If you’re going to the RWA conference in Washington DC (only about 10 days away now!) be sure and join the Riskies (Diane, Amanda, Carolyn, Janet, and Megan) for a drink and a “coze” before the awards ceremony on Saturday! 4:00 in Harry’s Pub at the Marriott Wardman hotel. Hope we see you there!!!

Congratulations, Mari!

You are the winner of Louise’s signed copy of The Disgraceful Mr Ravenhurst.

Email us at riskies@yahoo.com with your mailing address!

I always love reading biographies of independent-minded women writers in history! (Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, George Sand, Emily Dickinson, etc–it’s very inspirational). This weekend I read Brad Gooch’s new biography of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor was one of my favorite writers in high school, but aside from a class called “The American Short Story” in college I haven’t re-read her as much as Austen and the Brontes (which I re-read almost constantly!). This biography, though almost strictly about her life and with very little literary commentary, was fascinating and inspired me to take my volume of her short stories off the shelf again.

Flannery O’Connor, like almost all those other favorite authors I listed, was something of an eccentric, solitary soul, deeply devoted to her work and her own strange interior world. She had a relatively short life, dying at 39 of lupus in 1964, and the last 14 years of her life were spent mostly on the remote family farm in Georgia, but she was a writer of immense genius and originality. She wrote 2 novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and 2 short story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories and Everything That Rises Must Converge (which won a posthumous National Book Award). My college textbook says “(the) texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters.” They could loosely be called “Southern Gothic,” in the vein of her contemporaries Faulkner and Welty, but they are unique and deeply flavored with O’Connor’s own devout Catholicism and struggles with illness.

For a writer of historical romance fiction like myself, O’Connor isn’t such a direct influence as Austen and the Brontes. Though she declared “Hawthorne said he didn’t write novels, he wrote romances; I am one of his descendants,” they are ‘romances’ in a very different sense (more in the grotesque, fantastical way of Frankenstein). But as I re-read her most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” I realized O’Connor is a great teacher of craft. Nothing could be added or subtracted from this story; the visual details and rhythm of the dialogue paint a whole world. And the sense of sustained foreboding is equaled only (maybe) in James’s Turn of the Screw. It never falters. The same can be said of stories like “Good Country People” and the gorgeous “Revelation” (written partially from her deathbed. Determined to finish her Everything Rises… collection even as her body failed her, she set up a typewriter on a table by her bed, and would sleep for an hour and write for an hour until it was done. A lesson in artistic determination!).

There’s a great website on O’Connor’s work here, and her home at Andalusia is open to visitors, and I would love to visit there someday! (I would also love to visit Haworth Parsonage and Chawton, in hopes of soaking in some inspiration. Maybe we need to get together an international writers’ tour…)

Who are some of your unexpected influences and favorite writers? Whose life story do you find intriguing?

(BTW, on my own blog yesterday’s “Hottie Monday” was a Mr. Darcy edition! Be sure and stop in to vote for your favorite Darcy…)

…is Eva S! Congratulations! Please send your snail mail address to riskies@yahoo.com to claim your prize

This Sunday we welcome Harlequin Historicals and Kensington Brava author Terri Brisbin (who is also a 2009 RITA nominee)! Comment for a chance to win a signed copy of The Conqueror’s Lady…

Riskies: Welcome to the blog, Terri! Tell us about your July release, The Conqueror’s Lady. Where did you find the idea for this book?

Terri: I love the classic medieval romances about a victorious Norman knight and a Saxon lady and I tried to think of a twist on that premise–in researching the battle, I discovered that the Bretons were blamed for a big misstep that nearly cost William his invasion so I wondered if that was true or if the Bretons got the bad press? LOL! Anyway, after meeting a very sexy Breton harpist in Scotland, I decided my heroes should be Breton knights, all linked by being fostered by the same man. So, The Conqueror’s Lady is the first of my trilogy–Knights of Brittany.

In this, Giles Fitzrobert is the first one to be sent to lands granted by William and he needs to fight his way in! As he arrives, he interrupts a wedding between his betrothed and another man and Giles is not happy. Fayth is trying to hold everything her father worked so hard for together and ends up married to a warrior who may have been her father’s killer. But of course they begin to learn about each other and there is much more there than meets the eye going on…

Riskies: Did you find any interesting research tidbits?

Terri: Yes!!! William the Conqueror had anger management issues and poison seemed to be his favorite weapon of choice when taking out his enemies. The story of his rivalry and hostilities with Conan of Brittany were verryyy interesting. FYI–Conan died after wearing poisoned riding gloves…poisoned LEATHER riding gloves. Did I mention that William’s mother was apparently the daughter of a tanner? Ahem…

Riskies: And what is “risky” about this book?

Terri: Any time an author begins a new series, it’s risky…Will the readers like it? Will it all work out the way I planned? Will the characters do as they’re told and stop whining about it being THEIR story? All those things and more went through my mind as I wrote this story.

Riskies: And tell us about your July “Undone” release!

Terri: Now, this is the RISKY thing I wrote! It’s amazingly difficult for me to write these shorter length stories–I am used to having 350+ manuscript pages to tell my stories, so asking me to write something good in 1/3 of that for a novella was hard. But this Undone is 1/2 of a novella, so the same elements–plot, characters, emotions, relationship–all had to be a oart of it…and it had to make sense, too!

So I decided to tell the story of how the Knights of Brittany decided to fight for William and introduced the noble-born knight Simon, whose father fostered the other 3. It is Simon’s wedding day to the lovely, feminine Lady Elise and Simon worries over how things will go between them. Lady Elise has the same worries and they spend the day trying to be the person they think the other wants them to be. Simon is wooing her gently and Elise is tempting him to the brink of his self-control.

Riskies: I see on your website you have lots of beautiful pics of Scotland! What are some of your favorite places there?

Terri: I do love Scotland! A couple of my favorite places are Edinburgh (so much to see and do, oh my!), Pitlochry (a small Victorian village in the Cairngorm mountains) and the Highlands. And Islands. Too many places to list, really. I’m planning a trip for September and my problem is that I want to visit too many places there!

Riskies: And what’s next for you?

Terri: I am so excited to share that after my July Harlequin Historicals release, my next book will be in December and from Kensington Brava! A Storm of Passion is a medieval historical, set in Scotland when magic still glimmered in the Highlands and Islands. It’s a story of a gift and a curse and forces so strong that only love can prevail, if it can be found. That is also the first of a new trilogy so there will be two more to follow in 2010 and 2011, and they promise to be very emotional and sexy romances.

The next one out from Harlequin will be Brice’s story–I’m writing that now, so I suspect it will be a Spring 2010 release?

Also, Kensington just asked me to do a novella for an anthology headed up by Susan Johnson–THE Susan Johnson! I am so excited to be part of that project. I don’t have a title (or even an idea!) for it yet, but it is scheduled as a May 2010 release.

Please check my website for all the details, and for a new contest I’m going to do over the summer. Mills & Boon, the UK Harlequin company, is releasing all 3 of my Highlander novels this summer, so I’m doing some giveaways of the British editions. Lots of new stuff and I’ll be announcing it through my website and newsletter.

Thanks to the Risky Regencies for inviting me here today! Please ask me questions–I’ll be stopping in during the day and would love to hear from readers and writers…