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on the subject of covers…

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here’s my cover! It’s really, really pretty, but… they’re too young, too scrubbed-looking, and almost certainly too well-behaved. I asked for Harrison Ford with a bigger nose and Juliet Binoche. Personally I think it’s a mistake having people on covers, period, particularly on romances and particularly particularly on historicals where they get the costumes all wrong. (A red neckcloth???!)

If I could have the same art, but without the people, and with a stocking and a book lying on the sofa, that would have been fab. The worrisome thing about this cover is that it doesn’t deliver. It looks like a really sweet regency and it isn’t.

Janet

Another risk-taker here

7 Comments

Hi! I’m just back from Maine (authors of risky Regencies need relaxing vacations). So what do I think is a risky Regency? To me, it’s a story that has some element that may seriously upset some readers.

Before I started writing Regencies myself, I didn’t realize that there were some readers with rigid expectations of the genre. I’d read books ranging from Georgette Heyer (and endless imitations) to unusual stories like Karen Harbaugh’s VAMPIRE VISCOUNT, Gail Eastwood’s THE CAPTAIN’S DILEMMA (hero is a French POW), Mary Jo Putney’s THE RAKE AND THE REFORMER (an alcoholic hero, a non-virgin heroine) and didn’t see a problem with any of this glorious variety.

When my own books started coming out, I was startled by some of the comments on Amazon, both rants and raves. I never intended to upset anyone, but a couple of things did set some readers off:

1) Sex. One reader even insisted that “Regency women didn’t do that”. Um, have sex with their husbands? Where did the Victorians come from, then? But I understood her point: she just didn’t want to know about it.

2) Heroines who are desperately seeking something, even if they don’t know what it is, and make mistakes or misbehave in pursuit of that something.

My next book, LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, has both those risky elements and more. Ah well… I’m braced for mixed responses. At least I don’t think I will bore anyone!

BTW I can’t wait to read Cara’s book; Atalanta sounds like my kind of heroine. If heroes can be rakish and tortured, why can’t the heroines cause some trouble, too?

When I think of risky Regencies….

7 Comments
Hello! This is Laurie Bishop. Great cover, Cara!
I’ve been reading everyone else’s comments and trying to decide how I would qualify what makes a Regency risky. I find it isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. But since I have to come up with something 😉 , to me a risky Regency is one in which the heroine, and/or the hero, do something extraordinary for their sex/time/station—or must act in an unexpected way to address their dilemma. Also, in addition to this, they must do or be in this way without violating the attitudes of the time.Hence the trickiness.Let us say that I want my heroine to be courageous and able to take command to save the family estate. She might come to the traumatic conclusion that she must ruin herself by becoming the mistress of Snidely Whiplash; and she can acknowledge this by having all of the appropriate thoughts and feelings about what she feels forced to do. But…she will not use language that a gently reared young lady does not use, and she will otherwise behave with all the decorum within her power that she has been raised to use. And she will not know something that a gently reared young lady does not know.

Of course, if she is not a gently reared young lady, we have a different bucket of peas. She will have the perspective of a farmer’s daughter, a soldier’s daughter, or what have you. And that can be quite different. Even middle class daughters were different than the daughters of the highest peers. In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the Bennett daughters walked to town alone. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s daughter would never been allowed to do such a thing.

In my first Regency, THE BEST LAID PLANS, the heroine was a very independent-thinking American heiress who was not raised in high English society. She was therefore allowed to be a little outrageous—and was a ball to write!

Laurie

WHEN HORSES FLY Oct. 2005
LORD RYBURN’S APPRENTICE Jan. 2006

Cara’s Cover!

17 Comments

Here’s my cover! Hmm…does anyone want to talk about covers? Good covers? Bad covers? How you can have a cover that all your author friends tell you is really good, and you should be really grateful, but somehow you still whine about it? (Aw, come on, don’t say I’m the only one!) 🙂

Cara
Cara King, www.caraking.com
MY LADY GAMESTER — Signet Regency, 11/05

What are your favorite Regencies?

8 Comments

So — what are some of your favorite Regencies? I’m not asking for a definitive list, just list any that occur to you. Are they particularly risky ones, or classic Regencies, or does it vary?

I love many many Regencies, but included on my favorites list would be:

— “Sweet and Twenty” by Joan Smith. I suppose it’s risky in a way, in that there’s a lot of politics involved, and perhaps less romance than in a “classic” Regency. But for an older Regency, I wouldn’t exactly call it unusual (except that I like it so much!)

— “Poetic Justice” by Alicia Rasley. Again, this isn’t a book with just a romance plot — there are a lot of other things going on. But again, I’m not sure it screams “different!” (And if it did, wouldn’t that be odd? My other books would be so annoyed when they were trying to sleep.)

— “An Ideal Bride” by Nonnie St. George. Stylistically this is somewhat risky, I think — it’s delightfully weird in some ways, almost farcical at times, and occasionally just a tiny bit surreal. I think she made a big splash with this book partly because it was a bit unusual — but it’s so very funny (and sexy too) that that alone could have made the book so popular!

Well, there are three from me. How about you?

Cara
—
Cara King, www.caraking.com
MY LADY GAMESTER — Signet Regency, 11/05

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