This weekend we went to the Vintage Grand Prix at Watkins Glen. Besides racecars droning by on the curvy track, there was a cool vintage car show with all sorts of models from different countries. We even brought our own cool British car and did 3 parade laps of the track. Nothing fell off, so it was a great day!

“Mini Mouse” joined our family a few years (and too many repair bills) ago. My husband wanted a Mini ever since our 3 year assignment in England, and finally found this one. She’s a vintage, c.1982 or so, Mini, not a Cooper, but a model called the Mayfair. What could be more perfect? She’s great fun, so noisy and rattly that when you’re going 30mph it feels like 60.

The Watkins Glen event marks the end of car show season. I’m more of a horse person, but I’ve come to really enjoy these events. Seeing all those gorgeous cars from different time periods is fun. The “horseless carriage” pictured here dates from 1904. Doesn’t it look just like a phaeton (not the high-perch kind, of course) sans ponies?

My own fantasy car, should I ever start pulling in those 6-digit advances, would be a vintage Jaguar in British Racing Green, of course. Couldn’t you just see me arriving for a booksigning in one of these, hair in a chic scarf? Ok, maybe not but I can imagine.

I still like horses best and would love to own one someday. Here’s me on my friend Davina’s horse, Jack, now sadly deceased though I immortalized him as my hero’s horse in LORD LANGDON’S KISS. At over 17 hands high, he was half Thoroughbred, half Irish Draft, all good nature. The epitome of the equine gentleman, he could jump higher obstacles than I would dare put him at and never shied at pheasants darting from the hedgerows. His only quirk was that he detested pigs. It was quite difficult to get him to go past them!

So how would you satisfy your Need for Speed, Regency style? Would you ride a well-bred steed, wearing a flowing habit and plumed hat in the latest mode? Would you ride alongside your beaux in a dashing curricle, or would you take the ribbons yourself?

Back to modern times, do you own or dream about a fantasy vehicle? What is it that excites you about it?

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

In two weeks, on Tuesday September 26, I’ll be holding a contest here, at the Risky Regencies blog. To learn about the great prizes, including a biography of the Prince Regent, and an eighty-page, lavishly illustrated Pride & Prejudice “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION” Book, and for the rules, see last Tuesday’s post.

To enter, simply read my book — MY LADY GAMESTER, by Cara King — and then enter a comment about it on my September 26 post here. Your comment will need to show you’ve read the book, and have at least a little bit of content. (It doesn’t have to be clever or flattering or anything else, it just has to make a little bit of sense.) You can respond to something someone else has said, or start a debate, or just say what you think. (The book is available through Amazon and similar outlets.)

And remember — if this contest goes well, we may have more such in the future. So win now, win later — it’s all good!

In other news — I just returned from a quick trip to England — six plays in four days. I saw Shakespeare’s King John on Thursday, Troilus & Cressida on Friday, and his three Henry VI plays all on Saturday. It was amazing, it was exhausting, it was invigorating. It made me want to be a better writer. It made me wonder why people don’t do King John more often — and why Shakespeare ever thought it was a good idea to write Troilus and Cressida.

And now I have seen performed every one of Shakespeare’s plays — if you go by the list in my college Shakespeare book. (It didn’t include things like Edward III, which some more recent editions of Shakespeare are including.) This was one of my life goals. I have actually achieved one of my life goals! (Come to think of it, I’ve also achieved the goal of never reading Clarissa. So there’s two!)

By the way, here’s a picture of Dorothy Jordan dressed as a “boy” (a very curvy boy!) in As You Like It.

The question of the day: which is your favorite Shakespeare play? Your least favorite? Or was there one production you saw that you thought was really exceptional, or one you thought was really lacking?

All opinions welcome!

Cara
Cara King — author of MY LADY GAMESTER
Booksellers’ Best Award for Best Regency of 2005

It is difficult to think of a topic related to the Regency period or about writing Regency on this day, Sept 11, the fifth anniversary of the horrific event known by its date, the three numbers we punch into our phones in the event of an emergency. 9/11

I was at work that day, a social worker for the county that includes the Pentagon. A co-worker brought in a radio for the first time that day and was just testing it when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. That was how we heard. We canceled our clients and otherwise remained helpless, watching out the windows at the smoke rising from the Pentagon or listening to the radio. Thanks to cell phones, I was never out of touch with my loved ones. It took my husband, who worked in Washington DC, hours to get home. Had it not been for the heroes of Flight 93, he might never have come home again. My co-workers and I were asked to stay at work while all day people and cars streamed past our building getting out of the city. Our county’s police, fire, and medical workers were busy responding to the emergency. When I finally left, it was 4 pm and by then the streets were eerily deserted.

I won’t be watching the TV coverage or the controversial ABC docudrama. Have no plans to see the 9/11 movies. I’m just not ready. Last year when the emergency dispatcher tapes were released, I burst into tears hearing them. Last week I heard an actress who happened to be in NYC that day, tell about stepping out into the street and seeing the ash-covered survivors walking toward her. She saw a business man weeping being held by a homeless man who comforted him. I burst into tears and have tears streaming down my face now in the retelling. I don’t know why that image gets to me. I suppose because it symbolizes both the grief and the glory.

I visited the World Trade Center site this summer, as I did the summer of 2001. This time instead of a raw gash in the earth-a horrible scar- there was rebuilding. Rebirth. Hope. I didn’t cry.

What event in the Regency could be most similar to this?

Waterloo? Encarta says: “French casualties totaled about 40,000, British and Dutch about 15,000, and Prussian about 7000; at one point about 45,000 men lay dead or wounded.” That’s pretty horrific. On the other hand, the people knew the battle ended the killing.

Maybe the French Revolution, even though it was before the Regency and was a protracted event, not a single, terrible day. According to Wikipedia, 1200 people met their death on the guillotine or otherwise in the Reign of Terror, less than half our losses on 9/11. Many of the aristocrats in England knew these French contemporaries, some were even related to them. The English must have been terrified their own masses would rise up and kill them all. They certainly took repressive steps to nip any revolutionary sentiment right in the bud. No wonder the English feared a French invasion and made Nelson a hero for averting it, and later Wellington for ending it. In Regency times, Napoleon was the “Boneyman,” aka “bogeyman”, still scaring children today.

I wonder how history will paint 9/11 in 200 years?
I’d like to think somebody like me will still be brought to tears.

Like the example of that homeless man, my cyberhugs to all of you.
Diane

Maureen, who has won a copy of The Slightest Provocation by Pam Rosenthal, for participating in our interview/contest. Maureen, please email elailah@yahoo.com and send us (actually you’re sending Janet’s cat) your snailmail address.

Thanks to everyone who responded and thanks, Pam, for being so chatty!

Check out the Risky’s current contest, an interview with Candice Hern.

The Riskies are delighted to welcome Candice Hern as our guest!

Candice has been a voracious reader all her life. For many years she had been a devotee of Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, and other women writers of the Regency period. When she discovered Georgette Heyer and the Regency Romance genre (not so very long ago — it is not clear how she remained ignorant of the Great Georgette for most of her life) she was instantly hooked. After a few years of reading Regency Romances by the bagful, she decided to try her hand at writing one.

Her first book, A PROPER COMPANION, was published in January 1995. She went on to publish five more traditional short Regency Romances, and now writes longer Regency-set historical romances. Candice’s books have won the Holt Medallion, Golden Quill, Write Touch Readers Award, Booksellers’ Best Award and Colorado Romance Writers’ Award of Excellence, and have made it into the Top Five Romances of the Year by Library Journal and Top Ten Favorite Books by Romance Writers of America.

Learn more about Candice at www.candicehern.com.

Enter a comment or question for Candice by Sunday, September 17 for a chance to win an autographed copy of IN THE THRILL OF THE NIGHT (winner to be chosen by the Riskies).

Praise for JUST ONE OF THOSE FLINGS

Effervescent, unconventional, and brimming with honest sensuality, Hern’s second installment in her clever, well-conceived Merry Widows series about five wealthy widows bent on avoiding marriage but experimenting with affairs is a lively, thoroughly delightful tale that is sure to please. – Library Journal

It might be just one of those flings, just one of those crazy things, but it’s a rare reading experience in Hern’s capable hands. She brings the Regency to life with her endearing characters whose steamy passion (and May-December romance) only serve to heighten the powerful emotions and leave you begging for more. – Romantic Times BOOKReviews

Praise for IN THE THRILL OF THE NIGHT

Funny, fresh, and outrageously original, this lively, Regency-set historical hooks readers from the start and sweeps them right on to the satisfying conclusion. – Library Journal

This delectable tale shimmers with humor and sexual tension that only someone with Hern’s sensibilities about the era and women’s fantasies could write. – Romantic Times BOOKReviews, Top Pick

Tell us about your new release, and the next book to come!

JUST ONE OF THOSE FLINGS is the 2nd in my Merry Widows trilogy. Each book is the story of one widow’s search for a lover. Each of them has decided she does not wish to marry again but prefers to retain her social and financial independence. That does not mean, however, that they are also willing to give up physical pleasure for the rest of their lives.

I wanted each book to have a different type of love affair, coming from different experiences of men and sex. In the first book, IN THE THRILL OF THE NIGHT, the heroine had been madly in love with her husband, but the sex was ho-hum. In JUST ONE OF THOSE FLINGS, the heroine’s marriage had been good but was no love match, though the sex was fabulous. In fact, the heroine misses it. And she finds that spark of physical connection again with a younger man. Unfortunately, he is also the man her niece, for whom she is acting as chaperone, is determined to marry. You can imagine the difficulties that arise!

The third book, LADY BE BAD, comes out next year and is about the most proper and prudish of the friends, the widow of a famous bishop. She finds her stiff-backed inhibitions threatened by a sexy Bad Boy. 🙂

What gave you the idea for your new release/Widows series?

I originally conceived the idea for the first book, IN THE THRILL OF THE NIGHT as a standalone book about a respectable widow who decides to take a lover. But I like connected books and I think readers do, too, so I started to think about different ways I could make that book part of a trilogy. I decided not to use a connection with the heroes, since everyone was doing that with brothers and spies and soldiers and other groups of men. I wanted to connect the books through women, and considered doing sisters, but it just wasn’t clicking with me. Then I was watching Sex and the City one night and bingo! –­ it came to me. I would use a group of friends to connect the books. Like the heroine of THRILL, they would all be respectable widows. I decided they would make a secret pact to find lovers, and I would have them talk candidly about it, as Carrie and her friends do on Sex and the City. And just like those women, my Merry Widows would always have their female friendships, no matter how many men came into, and out of, their lives. So the theme of female friendship is important in all three books.

And just for fun, I decided to lampoon the Regency cliché of Almack’s and its formidable patronesses by making the Merry Widows a group of wealthy, respectable widows who sponsor charity balls. In private, however, they speak frankly about men and sex and love. I like to think of the trilogy as Sex and the City meets Almack’s.

Were there any challenges in researching these books? Any new or surprising historical information that you discovered?

The challenge for me is always to STOP researching and get on with the story. Research is so seductive. For JUST ONE OF THOSE FLINGS I wanted the hero to have been away from society for many years so that his appearance in Town for this particular season is something rather exciting for all those matchmaking mamas, making him the Catch of the Season. But where had he been all those years? I decided to send him to India for 7-8 years, and of course then I needed to know what he was doing there, so I did a lot of research on India. It was fascinating research and I became totally absorbed in it for quite a while. Of course all that research ended up being little more than a few paragraphs on the page. And I learned all about Indian dress just so I could put him in the right clothes for the masquerade ball that opens the book. I found some gorgeous books on Indian fashion and textiles that totally seduced me.

But I also got to use some “old” research for this book. I studied Indian art in college and did some serious graduate work on the subject. So I gave the hero a collection of Indian sculpture, just for the sheer pleasure of describing it. I even gave his collection my favorite piece of Indian sculpture, which you can see on the Behind the Scenes page for this book on my website.

We pride ourselves in writing “Risky Regencies.” Tell us what’s “risky” or different from the norm about your books?

I have to confess that my books aren’t what I’d call risky. I write fairly simple love stories. No complex plots with intrigue or mystery, no villains, no violence. I always strive to place the romance, the development of the romance, front and center. It’s something I honestly believe a lot of Regency writers lose track of sometimes, allowing the history (that seductive research) to overwhelm the romance.

JUST ONE OF THOSE FLINGS does have an older woman/younger man romance, so maybe that’s a bit risky. And perhaps the idea of a bunch of early 19th century women deciding to control their own lives is a risky notion. I have actually read complaints about the series and how the women’s openness about sex and men is too modern. I disagree. I think the Regency was a pretty bawdy age. Just think of all the rather “public” love affairs. Emma lived with Nelson. The Duke of Devonshire kept his mistress under the same roof as his wife, who bore another man’s child herself. And her sister, Lady Bessborough, had two children by a young man who later married her niece. And consider Jane Austen. She has a young girl run off to live with a man in PRIDE & PREJUDICE. And the heroine’s married cousin in MANSFIELD PARK runs off with another man. And then there’s Willoughby and all his sexual escapades in SENSE & SENSIBILITY. So I tend to believe that the Regency period was much more sexually liberated that some of us like to think. Many of us have taken Georgette Heyer’s version of the Regency as fact, but we have to remember that her own post-Victorian prudishness and social snobbery informs her stories, and they are more a mirror of her own age than of the Regency.

Given all that, I don’t really think my Merry Widows are that risky at all!

What is it about the Regency era that draws you in?

It all started with the fashion for me. I fell in love with regency fashion years and years ago, and I started collecting fashion prints of the age about 20 years ago. I just love how those beautiful, slender, revealing fashions were squashed between two eras of wide hooped skirts and unnaturally cinched waistlines. It’s like a few years of enlightenment between decades of darkness. 🙂 Over the years I also collected other Regency and Georgian antiques, and I read a lot of history etc to put my collections in context. A history buff since childhood, I soon fell in love with the Regency period and soaked up every bit of history — social, political, and artistic — that I could find. One of the reasons I am comfortable writing in this period is that I have years of dilettante-ish research behind me.

But what is it that draws me to the Regency? I love the Regency period because it is on the cusp on the Modern age. It is not so far away that it seems foreign, but still enough removed that it represents a fantasy world. Socially and politically it is a fascinating period, with the Industrial Age just beginning and the long wars in Europe touching everyone’s lives. It’s a time of change, of the beginning of social reform, with lessons still being learned from the French Revolution.

Tell us about your fabulous collections, which are such a great part of your website? How did you start collecting? What is your favorite item?

Like I said above, I’ve been collecting Regency and Georgian antiques for years. Our house is full of old bits of furniture — Georgian tea tables and Louis XV chairs, etc. But the fashion prints, my first “real” collection, started me off in several other directions. I never had the desire to actually own a Regency gown, but I began to look for accessories, like purses and jewelry and quizzing glasses. I even have a fichu! And I became fascinated with vinaigrettes quite early, which led to other “dressing table” items, like scent bottles and cosmetic cases. One thing always led to another. But sometimes I’d just stumble upon an item I loved and bought it, then ended up finding another one and another one until I had a collection. That’s what happened with paste shoe buckles. I bought the first pair just because I thought they were pretty. Now I have dozens of pairs. And one time I bought a small lot of Georgian silhouettes at auction for a song, and that led me to crave more of them. Collecting is an addiction. It’s never enough to have one or two of something. One has to have a COLLECTION. It’s a sickness.

As for the website, it was my designer who suggested the Collections articles as a way of having fresh content between book releases. I love writing those articles and sharing my collections with people who share my love of the period.

A favorite item? That’s a tough question, but I have actually given some thought to it. Greg and I have often discussed what we’d grab first in the event of a fire (or in our case, an earthquake). I have decided that if I could only take one thing, it would have to be a painting. We have a couple of large portraits, some watercolors, and a small collection of old master drawings. If I had to choose, I’d grab the portrait of Mrs. Urquhart by Sir Henry Raeburn. I adore her! She’s got those eyes that follow you all around the room, giving the heebie-jeebies to my house cleaner!

Let’s talk covers! How thrilled are you with the gorgeous new NAL covers???

I love them! Especially after all those dreadful clinch covers on my Avon books. I can’t begin to tell you how much I hated those covers, even as I understand why they are used.

NAL does beautiful covers. They told me they wanted to use “upscale” art to play against the “fun” titles I was using for the trilogy (twisted Cole Porter song titles for the first two, a twisted Gershwin song title for the third). My editor described my books as “elegant but fun” and wanted that same feeling for the covers. I think they did a great job. Each of the covers is based on a real painting. You can see the evolution from painting to cover on the Behind the Scenes pages for each book on my website (THRILL; FLINGS).

And, are you making any appearances or booksignings in the near future?

You just missed my big bus tour!!! I was part of the “Sizzling Summer Reads Author Tour” last month, sponsored by Levy Home Entertainment, the distributor that supplies books for Wal*Mart, K-Mart, Target, Walgreens, grocery stores, etc. There were 13 authors on a luxury bus touring the Chicago and Detroit areas. Other Regency authors on the “love bus” included “Queen Mary” Balogh, Sabrina Jeffries, Jacquie D’Alessandro, and Pamela Britton. We had a blast!

But I have nothing else on my calendar until next March when I’ll be speaking at a writers’ conference. I’m always happy to do workshops and such if anyone is interested. I have a list of prepared workshops on my website. Invite me to speak, and I’ll show up!

Thanks so much! 🙂

Thanks for having me! I’m a regular lurker here at Risky Regencies and pleased to be your guest!

Candice