Risky Regencies

Characters We Hate To Love?

Updated on September 24, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

First of all, get better soon to Diane!!! Cat bites are nothing to mess around with. Hopefully we will hear from her later today and find out she is resting at home….

Around here (luckily) there are no animal bites or illnesses of any kind! But I am NOT looking forward to moving my two homebody cats. They don’t even like to get up off their couch most of the time, and getting them into carriers for trips to the vet is always an ordeal. They are only moving about 45 minutes away, but still. And I am about to sit down in the middle of the floor and give up on this moving idea anyway. I have most of my books packed (65 boxes! And I just realized I packed a couple of research books I now need), but I have lots more stuff that needs to be consolidated and packed somewhere. Seriously, if anyone has any moving tips, let me know. (no wonder most people in the Regency stayed put in their houses for most of their lives. Except for people like Jane Austen. I wonder what she did about packing…)

In the meantime, I am about 1/4 of the way through the new WIP, an Italian Renaissance romance. as part of my Important Research Process, I spent the weekend laying around eating potato chips and re-watching DVDs of The Borgias. I love this show. I think it’s what The Tudors wanted to be, and just couldn’t quite hit the mark. Scandal! Murder! Intrigue! Sex! Gorgeous clothes! More sex! More gorgeous clothes! And a soupcon of historical accuracy. But I realized something rather disturbing. I absolutely adore the pairing of Lucrezia and Cesare, and, well….they are sorta brother and sister.

I know! I think I came to romance reading too late to really appreciate the “old skool” stylings of books like those of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers. I had already been reading stuff like lighter Regencies and historicals where the heroines were pretty much the equal (at least emotionally) of the heroes when I finally picked up a copy of The Flame and the Flower (because people kept telling me I HAD to read it). Well–I hated it. And to this day I can’t stand jackass heroes and half-their-age doormat/simper-y heroines. I hate “forced seductions” (I grew up with college campus campaigns against just that sort of thing, after all). Everyone has their fantasies, which is great, that’s just not really mine, so I found other stories I preferred. Why, then, do I love Lucrezia and Cesare so very, very much?

Hmmm, maybe it’s because I have a deep love of something not often found in romance novels–dark, tragic, desperate, doomed love, a la “Romeo and Juliet.” (Though certainly there are a few–maybe that’s why my all-time fave romance novel is For My Lady’s Heart). And you can’t get more desperate and doomed than C&L. In a crowded ensemble drama chock full of intriguing characters, I always found myself looking forward to their scenes together. Let’s face it, they are just so beeeeauuutifuuul, separate and together, and charismatic. It’s like the two of them against the world, true soulmates.

In Sarah Bradford’s excellent biography Lucrezia Borgia, she says of the real-life figures, “Incestuous or not, there is no doubt that Cesare and Lucrezia loved each other above anyone else and remained loyal to each other to the end.” (note here: I am thinking only of the fictional TV characters, not the real life ones, who were probably considerably more reprehensible, at least Cesare. I think Lucrezia is the victim of a historical hack job)

What are some couples (fictional or historical) you hate to love???

Posted in Risky Regencies | 5 Replies

Mad Dogs and Englishmen….

Updated on September 23, 2013 by Diane Gaston

This really has little to do with mad dogs and Englishmen, but bear with me. There is a sort of a connection.

Yesterday, the neighborhood cat came to our patio door to taunt and torture our cats and I did a foolish thing. I reached down to stop our “Devil Cat” from rushing the screen and he bit me! Good. His canine tooth sank into the skin of my palm right below my thumb. A couple of other teeth did less damage. I washed and soaked and slathered the wounds with antibiotic cream and bandaged them. Today I’ll call my doctor’s office. My hand hurts and I’m running a low grade fever but other than that, I’m not worried. My cat is current on his rabies shots and, being an indoor cat, he is never exposed to rabid animals anyway. And even if my cat had rabies, at least there is a (reputedly unpleasant) cure.

It certainly was not so in Regency England, though.

Rabies was described as early as 2300 B.C. in Babylonia. In 800-700 B.C. Homer describes Hector as being like a “raging dog.” Four hundred years later Aristotle describes dogs as suffering from a madness that is contagious and fatal to other animals who are bitten. As time goes on, rabies is mentioned all over Europe and Russia and first appears in the British Isles in 1026 A.D.

In the mid 1700s, a serious outbreak of rabies swept London. All dogs were ordered confined for one month and a reward of 2 shillings for killing dogs on the streets led to a carnage.

It wasn’t until 1804 that a German scientist demonstrated that rabies was transmitted through the saliva of mad animals, and finally in 1885 Louis Pasteur cured the first patient with his newly invented vaccine.

Nothing in the history of rabies mentioned rabid cats. Probably another way cats feel themselves superior to dogs.

I’ll let you know what happens at the doctor. Have you ever been bit by an animal? Tell us your story.

Posted in Anything but writing, Regency | Tagged cats, Louis Pasteur, mad dogs, rabies | 22 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

If my daughter had been born 200 years earlier…

Updated on September 20, 2013 by susanna

Last week Mr Fraser and I grounded our nine-year-old daughter, Miss Fraser, from all her electronic devices–her regular Kindle, her Fire, her DS, her computer, and the TV. She’s taking her electronics fast pretty hard. At one point I reminded her that when I was her age, I didn’t have any electronics except a TV which only got six or seven channels, two of them extremely fuzzy, and yet I entertained myself just fine with books, toys, and paper and pencils/crayons. All of which she has plenty of. “But you were used to it!” she wailed.

She’s adjusting. She’s been digging out toys she got for Christmas or her birthday that she’d barely touched, and she follows me around the kitchen wanting to help, but bored by the simplicity of my typical weeknight cuisine. While I’m just trying to get pasta or breakfast-for-dinner to the table, she’s trying to make it a round of Chopped or Iron Chef. Which might be fun–on a weekend when I have more time.

But it got me thinking what her childhood would’ve been like if she’d been born in 1804 instead of 2004. Setting aside for the moment the fact she’d probably be motherless (since I had complications of late pregnancy and labor and delivery that were no big deal in the 21st century but would’ve been dire back then), her world would look very different. She wouldn’t have My Little Pony figurines, she’d have an actual pony. (Assuming of course that Regency Mr Fraser and I were at least genteel and could afford to keep horses.)

Horsie!

(Yes, yes, I know, that’s a horse, not a pony. But isn’t it pretty? Horsie!)

She wouldn’t be able to read about Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, or Firestar the warrior cat, but she might enjoy Charles Perrault’s fairy tales. Or, given that we are Frasers (it’s a pen name, but one chosen from my family tree), she might find The Scottish Chiefs more to her taste than anything else available in 1813.

And while I suppose the Regency versions of me and Mr Fraser would’ve felt obliged to restrain our daughter’s tomboyish tendencies, I’m sure she would’ve angled for toy soldiers instead of dolls.

As much as I love history, the only thing I envy about Regency Miss Fraser’s childhood is the pony.

What about you? What are your favorite toys, or your kids’ favorites? And what would you have played with 200 years ago?

Posted in Frivolity, Regency | Tagged childhood, Susanna Fraser, toys | 9 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