Last week I was researching my current WIP (work-in-progress), part of which will take place in Scotland and I was looking up information about the Clearances in Scotland, when the land was taken from the crofters and consolidated for bigger profits. Not that my story has anything to do with the Clearances, certainly not the Highland Clearances or anything Highland, but I needed to know just for a throwaway line.

I came upon this in a History of Scotland page:

In 1810 Scott publishes The Lady of the Lake, a stirring historical poem of love and adventure. Loch Katrine, in a rugged gorge of the Trossachs, is the home of the heroine, Ellen Douglas. The beatiful Ellen’s Isle commemorates her, nestling in the loch against a background of high hills.

The poem is an immediate success. A new hotel is built to accomodate the rush of tourists, who wander through the landscape with their copies of the book, finding the exact spots in which to declaim the relevant passages. The Highlands acquire an aura for tourists which they have never lost.

The more things change the more they stay the same! I immediately thought of today’s tourists scampering about Europe and the UK on Da Vinci Code tours! It is rather comforting to me that people are the same in so many ways, even if they lived a long time ago.

Here for a taste of what our Regency ladies and gentlemen read in that poem is the beginning of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake:

Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung
On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan’s spring
And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung,
Till envious ivy did around thee cling,
Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,–
O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep?
Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring,
Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep,
Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a maid to weep?

Cheers!
Diane

My post this week is going to be a bit of a mish-mash (I know–what else is new??). Like Megan, I’ve been working on a new proposal, and have expended a lot of energy at the day job pretending to be entering sales data into the computer while actually revising my synopsis or looking at websites on Imperial Russia and Go Fug Yourself (shhh! Don’t tell). I’ve also spent a lot of time watching Project Runway and Dancing With the Stars, my current obsessions in life. My thoughts are always occupied with things like “Is Laura right–did Jeffrey have help sewing his collection? And wow, that past drug addiction thing really explains those tattoos. And how can I end chapter two on a cliffhanger?” And, after reading Janet’s post, “I must eliminate all ‘manroot’ from my WIP! And ‘petals of passion.’ And stop beginning sentences with ‘and’.”

Anyway, to get off the Irrelevancy Train and onto my post. My topics this week are inspired by Elena’s post on the forthcoming Persuasion movie, and by Janet’s post on language (sort of). I love costume films, and I’m not really terribly picky about what I watch. Good, bad, horrible, bizarre–if it has long dresses and accents of some sort, I’m there. On Megan’s ‘guilty pleasures’ post, I could have listed a dozen. Not that I don’t sometimes gripe about them afterward, or pick apart the details of the costume design and the sets, but that’s all part of the fun.

And one thing I found to be a great deal of fun this past week was Masterpiece Theater’s new version of Casanova (part two airing tomorrow night). I was wary after that dumb Heath Ledger/Sienna Miller movie a few months ago, which totally wasted the glories of Venice and some not–bad costumes on a film far too dull even to be a guilty pleasure. I’m also usually not much for the ‘modernist’ approach to costume drama–Moulin Rouge gave me a headache. But Casanova is charming and so full of giddy fun I totally enjoyed it. There’s also genuine emotion, and a sense of exhiliration in some of the scenes (like Casanova’s engagement ball with the former castrato Bellino–it’s a long story, involving unexpected revelations of the sausage variety. The clothes are a swirl of reds, golds, and bright blues, with soaring music and unrealized love). It’s not perfect–nothing ever is. I’m not entirely convinced that David Tennant (pictured above–he’s also the new Dr. Who!) grows up to be Peter O’Toole. And Henritte’s hairdo is VERY distracting. It must take hours to tie in all those bows just so she looks like she forgot to take her curlers out before she left the house. But it’s all great fun. I can’t wait to see what happens in Part Two!

The other part of my post has to do with language. Every year the Washington Post sponsors a neologism contest, where they ask readers to send in alternate meanings to common words. The results are always entertaining! Here are a few of my favorites from this year:
Flabbergasted: appalled over how much weight you have gained
Abdicate: to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach (sadly applied to me!)
Esplanade: to attempt an explanation while drunk
Negligent: describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown
Gargoyle: olive-flavored mouthwash
Balderdash: a rapidly receding hairline
Pokemon: a Rastafarian proctologist
(There was also a Style Invitational, where readers were asked to take a word, alter it by adding, subtracting, or adding one letter, and supply a new definition. Some favorites:)
Bozone: the substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating
Cashtration: the act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period
Sarchasm: the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it
Osteopornosis: a degenerate disease (this one got extra credit!)
Karmageddon: it’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the earth explodes and it’s like a serious bummer

So, now it’s your turn. Any new costume films you like? Or hate? Or any ideas for your own neologisms? I would try and supply one myself, but I’m afraid my mind is affected by the bozone layer at the moment, and entirely taken up with constructing my dreaded synopsis. Plus, wondering if Mario and Karina on Dancing With the Stars actually ARE an item off the dance floor, or if that’s just a D-listed rumor. Plus, wondering if I have now spent far too much time reading D-listed.

Have a great weekend!

Oh, no, it’s Friday morning, and I’ve already had two cups of coffee, and I’m dressed and everything, and the house is quiet, since the son is at school and the spouse is at work, and things should be percolating (not just the coffee) in my brain because it’s the only time I have to be creative, not counting the times I have to make up Adventure Stories For Pokemon and explain How I Managed to Make Lasagna Without Lasagna Noodles or just WHY I have so many books.

And I got nothing. I am still toiling away on my three chapters and synopsis, they’re both almost done, but I am fried. Not good-fried, like a french fry or a deep-fried Milky Way bar (yes, a local restaurant offers those. No, I have never been so confident or depressed to order one). Bad-fried, like ‘where is my head?’ fried.

So now what? Hm. Of course I’ve got some writing triggers, like sitting at the computer and turning OFF the overhead light and turning ON the little desk lamp so there’s only a small circular glow of light on the keyboard. And lighting a candle, somehow that makes me be able to pretend I’m a Real Writer, so I Really Write when I smell the candle.

But still. It’s the end of the long week, I’m fried, and really, I got nothing.

When I get really desperate (like, um, now), I look at pictures of Clive Owen, and not just because I think he’s totally foxy. See, he’s what my hero Alisdair looks like in the chapters I’m writing. And the heroine looks like Maggie Gyllenhaal (who, coincidentally, just moved into my Brooklyn neighborhood).

And then I imagine them distrusting each other and then growing to love each other. You know–they meet, they have adventures, they fall in love and live happily ever after.

Hey, it’s not so hard after all! Thanks for the help!

Megan
www.meganframpton.com

Or, why I am ambivalent about romance.
Why I am not always awestruck by the genre.
And why it’s more than the story.

And following on, sort of, from our spirited discussion on Conversion to Romance….No one expects the Romance Inquisition…”Silence, Infidel! Cardinal Scarlett, bring out the comfy chair, the Signet Regencies, the nice cup of tea and the cookies! Later there will be a test…”

Recently, a well-known literary agent bemoaned the fact that queries were full of cliches–rekindled passion, beautiful but feisty heroines, and more–and although there might have been some good stories lurking behind the turgid facades, we’ll never know. She rejected them. Who says language isn’t important?

Over sixty years ago, George Orwell defined six points of good writing in his essay Politics and the English Language:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. So why does so much romance use the same tired old cliches–the pebbled nubs, the hero who kisses the heroine senseless (quick, call Special Victims Unit!)? I know the argument is that we want to keep the reader in the flow of the story. We don’t want the reader to stop, gasp with astonishment at our artistry, put the book down, and….

But can’t we do better and keep the reader with us? We’re blessed with an extraordinarily rich and subtle language–the same language Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, and Shakespeare used.

Here’s something I love to quote as an example of startling, beautiful writing. It’s the beginning of D. H. Lawrence’s poem Figs. Yes, it’s about fruit, sort of, and if you read the whole thing you’ll find it has its moments but does wander off into DHL Crazyland:

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

You might not want to drop that in the middle of a love scene. But you might want to come up with something of your own, rather than something someone else has used that is “safe.” You might want to use something specific to your characters’ experience, something that speaks to you–and to your reader.

So, yes, it’s all about the love, the romance, the relationship. But for me it’s about the words too.

Thoughts, anyone?

Janet

Enter my contest all this month at roadtoromance.ca
DEDICATION~Winner, 2006 Golden Leaf Contest (Regency)

I recently heard there’s a new version of PERSUASION in the works! It’s a TV version currently planned for sometime in 2007, directed by Adrian Shergold. I found this information at IMDB and of course anything might change, but it looks intriguing so far.

The role of Anne Elliott will be played by Sally Hawkins. Here’s a picture of her playing the character of Sue Trinder in Fingersmith, a BBC series set in Victorian London.

Rupert Penry-Jones is cast as Captain Wentworth. Here’s a shot of him as Adam Carter in Spooks. He’s also played St. John Rivers in a production of Jane Eyre.

I don’t know much more about these actors. I’m not sure which of their past works have made it across the pond and I’m way behind in TV and films anyway. Does anyone know more about them?

It’s hard to imagine anything to top the beautifully done 1995 version starring Ciaran Hinds and Amanda Root. But then I felt that way about the 1995 version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and still enjoyed the very different interpretation of the story by Matthew McFadyen and Keira Knightly. I’m definitely open to a new version, which could be particularly interesting if it’s not under the time constraints of the 1995 version.

While I was googling around (it’s an addiction I try to fight-usually!) I also ran across this 1971 version, a 5-part miniseries starring Ann Firbank and Bryan Marshall. Has anyone seen this and what did you think? Am I wrong in thinking the guy’s hair looks a tad Victorian?

Anyway, if anyone knows more about the 2007 production, please share!

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