Risky Regencies

Wednesday Report

Updated on July 28, 2010 by carolyn

I am blogging to you from Orlando Florida where all the Riskies are attending the RWA National Conference. I have already declared that IT’S TOO HOT OUTSIDE and am determined to stay inside.

Also, I am going to reimagine my journey from Oakland California to the Dolphin Resort Hotel and it will be up to you to pick out the lies from the truths, if any there are of either sort.

I ran into a charming friend from the Beau Monde at the airport and thus I was accompanied in the flying post-chaise that was to bear me to my destination. I was worried about the unseemliness of traveling alone since my maid took desperately ill the night before and passed over, leaving me quite on my own. My companion was delightful and relieved the tedium of the long journey through the skies. I had, naturally, my own correspondence to work on, I owe a lengthy missive to an associate in New York and took this opportunity to add to my opus.

We arrived in Orlando Florida only a few minutes late whereupon my companion and I discovered there were several other persons whose destination matched ours. We engaged to travel from the flying carriage hostel to the inn where we were all to stay. But can you imagine? There was no carriage or horse to be had, despite our paying for it, for nearly two hours! Tempers flared and I do confess one of our party (not I) was ready to do bodily harm. She was restrained, but barely.

Oh the tedium of waiting whilst the conveyancers dealt with the masses of people who had reserved their trip to our hotel in advance. It seems it did not occur to anyone in their employ to count the number of reservations and compare that to the number of available conveyances… I can speak of this no more as I can feel the tears of frustration arise even now. Hire a private carriage if you can.

I sat next to a charming young lady (very young!) who had just flown in from London, but her baggage was damaged and the flying-carriage employees four times misdirected her as to where she might put in a claim. They were, alas, quite rude and uncouth and I confess I heard such tales from more than one person. My charming new friend had been on this large post-chaise for an hour with no explanation for why they weren’t traveling anywhere but in circles around the hotel. She was tearfully considering returning home to London as she had by then been at the flying carriage hostel for four hours. I gave her my cell phone number and my email and told her if she had any further problems or needed help at anytime during her stay to please get in touch, as she will be here for a year.

Three hours after alighting from our flying coach, we arrived at our inn. The poor staff appeared overwhelmed as there were fifty travelers awaiting assignment to a room and but two servants to make the arrangements.

We were, all of us, tired, hungry and, well, peeved, but being ladies nearly all of us, we maintained our cheer as best we could under such circumstances.

But now I am in my rooms with my delightful companion and fellow Risky, Mrs. Megan Frampton and I have showed her my new tattoo. She was in transports! It’s quite fetching. Tomorrow, of course, I will meet the duke of Orlando and we shall see if he suits me.

Yours ever so,

Carolyn

Lies? Truths? Opine in the comments.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged RWA Nationals | 4 Replies

At Conference!

Updated on July 27, 2010 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Like many of you (and most of the Riskies!) I am off at RWA this week doing writerly, business-y things (or more likely wandering around Disneyworld in my light-up Cinderella shoes–yes, I do have a pair, don’t ask…) . Back to regularly scheduled blogs and lots of conference wrap-up info next week!

If you are at RWA, come and say hi to me at one of these places (or in the bar, where I can usually be found):
Literacy signing, Wednesday 5:30
Grand Central Publishing signing, as Laurel McKee, Saturday 3:00 (Southern Hemisphere Salon One)
NAL signing (as Amanda McCabe), also Saturday, 12:00, Salon Two
Risky breakfast meet-up, Friday at the conference continental breakfast

See you all there!

The Romance of the Road

Updated on July 26, 2010 by Diane Gaston

Oh, for the romantic days of coach travel!

Today I am on the road with my friend Julie. We’re driving to Orlando for the Romance Writers of America Annual Conference and it will take us two days. Should be fun, especially since we’ll spend our overnight at our friend, Maggie Toussaint‘s house.

But what if this were Regency England and we were traveling by carriage?

For one thing, we’d be hard-pressed to find a journey from one end of the UK to the other that would as long. Mapquest says our journey will be 852 miles; from Plymouth, England to Kirkwall, Scotland is only 798 miles.

If we were taking such a journey in Regency times, we would undoubtedly be traveling by coach, and at our middle class income levels, we would probably be passengers on a stage coach, like these.

On the other hand, Julie does drive a convertible, so maybe we’d be in a more sporting vehicle, and not public transportation at all.

Mapquest says our trip will take a total of 13 hours 19 minutes.

The trip from Plymouth to Kirkwall by coach, assuming there wouldn’t be the problem of mountain roads and bad weather, would be a great deal longer.

When figuring travel time in the Regency, I always rely on Shannon Donnelly who is such a great horse and carriage expert! Shannon says that a coach in the Regency could travel 4 to 12 miles per hour. (For my books, I usually estimate travel time by using 9 mph), but horses have to be rested or changed every 10-11 miles. A crack group of stable workers at a coaching inn could change a team in two minutes. Most would have taken longer, I’d guess.

So using the 9 mph estimate, our Regency trip of 798 miles would take 89 hours. That’s a whole lot more than Julie’s and my 14 hours.

I figure Julie and I will travel about 10 or 11 hours before we stop at Maggie’s house, then the next day we should only have to travel 4 or 5 hours. If our Regency selves also travel for 10 to 11 hours, we’ll go a distance of 99 miles in a day. That means our trip to Kirkwall would take us about 8 days.

And I’m not even discussing the differences of spending the night in inns, getting meals and…….BATHROOM BREAKS.

Are you traveling this summer? If you are coming to Orlando for RWA, how are you getting there? If you are coming to RWA, join us for breakfast on Friday. We’ll find a table at the free breakfast and try to make it easy to find us. If you are not coming to RWA, where are you traveling and how?

Julie is coordinating the Literacy Booksigning and I’ll be helping her all day Weds. If you have some time to spare, come and we’ll put you to work!

Thursday I’ll be blogging at Diane’s Blog and I hope to post some Conference photos. Next Monday Julie and I will be on the road again, but I’ll try to post some photos of friends in their Beau Monde Soiree Regency finery. Or SOME photos from Orlando! Maybe we’ll even get all the Riskies together for a photo!

Til then, Bon Voyage!!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged coaching, RWA Nationals | 7 Replies

We’re ALL Special

Updated on July 23, 2010 by megan

“Oh, I’m real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I’ll give them heroics. I’ll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone’s super–[chuckles evilly]—no one will be.” Syndrome, from The Incredibles

First off, I gotta thank Diane for posting that I had gone MIA last week. Life got a bit busy last week, and I wasn’t able to think of anything to post but sobbing, and lord knows you didn’t want to read that. So anyway. Things have settled down, and so here we go.

This week, I finished reading a really lovely book, Sarah MacLean‘s Nine Rules To Break When Romancing A Rake. I’ve also been working on my latest WIP, a paranormal that would seem to have nothing in common with a historical romance. But wait! I can find parallels in anything!

And since I was thinking about Sarah’s book after finishing it (always a good sign) and thinking about my own writing (always a solipsistic sign), I realized why I like some heroines more than others: They’re not special.

Let me explain. Unlike the books many of us cut our romance teeth on, the heroines in many of today’s romances are not immediately memorable; they’re not impossibly beautiful, or dramatically above the crowd in some aspect. Instead, they’re likely to have brown hair, be considered plain or plump (as in MacLean’s heroine) and yet, by the end of the book, the hero thinks the heroine is the most gorgeous, sexy thing ever.

And isn’t that what we all want in our real lives? Honestly, if we were all stunning, wouldn’t it be hard to walk around in the streets with people falling all over themselves to look at us? I feel bad for Angelina Jolie sometimes because of that–it must be hard to be THAT remarkable looking when all you want is a little time to think. But if there is a special someone who thinks WE’RE a special someone, that’s what true love is, right?

In my paranormal romance, for example, my heroine has absolutely no skills, beyond being smart and a relatively fast runner. That’s why she’s chosen to do what she does in the book, because she doesn’t pose a threat. And when she first meets the hero, he is intrigued by her, but can’t figure out why. By the end of the book, he still won’t have figured out why, but he’ll have fallen in love with her by that point, so it won’t matter.

I don’t want to read about people who are remarkable, who are supers, in my romance. I want to read about people like me–people who are normal, but perhaps there are a few special things about them that only the hero can recognize (the impossibly gorgeous, sexy hero. It’s not like we’re even-handed here. It IS a fantasy, after all). And by the end of the book, the reader thinks the heroine is special, too. And is pleased knowing that Specialness is within HER grasp, as well.

Which ‘plain Jane’ heroines are your favorites? Do you like reading about regular women and the stunning men who love them?

Megan

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Megan | 7 Replies

Visit to England, Part 2

Updated on July 22, 2010 by Janet Mullany

Last week I gave a quick overview of my visit to England and today I wanted to talk a little more about the visit to Chawton, where Jane Austen made her home for nine years, polished and wrote her novels, and hung out with vampires (next book!). Naturally I haven’t finished unpacking yet and some of the stuff will get tossed into the bigger suitcase for Nationals, for which I really didn’t buy any more clothes. Sorry. I leave all that to Amanda.

Before visiting Chawton, we went to St. Nicholas Church in Steventon, which is where Jane Austen’s father was vicar, a living taken over by one of Jane’s brothers. The house where they lived no longer exists, but the church still stands, a tiny, charming building.

Austen enthusiasts from all over the world have visited and contributed money to restore the church.

Outside the church door is a venerable yew tree nine centuries old, where once the church key was hidden.

From there we went to Chawton, a place I hadn’t visited in about fifteen years so I was thrilled to see the changes there. The working areas of the house have been restored–the seventeenth century house was once a farm, so it has substantial outbuildings as well as a lovely garden.

Here’s Jane’s donkey cart, used on shopping expeditions (they kept two donkeys) and the copper (for washing clothes) and bread oven.

The kitchen has been fitted out with a range which is early Victorian but not period, and to the left of it is a Rumsford stove, probably original. The bricks above the fire had holes into which pots could be lowered or placed above. (If you’re going to attend my presentation on servants at the Beau Monde Conference next week you’ll see these pictures again!)

I was struck by how tiny and crooked the rooms in the house were–probably less crooked two centuries ago! Very little family furniture remains, although there is a desk and two chairs in the parlor which came from Steventon. And of course the most famous writing table in the world is there too.

It had been very hot the previous week and the weather had only just broken, so the garden possibly isn’t as lush and green as it should have been, but I thought it was gorgeous.

And here’s the last picture, the new cover for Jane and the Damned. When they told me it was going to be pink, I wasn’t very happy. I’m not a pink sort of girl and Jane Austen, as I depict her, wasn’t either. But I love it! Grubby pink works so well. What do you think?