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Category: Risky Book Talk

Posts in which we talk about our own books

I am very excited to announce that the fourth book in my Tales of Little Macclow series, His Lady to Love, releases this coming Sunday, September 15th! After the year+ long detour I took to co-author Writing Regency England, I’m so happy to be back to my little Derbyshire village and the fiction stories of my heart.

Here’s the link (it’s also going to be in KU): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DDRKCFH3

Book cover for Gail's new release His Lady to LoveThe heroine of His Lady to Love, Ailis Murray (known to her intimate friends as “Lissie”), is a young Scottish widow. Many of the widowed heroines we meet in romance fiction have not enjoyed a happy first marriage. I think the reason is simply that the heroine’s lack of previous emotional engagement makes the new romance easier to have the “first love” depth and intensity readers enjoy. But I always like a challenge and frequently prefer to swim against the current. What if our heroine doesn’t fit that mold?

Lissie loved her first husband deeply and after a year is still grappling to some extent with her grief. She is very resistant to falling in love again. She believes that she has “had her one great love” and isn’t willing to settle for a less satisfying relationship. She doesn’t want to wed again. (Naturally I hope the reader will be rooting for her to be proven wrong!) But the emotional risk is not her only reason for not wanting another marriage.

To understand the potential benefits of widowhood in the Regency, we need to take a quick look at what it meant for women to be married.

Black & white woodcut engraving of a Regency couple. She is seated, wiht one hand on her breast, looking excoted, while he kneels in front of her and is kissing her hand. Very romantic!

Regency lovers, woodcut 1815

Marriage in Georgian and Regency society was considered the ultimate point of womanhood. Procreation was necessary for the continuation of society. In the upper classes, children meant maintaining the structure of the ruling strata of society, while in the lower classes, they meant maintaining the supply of workers in the laboring strata. But also, in these periods, the alternatives for women were few. Being married meant survival and sustenance—being protected and provided for by a man.

I think it is very hard for us in this modern age to fully grasp how different things were for women back then in an entirely male-dominated world! The trade-off for the life-long sustenance and (assumed) safety of marriage was that wives had no rights of their own. Legally, marriage was seen as unifying the couple into a single entity. Once married, everything a woman owned, earned, or was given belonged to her husband (unless protected in some way, such as a trust). A wife was legally dependent on her husband for everything, seen as essentially a sub-unit of the man she is attached to.

Obviously, there were women who defied the system, but they were the rare cases. And if widows hadn’t adequate means of support from some source after their husbands died, marrying again was the necessary alternative to suffering in severe poverty. But widows who had an income source, having fulfilled society’s expectations by marrying, could enjoy a freedom that no wives, spinsters, or younger unwed misses were granted. For widows, marrying again meant giving up their freedom and submitting themselves back into the legal invisibility of being a wife.

Lissie is a wealthy widow. Her late husband, who owned multiple properties including estates, undeveloped land, shipping interests, and even a woolen mill, left everything to her. And immediately, despite her mourning, suitors flocked to her. The wealth attracted them but also society assumed a woman had not the skill or intelligence needed to manage such assets. Except Lissie has already been managing all of it, for her husband was ill the last two years of their marriage and trained her in the job.

If she marries, all of her husband’s legacy goes to her new husband. Lissie has dreams and ambitions of her own, ones she expects a husband would not support. So she has practical as well as emotional reasons for resisting our lovely story hero.

I hope you’ll want to see how this romance works out! Our hero has dreams of his own and marriage is not a good fit in his immediate future, although this is a romance where he falls first. How does Scottish Lissie come to be in the English village of Little Macclow, anyway? And how does our hero entice her away from the solitary existence she seeks to get her involved with the affairs of the village?

The books in my series follow a continuing chronology and characters from the earlier books pop up again in later ones, but each book is written to stand alone, so you don’t need to have read the earlier ones to enjoy His Lady to Love even though it is Book #4. I am releasing it in Kindle Unlimited (temporarily). This release is the first time I’ve done that for any of my books, so if you’ve never read one and want to give my work a try, this is a good opportunity! I hope you will.

Do you have any favorite stories with widowed heroines? Did they have good first marriages? Or after bad ones, are they either hoping for a better second chance or soured on the idea of marriage entirely? Have you had experience with any of these outcomes yourself?

 

That’s the title of the Christmas anthology with my novella, The Major’s Christmas Return, still on sale so hurry and order your copy now!

The Major’s Christmas Return tells of the reunion of Nash and Caroline who, because of an illness, are unwittingly trapped in their friends’ country house with only a few young servants, orphans who’d never experienced a proper Christmas. As Nash and Caroline contrive to give the orphan servants the Christmas they deserve, they discover the love and passion they’d lost years before — when Nash left Caroline at the altar.

Through Nash and Caroline I was able to show several Christmas traditions that would have been followed in the Regency. Here they are!

House decoration

No Christmas trees during the Regency, but evergreens were gathered and the house was decorated with them.

Yule log.

A yule log was a large log brought in on Christmas eve and kept burning in the fireplace during the Christmas season. Before it was lit everyone made wishes for the new year.

Christmas Candle

A large candle was also lit on Christmas eve. If it went out before Christmas day, it was very bad luck.

Plum Pudding

On Stir-up Sunday, at the beginning of Advent, the pudding was mixed and steamed and hung up to age for Christmas dinner.

Wassailing

Wassailing usually meant a group of people going from house to house singing Christmas carols and being rewarded with wassail, a spiced ale or cider. Nash and Caroline devise their own version in the house.

Mince pies

The traditional Christmas dinner dessert

Mistletoe

No Regency Christmas novella would be complete without the mistletoe or kissing bough. That’s how Nash and Caroline rediscover their love for each other!

 

Here’s wishing all of you a very happy holiday. What holiday traditions are your favorites?

 

Do errors or modern phrases bump you out of a historical story you were enjoying? Or as an author, do you find that despite your best efforts those kinds of errors creep in when you’re not paying attention? Well, if so, here’s good news: Writing Regency England has released! It is the culmination of two years of meticulous hard effort honing and focusing, choosing what to include (the topic could be an encyclopedia unto itself, of course!), writing, re-writing, fact-checking, digging for illustrations–all the work.

Picture of the book, Writing Regency England, shown at an angle so the front cover and the spine are both visible. Co-author Jayne Davis and I both love our genre, and we hope this book may serve everyone with any interest in the Regency time and world. We both believe if you’re going to go to the trouble to set a story in a historical time period, creating an authentic sense of that time and world strengthens the story and the experience the reader will gain from reading it. Mistakes can lead to bad reviews, disappointed readers, and an overall bad rep for the genre! WRE is our effort to help fellow authors avoid that fate!

Available in print only, the book offers sixteen chapters of wisdom and information about the Regency time period focused on the “most commonly seen” errors that authors make. Designed as a guide, not a list of complaints, the book covers a wide range, from developing an ear for period appropriate language, avoiding modernisms and Americanisms, to simple facts about the landscapes, flora and fauna of England (no chipmunks! no skunks!), the correct use of titles for characters in the nobility (and who is or isn’t a peer), wisdom about naming your characters plus much more. If you write Regency-set fiction or even just enjoy reading about the period, this is a new resource with a unique slant that you might find invaluable.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/191379010X

Reviewers are giving it 5 stars and saying:

“The authors of Writing Regency England: A Resource for Authors have nailed all the things I grit my teeth over when reading Regency fiction: language that is inappropriate to the period, foods that were not eaten, incorrect use of titles, ignorance of mores and early 19th century life in general. This book covers everything: setting, flora and fauna, building styles, transportation, Great Britain’s old, confusing monetary units (shillings, pence, etc.), professions, the army and navy, and much, much more. I’ve done research for my own books since 2016 and am amazed at the scope of Writing Regency England. I wish I’d had a copy then.”

“If you’ve ever wondered whether what you were reading was accurate or not, then this is the book to tell you. …whether you’re an author or a reader, this book is highly recommended.”

“Thank you to Jayne Davis and Gail Eastwood for putting their heads together to write ‘Writing Regency England’. I do not know how much time I spend going down rabbit holes when I research the period, especially when I am looking for something specific. This book is a great resource for both writers and readers of the period who care about historical accuracy.”

“I’m impressed with the quality of the information and how easy it is to read the book. I’d recommend it highly to historical literature fans, readers and authors alike.”

Every author’s approach to authenticity is as unique as their writing style and voice, but there seemed to be a need for Writing Regency England. Others who write in the same period could certainly have done this book, but Jayne and I were the ones who were crazy enough to tackle it!

Do you think accuracy matters in historical fiction? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

 I am thrilled to announce that I have a new release coming this month! The Lady Behind the Masquerade will be released in paperback and ebook on July 25.

 

Here’s the backcover blurb:

 

The ton’s newest member
Is not all she seems…

Diplomat Marcus Wolfdon can’t forget the alluring woman he met in Paris, the passionate night they shared or that she stole his money and disappeared! A year later, Wolf meets Juliana again in Brighton, seemingly a member of the ton. She begs him to keep their former liaison secret, and the emotion in her eyes compels him to agree. Desire still flares between them, but first Wolf must uncover the lady behind the masquerade.

From Harlequin Historical: Your romantic escape to the past.

 

The Lady Behind the Masquerade is Book 2 in A Family of Scandals series. Marcus Wolfdon, “Wolf” to his friends and family, is the younger brother of Eliza, now the Marquess of Hale, and heir to their father’s baronetcy. Rather than deal with his parents’ drama, Wolf has dedicated himself to a diplomatic career, lately in Paris, where he has his unforgettable encounter with Juliana. His father’s near-fatal illness brings him back to England where he must face his family obligations–and Juliana, who now is not an alluring French woman, but a lovely lady, cousin to Wolf’s friend’s mother. Never sure precisely what Juliana’s truth is, he cannot resist both loving her and protecting her but never trusting her.

Be on the lookout for the reviews and read and excerpt.

And you can preorder now!

A few things have happened in the last month or so to put diversity in historical romance at the forefront of my mind. All of them came to a head when I was reading tweets discussing the recent post on SmarthBitches. So I went over and read it. It’s basically the same argument/discussion that I’ve seen kicking around Romancelandia since the oughts when I first joined. I’ve seen it called a chicken and egg syndrome: readers can’t buy what isn’t for sale, but I’m here to tell you, readers don’t seem to buy it when it is for sale. And while we may all bemoan this, that doesn’t change it.

Historical romance is very white, straight, cis, and upper-class. It’s also kind of like playing jenga. It’s really hard to remove one of those and not have the whole thing come crashing down. Why? Let’s take a look (hopefully without making judgments about readers or authors, which I’ve seen quite enough of lately).

Dukes sell. They just do, like it or not. A few authors have managed to make names for themselves by moving into the gentry (Carla Kelley and Rose Lerner spring to mind) and some authors are pulling off love stories among the lower classes (like Erica Monroe), but from what I’ve seen during my writing career, when you leave the ton behind, you lose a lot of the readers who want that extra soupçon of fantasy.

Books set outside of Georgian/Victorian England and Scotland are harder to sell. I honestly don’t know why this is, but even Ireland and France are hard, let alone Ancient Rome or Shogunate Japan. A lot of us thought (hoped!) that indie publishing would unleash a tidal wave of settings that would brush away Regency England’s chokehold on the genre. Didn’t happen. And every time a new historical TV show is a hit, I see a flurry of hope that the setting will crossover into publishing. But it never seems to. Thankfully, there are authors writing other settings (like Beverly Jenkins, Jeannie Lin, and Sandra Schwab), but those are labors of love. Readers vote with their wallets, and the majority of them vote for Georgian/Victorian England and Scotland (preferably with dukes).

Because the most popular setting is among the 18th and 19th century British ton, the most popular characters are by default Caucasian. There are ways to work in characters of other races/ethnicities (England certainly had free blacks, a Jewish population, Anglo-Indians, Indians, and Chinese), but outside of an Anglo-Indian character, it’s hard to get a non-Caucasian character into the ton. For example, the movie Belle radically changed her actual history to make her wealthy and accepted in a way that she wasn’t in real life. Why? My best guess was that her real life story wasn’t romantic enough. The best examples I can find for how she might have been viewed in her own time are in the works of Austen (Sanditon) and Thackeray (Vanity Fair), which both have wealthy prospective brides who are mixed race as Dido was. Austen treats it as a non-issue. Thackeray does not. Both of which fit with the changing ideas of race and class as depicted in the book White Mughals (which I highly recommend).

Straight and cis. Yep. See above. There are certainly ways to tell gay and trans stories in a historical setting. There are real world examples (Lord Hervey, the Chevalier d’Eon, possibly the Ladies of Llangollen, maybe Dr James Berry), and I’m glad to see these stories being told (e.g. KJ Charles and Cat Sebastian), but we’ve not yet reached a place where these books aren’t niche when it comes to readers (I’ve seen discussions about why some readers avoid these and it’s much the same as why they avoid roms about working class people: the nagging worry about security breaks the fantasy for them; so while a contemp LGBTQ rom works for them, a historical one doesn’t because the HEA never feels “safe”).

So, what does this all add up to? It adds up to authors wanting to make a living (which I’ve been told is an inadequate excuse; a statement with which I strongly disagree) and publishing being a risk-adverse business. When it takes months (or years, depending on the author) to write a book, purposefully writing one that isn’t “to market” is a risky choice, especially if this is how you support yourself. And it comes down to readers.

How does this play out in real life?

When I pitched my first series, c. 2004, I pitched a black hero for book three. I was told by agents and editors that it was a no-go. The profit and loss on it was too risky, especially since those sales numbers would haunt us forever and would probably kill my career (which is funny, since losing a slot at a certain Big Box store killed that pen name long before this book would ever have come out). I did squeeze in a half-Turkish hero (my lowest selling book to date) and I got roundly told that bi-racial characters were “cheating” (as someone who IS bi-racial, this still pisses me off to no end).

[As an aside, I’ve also seen authors’ attempts to diversify their series dismissed as “tokenism”. So I’m damned if I don’t include any diverse protagonist in my series, and damned if I do, but not to the (arbitrary) extent that pleases whomever is deciding these things. Please note, there was a long discussion of this at a recent conference and several authors flat out said they’d rather be dismissed with the faceless majority than paint a target on their back so they could be singled out for tokenism or fake-diversity. I sincerely doubt this is the goal those pushing for diversity wanted, but it’s the one they got.]

Back to me: When I brushed myself off and began pitching again, I always pitched that guy’s book. Agents and editors were suddenly talking about wanting unusual, stand-out books (c. 2008). Books with a different angle. Books with a hook. Books they could promote as DIFFERENT. You know what they meant? They meant maybe not a duke, but still duke-adjacent. Oh, they loved the younger sons angle, but could I throw in a secret society to make it all hang together? I wish I were joking.

Sneak Peak: cropped image of my fencing master’s cover image

Ok, so this time I put that black character IN the series. I was hoping I’d get fan mail asking for his book that I could show my editor. I never did. Not a single email or tweet. What did I get? Requests for very minor (white) walk-on characters. *sigh* When I submitted by my black fencing champion as the hero for one of the books, I got told they’d let me do an e-only novella for him. Not even a novella set with other authors who were also writing Georgian (which they had!). None of that came to fruition anyway, and I left NY, so his book is still sitting there on the back burner (though I have cover shot, so I’ve got that tucked away waiting). This is a story I really want to write, but to date no one has wanted to publish it and I’m honestly not sure readers will pick it up unless I’m very, very lucky. And yes, I have a plan to hopefully help my luck, but if I had to pay my bills with writing monies, I can’t say that this book would ever be written. I know that every hour I put into that book is an hour I might not get paid for; or at least not at the rate that I would get paid if I was writing a duke. But I’m lucky. I have a day job that pays my way and a stubborn streak that wants to write what it wants to write. So, eventually my fencing master will get his book and I’ll get to see if readers love him or if only I do.

So that’s my take. YMMV.

 

 

 

 

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