I have nothing special to say today, so you are going to get very random thoughts!

Random Thought 1. I’m fully aware that the writers among us are thinking about or starting NaNoWriMo. I just received my revisions for Book 3 of the Three Soldiers Series, so there’s no way I can NaNoWriMo.

But here’s a tip….If you quickly want to find a series of NaNoWriMo tips, just google “NaNoWriMo tips.” There’s lots out there. (This tip works for anything you want to find, and works on other search engines, too)

Here’s another tip, especially useful for historical writers. Don’t get bogged down in research. If you aren’t sure of something or need more information, just write in “Needs research” and highlight it or put it in a different color font. If you want to be able to search for it easily, put in some searchable symbol, like * or parentheses.

Think how much harder it would have been to do NaNoWriMo in 1816.

Random Thought 2. What if Elizabeth Bennett had email? What might her inbox look like? There is a very clever website called Famous Inboxes by Mark Brownlow that shows us Elizabeth Bennett’s Inbox.

You may have seen this already but it is worth another look. Apparently it caught the attention of a UK Newspaper last month. And, Judy, there is a Lord of the Rings Inbox, too.

I’m just bummed that WE didn’t think of this. It’s right up Carolyn’s or Janet’s alleys. (I hope Janet’s booksigning went well, by the way!)

Random Thought 3. With all the talk of clever costumes last week, I thought you’d be dying to know what I wore to my friend Helen’s Halloween party. So here it is! I’m with my mouse….er, I mean, my spouse. We spared no expense of time or trouble with these costumes. None at all!

Oh! Oh! My books are being featured all week on Novel Works by Jerri Hines facebook fan page. Stop by and leave a comment! Today is Chivalrous Captain, Rebel Mistress day.

What random thoughts are you having today?
If you are doing NaNoWriMo, why are you reading this?
Did you have a fun Halloween?

I’ll be back at Diane’s Blog on Thursday!

Happy Halloween, everyone! I hope you’re all having a good/scary time and haven’t eaten too many Kit-Kat bars as I have. The town where I live had their trick-or-treat last night, so my festivities are now over and I’m onto thinking about the next holiday (Christmas!) and the rush of new releases coming up in the next two months. Where has the year gone???

But thinking about Christmas is perfect for my first November release! (Since I have 2 releases in November and my new Laurel McKee book, Duchess of Sin, in December, I am spending the next few weeks visiting blogs and running around to bookstores in addition to wrapping presents and mailing cards…) Snowbound and Seduced is my new Christmas novella in Regency Christmas Proposals

“Mary Bassington, Lady Derrington longs to be the carefree woman she once was. But she gets more than she bargained for this Christmas when she’s snowbound with old flame Dominick, Viscount Amesby, who reignites her passion for life–and love!” (from the back cover)

I had so much fun working on the Diamonds of Welbourne Manor anthology with Diane and our friend Deb Marlowe that I loved getting to re-visit the characters for this story. I had never really intended for Mary Bassington to have her own tale, but after I met her I became very curious. Why was she so sad? What was going on between her and Dominick? Snowbound and Seduced was my chance to find out and give them their very own holiday HEA (and also catch up with some of the Welbourne crowd!).

I also love snowbound stories, am totally addicted to them, so it was easy to devise a plot for Mary and Dominick that would get them together again and make them talk to each other finally (among other activities…). They have to join forces to set out in nasty winter weather in order to track down her naughty younger sister–who has eloped with Dominick’s cousin! On the way they find out the truth about the past, and discover that their love has never died. And they have a lovely, holly-berry Christmas too! (Regency Christmas Proposals also includes stories by Carole Mortimer and Gayle Wilson, so it’s a great holiday treat! It’s available at Eharlequin, and you can find excerpts and more info at my website)

“A heart-warming tale of unrequited young love that comes back to haunt and stoke flames of passion!” –The Season Reviews

My second November release, a Harlequin Historical Undone story with the all-encompassing title To Court, Capture, and Conquer, has nothing at all to do with Christmas, but it’s also a “cabin” romance! Set in Elizabethan England, Lord Edward Hartley is finally poised to take his long-planned revenge on Sir Thomas Shelton, a villain who once destroyed Edward’s brother. Edward will kidnap Shelton’s virginal intended. But he gets the girl’s beautiful, sophisticated aunt, Lady Elizabeth, instead! (It’s available at Eharlequin now as well!)

Trapped together in a country cottage, they find a passion neither of them ever expected–and a way to heal the wounds of the past. I loved seeing Edward and Elizabeth find happiness together, and I loved the setting too, the seamier side of the 16th century. Look for these characters to continue in a full-length novel next year, release date TBA…

You haven’t seen the last of me this year, either! I will be at various blogs in coming weeks (Word Wenches on November 24 to promote Duchess of Sin, followed by The Season on the 30th, Borders on December 15, and SOS on December 6, along with Nicola Cornick. Lots of chances to win! I also have a great contest going on at my Laurel site until December…)

What are some of your favorite holiday stories?? (I like to get out all my old Regency Christmas anthologies, which I used to buy every year, and re-read them around Christmastime!). What are some of your favorite holiday traditions? And do you enjoy the shorter-length stories? (I will give away a free download of To Court… and a signed copy of Regency Christmas Proposals to two commenters)

Happy Halloween week, everyone! I can’t believe the holiday is getting so close, I need to go buy more candy and put the finishing touches on the decorations. The weather is finally cooperating here, getting cool and crisp, with leaves drifting to the ground and cloudy, spooky evenings, perfect for little trick or treaters…

I thought, since we’ve looked at various haunts and ghosts this month, we’d wrap up with a little info about the Halloween traditions we still do today. For one–costumes! This is my favorite part of the holiday, since I love to dress up. (This is my Alice in Wonderland costume, which I wore to the Ghouls Gone Wild Halloween parade last weekend! You can’t see it in this pic, but I have a great Alice headband I bought at the Disney Store). The practice of dressing up in costumes and going door to door asking for treats dates back to the Middle Ages (though not quite in the same form we use today!) and is part of the same tradition as Christmas wassailing. Then it was called “souling” and people would go from village house to village house on Hallowmas (November 1), asking for food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day (November 2). This seems to have originated in Ireland and England, but there are details that show it was in practice as far south as Italy. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare has a line about “puling like a beggar at Hallowmas.” Wearing costumes can be traced back to an ancient Celtic tradition of wearing masks and disguises to fool the spirits on this day, when the veil between the two worlds was thinnest.

“Souling” also involved using candle lanterns carved from turnips to commemorate the dead. Large turnips were hollowed out and carved with scary faces, then placed in windows to keep spirits away. (Pumpkins started being used in the New World, where they were widely available and larger, thus easier to carve than turnips!). I don’t think Hello Kitty was a motif used back then, but I love this pic…

There always seem to be games at Halloween parties, like bobbing for apples. Traditional games seem to involve divination of some sort–a traditional Scottish practice said that to divine one’s future spouse you should peel an apple in one long strip, then toss it over your shoulder. It will form the spouse’s initials. (This seems pretty iffy to me!). Unmarried ladies were also told if they sat in a dark room and looked into a mirror on Halloween night, the face of their future husband would appear in the mirror. But if they were to die before they married, a skull would appear instead! (This seems to be a variation of the “Bloody Mary” game so beloved of slumber parties…). Thsi sort of thing seemed so popular in Victorian/Edwardian times that there was a wide range of postcards available for the holiday.

I have a couple of great books that tell more of the history and traditions of Halloween! If you’d like to read more, check out Nicholas Rogers’s Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night and David J. Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween.

If you happen to be in the UK for the holiday (as I wish I was!), Hampton Court is offering Ghost Tours, and the Tower is having rare after-dark Twilight Tours I will just be dressing up my dogs in their costumes and handing out candy to trick or treaters, but I guess I can pretend it’s the Tower….

What are your plans for the holiday??? (And don’t forget, I will be back here on Sunday, the 31st to talk about my November releases, a new “Undone” short story, To Court, Capture, and Conquer and “Snowbound and Seduced” in Regency Christmas Proposals. I’ll be giving away copies, too–a sort of Halloween treat…)

I can’t believe it’s almost the end of October! It’s flown past and soon it will be time to think about Thanksgiving and (gasp!) Christmas. But there is still plenty of time left for more spookiness….

Last Tuesday we looked at some famous ghosts of the UK (Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, etc)–today we’ll look at some interesting apparitions, not necessarily ghosts (whatever we think a “ghost” is) but stuff that is pretty creepy anyway. In many parts of the world, there are lots of legends of spirits and “phantom lights” wandering roadways, hitchhiking or just generally floating around being creepy. (When I was a teenager, I remember tales of a certain spot outside town where ghost lights could be seen, and the spirit of a girl who was run over on a railroad track and pushes cars over the fatal spot. But I was never brave enough to go look for myself…) There are also ghost cars and phantom carriages pulled by ghoulish horses and headless coachmen. The streets can be dangerous places.

There are also lots of haunted World War II airfields in England, places where scores of young men flew off to their doom and now keep coming back to their airstrips. One legend combines the haunted airstrip with the roadway ghost. At the remains of RAF Metheringham, a young woman is spotted standing by the road just outside the gates between 9 and 10 at night. She wears a pale green coat and gray scarf with an RAF wings badge pinned to her collar. She stops passers-by and asks for help, telling them her boyfriend had a motorcycle accident and is injured nearby. She looks quite real–until she suddenly vanishes, and leaves a feeling of fear and panic behind, along with an unpleasant smell. (Legend has it she was killed when riding the motorcycle with her fiance).

Biggin Hill airfield is perhaps the most famous of the “haunted airfields”–phantom Spitfires fly overhead, heard but not seen, and sometimes airmen dressed in trench coats walk through the village before disappearing. Another similar spot is Bircham Newton, where doomed airmen are said to play squash in deserted buildings.

One famous manifestation of the “phantom carriage” is Lady Howard, a 17th century noblewoman who was widowed 4 times and also lost her young son. Strangely, in life she had a good reputation, despite a horrible father who was detested in the local village (and killed himself) and one abusive husband who (shockers!) divorced her, but her other 3 marriages were content enough and she was charitable and well-liked. Now in death she is cursed to ride each night in a carriage made of the bones of her 4 husbands and accompanied by a huge black dog with blood-red eyes and driven by a headless coachman. The ghostly-white figure of a lady can be glimpsed inside. It leaves behind a foul smell, and it’s said that if it stops at any door or for anyone on the road, that person will die.

Recently–or actually, all of the time–authors on Twitter were discussing copy edits, and their bad habits.

One commented THAT she seemed to use THAT all the time, and THAT it was THAT annoying to find in her manuscript.

Others have talked about their heroines making certain expressions continually, such as glaring, and heroes often drawl (especially Regency heroes!) beyond even the deepest of Southerners.

One of my tells is starting blog posts with “So,” which I do in real life a lot. One of my other tells is repeating the same information in the next sentence, just in case you didn’t get it the first time. Yeah, not such a good habit.

Resulting in the ever popular *facepalm*.

And then there are thematic tells, but that is for a much longer post.

Certain authors have such distinctive tells you can immediately identify their work by a few sentences. For example (and some of these are so, so easy!):

Sentences that last AT LEAST half a page (hello, Mr. Faulkner!)
Sentences that are one word and one entire paragraph (Robin Schone and, um, me)
No capital letters (It was just e.e. cummings‘ birthday)
No punctuation (this isn’t quite the same thing, but apparently Christopher Walken removes all the punctuation from his scripts which results in his intriguing reading of his material). Plus many early authors had unfamiliar punctuation, but that is more likely due to the changes in the art rather than a tell itself.
Certain words; I have yet to read a Barbara Hambly where I didn’t stumble across a word I had no idea of its meaning, usually within the first two pages. Always the first five.

Some of these tells result in what editors and agents are apparently always looking for, which is voice. I’ve been told I have a strong writing voice, which is good, unless you’re not fond of the voice in question.

What tells have you noticed in authors? If you’re an author, what is your best and worst tell?

Megan