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Category: Writing

Posts in which we talk about the writing craft and process

Today the Riskies welcome guest author, Camille Elliot. She’s offering a giveaway, too, so be sure to check the details at the end of her post.

Hello! My name is Camille Elliot and I’m a relatively new Regency romance author.

Camy selfieI’ve been reading Regencies since I was thirteen years old, but didn’t start writing them until a few years ago. For my 40th birthday, I decided to take a “bucket list” trip to England rather than throwing a big party, and I’m so glad I went! It was the most wonderful experience I’ve ever had and it inspired some scenes in my latest Regency, The Spinster’s Christmas.

I was able to visit Lord Byron’s estate, Newstead Abbey, and it absolutely captivated me from the first sight of the ruined chapel front attached to the house.Abbey front

The grounds are absolutely stunning—not as extensive as, say, Chatsworth, but beautifully cultivated. Most of the gardens were developed in the late 1800s but some of the gardens nearer to the house had been there when Lord Byron lived at Newstead.

Two of the gardens that really captivated me were the Small Walled Garden and the Rose Garden. They were originally the kitchen gardens, but were developed, I believe, in the late 1800s. The Small Walled Garden is especially beautiful with arches made of trained pear trees, and the high walls make it seem like it’s cut off from the rest of the world.Small Walled Garden 1Small Walled Garden 2

 

The Rose Garden is gigantic and I could see it as a wonderful place for children to play hide and seek. What was rather funny was the way the trees were sculpted. My friend, Liz Babbs, said they looked like Hershey’s kisses, but I thought they looked like giant turds.Rose Garden 1-cropped

 

Rose Garden 2When I wrote The Spinster’s Christmas, I went back to my memories of Newstead Abbey for a key scene in the book (in other words, a major kissing scene). The children are playing Hide and Seek in the Rose Garden, which I named the Lower Gardens, and my heroine speaks to my hero in the Small Walled Garden, which I named the Upper Gardens.

When writing the scene, I almost felt like I was back at Newstead. Sigh. I hope to go back to England soon, and back to Newstead again!

Thanks so much for visiting with us today and sharing this adventure, Camy!

Camy writes Christian romantic suspense as Camy Tang and Regency romance as USA Today bestselling author Camille Elliot. She lives in San Jose, California, with her engineer husband and rambunctious dog. She is a staff worker for her church youth group and leads one of the Sunday worship teams. The Spinster's ChristmasHer latest novel, The Spinster’s Christmas, is now available for pre-order: http://camilleelliot.com/books/lady_wynwood_series/1_the_spinsters_christmas

This story is the first in Camy’s new series.

The Lady Wynwood series:
The pain and suffering of her short marriage eventually brought widowed Lady Wynwood emotional and spiritual peace. She is able to help her extended family members find love and happiness, but what about herself?
The Spinster’s Christmas:
Miranda Belmoore has never felt attuned to the rest of society. Her family has never understood her blunt speech and unwillingness to bow to conventional strictures, and so they have always made her feel that there is something wrong with her. Now as a poor relation in her cousin’s house, she makes plans to escape a life of drudgery and disdain from her own family members.
Naval Captain Gerard Foremont is having difficulty adjusting to life back on land, frustrated that his career has been cut short by his severely injured knee. Guilt haunts him as he sees the strain his long convalescence has had upon his parents. As they spend Christmastide with the Belmoores, he wants to help fulfill his mother’s wish to have her orphaned niece come to stay with them.
However, an enemy has infiltrated the family party, bent on revenge and determined that Twelfth Night will end in someone’s death …

Camy is offering three copies of The Spinster’s Christmas when it releases (please note it is not available yet!!) to three lucky winners who will be chosen randomly from among those who comment below. Do you have a favorite place in England you would most like to go back to visit again? If you haven’t been there, what one place is highest on your “wish to see” list? Writers, what real places have inspired scenes in your stories?

Tipoos Tiger-pcard view      Are you familiar with this lovely item from the V&A Museum in London? I was not, until I recently received a postcard of this from a friend visiting London, who wrote “Look This Up Online” after his brief message. All of you who do research know what happened after that! Alice down the rabbit hole…. Ah, but there is so much more to what happened than that.

“Tippoo’s Tiger” is actually very famous and has been an object of curiosity ever since it was first displayed publicly in London in 1808. It is a nearly life-sized wooden sculpture, an automaton (the victim’s arm moves, and the tiger growls while the man cries out), a playable miniature organ with 18 pipes, and not least, a political statement by an Indian ruler whose hatred for the British is very clear.Close-up Tippoos Tiger-2

tipoos-tiger-organ view Tippoo was the sultan of Mysore, a power-and-territory-hungry thorn in the side of the East India Company and the cause of several wars. Tippoo’s Tiger was seized from Tippoo’s palace along with a great deal of treasure after the fall of Seringapatam ended both the 4th Anglo-Mysore War and Tippoo’s life in May, 1799. A few years after the Tiger was sent to England, it was put on display in the reading-room of the East India Company Museum and Library at East India House in Leadenhall Street. Did you know that the East India Company had a museum? In this picture, you can see Tippoo’s Tiger in the shadows at the left.East India Co Museum-Leadenhall_Street

The timing of my friend’s postcard was one of those Twilight Zone-ish coincidences that feel like messages. Synchronicities that happen during research never cease to thrill me. They feel like little gifts from the universe confirming that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. When his card arrived, I had just –I mean, literally days before –stumbled across some other East Indian-connected anecdotes in a most unlikely place, while I was researching something entirely unrelated. But I had jumped on them, because they tied in with a project I had moved to the “back burner” –revisions I’ve mapped out for the reissue of my 1998 Signet, The Magnificent Marquess, with a hero who spent most of his life in India. I had been reading Sarah Markham’s book, A Testimony of Her Times, Based on Penelope Hind’s Diaries and Correspondence 1787-1838. That’s research for the Christmas novella I am working on. But blessed Penelope repeated two tales of British subjects who survived tiger attacks in India. And then came the postcard! Message received –I’m back at work now on the TMM revisions. And my characters are definitely going to visit the museum, now that I have no length restraint on the story!

Pottery Figurine of H Munro & Tiger

Tippoo’s tiger figure may have been based on the same incident that inspired this Staffordshire pottery figurine (c. 1814) showing the 1792 death of British subject Hugh Munro in India (now in the British Army Museum).

The fact that stories about encounters with Indian tigers circulated all the way out into the country where a parson’s wife like Penelope Hind received them is a good reflection of how fascinated people were becoming with things East Indian during her lifetime. That fascination was multi-faceted; it included a kind of horror mixed with admiration, and for many, but not all, a growing sense of justification for the East India Company’s expanding domination. The tiger became not just Tippoo’s personal emblem, but a symbol of resistant India itself –a symbol used for the medals issued to the men who fought at SeringapatamSeringapatam_Medal_obv, and in political cartoons, and much more as the century advanced. I tried to give a sense of the variety of attitudes about India that existed during the Regency period in my novel.

The life and times of Tippoo (also spelled Tipu) inspired written accounts that I have not even begun to look into –most of this East Indian connection is just background for my story’s hero, at any rate. But besides the first published account about the final Mysore war, published in 1800 by James Salmon, Tipu's_Tiger_Salmond_1800Tippoo and his exploits figured prominently in art, literature and drama far into the 19th century. According to an article on the V&A’s website, “the Storming of Seringapatam unleashed a flood of prints and broadsheets. It inspired one of the largest paintings in the world, exhibited in London as a panorama. It was featured as a vast spectacular at Astley’s Amphitheatre, and cut down to size for the juvenile drama. As late as 1868 it set the scene for Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone.” I am also now aware that G. A. Henty wrote a fictional account, The Tiger of Mysore, and then there’s Bernard Cornwell’s offering in the Sharpe series, Sharpe’s Tiger (which I have not read yet, but now I want to!). Have you read any of these?

An end-note on Tippoo’s Tiger: Tippoo’s Tiger was on display at the East India Company until 1858, after which it was stored, then displayed in the new government India Office, and then in the India Museum. It became part of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection in 1880. The musical and noise-making aspects of Tippoo’s Tiger suffered over the years from public exposure and use, and gradually fell into disrepair. Eventually the crank-handle that powered the bellows inside the tiger disappeared. Not everyone was disappointed in this, however, as was noted in The Athenaeum magazine in 1869: “These shrieks and growls were the constant plague of the student busy at work in the Library of the old India House, when the Leadenhall Street public, unremittingly, it appears, were bent on keeping up the performances of this barbarous machine. Luckily, a kind fate has deprived him of his handle, and stopped up, we are happy to think, some of his internal organs… and we do sincerely hope he will remain so, to be seen and admired, if necessary, but to be heard no more”.

I’ve only scratched the surface here. For more information about Tippoo, his tiger obsession and his mechanical tiger, check this article offered by the V&A, or google the topic to find lots more!

Did you already know about Tippoo’s Tiger? Do you like stories that have an East Indian connection? Do you get distracted by fascinating historical diversions when you are doing research? Or how about those research synchronicities? Have you had those happen to you? What happened and how did you feel?

 

beauty&beast-vintageCan we talk about #tropes? Romance fiction is full of them, and some are specific to Regency romance. Do you have favorite tropes that always draw you to a story? Or some that guarantee you won’t pick up a book? I got a poor Amazon review for my book An Unlikely Hero mostly because it was a “house party” story and the reader was sick of those. I do wonder why she bought it!

Elena talked about a few she dislikes back in January here when she was judging Rita books –and oh, boy, that task is coming up again all too soon! But the reason tropes are on my mind today is because in my “other” little Regency author group, the Bluestocking League, we are working on a website where we intend to include what may amount to a small encyclopedia of Regency romance tropes –a list, with descriptions of each and perhaps a few words about their appeal– and we have been compiling the list to start with. Not as easy as you might think, despite the existing lists already out there!

Want a peek at our list-in-progress? Have any you think we should add? Here it is in no particular order:

Loveable Rogue/Rogues in love

Agents of the Crown secret-agent-man

Childhood Friend Romance

Protectors

Dukes

Scandal

Beauty & the Beast

Ugly Duckling/Makeoveri_love_being_estranged_mug-re330ccf88ac348ad8b2b7575bfeb37a8_x7jsm_8byvr_324

Estranged Lovers reunited

Friends to Lovers

Marriage of Convenience

Compromised

Governesses Governess

(other) Boss/Employee

Rakes

Mistaken Identity

(kidnapping) –almost always mistaken identity?

Rags to Riches

Wounded Hero/Caretaker Heroine

House Party Chatsworth-House

Masquerades (including Secret/Hidden Identity)

Road Trip/Runaways

Amnesia

Wagers/bets

my-guardian-angel-85701 Ghosts/guardian angels/magic locket–i.e. Something paranormal outside of self influencing the romance.

Soldier

Thief/highwayman/con artist  (are there any gypsy Regencies–and if so, would they fit here or as own trope?)

Hidden treasure

Murder(s)

Spies (not just Agents of the Crown–could be a soldier, a French spy, etc.)

Wills (tricky provisions and/or inheritances that play a major role in the plot)

Marrying out of one’s class (not sure how to say that more simply)

Demi-monde/light skirts

Spinsters

Widows/Widowers

InventorsMusicians 1817

Artists/Musicians/Writers

Heroes who have a profession

Naval/Sea faring

Smuggling

Politics/Parliament

Handicapped (could be hero or heroine or secondary character whose handicap is an issue)

Social Issues (including slavery, abuse of children, etc.)

Farming/Raising Horses/Animals?

Waterloo (since this seems of particular interest to some readers)

Christmas (and perhaps other  holidays)

India/Other foreign travel?

Children (stories where a child or children play a significant role in bringing the hero and heroine together)

Lots of books include more than one, and some overlap. Which books that you’ve read (or written), leap to mind when you look at these tropes?

We could talk about which favorite tropes appear in which favorite authors’ books. Or we could get into a discussion about where some of these tropes originated (besides the history of the period itself) –Austen? Heyer? Some of the early Regency writers like Cartland?

Sadly, I’ll have to leave that to you in the comments –I am really short on time this week! But I would love to hear what you all have to say about some of these tropes, or even about the list itself!

GOUTa021449

Origin of the Gout (artist Henry Bunbury 1750-1811), English, 1815 The perceived origins of gout may be tied more to the liquor on the table than to the more localized work of the devil.

I’m excited to share my new discovery of a great research source! (I hope I’m not the last to find out.) The U.S. National Library of Medicine has a truly awesome website offering a ton of databases and a massive library network. Its offerings on the History of Medicine include a collection of 71,000 downloadable images, and through the Medical Heritage Library, maybe one of the best collections of digitized period books on medicine –more than 9,000 books!

Does one of your characters have a medical issue? Or the need to know how to deal with someone else’s medical needs? We all know about laudanum, but how much more do we know about medicine in the Regency? I wish this goldmine had been available when I was researching my early books. Just thinking quickly through my first four stories I recall that my characters had to deal with hypoglycemia, infected wounds, psychological trauma and epilepsy –all (at one level or another) medical issues.

Battle of the Nile 1817a021102

The Cockpit, Battle of the Nile. London: Edward Orme, June, 1817. A view of sailors receiving medical treatment below decks.

Oh, doesn’t that make you want to run right out and read those? LOL!! Obviously, these aren’t the main focus of any of the stories –they are love stories, after all. But health and medical needs are part of everyday life, so if we want a realistic world for our characters to live in, I think we shouldn’t ignore these. Do you agree? Or do you think it ruins the fantasy?

As with any great resource, you have to be careful not to get sidetracked (or you can give in and have fun roaming)…I followed a link to the Medical Heritage Library (http://www.medicalheart_of_beauty2-192x300ritage.org/ ) and discovered they had some fascinating coloring pages to offer, and a “medical pop-up book” from the 17th century…with a video about how they handled digitizing this! So many treasures, so little time… The MHL, “a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine” and as said above, has an amazing collection of fully accessible digitized material.

culpeper_british_herbal2-188x300 botanical_letters-180x300

The databases you can find at the NLM site include Toxnet, which can help you find info on poisons, among other useful things, and MeSH (which stands for Medical Subject Headings) where you can learn about medical terminology. And another thing they have is a worldwide map directory of where to find History of Medicine collections. Each spot on the map links to specific libraries and includes a description of their holdings. Is there one near you?

Just to give you a glimpse of the NLM site:

Digital Collections is a free online archive of selected book, serial, and film resources. All the content in Digital Collections is in the public domain and freely available worldwide.

Rare Books & Journals: Books Published before 1914: The historical book collection includes related areas of social, economic, and intellectual history. It includes over 580 incunabula (books printed before 1501), some 57,000 16th-18th century books, and 95,000 items published between 1801 and 1913, from all over the world, in many languages. Among works of popular and ephemeral interest are home health guides, pharmaceutical almanacs, patent medicine catalogs, medical equipment catalogs, personal narratives, first-hand accounts, broadsides, pharmacopoeias, illustrated herbals, and botanical name indexes (materia medica). Medical history landmarks in the collection include Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543), William Harvey’s Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis (1628), William Withering’s An Account of the Foxglove (1785), and Edward Jenner’s An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae (1798), as well as comprehensive holdings of the works of major medical figures such as Hippocrates, Galen, Paracelsus, Boerhaave, and Osler.

Archives & Manuscripts: Searchable database of material, most dating from the 17th century to the present (which they call “modern”).

Images from the History of Medicine (IHM): A searchable database of images from IHM including fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that “illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century.” (granted many of them are portraits, but I’ve included with this post a couple of the Regency images I found)

PhysisciansFrienda021807

The Physicians Friend [Charles Williams, 1797-1830, artist] England, c. 1815. In a kitchen, a fat physician grasps the hand of the cook and compliments him on his culinary abilities, which increase the frequency of the physician’s visits.

Of course, if the material you want hasn’t been digitized, you still have three recourses: 1) go to Washington DC and visit the NLM in person, or 2) see if the material is available via inter-library loan, or 3) check if the material is available at one of the History of Medicine collection locations near you (see above). The Library does not lend historical material in its original format; however, they do lend copies of journal articles, copies of selected manuscripts, books on microfilm (when available), and copies of films and videos. The Library’s interlibrary loan services are available only to libraries, not to individuals. Individuals who want to borrow NLM material should make a request through a local library.

So, what do you think? Should medical issues be part of the Regency world we recreate? How much research would you do to make sure you had an accurate portrayal of the way such things would be handled? Did you already know about the NLM?

Cooking recipes 1882How many of you researchers love primary sources? Is anyone’s hand NOT raised?

One of the things I love best about researching is that moment when you stumble across some telling tiny detail that just resonates…. Diaries, letters, and other materials from centuries past offer a trove of detail rich enough to make a researching author sing for joy. Where would we be without Jane Austen’s letters? How would we know what colors were in fashion, or how seams were sewn, without period magazines, dressmakers’ patterns or samples of clothing? Just for examples. While we may learn some of these things through secondary sources, we wouldn’t have THOSE without the primary sources to be studied and interpreted first.

I am currently deep in the middle of two quite different published collections of letters and diary excerpts, Penelope Hind’s (thank you for the loan, Elena!) and James Woodforde’s famous “Diary of a Country Parson”. As is so often the case, parts of them are wonderful and parts less so. Woodforde's Diary  Because these published versions have been edited, I wonder about the parts that have been left out –probably dull, but what if something useful to me (not to the editor) was in there? I would have loved to have the job of reading through the originals. Do you also think this way?

What got me thinking about this topic, though, was spring cleaning. My younger son, temporarily out of work, has been helping out at home by bravely delving into boxes that have been sitting in various corners ever since we moved here –and I don’t want to tell you how many years ago that was. Many belonged to my mother, who passed away four years after we moved here, and that was not recently!

Amazing things have been coming out of the boxes, besides trash (junk mail still unopened from when we moved, for example) –two items pictured here were too old to belong to my mother. Who knew we had this stuff?  Caduceus 1908

The 1882 recipe booklet (at top) is filled with ads for local businesses on all the pages facing the recipes. It is too old even for my grandmother. Did it belong to my great-grandmother? The ads remind me of my favorite type of primary resource, old newspapers. Do you have a favorite?

The “Caduceus 1908” was a mystery, even after I saw it was a sort of yearbook from the senior class of Classical High School in Providence, RI. Why did we have it??? As I perused the pages, amused by descriptions of events and the humor, I stumbled across write-ups of the individual class members and discovered that my paternal grandmother was a member of this class. I can pick her out clearly in the class photo (blonde in the center of the 2nd row) –because she looks so much like my sister!

Class of 1908I knew she had been a school teacher, but love this glimpse of her earlier life. My imagination runs with it. She did not live in Providence and must have had a long trip by trolleycar and on foot each day to get to school and home again.

I won’t be keeping these, fascinating as they are. But I hope to find good homes for these treasures. “Museum mentality” is the bane of those of us with cluttered homes. We can’t hang onto everything! But what if no one ever did? Those precious letters and diaries, those old newspapers and magazines from long ago that we now enjoy so much, that give us glimpses into the real lives of people in the past? What if zealous spring cleaners had tossed them all?

Do you wonder, as I do, if all the electronic versions of everything we have now were to disappear (or, as we have repeatedly seen, become inaccessible as technology keeps changing?) –what are we leaving for future generations to study? I know it won’t be stuff from my house.  The chorus around here lately is “just throw it out!” However, at least a few treasures deserve to be “re-homed”, as I call it. I just wish that didn’t require so much extra time. What do you do with your clutter?

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