d love to be rich and famous. But not quite as much as I love writing my stories my way. I think that’s called being eccentric. But that’s okay. I’m old enough now that eccentric sounds good to me.

Let’s talk about–pacing. Not the sort I do on a treadmill (or should be doing–that 10 pounds won’t lose itself before RWA!). The kind that moves stories along. It all sounds dull, doesn’t it, especially compared with hunky heroes and sparkly dialogue, but it’s vital. Without the right pacing, Mr. Hunk is mired in the quicksand. When it’s ‘on’, hopefully the reader doesn’t notice it at all. They’re too busy skipping happily through the engrossing story. When it’s off–well, readers can feel caught in the quicksand, too.

Here is what made me think about it–movies. Two of them. I was watching the DVD of The Holiday. Amanda and Iris (aka Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet) switch houses for Christmas, to get away from disastrous relationships, etc. Kate goes to Cameron’s fab mansion in L.A., Cameron to Kate’s ramshackle (but probably vastly expensive) cottage in Surrey.

There’s quite a bit I like in this movie. The two women are appealing characters, their stories interesting enough–I wanted them to find love and be happy! And, let’s face it, the Jude Law character is like my Ideal Man. He’s English, a book editor, has a terrific London house and 2 adorable daughters, and is funny and emotionally aware on top of it. Kate’s story involves a bit more wheel-spinning and a purported sort-of romance with Jack Black, of all people, but I like her. So far–good.

But, let’s talk editing. This movie tries to tell two stories, and yet the set-up alone takes nearly half an hour. We see what jerks the respective ex-boyfriends are (repeatedly), how neurotic Amanda is and how insecure Iris is (again, repeatedly). There are long scenes about the on-line house swap, driving to the houses, etc. I ended up fast-forwarding a bit here, and still had no trouble following the story at all. The set-up could have taken, oh, about ten minutes, and we would have gotten to Jude Law, I mean the rest of the story, sooner.

Contrast this with a gem I saw in the theater last weekend, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. The roles, every one of them, were perfectly cast. From the leads (Amy Adams and Frances McDormand), to the so-called villain (the wonderful Shirley Henderson), to the men (2 Jane Austen film vets, Ciaran Hinds and Mark Strong, and the Pie Maker, er, Lee Pace. I knew from Pushing Daisies he was cute–now I see he’s sexy, too!). Every scene is vital to moving the story forward. Not a line of dialogue is wasted. The world of late ’30s London is beautifully built through sets and costumes. The actors can just be let loose into the story, and it all falls into sparkly (and ultimately very emotionally moving) place.

This pacing thing is something I really worry about as a writer. Where should the story even start? There’s always backstory a reader needs to know, but we don’t want to bore the snot out of them in Chapter One, and thus prompt fast-forwarding (like I did with The Holiday). Without a strict word count and some deadline structure, I do tend to meander a bit. I’m working on my Balthazar/1530s Caribbean book right now. I did lots of research for this one, on ships, life in the islands, nautical charts, pirates, etc. In addition, the characters have rather, um, complicated pasts (and personalities!) that are important to their relationship now.

How much of all this do I put in? When? What’s really important, and what’s just my half-hour set-up? I struggle a bit with this these days. But I do get a great deal of inspiration from looking at images like this one of Orlando!

So, I need your help. What do you like to see in stories? What can you do without? What makes you fast-forward through movies or books? And have you seen The Holiday or Miss Pettigrew (I recommend both, BTW!)??

Happy Easter, everyone! Save me some Cadbury Caramel eggs. And a Godiva chocolate bunny. (Oh, and Keira informed me that A Sinful Alliance is now being shipped from Amazon! Yay! Next Saturday join us for a chance to win an autographed copy–but if you can’t wait…)

I like words.

I know — shocking revelation for a writer to make. But there it is. I like words.

And some words, I really like…either for their sound, or their meaning, or some strange essence they possess…

Today, words that fall into my “really like” column include:

deciduous

concatenation

lucidity

paraphrase

plethora

soothing

bombast

peregrination

shutters

How about you? What words do you like to say, read or write, due to their inner (or outer) beauty?

All opinions welcome!

Cara
Cara King, author of the soothing and rarely bombastic MY LADY GAMESTER, a book that does not contain the words “deciduous” or “concatenation”

Happy Saturday, everyone! St. Patrick’s Day is not actually until Monday, of course, but I’m off to the St. Patrick’s Day Ball tonight (with my black and white dress, plus a green chiffon shawl and a big fake emerald ring–thanks for the accessories advice last week!). Plus I got an early St. P’s Day present this week. I sold a trilogy to Grand Central Publishing!!!

Now, how does this fit in with the Shamrocks and Slip Jigs theme? The series, tentatively called “The Daughters of Ireland,” is set in Ireland and London around the events of the 1798 Rebellion. I’m very excited to get to tackle a book set in Ireland amid so much drama and upheaval–Ireland is very big in the McCabe Family. It seems like a place just meant for romance and passion.

Book One, called Countess of Scandal (but which will probably be something different later) comes out sometime in 2010. It features the first of the three Blacknall sisters, Elizabeth (Eliza). She is a young, rich widowed countess, the daughter of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family. But she has a secret–she writes seditious pamphlets for the United Irishmen, and hides fugitives in the cellars of her vast Dublin townhouse. She’s devoted to Irish freedom, but a serious problem pops up in the person of her childhood sweetheart, Will Denton, the son of her family’s equally wealthy neighbors. He left her when she was young to join the Army and go off to the West Indies, breaking her heart. Now he’s back–and he’s Major William Denton, sent to Ireland to quell the growing unrest. He knows Eliza is up to something dangerous, and is just as determined to stop her as she is to fulfill her mission. If they can keep from falling hopelessly in love all over again.

I am very excited about this series! Of course, now I have to actually get to work and write them…

And, in the spirit of All Things Irish, here are a few facts I found about Guinness (to go with your corned beef and cabbage):
–Arthur Guinness started brewing the famous stout in Dublin in 1759, having purchased a dormant brewery with 100 pounds from his godfather’s will. He signed a 9000 year lease on that brewery, with an annual rent of 45 pounds (still in effect, I would think)
–10 million glasses of Guinness are drunk every day around the world
–A pint of Guinness Draught has fewer calories than a pint of 2% milk or a pint of orange juice
–The Guiness Storehouse in Dublin is one of their most-visited tourist attractions, with over 750,000 visitors every year

So, Cheers to everyone this St. Patrick’s Day! I’m so happy to share my news with all the Riskies! What are your plans for the holiday?