Risky Regencies

Winter is coming

Updated on August 15, 2013 by susanna

The instant I stepped out of the house this morning, I looked at the sky, sighed, and said, “Winter is coming.” (And, yes, that was a deliberate George RR Martin reference.) You see, I live in Seattle, and the sky above was a gloomy gray. It wasn’t raining right at that instant, but my car was dappled with raindrops from a recent shower.

Contrary to what the rest of the country seems to believe, it ISN’T always like that here. The weather gods console us for eight months or so of annual gray gloom with the best summers in the world. It hardly rains at all between July 4 and sometime in mid-September. Most days the highs are in the 70’s, maybe the 80’s, but even then it’s comfy in the shade because in keeping with our nonexistent summer rainfall it’s a dry heat. And because we’re so far north, we have long, long days to savor the perfection of our summer.

Summer in my city

And this summer? Arguably the best weather we’ve had in a generation. So you can understand why this morning’s cloudy reminder of what my city looks like the rest of the year made me want to weep a little:

Winter is coming for YOU.

That’s what my morning commute looks like in early November. In late December it’s still pitch dark, even though I don’t get to work till 7:45 or so.

Our local weathermen faithfully promise our sunshine will be back, maybe as soon as tomorrow. But I still can’t escape the signs of the changing season. We’re starting to get mail from the school district with logistical info for Miss Fraser’s fourth grade year, which starts in less than three weeks. We’re planning our holiday vacation time at work, since we have to juggle our schedules to make sure someone is in the office. The spam in my inbox is giving me great offers on new fall fashions.

But throughout the seasonal rhythm of the year, my writing remains a constant. Now that A Dream Defiant is out, I’m hard at work on my proposal for its sequel, which is set mostly in America in the aftermath of the Battle of New Orleans. And I’m already busy researching my next manuscript–one with a French hero, set during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. The winter that’s coming for Jacques Gordon (yeah, he’s French, but he’s also half-Scottish, and related to the Gordons in my earlier books) is far more dire than anything Seattle is likely to throw at me….

Retreat

What does the changing season have in store for you?

Posted in Risky Regencies, Writing | Tagged Battle of New Orleans, Invasion of Russia, manuscripts, Seattle, Susanna Fraser | 12 Replies

The great SF mobile writing retreat

Updated on August 15, 2013 by Janet Mullany

I’m on my way home after a week in San Francisco hanging out with Pam Rosenthal and staging the great SF mobile writing retreat. Mobile in the sense that we had no fixed address (apart from my solo turn at Pam’s kitchen table yesterday), but parked ourselves in whatever coffee shop had wifi–which is of course essential to good solid writing–and power. (btw, Starbucks, you cannot make a nice cup of tea. I don’t know what it is but it tastes stewed from the get go. I guess this is what happens when you order tea in a place renowned for its coffee.)

We both got a lot of stuff done and also polished up our presentations–mine was on writing humor, which I gave to the SF-RWA last Saturday (and it’s coming to Maryland Romance Writers in November). Pam’s was last night at the Pink Bunny, an upscale lingeries/sexy stuff store, about writing BDSM. Both very well received. All this and I got to have nachos with the lovely Ms. Jewel, Korean food with the lovely Isobel Carr, and lots of book talk. Lots more great food in good company and a memorable day in the Asian Art Museum.

It’s interesting how productive you can be with a friend parked opposite you also being productive. Why is this? We didn’t resort to cries of encouragement or word counts within a certain amount of time. I don’t know that either would have worked since we both have such different styles and I am doing a rewrite/reconstruction (don’t ask me how, I lost my final manuscript. Well, it was written seven years ago). We didn’t even talk to each other much (not while writing). We just sat there and plugged away.

An interesting process. I don’t know how long this would have taken on my own, weeks or months rather than days, and I got some icky plot problems solved from the original and figured out how to work in a final sex scene. Pam very wisely told me I needed more talk less action and she was right. And I got to see a couple of excerpts from her WIP. (No, I’m not saying a word.)

I don’t know why this particular chemistry happens, and I’d like to hear your thoughts. Is it because writing is such a solitary pursuit that having a bit of company is a comfort? That if you get to one of those places where you get stuck knowing that you have someone to bounce an idea off gives you the oomph to move forward?

What do you think?

Posted in Risky Regencies, Writing | 2 Replies

Church of Kings

Updated on August 13, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

I am almost done with my second Amanda Carmack mystery novel, Murder at Westminster Abbey (due–gulp!–Thursday!). It’s set around the events of the coronation of Elizabeth I on January 15, 1559, and at this point I sort of feel like I was there myself, I’ve spent so much time researching every detail. (Who wore what? How many processions were there? Who carried the queen’s cloth of gold and ermine train? Answer to the last: the Duchess of Norfolk, who was nearly knocked over when souvenir-seekers pushed her out of the way to tear up the carpet the queen walked on from Westminster Palace to the Abbey…)

Just for fun–here is a sneak peek at the cover of the book! It will be out in April 2014, and the image is still being tweaked, but you can see what it will look like…

So I thought today I would take a very brief look at the history of Westminster Abbey! It’s a vast, fascinating place, overwhelming for a history lover (Risky Diane and I once had a long, jet-lagged visit to the Abbey in a torrential rainstorm!). There are over 3000 burials there, with over 600 monuments and tablets, many to famous (and infamous) people. Over 16 royal weddings have taken place here, the most recent the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

But its history started a VERY long time before Kate Middleton walked down the aisle in a Grace Kelly-esque gown. Legend has it a fisherman named Aldrich saw a vision of St. Peter on a plot of riverside land called Thorney Island (the Fishmonger’s Company still presents and annual salmon to the Abbey). In the 960s/70s, St. Dunstan and King Edgar established an order of Benedictine monks on the site, then named after St. Peter. (It eventually became known as “west minster” to distinguish it from St. Paul’s, the “east minster”).

In 1042, King Edward the Confessor began rebuilding St. Peter’s in the Norman Romanesque style. It was consecrated on December 28, 1065, sadly just a week before the king’s death, and he was buried before the high altar. The first coronation took place there a year later, of William the Conquerer (every royal coronation since has taken place there). There is little left of the Confessor’s church now, just the rounded arches and support columns of the undercroft and the Pyx Chamber. The present church was begun in 1245 by Henry III in the fashionable Gothic style. There have been a few more additions over the years, most notably the beautiful Lady chapel of Henry VII, with its gorgeous fan-vaulted ceiling and the elaborate gilded tomb of Henry and his wife Elizabeth of York. (Elizabeth I and Mary I are buried in a side aisle of the chapel, but Henry VIII is at Windsor. His only wife buried at Wesminster Abbey is the rejected Anne of Cleves).

The medieval monastery was dissolved in 1540, and Henry VIII erected Westminster into a cathedral church with a bishop (Thomas Thirlby), a dean and twelve prebendaries. The bishopric was surrendered on 29 March 1550 and the diocese was re-united with London, Westminster being made by Act of Parliament a cathedral church in the diocese of London. Mary I restored the Benedictine monastery in 1556 under Abbot John Feckenham. But on the accession of Elizabeth I the religious houses revived by Mary were given by Parliament to the Crown and the Abbot and monks were removed in July 1559. Queen Elizabeth I refounded the Abbey by a charter dated 21 May 1560 as a Collegiate Church, a Royal Peculiar exempt from the jurisdiction of bishops and with the Sovereign as its Visitor. In place of the monastic community a collegiate body of a dean and prebendaries, minor canons and a lay staff was established and charged with the task of continuing the tradition of daily worship (for which a musical foundation of choristers, singing men and organist was provided) and with the education of forty Scholars who formed the nucleus of what is now Westminster School.

A couple books I’ve used in researching the history and floorplans of the Abbey are Tony Trowles’s Treasures of Westminster Abbey (2008) and James Wilkinson’s Westminster Abbey: A Thousand Years of Music and Pageant (2003). I also watched a DVD of William and Kate’s wedding to study details of the church a little closer!

Next week, I will share some of my research of the 1559 coronation itself, and what we might look for when it comes to the future coronations of Charles III and William V.

Have you been to Westminster Abbey? What was your favorite site there???

Posted in Risky Regencies | 3 Replies

I Dreamt I Went To Manderley Again

Updated on August 13, 2013 by Diane Gaston

I watched Rebecca on TCM a few days ago. The movie opens with that line as, of course, does the book, which I read so many years ago I can’t remember. It has to be one of the best opening lines for a book ever:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . I came upon it suddenly; the approach masked by the unnatural growth of a vast shrub that spread in all directions . . . There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the gray stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand..

Who would not want to read on after such an opening?

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier was the hit of its day. First published in 1938, it has been continuously in print and as recently as 1993 was selling 4,000 copies a month. As we romance writers might expect, critics panned the book as “nothing beyond the novelette (The Times) or predicted that the novel “would be here today, gone tomorrow” (Christian Science Monitor ).

Books like Rebecca and other gothic romances (Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart) fueled my love of reading when I was young. I could not get enough of the woman-in-peril stories, the sinister mood and suspense–was the hero a villain or a saviour? I read as many as I could get my hands on. When the steamier historical romances became popular, I was ripe for them, too, and I quickly fell in love with Regency romances, the old traditional regencies, as well as Georgette Heyer, and back to Jane Austen.

Rebecca had early influences, not quite back to regency times, but it is clear the book was influenced by Jane Eyre. The innocent heroine, the dark “widower,” a mysterious servant, a big secret about the hero’s former wife, the fire at the end–all are there. I like that du Maurier wrote such a popular book based on a classic. I had my own Jane Eyre-inspired book, Born To Scandal, after all.

Daphne du Maurier has her own connection to regency times. Her great-grandmother was Mary Anne Clarke, former mistress of Frederick, Duke of York. It was Mary Anne Clarke who sold army commissions with the Duke of York’s knowledge, a scandal which forced Frederick to resign from his position as Commander in Chief of the Army. Du Maurier’s book, Mary Anne, is a fictional account of her great-grandmother’s life.

Have you read Rebecca? Or have you seen the movie? Can you think of any other great opening lines of books?

Posted in Reading | 4 Replies

What is it about Jane?

Updated on August 8, 2013 by Elena Greene

Although I’m deep in the final editing for Fly with a Rogue, Jane Austen’s been on my mind this week, for various reasons.
A dear friend just gave me the cutest gift: the Cozy Classics version of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, by Jack and Holman Wang. It’s part of a series presenting classics using “twelve child friendly words and twelve needle felted illustrations.” It’s cleverly done. Here’s an example, from the famous “She is tolerable” scene.

Now I am wondering if I scooped Amanda on this one. It almost makes up for the sad fact that no one has ever given me a Jane Austen action figure.

That same action figure is featured, along with the delightful Republic of Pemberley, in this recent piece on “10 Signs of Jane Austen Addiction.” It’s good for a few laughs. My own score was middling. I own only one copy of each book and do not have a Jane Austen action figure. Sigh…

This lighthearted piece also attracted a surprising number of comments angrily dissing Jane “Austin” and her books. I broke my usual rule of not reading comments—maybe I was procrastinating on the editing—and as always, I wondered why some people do so much online ranting. If you don’t like Jane Austen books or film adaptations, why not just read or watch something else?

Maybe it’s because Jane Austen wrote about relationships, and not just romantic ones. Maybe people who are challenged in the area of human relationships need to disparage such books the same way children who struggle with math call it “stupid.”

But it gets worse. Recently, the Bank of England announced plans to put Jane Austen on the 10 pound note. Read what happened here.

It is depressing that misogyny is alive and well in our world. But that’s all the more reason for women to keep reading and writing what we enjoy, to keep voting, to keep speaking out as we see fit, and to keep reaching for success, however we’d like to define it.

So I will continue my editing–vowing to avoid all distractions! Once the book is out there, I’m going to treat myself and my daughters to a Pride & Prejudice movie marathon.

Why do you think Jane Austen provokes such strong reactions? How do you cope with trolls?

Elena

www.elenagreene.com

Posted in Jane Austen | 5 Replies