Risky Regencies

Doing a retreat the right way

Updated on May 8, 2015 by Elena Greene

I recently went on my annual writers’ retreat, and it was wonderful as usual. Here I am with one of my friend writers, the lovely and talented Laura J Bear, who’s working on her next book. Laura’s debut women’s fiction novel, Where the Heart Lands, came out in March and deals with the relationship between two intriguing and troubled female characters.

The basic formula for retreat success is the same every year: an idyllic lake house, a group of caring, supportive writer friends, lots of good food, wine and chocolate, romantic films to watch in the evening, and lots of time and space to write.

What could go wrong?

For many people, not much. If you’re a well-adjusted, happy person who can be spontaneous and creative without guilt, the above is more than enough to ensure a happy, productive weekend.

If you are a ~~neurotic, self-flagellating nut~~ sensitive soul who has at times been made to feel guilty about her creative life, it’s also important to bring the right mindset.

The challenge of having a perfect setup is that it creates a lot of pressure to be productive. It would be very easy for me to set crazy-high productivity goals. Such goals work well for people who are sane enough to be happy when they achieve say, 75-80% of their target. For me, setting the bar too high can make me choke, or at least to feel disappointed if I don’t manage to clear it.

There can also just be pressure to make every moment count. Being as starved for free time as I am, sometimes when I get some I worry about how best to use it. (OK, maybe “neurotic nut” is the right term.) I could also easily fall into the extreme of self-indulgence: too much chocolate, too much wine, too much watching videos into the night. Followed by guilt over not having achieved anything regarding the writing.

The key, I’ve found, is to aim for a happy medium between rigorous discipline and wild self-indulgence, and to focus on the process rather than the output.

This year in particular, I’m grappling with personal issues. Since I couldn’t write before the retreat and knew I wouldn’t be able to write for some time afterwards, I decided to use the retreat as a traveler through the desert uses an oasis: a place to refresh, renew hope, and gather energy for the next part of the trip.

I made sure to spend some time every morning doing the complete wellness routine I wish I could do every day. This includes journaling, yoga, and meditation. I also made sure to exercise, either hiking and/or taking a kayak out for a paddle. I allowed myself to enjoy all that good food and the wine, neither bingeing nor denying myself.

Instead of striving for wordcount, I used my writing time to brainstorm new stories. I now have a lot of detailed notes that will be very helpful when I’m ready to start writing again. Just as importantly, the retreat reminded me of how good–and very right–it can feel to be creative.

Do any of you do retreats of any sort–writing, spiritual, crafting, etc…? Any particular tips and tricks that help you get the most out of them?

Elena
www.elenagreene.com

Posted in Writing | Tagged Laura J Bear, Where the Heart Lands, writing retreats | 4 Replies

Fictionalizing the Past

Updated on May 6, 2015 by Sandra Schwab

[My apologies for this late post. After coming home from university, I spent the late afternoon recording a video of me reading bits of my new book to you lovely people (this involved an accident with the retractable desk and making faces at the camera and checking whether “lamp” is really pronounced with a “p” or not). Then I spent the early evening editing the video, watching the software crash, editing the video again, finally starting the process to upload it to YouTube only to be told it would take 900 minutes to upload this lovely 5-minute video. At which point I nearly broke down and cried. After four hours, I eventually abandoned all hope & decided to do this post without a reading. *sigh*]

sketch of the Saalburg, by Sandra Schwab

The main gate of the Saalburg, a reconstructed Roman fort

When you’ve been reading and writing Regency-set historical romances for more than a decade, chances are that you’ve become quite familiar with the conventions of the genre, including the way the genre fictionalizes the Regency period. In other words, you know how the construction of this particular romantic fantasy works: the characters are typically from the upper classes (with an abundance of dukes *g*); the stories are typically set in London during the Season and / or on a lavish country estate; the hero is often tall, dark, and dangerous and might be a rake, but doesn’t suffer from syphilis; everybody has excellent teeth; nobody has any fleas nor lice. You also know exactly what kind of things are typically not touched upon: e.g., child labor, the massive economic problems after the Napoleonic Wars, the often dire situation of domestic servants.

You know this framework inside out, you know exactly what does and doesn’t work and what needs to be tweaked to fit the fantasy.

And then somebody on Twitter talks you into writing a romance novel set in ancient Rome.

And thus, you find yourself, for the most part, without any kind of framework.

For me this was certainly one of the most difficult parts of writing my Roman romance. It didn’t help that during the first few weeks I kept comparing my work to that of Rosemary Sutcliff, whose books I’ve adored since I was eight years old. No, this didn’t help at all. Instead it threw me into full-blown panic mode. How preposterous of me to think I could even begin to imitate Sutcliff’s work!

It took me a few days to realize that of course I wasn’t imitating Sutcliff’s novel. I was creating my own version of the Roman period, which in turn forced me to consciously think about how to fictionalize the past — something I hadn’t really done in years because I am so very familiar with the Regency period and the Victorian Age.

But suddenly I was forced to think about things like

How do you write about a world with completely different religious principles? (Funnily enough, my Roman hero ended up being the most religious character I have written to date.)
How do you write about a city that, for the most part, no longer exists? (The perfectionist part of me had a little melt-down over this.)
How do you write about slavery? How do you convey the full horror of slavery while at the same time making it part of the everyday life of your characters?
How do you explain an understanding of sex that was in many ways radically different from our own?
And why the heck wasn’t the Colosseum called Colosseum?!!?!? (This came up during a frantic bout of last-minute research last weekend.)

Roman military standards

Writing my Roman romance thus became a true adventure, which allowed me to not only explore a different time period, but also to question and challenge my own writing process and my process of translating the past into fiction.

Indeed, it also challenged me to rethink my own view on history and made me realize there are many aspects of the past we know little or nothing about.

A good example of this is the question whether or not centurions were legally allowed to marry. Though there are a good many grave stones that were erected by a centurion’s “wife”, they are not conclusive proof because the terms maritus (“husband”) and uxor (“wife”) were also used by partners who were not formally wed. Apart from formal, legal marriage, there were two other forms of socially accepted long-term relationships, namely concubinatus and contubernium. While the former refers to “lying together”, the latter term was used for a relationship where the partners lived together in one house. (Initially, the term denoted a community of people sharing a tent, and as such it was also used in a military context to refer to a group of eight soldiers sharing a tent during campaign or a room in the barracks in the fort.)

I have to admit that I found it slightly disturbing that my research often didn’t turn up hard facts, but forced me to make decisions about (key) aspects of my characters’ lives. (It gets even worse when you move beyond the borders of the Roman Empire!) (But hey, who would be stupid enough to do such a thing???) (Eh…um…)

Giving all the challenges of writing a romance set in a completely different period than what I’m used to, I am so thrilled that my first Roman romance it out in the wild. 🙂

Here’s the blurb:

A proud warrior.
A brave woman.
A forbidden love that is tested by the intrigues of ancient Rome and the hostilities at the northernmost edge of the empire.

Centurion Marcus Florius Corvus has a splendid career in the legions ahead of him. Yet a visit to Rome and a chance encounter with an old friend change his whole life: He falls in love with one of his friend’s pleasure slaves and becomes entrapped in an evil scheme designed to destroy him. And yet—he cannot help risking everything for Lia, the woman he has given his heart to, even if it means he will be banished to one of the most dangerous places in the Roman Empire: the northern frontier of Britannia.

Do you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription? Then you can now grab a copy of the first part of the serialized edition of Eagle’s Honor: Banished: www.amazon.com/dp/B00X50PXC2/

If you don’t have a KU subscription, you can also pre-order the complete edition, which will be cheaper for you: www.amazon.com/dp/B00WMAKH4K/

Please note that this is a steamy historical with explicit sex scenes, some graphic language, and shocking questions about a centurion’s vine staff. And people eat, like, the STRANGEST things! 😉

Would you like to be among the first to read Marcus & Lia’s full story? Then leave a comment for a chance to win a digital copy of the complete edition of Eagle’s Honor: Banished.

Posted in Writing | 7 Replies

“‘Pickles’ left behind”

Updated on April 27, 2015 by Rose Lerner

Two weeks ago, I finally wrote “The End” on the rough draft of my next book, Listen to the Moon, out in January. (It’s book 3 in my Lively St. Lemeston series, starring Toogood and Sukey, the valet and maid from book 1.) Woooo!

But when I say rough, I mean ROUGH. Part of my process for going from “rough draft” to “clean draft I can send to my friends with only a minimum of shame” involves looking up a lot of words in the Oxford English Dictionary (thank god, the Seattle Public Library has a subscription) to see if they were in use during the Regency.

One word I looked up was “epergne.” I had the vague idea this was some kind of large silver thing used as a centerpiece on a dinner table. Maybe a vase? But I discovered to my surprise that it is a “centre-dish, or centre ornament for the dinner-table, now often in a branched form, each branch supporting a small dish for dessert or the like, or a vase for flowers. (From our quots. it appears that the earlier use was chiefly to hold pickles.)” !!!

The relevant quotations are:

“1761 Bill of Fare in Pennant London (1813) 562, 2 Grand Epergnes filled with fine Pickles.[…]
1804 Verses to Dr. Warton in Ann. Reg. 928 [His pupils present him with an epergne on his resigning the head-mastership of Winchester, hoping that it may remind him ‘of “Pickles” left behind’].”

[ETA: I want to clarify that this doesn’t mean epergnes were ONLY used to hold pickles. Another quotation, from 1779, mentions using one for sweetmeats. But I think the 1804 quote makes the strength of the association clear.]

Of course, this is slightly less limiting than it might sound to us—while “pickles” have come to refer primarily to pickled cucumbers, in the Regency it could mean any pickled dish. Take a look at “Pickle” in the index of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery to get an idea of the possible variety! Ox palates, red currants, walnuts, and “elder shoots in imitation of bamboo” are just a few of the most picturesque recipes.

Epergne by Thomas Pitts, London, 1761. Image credit: Daderot via Wikimedia Commons. Notice the pineapple topper! We’ll be talking more about pineapples later.

This got me thinking about other kinds of dishes with specific purposes that have passed out of fashion. A few of my favorites:

1. The seau à glace, or ice-pail, used for serving ice cream at table. Assembled, it looked like this:

Flight & Barr, Worcester, 1782-1802. Image credit: Daderot via Wikimedia Commons.

The lid is filled with ice, and the central bowl can be lifted out and the bottom of the pail filled with more ice. In this way ice cream can be kept cold on the dinner table for up to four hours (!), if salt is added to the ice. To see one in use, scroll to the bottom of Ivan Day’s wonderful page on Georgian and Victorian ice cream (and look in the left sidebar for a picture of one completely disassembled).

If you’re as charmed by this dish as I am, some helpful soul has assembled an entire Pinterest board of them, and they’re all wonderful!

2. The turtle soup tureen. “Turtle dinners,” or dinners at which turtle soup was the central dish, were a popular form of lavish entertainment in the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth.

(They were especially popular at civic celebrations like the Lord Mayor’s Feast, etc. The association was strong enough by 1834 that I came across this quotation from Blackwood’s Magazine in the OED in the entry for “swallow, v.”: “Dosy, who sate in open-mouthed wonder, swallowing them [sc. his stories] down as a common-councilman swallows turtle.”)

I also read a quote (which I can’t now dig up but I’ll give it another shot this afternoon) about one enthusiastic candidate’s wife attending five turtle dinners in a week as part of campaigning for her husband during the 1754 general election. Oy!

You can read more about this custom (and about where all the turtles came from) in this article.

(Mock turtle soup was created to cheaply imitate the fashionable delicacy. As Wikipedia says, “It often uses brains and organ meats such as calf’s head or a calf’s foot to duplicate the texture and flavour of the original’s turtle meat.” Heinz used to make a canned variety that only went out of production in the 1970s—you can see a picture of a can as well as some old recipes here.)

Anyway, special tureens were made shaped like turtles to hold the soup. I’ve seen them now and then in museums; the article linked above contains a photo of a splendid example in silver at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.

3. And possibly my favorite for sheer whimsy…the pineapple stand! The pineapple was a fad luxury item in eighteenth and early nineteenth century England in rather the way tulips were in 17th century Holland. By the Regency the initial craze, which led to things like the building of a giant stone pineapple-shaped conservatory, had passed…

The Dunmore Pineapple, built by the Earl of Dunmore in 1761. Image credit: Davidw82, via Wikimedia Commons.

…but pineapples remained a popular display of wealth and glamor. Whole pineapples were used as table centerpieces (and sometimes were taken away again by the caterers at the end of the night without being eaten!). This blog post contains two beautiful examples of porcelain pineapple stands by Spode, one from 1813 and one from 1820, with an explanation of their use. These are clearly designed for the whole pineapple to stand in the center surrounded by sliced pineapple, as is this lovely boat-shaped stand, but some, like this cut glass one…clearly are not.

Honorable mention goes to the Solomon’s Temple pudding mold, popular for nearly two centuries. You can see pictures of a variety of molds AND, incredibly, a video of the finished pudding wobbling comically, at this awesome blog post by Ivan Day, who explains, “Because it is made of flummery, which is a kind of opaque milk jelly, the central obelisk wobbles and cavorts in a most entertaining manner, while the four little cones shake, rattle and roll in a very naughty way.”

What’s your favorite single-purpose serving dish? Teapots? Salt and pepper shakers? Gravy boats? Tell me all about it!

Posted in Food, Regency | 10 Replies

Happy birthday Shakespeare

Updated on April 24, 2015 by Janet Mullany

A day late–or possibly even more, because no one really knows the date, but happily April 23 is also St. George’s Day, by a fortuitous coincidence. So I thought I’d make a stab at the huge topic of Shakespeare during the Regency, a time of both revival and suppression.

Essentially people have been tinkering with Shakespeare before his ink was barely dry, and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were no exception. There was a great Shakespeare revival in the period, thanks in part to larger theaters, not to mention larger than life performers:

The Kembles were statuesque: the two factors, which, according to James Boaden in 1826, caused Sarah Siddons to change her style were the larger theaters and ‘her delight in statuary, which directed her attention to the antique and made a remarkable impression upon her as to simplicity of attire and severity of attitude … Hazlitt thought Kemble was ‘the very still life and statuary of the stage … an icicle upon the bust of tragedy.’ Such frigidity was especially absurd off stage: a contemporary remembered Kemble at breakfast looking as if he had eaten ‘a poached curtain rod’. Read more

Mrs. Siddons made the role of Queen Katherine in Henry VIII one of her signature roles. Henry VIII also plays a pivotal role in Austen’s Mansfield Park–Austen came from a family that loved the theater, performed amateur productions, and almost certainly read Shakespeare aloud to each other. The seductive Henry Crawford reads aloud from the play and Edmund becomes jealous:

Edmund watched the progress of her attention, and was amused and gratified by seeing how she gradually slackened in the needlework, which at the beginning seemed to occupy her totally: how it fell from her hand while she sat motionless over it, and at last, how the eyes which had appeared so studiously to avoid him throughout the day were turned and fixed on Crawford—fixed on him for minutes, fixed on him, in short, till the attraction drew Crawford’s upon her, and the book was closed, and the charm was broken.

Crawford elsewhere in the book states that Shakespeare “… is a is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.” Edmund agrees, saying that “No doubt, one is familiar with Shakespeare …from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by every body; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare,…”

Shakespeare was big business. In 1786, engraver and publisher John Boydell began an ambitious project to foster a school of English history painters and publish an illustrated edition of Shakespeare and a folio of engravings based on commissioned paintings. The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London enjoyed enormous popularity during the 1790s.

Here’s an engraving from the collection by Robert Smirke:

I have to admit I had trouble guessing what play this could possibly be. It’s an illustration of infancy (the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms) from As You Like It, beautifully translated to the late eighteenth century. A very well-dressed lady is visiting the foster family of her latest child, but I’m not sure whether it’s her child or that of the woman kneeling in the foreground. I love the details of this–the cottage loaf on the table, the poor but honest foster family, and the dog barking at the black servant outside.

I think the two examples from Mansfield Park sum up the contemporary attitude toward Shakespeare–our playwright, but also an artist who can be disturbing or unwholesome. And that brings us to the sorry case of King Lear. In 1681, Nahum Tate rewrote–or “Reviv’d with Alterations,” as he put it–the play as The History of King Lear for the sophisticated patrons of London’s theaters. Notably, he gave it a happy ending, provided Cordelia with a love interest, dropped the role of the Fool, and so on. You can read his description of the changes and the whole text here. Incredibly, this was the version in use until 1823 when Edmund Kean restored the tragic ending, although Tate’s version remained in use throughout the nineteenth century. But performance of the play was banned entirely from 1810 until after the death of George III, because the story of a failing king succumbing to madness and being the head of a very dysfunctional family was a little too close for comfort. You can read more at The Regency Redingcote and What’s It All About Shakespeare.

And then, bless his heart, there was Dr. Bowdler who found that reading Shakespeare aloud to his family could be a little icky, apparently something that didn’t bother the Austens. He censored as he went (I used to do much the same when reading the Care Bears to my toddler daughter) and then had the bright idea of publishing his cleaned up version in 1818: THE FAMILY SHAKSPEARE, in which nothing is added to the Original Text; but those Expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud.

What’s your favorite Shakespeare play or movie version? Or have you seen a particularly good production recently?

Posted in History, Jane Austen, Reading | Tagged Shakespeare | 2 Replies