You enter your library to find your mistress in flagrante with the butler. You…
a. Fire the butler and the mistress
b. Kill the butler
c. Ask the butler if he’ll dust the bookshelves when he’s finished
d. Shrug and invade another European country

You are discovered in flagrante with the season’s leading debutante. You…
a. Propose marriage to her
b. Offer to set her up as your mistress (you are tiring of her predecessor who will not shut up about the butler)
c. Offer to pay for the damage to the carpet
d. Shrug and pass her on to a lackey

Your preferred mount is…
a. A fiery mare only you can handle
b. A fiery stallion only you can handle
c. A friendly cob who goes to sleep when he stands still
d. Anything so long as it’s at the head of a victorious army

You find yourself snowed in at a remote country inn. To pass the time, you…
a. Flirt with the fascinating female guest who is traveling alone
b. Seduce all of the chambermaids and female guests, mainly serially
c. Settle down with a good book
d. Get out the maps and plan the next campaign

You hire a plain, respectable governess to educate your child. You…
a. Fall in love with her but respect her too much to seduce her
b. Seduce her and toss her out (the slut)
c. Discuss lesson plans with her
d. Kill her. She’s probably a spy

Your hobbies include…
a. Horse racing, gambling, drinking, womanizing
b. All of the above, but to excess
c. Collecting and cataloguing the botanical specimens on your estate
d. Conquering the known world

If your answers were mostly
a–Sorry, you’re far too typical a hero to attract a truly outstanding woman. You really need to re-think your lifestyle.
b—A hopeless rake. Women will swoon at your feet, fall into your bed, and generally harass you.
c—A lovable nerd. Sadly, you’ll never be more than a supporting character. Women, however, will find you strangely attractive, particularly after the rake has ruined and abandoned them.
d—You’re Napoleon and you can do whatever you want to.

The first week of National Novel Writing Month is over. So far I’m having a blast. Somehow (it still feels like a miracle) I have managed to silence the internal editor that’s been shouting more loudly at me with each book and I’m having so much fun with this story it ought to be illegal. Possibly it is in some states!

You can see my progress at my NaNoWriMo profile page. I’m up to 12,000 words already and amazingly enough, they’re better than my usual rough draft.

I think the reason it’s working so well is that it’s just a month and it’s November, a month when holidays often interfere with serious writing. My inner critic will usually tell me I shouldn’t waste time noodling around with story ideas that might not work. But somehow limiting the noodling to a normally unproductive month makes it a low risk proposition. Low pressure=high productivity. Duh!

BTW the cartoon is by Debbie Ridpath Ohi at www.inkygirl.com. She’s got quite a few that speak to the craziness of writers!

Now I’d like to share a poem my daughter wrote at school. The assignment was to use some number of their weekly spelling words, which included the terms they are using to describe story development. Here ’tis:

MY MOTHER’S WRITING

Lots of drafting and revising,
As for editing, the computer does that.
I wonder whether she has a planning page?
For publishing, go to the publisher,
Afterwards…
What do you do with the book?
Put it in a contest!

Where judges are admiring your book,
or giving it a dirty look.
Sometimes “I won” is right.
Sometimes “I lost” is right.
It can still be good, you hear?
One book wins.
Could it be yours?
If not maybe not here,
Because judges have different likes and dislikes.

I thought this was cute and sure wish the computer did my editing!

Elena
LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, RT Reviewers’ Choice, Best Regency Romance of 2005
www.elenagreene.com

Last year I read Discipline by Mary Brunton (1778-1818). Mary was a Scottish novelist, a contemporary of Jane Austen, whose life, like Austen’s, was cut short by her early death–in childbirth for Brunton. She left us just 3 books, one Emmeline, unfinished.

Self Control, her first published novel was popular and mentioned in Austen’s letters, albeit with less than admiration.

I read Discipline because someone somewhere said that it had a good description of a Regency era ball. It did. The London part of the story was very interesting. The characters had a great deal more freedom than we ever give our heroines. The book’s plot wandered, but there was a lot going on in it. It tells the story of a wealthy but impetuous young woman whose folly and happenstance cause her to descend into poverty and despair, until she reforms her ways and vows to live a disciplined and moral life.

In some ways the book is difficult to slog through. In today’s fiction-world it would be in for some extreme tightening, but Brunton’s voice is an authentic voice of the past, and, to me, it felt like a peek into the real Regency world. One of the things I liked was that Brunton’s characters misbehaved in a grand way. She did not treat their scandals with the delicacy that Jane Austen achieved, but plopped the scandals on the page, front and center. I can just see a Regency teenage girl sneaking her mother’s copy of Discipline and relishing it, like we relished those first romance novels pilfered from our own mothers’ bookshelves.

Here is a very nice piece about Mary Brunton. http://www.chawton.org/biography.php?AuthorID=49

And here is a link to what Jane Austen said of Brunton’s Self Control, complete with links to the complete text of Discipline, Self-Control and Emmeline, her unfinished manuscript.
http://labrocca.com/marybrunton/

Has anyone read Mary Brunton?
What other novels popular in our Regency time period do you recommend, besides Austen, that is?
What romance novel did you sneak from your mother’s bookshelf?

Cheers!

Well, after a great Halloween where I got to run around dressed as a pirate and eat far too many miniature Kit Kat bars (extra hours on the treadmill now, ugh!), I thought it’s time to Get Serious. I’ve been reading a great book called The Things that Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life by Edward Mendelson (a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia). It’s not a super-long book, only about 240 pages, but full of fascinating ideas.

For the record, the 7 books are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and three by Virginia Woolfe–Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Between the Acts. I’m not going to go over all of them–that would make this post waaaay too long! I just want to touch on a few points he makes about Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre that I found interesting, and also think apply well to our modern romance genre.

I love both these books, in totally different ways. As Mendelson points out, Emily and Charlotte Bronte grew up in the same family, the same environment, had almost identical educations, and yet “everything that Wuthering Heights says about childhood, growth, and adulthood is contradicted by Jane Eyre.” I read these books first when I was very young (about 9 or 10), and even I could discern something of this difference. I adored Jane Eye, and when I got to the end I just started it all over again! I didn’t love or understand Wuthering Heights–I was too young for it then. It was only later, when I re-read it and could see the complex narrative structure and the layers of the even more complex characterization, that I understood what a masterpiece it was. I still prefer Jane Eyre in some ways, but Wuthering Heights is also a favorite.

Emily Bronte was one of the great visionaries of the Romantic era (and a deeply, fascinatingly weird person!). She followed her own inner belief system built on nature and unity that is so very strong in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff and Catherine are passionately in love, but it’s not the passion of mere sexual desire–in fact, they show no interest in the other’s sex lives at all. What they seek is Unity, to literally BE each other. Mendelson states that Wuthering Heights is about that Unity; Jane Eye is about Equality. Mendelson writes, “Equality, in contrast (to unity), is a difficult but plausible goal, with profound emotional and ethical meaning in both the private world and the public one.”

I think most of our modern romance novels share this goal and theme of Equality. The hero and heroine face challenges (much as Jane and Rochester did) that in the end put them on an equal footing as they begin their married lives, even if he’s the duke and she’s the vicar’s bluestocking daughter. Perhaps only in some paranormals is there more of that Wuthering Heights-ish theme of Unity. of true soulmates. It’s a fascinating idea.

My question (or questions) to you are: Which do you prefer–Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights? Do you agree with theses concepts of Unity vs. Equality? Can you think of any romances where these would apply (I’d love to hear more about this!)? Now, I’m off to re-read some Bronte…

Okay, this is ridiculous. I came over here today and wondered if today’s post-er had put her post up. I always like reading what my fellow Riskies have to say, even if I forget to comment (note to self: Stop being so damn reticent).

And then I remembered TODAY’S POST-ER IS ME!

Oy.

I’ve had some personal drama lately, having to do with a friend, thank goodness, not me, so I’ve forgotten what day it is. I am waiting for my agent to send me notes on my Regency-set historical, but I’ve also been dreading seeing the email in my inbox, because that’ll mean I have to knuckle down and do the revisions. Ack. We had Halloween, and my mother-in-law was in town, which means I have a cleaner house, but a more stressed brain, and it’s gotten colder, then warmer, then colder–honestly, I’m surprised I actually remembered Friday was my day.

So let’s turn the tables and have YOU guys supply the meat of the post, if you don’t mind:

What are you reading now?
What’s the last book you decided not to finish (if you don’t want to name names, that’s fine.)
What periods other than the Regency do you indulge in?
Which author have you glommed recently?
Have you started thinking about Christmas yet, or are you just surprised it’s November already?
Will you take your son to see Flushed Away just because Hugh Jackman does the voice?

Thanks, and meanwhile, I’ll WAIT here for your answers. Happy Friday!

Megan
www.meganframpton.com