This is going to be a short Saturday post! I’m writing it at an Internet cafe in snowbound Santa Fe, where I’ve come for a too-short birthday trip (it’s on the 15th, and Barnes and Noble giftcards make GREAT presents. I’m just sayin’…). So, I’m going to follow Megan’s example from a few weeks ago and let YOU be the post. Tell us what you’re currently reading, what’s in your TBR pile, or what upcoming books you’re looking forward to.

I decided not to bring many research books with me this weekend. I’ve been buried in my three ongoing projects (Regency with elements of ancient Greece, Tudor England, pre-Revolutionary France), and I’m afraid if I don’t take a break I’ll have Henry VIII dancing at Almacks with Marie Antoinette. Instead, I’m treating myself to some fiction–Colleen Gleason’s The Rest Falls Away (couldn’t resist after her interview here!), Claire Thornton’s The Abducted Heiress (a rare Restoration setting, something I would love to see more of), and a mystery by Sarah Stewart Taylor, Still As Death.

That’s my weekend reading! What’s yours?

There’s big excitement about this entry on
Kristin Nelson’s blog where she claims editors are gagging for historicals.

She’s too discreet to say which editors, though, which is a pity.

Apart from the argument that historicals have never been dead/dying, this raises another point:

Who determines the market?

Is it the editors, who make the decisions about what they want to buy? The marketing department, who decide how the books should be packaged? Is there a special bucket, way up in the penthouse suite of every publisher, where an executive dips his hand in, pulls out a slip of paper, and solemnly announces (for instance) that eighteenth-century men in kilts are in?

Or is it the readers? Or the writers?

How can anyone write to the market when the high concept of 2007 may be the stale bagel of 2009 (which is probably when a book submitted now would be published)?

We’ve been talking here recently about cliched plots vs. tried and true story lines, and I think the truth is that a good writer can subvert and polish something that’s been done to death. But what are we missing?

What would you like to read and/or write? It’s time to roleplay the character of Ms. or Mr. Big NY Publishing House Executive. Is there a time period you feel is neglected? A type of character you don’t often see? A setting? You’re going to choose what we’ll be reading next…and it’s….

Janet

Writing as Jane Lockwood, Forbidden Shores, September 2007, Heat/NAL
One Last Scandalous Exchange, October 2007 HarperCollins Historical
www.janetmullany.com

I confess. I’m an emotional slob and did I prove it this weekend!

First I took my kids to see the new version of CHARLOTTE’S WEB. When I first read this book as a child, I cried at the end. I apparently still haven’t grown up because I had to surreptitiously wipe away a few tears in the movie theatre. The movie was pretty well done, the celebrity voices only occasionally distracting (and Julia Roberts was great as Charlotte). The special effects used to show Charlotte spinning her web were lovely. But it was the ending, of course, that got me, when Wilbur says “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” May we all deserve such a eulogy!

Apparently this wasn’t enough exercise for the tear ducts. I also happened to finish THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE (a New Year’s resolution of sorts) this weekend. It’s a polarizing book. Some people are put off by the nonlinear storytelling, some people are disappointed because they were expecting science fiction, not a love story, others complain it’s not a love story because Harry and Clare have too much sex (we Riskies have never heard that complaint, have we????) But there are many who love the book, including my friends at Writer Unboxed, who did an interview with the author, Audrey Niffenegger. One of my friends commented how she cried over Henry. Well, slushbucket here cried too, not just over Henry, but over Clare, too (and maybe a little for myself because I may never write anything half as powerful).

Of course I had to think about why these stories affect me so much. I think it’s because by taking a different view at life (through a friendship between a pig and a spider, through a love relationship whose ordinary events unfold in an extraordinary way) they remind me to live in the moment more, to cherish love and beauty whenever and however they come into my life, and to be willing to risk the pain of losing what I love.

I try to get some of that into my stories, though it’s harder in romance where the reader is primed to expect a happy ending. The thing is the characters don’t know it’s going to be OK and one has to get the reader to feel that. One can also plumb wounds from the past or sacrifice secondary characters, though these things can’t be contrived or they feel like cheap ploys. And rosy as we might make those final scenes, the bittersweet is there in the vows “til death do us part”. Maybe that’s why people cry at weddings. (Of course this whole issue is moot if it’s a paranormal and h/h are immortal, I suppose!)

So do you like tear-jerkers? What are your favorites? Any favorite romances that get you going? What do you think makes them work? Are we authors evil for doing such terrible things to our characters?

And lastly, could you imagine anyone ever having wiped a tear (let alone do anything so unladylike as to blow her nose) into this antique hanky c.1850? (Image from Karen Augusta Antique Lace & Fashion.)

Elena, resident Risky Regency Watering Pot
www.elenagreene.com

Kalen’s comment on Friday about being tired of Regency spies got me to thinking.

What Regency plots are readers tired of?

One of the things that strikes terror into my heart is the idea that the Regency genre might run out of plots. For example, one of the tried and true Regency plots is the lord and the governess plot. You know, the spunky governess comes to care for the lord’s unruly children and winds up married to the lord. I love that plot. I have a whole book with such a plot in my head, but I doubt that any publisher would buy it in today’s market. Unless I could give it a great twist. Maybe not even then.

Several of my plots have been “Marriage of Convenience” plots – The Mysterious Miss M, The Wagering Widow, The Improper Wife, The Marriage Bargain. Obviously that is another plot I’m fond of. Are readers sick of that one? When I first wrote The Mysterious Miss M editors said that readers would never accept a prostitute heroine, but now it seems like there are lots of Regencies out there with prostitute or courtesan heroines. Did the readers change or were those editors simply mistaken? And was it my heroine who made that book popular or was it because I used that marriage of convenience plot?

I always wondered if the traditional Regency lines were hampered by overuse of some of the popular plots – the marriage of convenience, governess and lord, unmarried duke and the ingenue in her first season, bookish spinster and debauched rakehell. What are some others?

Ironically, though, I started reading fewer traditional regencies when they started to widen the plots into suspense, mystery, paranormal. Were other readers saturated by the “traditional” plots or did they miss them, like I did?

Presently I read very few regency-set novels, but it is because I’m afraid of contaminating my fragile muse. I’m afraid I’ll either mimic others’ great ideas or I’ll be struck wordless by others’ creativity….

After I finish writing my next Harlequin Mills & Boon and my next Warner, I’ll have to seriously think about these issues. I have a fledgling Regency plot floating around in my head. It has a bit of paranormal in it, but by the time I get to writing those books, will the appetite for paranomal be satiated?

Do other Regency writers worry about such things or is it just me? I’m always afraid I will never have another story idea….

Writing Regency romance is my passion, though. I don’t ever want to stop. How do we keep the Regency genre fresh? Is it by reinventing the tried and true plots or by expanding the genre into new directions? Will the Regency ever lose its position as a popular time period in romance? Gosh I hope not!

So, tell me… What Regency plots are you tired of? Which ones do you never get tired of? Do you like it when Regency spreads itself into other genres? And, last of all, do you think the Regency genre is here to stay?

Confession: I subscribe to way too many fashion/beauty magazines. I’m addicted to them–my bedroom is full of copies of Vogue, Elle, In Style, Allure. It’s like lipgloss porn. And with a new Sephora open near my house, I have a place to go for a prime “fix.” (The funny thing is, I read about all these new products, make lists, pore over the makeup counters, sometimes even buy stuff. But I always go back to the same things in the end–Clinique eyeshadow, Chanel lipstick, Maybelline Great Lash).

In the January Allure there’s an article called “Beauty Secrets” about some of the extreme lengths women go to in order to look beautiful. Waxing, plucking, Botoxing, etc. One woman slathers herself all over with olive oil and wraps up in a sheet, mummy-like, before going to bed. But her ex-boyfriend was “appalled. I thought we were past this gotta-be-a-goddess stage. But no.”

Of course, suffering for beauty is nothing new. We’ve been doing it since Egyptian women stuck perfumed cones of wax on their heads and let them melt. Maybe cavewomen even set up day spas in open rock formations. One of my favorite “cosmetic history” sources isn’t Regency but Elizabethan, a 16th century pamphlet called “A dialogue of the faire perfectioning of ladies.” I have a modern reprint of this interesting early version of Allure, written as a dialogue between two kinswomen, Raffaella and Margaret, as Raffaella guides Maragret through the intricacies of glamour. She recommends such things as a lotion of “Malmsey wine, white vinegar, honey, lily flowers, fresh beans, verdigris, right silver, rock salt, sandiver, rock alum, and sugar alum.” At least this isn’t quite as toxic as some of the other preparations, like white lead paint for the face and bosom! Or like this one:

“…One takes pure silver and quicksilver and, when they are ground in the mortar, one adds ceruse and burnt rock alum, and then for a day they are ground together again and afterwards moistened with mastic until all is liquid; then all is boiled in rainwater and, the boiling down done, one casts some sublimate upon the mortar; this is done three times and the water cast on the fourth time is kept together with the body of the lye.”

Would you try this sort of thing in order to be fashionable? What about in your modern life? Any favorite beauty products, whether or not it involves olive oil? (because I’m always looking for new things to try!). Or do you have any beauty resolutions for the new year? Mine is to remember to reapply my lipstick, instead of just slapping it on in the morning and forgetting about it…