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Fall Forward

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I’ve been even more busy than usual lately, so my apologies for not having a Regency-related post. I recently delivered my oldest back to college and my youngest just started back at high school. It’s been a maelstrom of back to school shopping, helping to plan the children and youth programs for this year at my UU church, plus redecorating my youngest’s bedroom. She was finally ready to let go of the ladybugs and butterflies I painted on her walls before she was born. The walls are now the color of strawberry ice cream–so cheerful! Painting over the murals made us a little weepy (we took lots of pictures). It was also a challenge, requiring 4 coats in some places, but it was also a lot of fun and we’re both thrilled with how it turned out.

Writing, however, has still been on the back burner. Last February, I posted about Going Home, the need to take some time to deal with a situation that has been affecting my writing for a long time. Unfortunately, the situation is ongoing but I’ve grown stronger and recently I started doing some CPR on my writing career.

Due to some rather boring problems related to European VAT tax laws, I had unpublished my ebooks from every place except Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I’ve resolved the problems and recently republished all my titles at Apple and Kobo and hope to get them out to other sites as well.

I’m also working on plans to get back to the writing itself. Although taking a break was the right thing at the time and my situation is still challenging, at this point any work I do will be an empowering act, even if it’s a few hours a week at a coffee shop.

I’m also looking forward to the usual pleasures of the season: apple picking, fresh apple cider, baking with pumpkin, fall foliage.

Anyone else looking forward to fall? Any transitions in your lives?

Elena

Posted in Writing | 1 Reply

Greetings from Oxford

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I’m currently on vacation in Oxford (and I’m typing this on my phone so that should be… er… interesting. Now when you think of Oxford, there are of course the colleges…

Christ Church

Christ Church

…and Radcliffe Camera (part of the ginormous Bodleian Library)….

Radcliffe Camera

Radcliffe Camera

…and the Bridge of Sighs, which links the two halves of Hertford College.

The Bridge of Sighs

The Bridge of Sighs

But what I found most impressing are the grazing sites that have been in use for hundreds of years. There is Christ Church Meadow, which as the name suggests is part of the college grounds – and it’s also home to the college’s herd of longhorn cattle.

Christ Church Meadow with the college cattle

Christ Church Meadow with the college cattle

The view across the meadow with the college in the background

And then there’s Port Meadow, where I took a long, long, oh-gosh-my-feet-hurt walk today. It is mentioned as a piece of common land in the Domesday Book, a survey of English landholdings comissioned by William the Conqueror after the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century. And since then, Port Meadow has been in continuous use as grazing grounds.

Port Meadow

Port Meadow

Indeed, it was used as common grazing grounds ever since Alfred the Great granted all freemen of Oxford the right to use this piece of land as a reward for their bravery against the vikings. But even before that time, the land hadn’t been ploughed for thousands of years.

How intriuguing to imagine the seemingly endless stream of generation upon generation of cows that have grazed here!

 

The small village of Binsey to the west of Port Meadow

The small village of Binsey to the west of Port Meadow

The history of the English countryside is not necessarily something that features heavily in our books, so walking across Port Meadow today served as a nice reminder of the importance of that history and how it has helped to shape the country we all love so much!

 

Posted in Places | Tagged , | 4 Replies

A Day Out of Time.

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Fun is the word whenever I welcome Lavinia Kent to the Riskies. Lavinia is a good friend of mine and though we write in the same genre we are miles apart in our approach to the period. ©Rebecca Emily Drobis ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDI tend toward the traditional and Lavinia writes hot in about a hundred different shades. I love what she has to say here. Read on and see what you think.

Belly dancers. Pirates garbed in black. Fairies with flower wings. Woodland warriors with full wolf masks. Friars, satyrs and pixies. A steampunk gentleman.IMG_2057

What do any of these things have to do with the other?

A glorious afternoon spent at the Renaissance Festival answers that question. Do any of these things belong there? No – and Yes, Yes, Yes. I love the anachronism of the Festival. I love the joy people take in their costumes even when they make no sense. Few of the costumes are directly related to England under Henry the Eighth. Somehow it just doesn’t matter.

Some of the garb is timely to the basic period but still the differences can be great, the costumes differing by centuries.

As I sat and watched the people go by, I considered how to make them work for the period, what story to tell to make each piece fit. Why was that group wearing hats of fabulously colored ribbons? IMG_2051 (1)Was somebody throwing a masquerade and required that all the guests come dressed that way?

And why was a party of pirates walking down the center of the street and nobody reacting? Was a prodigal son returning and all his friends chose to dress in a similar fashion to make him feel at home?

And where did the belly dancers come from? Were they heading to some other foreign land and after a great storm came to shore on England’s coast in all their bells and scarves? Or did some crusader knight return with a retinue of fair dancers who didn’t know how to dress for the English winter?IMG_2052-1-300x225 (2)

And the steampunk gentleman? Clearly a time traveller lost by a century or two now doing his best to fit in.

For each passerby I could find a story and a reason.

And that made me think about my own writing. I’ve always acknowledged that I am research light. I love the characters and the story more than the facts. But, and it’s a BIG but, I work hard to not get anything wrong. I may skim over a detail, if I can’t find a ready source, but if I put a goldfish in the pond I do the work to be sure that goldfish or koi had already arrived from China. And I’ve spent countless hours looking up words to see when they came in to use and whether they were used the same way they are now.

So why do I love the anachronisms of the Festival? Because the inspiration I find in them. And the same is true in my writing. I love the challenge of explaining why my heroine’s viewpoints might not be traditional for the age, why she knows more (or less) than the other women around her. It’s fascinating to explain why an elderly woman clings to the corsets of fifty years before.

I don’t like it when history is wrong, but there is something wonderful when an author can add an oddity and make it work. I worked along the lines of this premise when creating Ruby, Madame Rouge in my Bound and Determined series. I wanted to create a multi-faceted woman who could run a successful brothel, go to church with her grandparents and put on the airs of any great lady plus she had to know about textiles and how to sum a patron up by the cloth of his trousers.mastering the marquess_3_7_14

I am not going to give all the secrets of her past, but I will say that having a duke for a father and his well bred, but not quite well enough bred, mistress for a mother was an easy place to start.

And then came the fun of figuring out how to bring each heroine to Madame Rouge’s house. Surely no true lady would ever visit such a place – or would she?

A lnaked couple embracing each other in the darkness

What would make each individual make the choice to do something so out character?Answering those questions is what makes the writing such fun and hopefully the reading as well. I’ve had a different answer in each of books, Mastering the Marquess and Bound by Bliss and in my September novella, Sarah’s Surrender, I work to find one more, to explain why a gentleman would ever bring his love of years before to such a scandalous establishment as Madame Rouges.

What sparks your imagination? As a reader are you curious about what inspiration lurks behind the title?

Finally, thank you for having me. I always love the chance to stop by Risky Regencies.

Thank you , Lavinia. We all enjoy having you with us!

Posted in Regency, Research, Writing | 7 Replies

Theatrical ick factors

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Let’s face it, there are a lot of icky things about the Regency (dukes, for instance) as well as the things we love (well, dukes, I guess). But one of the stranger and ickier things I came across recently was the mercifully short-lived craze for child actors in the early nineteenth century: child actors in the sense of children playing major roles in a cast of adults.

For a short time, the London theater scene was dominated by child actors. Charles Dibdin offered an acting school for children at the Royal Circus, and Henry Francis Greville at the San Souci offered regular evenings of child players.

(c) National Trust, Petworth House; Supplied by The Public Catalogue FoundationPossibly the most famous child actor was Master Betty (William Henry Best Betty, 1791-1874), the son of a once wealthy Anglo-Irish family.  Mr. Betty Sr. discovered a goldmine in his stage struck son, who determined to be an actor after seeing Mrs. Siddons perform when he was eleven. Master Betty became a sensation, playing such roles as Hamlet (below) and Macbeth. His father joined forces with an unscrupulous manager, and one of their most popular money-makers was to charge gentlemen (in the widest sense of the word) to visit Master Betty in his dressing room.

hamletMaster Betty made his Covent Garden debut in 1804, following appearances in Ireland and Scotland and a bidding war between that theater and Drury Lane. A detachment of guards was hired to keep order in the house. For two years he hobnobbed with the great and powerful, and his career eclipsed those of Kemble and Siddons. But in 1806  he was hissed off the stage playing Richard III–and coincidentally when he hit puberty. He had made enough money to restore his family’s fortune, and entered Cambridge in 1808. But the life of a country gentleman was not enough–he made several unsuccessful attempts to revive his acting career, and in 1835 tried to start his fifteen-year-old son on an acting career.

miss mudieAnother reason for his downfall was the emergence of a rival, Miss Mudie. Dickens, who almost certainly met Master Betty, gave this description of a child actress in Nicholas Nickleby. The daughter of Vincent Crummle is supposedly ten years old and “the idol of every place we go into.”

The infant phenomenon, though of short stature, had a comparatively aged countenance, and had moreover been precisely the same age…for five good years. But she had been kept up late every night, and put upon an unlimited allowance of gin-and-water from infancy, to prevent her growing tall.

In a rare show of good taste, the audience was revolted by Miss Mudie’s role as the heroine of The Country Girl, an adaptation of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. If you’re not familiar with the play, it’s about a naive woman, married to an older man, who brings her to swinging Restoration London. There she meets up with a rake, whose last name is Horner, nudge nudge, who’s currently passing himself off as a eunuch so that husbands will be blissfully ignorant of his designs on their wives. And so on. Miss Mudie was eight years old and so small for her age that the actor playing her lover had to go on his knees to embrace her.

During the ensuing uproar, Miss Mudie, who had chutzpah if not acting talent,  announced from the stage, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have done nothing to offend you; and as for those who are sent here to hiss me, I will be much obliged to you to turn them out.”

Actor-manager John Philip Kemble came on to beg that Miss Mudie be allowed to continue. As a witness observed, “All was noise and confusion … the curtain fell upon the most imperfect performance ever before witnessed on a London stage.”

Now here’s a plot bunny going begging. Child star falls out of fashion, what is he/she going to do for the next, uh, seven decades? Or, an impoverished parent of a child prodigy–what’s the ethical thing to do (still a relevant question today, sadly).

Oh, and if you’re in the Washington DC, area please visit Riversdale House Museum this Sunday where we’re having an author event, and I’ll be reading/signing some of my allegedly PG-rated books. Info here.

Posted in History, Plot bunnies | Tagged , , , | 1 Reply
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