Category: Writing

Posts in which we talk about the writing craft and process

Christmas Past (and yet to come!)

Updated on November 14, 2013 by susanna

I’m normally the type who keeps all Christmas activities strictly confined to the six weeks or so between Thanksgiving and Epiphany. I never Christmas shop before Black Friday. I wouldn’t dream of putting decorations up before the first Sunday in Advent. But this year I spent a good chunk of February and June with Christmas on the brain–I was writing Christmas novellas!

My February project will be a Carina release in 2014. Since that’s so far away, and it doesn’t have a release date or title yet, all I’ll say about it for now is that it’s the story of star-crossed lovers reunited after a five-year separation at a Regency house party…with wassailing and mistletoe and a thick coat of snow on the ground.

But my June project, Christmas Past, releases in less than two weeks, on November 25!

Christmas Past cover

As the title hints, it’s a time travel story. The heroine is from my own adopted hometown of Seattle in 2013–only in her version of the present, time travel has been invented and is largely used for medical and other scientific research. Sydney is a PhD student in historical epidemiology, making her first trip to the past to collect blood samples from soldiers in Wellington’s army for her mentor’s study on the epidemiological impacts of the Napoleonic Wars.

Time-traveling PhD student Sydney Dahlquist’s first mission sounded simple enough—spend two weeks in December 1810 collecting blood samples from the sick and wounded of Wellington’s army, then go home to modern-day Seattle and Christmas with her family. But when her time machine breaks, stranding her in the past, she must decide whether to sacrifice herself to protect the timeline or to build a new life—and embrace a new love—two centuries before her time.

Rifle captain Miles Griffin has been fascinated by the tall, beautiful “Mrs. Sydney” from the day he met her caring for wounded soldiers. When he stumbles upon her time travel secret on Christmas Eve, he vows to do whatever it takes to seduce her into making her home in his present—by his side.

I had a lot of fun writing this story, particularly going back and forth between Sydney’s contemporary voice and Miles’s Regency voice–and I’m so used to shifting into Regency vocabulary and diction the instant I open a manuscript file that Sydney’s was far more challenging to achieve!

When writing my Christmas novellas, I found myself imagining reader busy with everything that makes November and December such a joyous yet challenging time of year. Maybe she’s flying home to her family and wants a good story to take her mind off a crowded, turbulent flight. Maybe she just put her pies in the oven and wants to put her feet up and read while her house warms with the aromas of pumpkin and spice. Maybe she’s snowed in, unable to make it to work or school, and is elated to finally have time to escape into fiction.

What about you? When do you read holiday novellas? What are some of your favorites? And when do you put up and take down your decorations?

Christmas Past is now available for preorder from multiple sources, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play.

Posted in Regency, Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged Christmas, novella, Susanna Fraser, Time travel | 4 Replies

Critiquing my younger self

Updated on November 8, 2013 by Elena Greene

Just as Janet has released A Certain Latitude, I’m starting to rework my first book, Lord Langdon’s Kiss, on the opposite end of the heat spectrum, though.

Lord Langdon’s Kiss is my only totally “sweet” traditional full-length Regency. (Even though I’m not comfortable with the idea that “sweet” and “hot” are opposite ends of a spectrum–you can have emotional warmth and sensuality at the same time–I use the terms because everyone understands them.) I haven’t reissued it yet because I suspected it needed some rework to meet the standard of my subsequent books.

When I first talked about the idea of a Do Over, Carolyn suggested it might turn into a completely different story. Now that I’m getting into it, I don’t really see that happening. I like the characters pretty much as they are (with some tweaking I’ll describe further down) and I’d have to really change them in order to send the story in a different trajectory, like making it sexier. I’ll keep the same title, because it’s going to be very much the same traditional Regency, but better. I hope.

It’s not a story I would write now. Instead, I’m pretending to be the older, wiser critique partner of my younger self and giving her advice on how to improve the story she imagined.

As I’m reviewing the manuscript, I can see that my suspicions were right. The hero is a blockhead. That was intentional, and still is, but I need to better set up the reasons why he’s a blockhead at the start, and he needs to get a clue sooner. The initial conflict goes on for too long.

The other thing is the introspection. I love introspection, but in my later books I think it’s much more in balance with everything else. In Lord Langdon’s Kiss it really goes on and on! A lot of the older Regencies have that, but it doesn’t suit modern tastes and I actually think the story will benefit from tightening.

Has anyone else ever dusted off and reworked an old project? (It doesn’t have to be a book.) Do you smile or cringe at what your younger self produced? Have you been happy with the results?

Elena
www.elenagreene.com

Posted in Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged LORD LANGDON'S KISS | 5 Replies

Plummeting to earth in 1797

Updated on October 24, 2013 by Janet Mullany

I’m always impressed by the inventive Google doodles and I’m venturing into Elena territory today by talking about an event that took place in 1797 on October 22–the first descent by parachute by the daring Andre-Jacques Garnerin in Paris. This was how Google celebrated the event:

The parachute, more like an umbrella than a modern parachute, was attached to a balloon that, once it had achieved sufficient altitude, M. Garnerin let rip and plummeted to earth from 3,200′. No graceful floating with this prototype parachute. Allegedly he threw up on the enthralled crowd below. Later he adapted his parachute with a vent to make a less exciting descent for both himself and onlookers. You can read a description of the Parc Monceau, the scene of this daring adventure, at Bonjour Paris.

But it was in the following year that he achieved tremendous notoriety by taking a woman on a balloon ascent. Mon dieu! He had to appear before the Central Bureau of Police to assure them that Citoyenne Henri would suffer no ill effects to her delicate female constitution and that no hanky-panky would take place in the basket. It was eventually decided that a balloon ascent held the same moral danger as sharing a carriage, i.e., not much. Once again a crowd gathered in the Parc to see the first woman in a balloon–ever the showman, Garnerin had wisely chosen a young and pretty woman.

His wife Jeanne Genevieve was the first woman to make a parachute descent in 1799 from an altitude of 900 meters. In 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, he and Jeanne Genevieve visited England and made balloon ascents together, and M. Garnerin gave a parachute demonstration in a field near St. Pancras. On another balloon trip he carried a letter of introduction from the Prince Regent in case of a crash landing.

If you’ve ever been in a hot air balloon or parachuted, please tell us about it, and if you wish, report on the effect on your morals and delicate female constitution. And, this has nothing to do with it unless you consider NaNoWriMo the equivalent of diving into thin air: if you’re in or near Maryland, there’s still time to register for Saturday’s workshop Writing From the Ground Up.

Posted in History, Research, Writing | 7 Replies

Megan Frampton’s What Not to Bare: Excerpt

Updated on September 20, 2013 by megan

Hey, happy Saturday! I have a book coming out on October 14, and I wanted to share the excerpt with you guys here. First the blurb:

In Megan Frampton’s witty historical romance, a woman is judged by her gown, and a man by his reputation—until both are shed in one sexy moment of seduction.

Lady Charlotte Jepstow certainly knows how to make an impression—a terrible one. Each one of her ball gowns is more ostentatiously ugly than the one before. Even she has been forced to wonder: Is she unmarried because of her abysmal wardrobe, or does she wear clashing clothing because she doesn’t want to be pursued in the first place? But when Charlotte meets Lord David Marchston, suddenly a little courtship doesn’t sound so bad after all.

David will be the first to admit he’s made some mistakes. But when he gets yanked from his post by his superiors, he is ordered to do the unthinkable to win back his position: woo his commander’s niece. If David wants his life back, he must use his skills as a negotiator to persuade society that Charlotte is a woman worth pursuing, despite her rather unusual “flair” for color. But David does such a terrific job that he develops an unexpected problem, one that violates both his rakish mentality and his marching orders: He’s starting to fall in love.

What Not to Bare by Megan Frampton (Excerpt)

The Random House page has all the possible e-format links for purchase (it’s only available for e-readers).

Thanks for taking a gander at it!

Megan

Posted in Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged Megan | 4 Replies

Dreams, works under reconstruction, and other good ideas

Updated on September 19, 2013 by Janet Mullany

I must tell you that next week it will all about the one year anniversary of Hidden Paradise and the Baltimore Book Festival, where I’ll be speaking and reading from the WUR (that’s the Work Under Reconstruction) on Friday, September 27. But to maybe win a signed book (including one of mine) and start planning your attendance, check out this post all about the festival at the Romantic Times blog today.

I want to talk a bit about the Work Under Reconstruction today. It’s my first venture into self-pubbing and I’m a bit nervous about it. Its title, rather than referring to it as the WUR, is A Certain Latitude. It was published six years ago and was my major flop for many and good reasons, one being that it wasn’t that good a book. It had moments–many of them–but as a whole it didn’t do the job. Well, you try writing a book about sex and abolitionists and see what happens…

So I’ve been rewriting. Mostly I’ve been trying to make sense of the heroine. I think I have her nailed now (haw de haw haw, so do both the heroes). About five times in the last couple of months I’ve hit save, turned off the computer and grandly announced “I’m done!”

The last time was yesterday afternoon. Then one of my beta readers gave me a fantastic analysis of the book that I read last night in which she suggested something about my favorite chapter. And she said … she said get rid of it. Noooooooooooooo.

But then I went to bed and had an amazing dystopian, Stockholm syndrome type of dream that tied into a novella I’m planning to write and I woke up with that bouncing around in my head and also absolutely clear about what I was going to do in terms of sorting out my heroine some more. And yes, it does involve cutting that chapter. It will make the book shorter, it will make it tighter and stronger and I need to go write what I have to do on the back of an envelope before I forget. Or maybe this blog is the equivalent.

Thanks, Anna!

Do you find dreams sort things out for you? Do you remember dreams at all? Do share, within reason.

Posted in Writing | 4 Replies