Risky Regencies

Time passes

Updated on April 27, 2013 by Janet Mullany

A year ago today the Risky Regency blog started! I decided, after Elena’s preemptive birthday strike yesterday, to talk about what’s changed in the past year–for me (well, it is my day to blog) and, as far as I’m able, to talk about changes in the industry. Because one thing that hasn’t really changed for me is that I still feel totally bewildered by the strange Alice-in-Wonderland world of publishing.

One major change, of course, is that the Signet Regency is no more. A lot of us were taken by surprise and not too happy about it. I’m the exception, because I was clueless what I was going to write for my option manuscript. When I did start one, the hero/heroine had sex on page seven and by chapter three she’d become an old man’s darling; not the usual fodder of the trads. (Go on. I challenge you. Give me the name of the trad where this happens and I’ll send you a copy of Dedication–Riskies, particularly Cara and her encyclopaedic knowledge of the subgenre, are prohibited from entering.) Meanwhile trads are popping up as e-books–even Cerridwen Press, the well-behaved, polite sister of Ellora’s Cave, is starting the Cotillion Line. The first title, A Certain Want of Reason, which will be out this fall, is by my buddy and critique partner Kate Dolan.
I’d like to share with you what this past year has been like. A year ago I was about-to-be-published, and thinking philosophically that if I hadn’t done it by now, it was too late (website, check. Galleys sent out for review, check. Bookmarks made, check. And so on). I’d attracted the attention of a very sharp agent (with whom I have since signed). The future was both terrifying and exciting. I discovered I could spend hours fretting about things like reviews and therefore avoid any actual writing. I plummeted into first book syndrome, something I recently wrote an article on, and which you can read at the Wet Noodle Posse e-zine.

It’s pretty mind-boggling that exactly a year later I can now call myself a multi-pubbed, award-winning author. (Well, almost. I guess I’m multi-contracted, -dealed, or -gestated right now.) There’s a part of me that shrieks, amidst hysterical giggles, What, me? Me? Nice-cup-of-tea Janet? And another part of me that struts around saying things like, Well, why the heck not? I can write and I work hard. So there! Meanwhile, my muse, a rather severe woman of a certain age who sports tweed skirts, refined cameo brooches, and sensible shoes, raises her eyebrows in the way that makes me cringe and murmurs caustic comments about doing what writers should do–write.

I’m not sure exactly where I’ll be this time next year, other than still bemused by the industry, and, I hope, writing better and more, and enjoying the company of my Risky friends.

Janet

Posted in Reading, Risky Book Talk, Writing | 3 Replies

Anniversary Eve for the Riskies

Updated on April 27, 2013 by Elena Greene

Tomorrow will be the first anniversary of the Risky Regencies!

A little history for those who may have joined us more recently. About a year ago, I went to the RWA conference in Reno, where I roomed with Cara and Amanda and met Janet and Megan in person for the first time. Each of us was looking forward to releases of Signet Regencies within the upcoming months. Each was also well aware that the writing was on the wall for the line, though no announcement had yet been made.

Soon after the conference, we decided that starting this blog was better than donning blacks and mourning the demise of Signet Regencies, that this would be a fun way to share our passion for the Regency while searching for new publishing “homes”. And it has been. One of the nicest things for me has been working with this talented and highly individual group of women, including our newest member, Diane.

The idea of calling ourselves the Risky Regencies stemmed from the fact that many of us did things in our upcoming books that felt risky to us. My September release, LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE is a Super Regency. It’s longer and more complex than anything I’d written before, which led to some serious midnight-oil-burning as the deadline approached. It also deals with more serious issues than I’d tackled in previous books. And it’s sexier.

My first traditional Regency, which came out in 2000, was on the “sweet” side. In my second full-length Regency I wrote my first sex scene. Some readers loved it; others castigated me because “ladies didn’t do that in the Regency”. Over the next few books, my stories kept getting sexier (blame my characters did it, I have no control over them!) and I continued to get a mix of rants and raves from readers.

So I was pretty nervous when LDM finally came out. Now the problem child has made me proud, winning the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Regency of 2005 and the Desert Rose RWA’s Golden Quill in the historical romance category.

Meanwhile my fellow Riskies have earned all sorts of awards, as this week’s posts amply prove. So many different books have been honored this year, and so many of them have been ours! It says to me that readers want variety, and the Riskies have been offering just that.

As we near our one-year anniversary, I’d like to ask the visitors what you think of our blog. What have you most enjoyed? Anything you’d like to see more of?

In a spirit of nostalgia, and as a thanks to our visitors over this past year, I’d like to send an autographed copy of my first book, LORD LANGDON’S KISS, to a visitor chosen at random from comments on this post. Sometime this weekend I’ll announce the winner.

To my Risky friends and visitors, thanks for a great year!

Elena
LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, Golden Quill, Best Historical Romance
www.elenagreene.com

Posted in Reading, Risky Book Talk, Writing | 13 Replies

Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!

Updated on April 27, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Today marks Shakespeare’s 449th birthday! Well, sort of–he was baptised in his hometown of Stratford-on-Avon on April 26, 1564, and since that usually happened about 3 days after a baby was born, plus it’s St. George’s Day AND Shakespeare died on April 23 in 1616, it just makes a neat little juxtaposition, so April 23 is the Official Day.

Not much is really, concretely known about Shakespeare’s personal life. He grew up in Stratford, where he probably attended the free local grammar school, The King’s New School. His father was a glover in town who was very prosperous for a time (and married an Arden, local gentry), but then kind of went downhill. At 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26 (the hussy!) and gave birth to their first child, Susanna, 6 months later. Twins followed, Judith and Hamnett (Hamnett died at 11, but Judith grew up to make a disappointing marriage). Between 1585 and 1592, he built a successful theater career with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men) as an actor, playwright, and eventual sharer in the company. He made enough money to buy New Place, the biggest house in Stratford, as well as rent respectable lodgings in London (see Charles Nicholl’s book The Lodger Shakespeare about a lawsuit he got embroiled in via his landlords the Mountjoys on Silver Street. His part in the quarrel was tiny, but it’s a great picture of London life at the time). Around 1613 he retired back to Stratford where he died 3 years later. His direct line ended with his granddaughter Elizabeth, but his monument can still be seen at the church there. That’s about it really, though bits and pieces keep popping up to give grist to the scholarly mill. He left 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2 long narrative poems.

But what’s really important isn’t what Shakespeare did in his life, but the beauty of the words and the worlds he left us, which have brought such immense joy to so many people and taught us so much about the world around us and ourselves. One of the best nights in my life was spent at the Globe Theater, watching a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, imagining what it must have been like to be there when those words were first spoken, and what that world must have been like. (This also happened to be the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, when I was about 7! An outdoor production where Puck would climb the trees to say his lines, which really impressed me then…) I just saw a production of Love’s Labors Lost (not the best play, but fun) updated to the 1950s, where it lost none of its humor and meaning, and goes to show the timelessness of Shakespeare’s characters. (Really, I think he and Jane Austen, and possibly Dickens, had the greatest insight into human nature of any writer…). Plus there’s a new movie version of Romeo and Juliet coming this summer, and I can’t wait!!!

For a man who left so little mark of his personal life on the world, there’s no end to great biographies. Some of my own favorites are: Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography; Jonathan Bates’s The Soul of the Age; Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life; James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (which mostly sets Shakespeare in the wider Elizabethan world); and Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Since I’m working on 2 Elizabethan projects of my own at the moment, I’m happy to live vicariously in Shakespeare’s Tudor world whenever I can. 🙂

What are your own favorite Shakespeare plays, or memories??

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Sonnet 29

Posted in Research | Tagged Shakespeare | 3 Replies

Dragged kicking and screaming…

Updated on April 27, 2013 by Elena Greene

I used to be a software engineer by profession, but I have to confess even then I had this love/hate relationship with technology. Even though I learn pretty quickly, I resent the time it takes to figure out how new stuff works. I’d rather be writing! You would not have believed how much I was cussing when I helped my daughters set up their new laptop, which uses Windows 8. What brilliant soul invented a FOUR STEP process just to power off?

I’m also cheap and I don’t care if other people have shinier gadgets, as long as my own gadgets meet my needs.

But I’ve made some progress recently. After over a year of successfully self-publishing e-books, I now actually own a Nook reader myself. I really do like it, especially the ease it brings to taking LOTS AND LOTS of books with me on a plane.

However, my recent trip to Florida showed me another thing I need to upgrade. My father-in-law passed away last year and my mother-in-law not only discontinued their internet service but also threw away all their maps. Since our poor old cell phones aren’t good for anything but phone calls, there was no good high or low tech way of figuring out how to get places we wanted to go on the spur of the moment. OK, maybe we do need to upgrade from what my daughters tell me are “loser phones.”

If I lived in Georgian times, would I be so averse to new technology? Perhaps my cook would resist using one of the new closed stoves, but I can’t imagine that I would resist advances in personal hygiene, like the invention of the shower. Even though it did recirculate the same water… Here’s a cool article from Jane Austen’s World on Regency showers.

Are you a technophobe or do you embrace new technology? What do you rely on now that you never dreamed of needing a decade ago? What would you miss most going back in time?

Also, in the spirit of upgrading, I have a shiny new mailing list. If you don’t always have time to get here to the Riskies but would like to know the big stuff—new releases and special deals—please sign up here.

Elena
www.elenagreene.com
www.Facebook.com/ElenaGreene

Posted in Rant, Research | 3 Replies

Reading and squiggles

Updated on April 25, 2013 by Janet Mullany

One of the unfortunate effects of e-readers is that you can no longer press a book you’ve just finished into someone’s hands and tell them they absolutely must read this but they’ll be in trouble if they don’t give it back. It also makes spying on fellow commuters’ reading a lot less interesting. So, I have two books on the go at the moment, my usual reading pattern. One is on the kindle for the commute and the other is my bedtime reading.

Now the one on the kindle is sort of weird. It’s a romantic contemporary by an English writer and it’s not quite as strange as the one by another English writer where h/h would suddenly fall into a liplock and then resume polite conversation. Many times. There’s a lot of food in this one and people politely offering tea/coffee which seems to be a characteristic of English fiction.

And, segueing effortlessly into the next topic… Charles Dickens is always writing about food too.

Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated himself to three, and so on, till in a week’s time he had got through the necklace — five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister, who was an industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried her eyes out at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I needn’t say, didn’t find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner — baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it — the child, who wasn’t hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly there was the devil of a noise, like a small hailstorm. (Pickwick Papers)

George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens comments:

As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-century comic paper. But the unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing that nobody else would have thought of, is the baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it. How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn’t. It is something totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is created.

My other reading–after that somewhat long squiggle on the edge of the page–is Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, which is terrific. I could go on and on about this book and Dickens’ strange life, but one thing that surprised me is that even his contemporaries didn’t like his portrayal of women.

They’re either dumb and pretty (begging to be killed off or humbled), saintly (sometimes the same) or straight out of a melodrama (much writhing and breast-beating, doubtless must die as Bad Girls do). Even a tough girl like Lizzie Hexham (Our Mutual Friend), whose occupation is fishing corpses and other flotsam and jetsam out of the Thames, has to be warned that she is in moral danger when she is pursued by Eugene Wrayburn. Really, Mr. Dickens? You don’t think a working-class girl (with impeccable and inexplicable good diction) wouldn’t know about the birds and the bees? Or, horrors, see a liaison with a rich bachelor as an opportunity?

So what are you reading?

And don’t forget, Carolyn’s contest is still open, affording the delightful prospect of reading about hot demons.

Posted in Reading | 6 Replies