Risky Regencies

Debut Author Stefanie Sloane and The Devil in Disguise

Updated on May 22, 2011 by Diane Gaston

As you know, The Riskies all love a debut author. Today we welcome debut author Stefanie Sloane whose first book, The Devil in Disguise, will be released May 24.

The Devil in Disguise has received some pretty impressive endorsements:

“Captivating… Stefanie Sloane will charm her way into readers’ hearts.” –Susan Wiggs

“Smart, sensuous, and sparkling with wit…. Spectacular.” –Julia Quinn

Stefanie will give away one signed copy of The Devil in Disguise to one lucky commenter chosen at random. Without further ado, let’s welcome Stefanie to Risky Regencies.

Stefanie, tell us about The Devil in Disguise.

Lord William Randall is a rake—a most unlikely suitor for the beautiful and fiercely intelligent Lady Lucinda Grey. But his latest assignment for the Young Corinthians, an elite spy organization, involves protecting her from a kidnapping plot. To do this, William uses his devilish charm to seduce Lucinda, never imagining he will lose his own heart in the bargain. And though Lucinda has gracefully sidestepped even the most persistent suitors, she is tempted by William’s sinfully sensuous mouth and piercing eyes. Can she resist him when his touch begs her to let him so much closer?

How did you think of writing this particular book? Did it start with a character, a setting, or some other element?

The Devil in Disguise started with a character. I was at the gym, sweating away on the elliptical, when a dark, handsome stranger appeared in my mind’s eye. But he wasn’t just any handsome stranger. There was something decidedly dangerous about this man. I let my mind wander about his back story, and William Randall, the Duke of Clairemont, was born. A few more grueling rounds at the gym and I had Lady Lucinda Grey, my heroine, her unforgettable aunts, the Furies, and the over-arching premise of the Young Corinthians.
And then I had to, you know, actually write the book, which it turns out is way more tricky than anything I’ve ever endured at the gym.

Did you come across anything interesting in your research for The Devil in Disguise?

Oh, most definitely! I love the research part of writing—a little too much, actually, as I’ve been known to spend hours pouring over books and websites in search of the perfect touch for a scene. One of the most interesting aspects about the research for my debut was the fact that SO many interesting individuals turned out to be spies during the time period. From poets and professors to important politicians, clergymen, actors, and more were involved in espionage.

What do you think is the greatest creative risk you took while writing this book?

Honestly? Actually sitting down and finishing the book was the biggest risk for me. Before The Devil in Disguise, I’d poured my heart and soul into writing a contemporary chick lit manuscript. I signed with a top agent and thought that my career was going to really take off, the future looking as limitless as a summer sky. And then every last publisher passed on the book. I was devastated. It took a long time for me to think about writing again, and when I finally did sit down to start the Young Corinthians series, I was scared. Actually, terrified. Writing is unbelievably hard work on every level, and I just didn’t think that I could put myself through the process once again knowing that there would be no guarantees when I reached “The End.”

But, the only thing worse than the fear of a second rejection would have been the regret I felt over letting myself get in the way of, well, myself. So I finished the book, and the rest, as they say, is history.

What’s next for you?

The second book in the Regency Rogues series, The Angel in My Arms, will be published June 28, 2011, and The Sinner Who Seduced Me, the third installment, will hit the shelves July 26, 2011.

And I recently turned in the fourth book, tentatively titled, The Saint Who Stole My Heart, to my editor. Fingers crossed that she loves it!

Now, please say hello and you’ll automatically be entered to win a signed copy of my debut book, The Devil in Disguise!

Thanks so much for being our guest, Stefanie. I’m sure our readers will have questions and comments. They always do!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged debut author, Stefanie Sloane, The Devil in Disguise | 44 Replies

The Life of a Regency Courtesan, Part I

Updated on May 21, 2011 by Elena Greene

I just finished HARRIETTE WILSON’S MEMOIRS. Though I don’t trust her on details of dates, persons or places, I find her memoirs highly satisfying Regency research, for at least two reasons. One is her use of language, which feels so conversational. The second is what they reveal about the lives of Regency courtesans: Harriette herself, her three sisters and her friend/rival Julia Johnstone.

Courtesan heroines used to be somewhat taboo in romance, but now I think they are becoming a trope rather like dukes (i.e. shorthand for glamorous and sexy). Actually, one of my favorite courtesan stories is GAMES OF PLEASURE by Julia Ross, in which the hero is the heir to a dukedom. But I digress!

I don’t have a courtesan story on the backburner, but I never say never. If I ever write a courtesan story, just as with dukes, I would write with an awareness of the reality as well as the fantasy. There’s some of both in Harriette’s memoirs.

One aspect I find interesting is the motivation for taking up such a life. Recent biographers of courtesans suggest a desire for independence, and this is borne out by Harriette’s account.

“I am afraid my conscience has been a very easy one; but, certainly, I have followed its dictates. There was a want of heart and delicacy, I always thought, in leaving any man, without full and sufficient reasons for it. At the same time, my dear mother’s marriage had proved to me so forcibly, the miseries of two people of contrary opinions and character, torturing each other to the end of their natural lives, that, before I was ten years old, I decided, in my own mind, to live as free as air from any restraint but that of my conscience.”

However, I don’t doubt the motivations to become a courtesan were complicated and as varied as individuals. None that I’ve read about had the connections or fortune to be likely to make a good marriage (although a few did eventually). Some were “ruined” when very young. So becoming a courtesan may have been an attractive alternative to the otherwise limited opportunities women had for interesting and gainful employment. Perhaps for some it was a way to gain some power.

I get the impression from the memoirs that neither Harriette nor her fellow courtesans thought of themselves as high-end prostitutes and showed much the same disgust for them that one would expect of a respectable woman. She tells a story of going to the play with a friend and then mistakenly leaving through the wrong room: “Oh, dear me! Good gracious, Mrs. Prude, we are in the lobby, with all the very worst women!” When she goes to Melton (having been previously told it was not the thing to join the men there during hunting season) she is shocked at the “wretched, squalid prostitutes”.

I think there’s more here than the contempt of the elite for the less glamorous practitioner. In the career of a courtesan, for instance, companionship and lively conversation were important as well as sex. There are many places in the memoirs where the courtesans and their pretenders live a sort of mock-marriage. Love, or at least the semblance of love, seemed often to be important to one or both parties.

Here’s an exchange in which Harriette urges Julia Johnstone to take up with Napier:

“Napier is your man. Since you could be unchaste to gratify your own passions, I am sure it cannot be wrong to secure the comfort and protection of six beautiful children.”

“But Napier’s vanity makes me sick,” retorted Julia, impatiently. “The possession of my person would not satisfy him. He wants me to declare and prove that I love him; and the thing is physically impossible.”

Here’s a bit about her sister Sophia and a prospective lover:

Sophia continued to hint, with proper delicacy and due modest blushes, that her living with him or not, must depend on what his intentions were: in other words, she gently intimated that, as yet, she was ignorant what settlement he meant to make on her. The gay handsome Colonel Berkeley’s vanity being now deeply wounded, he in his sudden rage, entirely lost sight of what was due to the soft sex, at least to that part of it which had been so hard upon him. “Do you fancy me so humble and so void of taste, as to buy with money the reluctant embraces of any woman breathing?”

Harriette writes of Lord Ponsonby and “…how he, one day, one night I mean, called me his angelic Harriette! and further declared that, had he known me sooner, he would never have married any other woman?” In other places, he calls her his “angel-wife.”

I’ll talk more about Harriette in a later post, but for now, do you enjoy courtesan stories? What do you find most interesting about the life of a courtesan?

Elena

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged courtesans, Harriette Wilson | 11 Replies

Best Way To Go?

Updated on May 20, 2011 by megan

Okay, so accept, for a brief moment of premise-accepting, that the world (as we know it) is ending tomorrow.

What would you do today?

I would:

–call my friends and tell them I love them. Thankfully, that is a lot of phone calls (I would get phone ear, but that’s a small price to pay).

–chill the super-pricy champagne we’ve had in our wine rack forever; drink it, at some point, before Saturday at 6:00pm.

–wear one of my loudest, longest maxi-dresses all day. Put glitter on my eyelids AND my skin.

–watch my favorite films: Pride and Prejudice, House of Flying Daggers, North and South.

–hug my husband and son for hours until I squoze them to pieces.

–take a guilt-free nap.

–burn my TBR pile, maybe, so I didn’t have to regret not reading anything. Maybe not. That seems like a waste of a lot of good books.

–read the ends of books so I could know what happened.

–eat nuts and cheese ALL DAY!

What would you do?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Megan | 10 Replies

Dark Day anniversary

Updated on May 19, 2011 by Janet Mullany

‘Twas on a May-day of the far old year
Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell
Over the bloom and sweet life of the Spring
Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,
A horror of great darkness, like the night
In day of which the Norland sagas tell,
The Twilight of the Gods. The low-hung sky
Was black with ominous clouds, save where its rim
Was fringed with a dull glow, like that which climbs
The crater’s sides from the red hell below.
Birds ceased to sing, and all the barnyard fowls
Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars
Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings
Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died;

Read the whole of John Whittier Greenleaf’s poem here.

The “far old year” of the poem was 1780, and May 19 the day on which darkness descended upon a huge swath of New England from Portland, Maine south, with duskiness extending as far as New York. Philadelphia was not affected. Some thought it was the end of the world; some were amazed at the way the light changed colors, silver appearing as brass, green grass taking on a new richness.

The day was ordinary enough at first, although people remembered that in the few days before the sun had assumed a strange, rusty color in a yellow sky. And then in mid morning darkness fell, with all the phenomena that Whittier described (although he was born after the event almost certainly he knew those who had experienced it first hand). It lasted over 36 hours.

In some places, the darkness was so great, that persons could not see to read common print in the open air…. The extent of this darkness was very remarkable.

The darkness of the following evening was probably as gross as ever has been observed since the Almighty fiat gave birth to light…. A sheet of white paper held within a few inches of the eyes was equally invisible with the blackest velvet.

By 12, I could not read anywhere in the house — we were forced to dine by candle light. It was awful and surprising.

So what did cause the Dark Day of New England? Tree ring analysis from Algonquin Provincial Park in eastern Ontario has revealed that it was smoke from massive forest fires.

I love this sort of phenomena even if I’d never dare invent something similar and include it in a book. That’s not to say I’d want to experience 36 hours of darkness, but if it did happen (and you weren’t busy praying or drinking like New Englanders in 1780) and you had only candlelight, how would you spend the time?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Dark Day | 5 Replies

Secret Facts

Updated on May 18, 2011 by carolyn

The Shameless Self-Promotion Portion of This Post

I have put out another of my backlist titles. Stolen Love is my second book, published by Harper-Collins in 1991. It’s not quite old-skool but almost. I’m not the same writer as I was in 1991 but I’ve put the book out pretty much exactly as it was published — because today I would write a totally different book and any editing would inevitably be a total re-write and then STILL no one would be able to read the original unless they got their hands on a paper copy.

I made one change because I realized later my editor was right, my hero would call his valet by his last name only. So I removed all the Mr.’s for that character. That’s it.

Nicholas Villines is the heir assumptive to a viscount. His father left him in dire straits, but he’s managed to recover the family fortunes and re-enter society. His childhood friend Elizabeth is now in London, hoping to make a modest marriage, as she is a woman of very modest means. Not so her beautiful (and rich) cousin Amelia. Every agrees that Nicolas and Amelia would be a perfect match. As Elizabeth and Nicholas rekindle their friendship, society can talk of little but The Mayfair Thief, a mysterious and cunning person who has made off with a fortune in jewels and other valuable items. Just who is this mysterious thief, and has Elizabeth really guessed his identity?

Nicholas agrees that Amelia would be the perfect wife for him, but he can’t stop thinking about Elizabeth and the beautiful woman she’s become. Will he accept his feelings for her before it’s too late or will she marry his best friend?

Secrets Revealed

Stolen Love was written before the World Wide Web and when the Internet was mostly accessed via text based commands (gopher, anyone?). In those days, authors couldn’t do anything like the promotion we can do today.

I wasn’t able to tell anyone things like this:

The hero, Nicholas, was named after my sister’s dog.
The hero’s last name (Villines) came from an article I read about a General Contractor who had an embezzling employee.
I lived in Berkeley at the time, in an apartment that, unbeknownst to me, had absolutely ideal conditions for growing orchids. I had several Phalenopsis and a Cattleya that bloomed six months of the year. I believed I was an orchid genius and made my hero one, too. Because, like, what’s so hard about growing orchids? Then I moved to San Francisco and my orchids died or never bloomed again.
I set the book in 1844 because I thought the fashions then were killer. I HATED Regency gowns. The cover was pure Regency. There was no cover consult.
When on submission, the book was pitched as hardcover and even I, pretty much a total newbie, knew that book wouldn’t sell hardcover and I was brave enough to tell my agent that. It sold to a St. Martin’s Press editor who promptly left to go to Harper-Collins, which was starting a NY based Romance line that, eventually, morphed into Avon. She took my MS with her.
I didn’t know I was a pantser. I just wrote the dang story by reading what came before and seeing an interesting theme and going with it. (Oh hey! In this chapter, the hero’s best friend is in love with Elizabeth! Let’s go with that. . . )
My printer was a near top-of-the-line daisy-wheel printer and it took 9 hours to print out the entire MS.
At one time, I laid out all the chapters in piles on the floor and rearranged them. I used scissors and tape to move scenes
I did all my research in the UC Berkeley libraries or at any number of extremely fine used book stores in the area. During that period I acquired some great reference books.
I learned that about this time (1844-ish) there was an orchid craze. The Amazon and other fragile habitats were scoured for orchids to the point of destruction and/or extinction of the flowers. They believed all orchids required the same hot-house conditions — which was untrue as we now know –so there were some orchid species that never bloomed in captivity. Orchid collections were valuable and stealing of collections and plants was a threat.
In 1991, there was no such thing as email for regular people, but I had a fancy answering-machine. With a tape.
I was worried the sex came too late in the book so I tried to sex it up in other ways.

If you want to read a sample or just buy the book:

ISBN: 978-0-9833826-4-5

A Racy Offer

If you happen to read Stolen Love (or any of my backlist titles) and post an honest review on Amazon or B&N, I will send you the eBook of two erotic short stories I wrote. I have a pretty cover for it. One story is historical, the other contemporary and both, technically, involve demons. You have to be over 18 and not easily offended.

Just post your review (You are not required to have liked the book) and send me the URL to it and let me know what format you’d like. I will then send you the stories in just about any digital format.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged backlist, blatant self promotion, Free stories, Old Skool Romance, orchids | 8 Replies