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Monthly Archives: October 2011

A Regency Ghost Story

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Happy Halloween!

My quick surfing of the net and peek into Google Books yielded very little information about Halloween during the Regency.
In 1818, Blackwood’s Magazine entertained its readers with ghost stories from Wales (as opposed to Scotland, where such stories usually originated, apparently). Witches, ghosts, demons, evil spirits, dogs of hell, fairies, corpse candles, and something called Kyhirraeth, a “doleful foreboding noise before death,” were discussed.
This example amused me:

The Rev. Mr Thomas Baddy, who lived in Denbigh town, and was a dissenting minister in that place, went into his study one night, and while he was reading or writing, he heard some one behind him laughing and grinning at him, which made him stop a little. It came again, and there he wrote on a piece of paper, that devil wounding scripture, 1 John iii. ‘ For this was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil,’ and held it backwards towards him, and the laughing ceased for ever; for it was a melancholy word to a scoffing devil, and enough.

Clever fellow, Reverend Tom. Nerves of steel, as well. I believe I would have screamed and run from the room.

It seemed to me that the Regency era people prided themselves on being rational, with no time for such nonsense as ghosts and witches and fairies. I suspect the prevailing view on the occult was similar to Sir Walter Scott’s.
In Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Scott clearly scoffs at ghost sightings and such. He believes in rational explanations for events which are credited to the supernatural.

Here’s an example in Scott’s words:

The remarkable circumstance of Thomas, the second Lord Lyttelton, prophesying his own death within a few minutes, upon the information of an apparition, has been always quoted as a true story. But of late it has been said and published, that the unfortunate nobleman had previously determined to take poison, and of course had it in his own power to ascertain the execution of the prediction. It was no doubt singular that a man, who meditated his exit from the world, should have chosen to play such a trick on his friends. But it is still more credible that a whimsical man should do so wild a thing than that a messenger should be sent from the dead, to tell a libertine at what precise hour he should expire.

Sir Walter is clearly a skeptic. Too bad he didn’t have access to Celebrity Ghost Stories on the Bio Channel.

Perhaps in Wales and Scotland, families practiced old rituals on Halloween during the Regency. Perhaps people told ghost stories by the light of the fireplace at night and carved turnips into jack o’ lanterns, but I suspect Halloween was not celebrated among the Beau Monde.

I’m celebrating Halloween today with a contest! Seven authors, including me, are hosting a Novel Trick or Treat Contest. Stop by my website to start. We’re each giving away prizes to some lucky commenters, but, like all good trick or treaters, you have to visit each of us in turn. Come join the fun!
How else are you celebrating Halloween today?
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Guest Rose Lerner Talks About A Lily Among Thorns

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Today we are delighted to have Rose Lerner as our guest author. Rose burst onto the scene last year with her debut book, In For A Penny (Amanda listed this book as one of her 2010 favorites). Today Rose will talk about her second book, A Lily Among Thorns.

Praise for A Lily Among Thorns:
“I loved it, even more than I loved In For A Penny…most of all for a heroine who is independent, prickly, and wonderful all at the same time.” — Courtney Milan, author of Unveiled.

“Rose Lerner is masterful at bringing out the details that make characters human, in a way that reminds me of Judith Ivory and Meredith Duran. I highly recommend this novel and can’t wait for her next novel.” — Kat Latham, Reader I created him.
Rose is giving away one signed copy of A Lily Among Thorns to one lucky commenter chosen at random.
A Big Risky Regencies welcome to Rose Lerner!
Tell us about A Lily Among Thorns.

My heroine Serena has been fighting for the past five years to build her hotel’s business and to be safe as a woman alone who’s known to have once worked as a courtesan. Then Solomon walks back into her life. She’s had a secret crush on him for years, ever since he gave her the money she needed to buy back her contract at a brothel, and walked away without touching her. But love, and the vulnerability it brings, terrifies Serena at the best of times–and these are definitely the worst of times. On the heels of Solomon’s arrival, she faces a close friend’s betrayal, the threat of losing her hotel, French spies, and a whole mess of other things that could bring her carefully constructed life crashing down around her ears.

What inspired this story?

Traditional Regencies, actually. There was a certain type of alpha hero who was very popular for a while: he never ever expressed his emotions. He barely had facial expressions. And sometimes, he had a deep, broad, and often unexplained knowledge of the criminal underworld. He was generally saved from his own self-hatred and isolation by the unconditional acceptance of an innocent but unconventional young woman. And I wanted to see what that would look like with the genders flipped.

The book grew from there, of course, but that was the seed.

What is risky about A Lily Among Thorns?

Three things. First, Serena is an embittered ex-courtesan. Remember that conversation last year about “unlikeable heroines”? (If not, my post on the subject is here, about how difficult it is as a woman to express anger and not feel guilty about it, and it’s got links to the original Dear Author post and another post at History Hoydens that I loved.)

Plus, Solomon, my hero, is a beta. He’s socially awkward, geeky, doesn’t have a ton of experience with women, and he works as a chemist for his uncle’s men’s tailoring shop. He’s got no problem standing up to Serena when it matters (and since she’s got some issues, that’s more often than you’d think), but he’s perfectly content to stand back and let her run the show in the general course of things.

The third thing is that the secondary romance is between two men, but I don’t want to say too much about that because there are some major spoilers involved.

Did you come across any interesting research when you were writing A Lily Among Thorns?

Oh, tons! I researched the London criminal world, gay clubs, annulments, chemistry, ethnic diversity in London, women’s property rights, who exactly is entitled to be beheaded instead of hanged, drawn, and quartered when convicted of treason, food and kitchens, the Battle of Waterloo…I could go on. If anyone has any questions about any of those things, I’d love to talk about them with you! Here’s two interesting things I discovered:

British people in the Regency did eat plenty of foreign-inspired food, especially French food. But it was much rarer than it would be a little later, or now, to refer to them by their foreign names. So when Solomon says he knows how to make crème brûlée, he calls it “burnt cream.”

And that story about Nathan Rothschild getting news of Waterloo in advance, tricking everyone at the ‘Change into thinking he knew Wellington lost, and then buying up all the consols and seizing control of England’s finances? Totally false. Also, when I was researching that, you would not believe how many scary anti-Semitic websites I found that used it as an example of how Jews control the world. Anyway, if you want to hear more, I’ve got a blog post about it here with lengthy quotes from a Rothschild biography.

I’ve also got a post on Regency chemistry up over at History Hoydens.

This is your second book, but we at Risky Regencies always love a debut author story. Your debut received some wonderful buzz. Tell us about your journey to publication?

Thank you! I was actually having a really tough time with writing romance when I sold that book. I was having a tough time, period. When I was about a hundred pages into my first draft of In for a Penny, I found out my mom’s cancer was back and that she was going to die. I found out she would never get to read the book, and I didn’t write a word for about six months. My mom introduced me to romance novels and she was always the person I wrote for, the person I knew would love my books.

Eventually I forced myself to finish a draft but it was like pulling teeth, and once I was done, I couldn’t bring myself to edit it. I couldn’t even bring myself to reread it. I had a revised first three chapters, though. I promised myself I’d pitch it at the Emerald City Writers Conference, but if I didn’t get any requests for a full, I didn’t have to look at it ever again.

Well, Leah Hultenschmidt requested the partial, and I sent it to her, and I didn’t hear back. I figured, okay, that’s it then. I didn’t revise it, I didn’t send it out, and I didn’t start my next book, either. I thought maybe it was the end of the line for me and historical romance. Maybe the spark was gone. Heck, it wasn’t like anyone would ever want to publish me anyway.

Then about six months later, Leah requested the full. For a minute there, I was actually kind of mad. I still didn’t believe she was going to buy it, and now I had to go through this whole grueling process and it would all be for nothing, right? But when I read the book again, I kind of liked it. Yeah, it needed a lot of work, but I could fix it. So I dived in, cleaned it up, sent it off, even got my groove back enough to start a new book…and it turned out the spark wasn’t gone at all. I just needed to believe that someone might someday read what I was writing. I just needed to believe that someone might love it.

And then Leah called and said she wanted to buy In for a Penny, and the rest is history!

What is next for you?

I’m not sure. I’m almost done with a draft of a book about the 1812 Parliamentary general election. By the local rules of her town, the middle-class heroine’s husband would be eligible for a vote…if she were married. The younger-son-of-an-earl hero is sent to the town to find the heroine a husband, but of course he falls in love with her himself! But it’s not sold yet so I don’t actually know yet if it will be my next book out or when it will be available. I’ll keep you posted!

There’s plenty to comment about from this interview. Rose’s emotional debut story. The risks she took in this book. The research, especially about the Rothschilds. The whole issue of unlikeable heroines. So there’s no excuse not to leave a comment and earn a chance to win a copy of A Lily Among Thorns.

Or ask Rose a question! She’s coming back from a conference today, but will check in during the evening.
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It’s not really about the 50,000 words

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I don’t participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, often abbreviated to NaNo) every year. For two years, dealing with my husband’s stroke has made writing impossible. At other times, like this year, I’ve been in editing mode, which is a NaNo no-no. The goal is 50,000 words of a new novel.

But I’ve done NaNo three times, “won” twice by hitting the 50,000 wordcount mark, but had a blast each time.

I have heard detractors of NaNo say that it’s a waste of time, that participants produce 50,000 words of garbage that are promptly forgotten, etc… What I say is it’s great for people who always said they wanted to write a novel to give it a try. If nothing else, they learn something about the work of writing and themselves. But it can also be a boon to serious aspiring writers.

If you are the sort of writer who strives to get every chapter right before moving on to the next–and I know several successful, published authors who work this way–NaNo is probably not for you. Unless you have a lot of time and are a fast writer, you may not be able to write as cleanly as you like and still reach the 50,000 word goal.

But if you are like me and many other writers, NaNo is the opportunity to get in a good chunk of first draft. IMHO it’s not about writing 50,000 words that can be submitted to an agent or publisher; it’s about generating ideas and learning about one’s characters.

I find the wordcount goal helps me to focus on that, by ignoring things I can fix later: awkward sentences, background research that doesn’t affect the plot, bits of dialogue that don’t feel period, etc… Although sometimes nuggets of “keeper” prose sneak in, they are just a bonus. What matters is coming out with a lot of new ideas I can use in writing the next draft.

Some people don’t have as good an experience with NaNo as they’d hoped. I’ve heard them complain that they started generating pages of blather just to reach their daily wordcount goals. My advice to anyone this happens to is to stop. You need to forget the wordcount at that point, because you may be bogging down on something important. It’s likely you’ve lost touch with your characters.

It’s time to back away, take a walk, have a cup of tea, brainstorm with a friend, do a character interview or a Goal/Motivation/Conflict chart as in Deb Dixon’s book. Anything that will get energy back into the story. If you solve it, you may be behind on your pagecount but you’ll be closer to the real goal of NaNo. IMHO a lesser wordcount and a lot of good ideas are worth more than a winner’s certificate and 50,000 words of a story you’ve lost interest in.

But you also may find that your enthusiasm for the story will rebound and you may end up with the certificate too.

So that’s my tuppence on NaNoWriMo. Anyone heading into it, good luck and have fun!

Elena
www.elenagreene.com
www.facebook.com/ElenaGreene

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Vanity Fare to be Published!

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So this was made official yesterday:

Megan Frampton writing as Megan Caldwell’s VANITY FARE, about a 40-year-old Brooklyn mother, recently divorced with a son, who starts writing copy for a bakery, discovers a knack for food-related literary puns, and becomes entangle in a love triangle, to Wendy Lee at William Morrow, in a nice deal, by Louise Fury at L. Perkins Agency (World).

And it was inspired, surprisingly, by that mid-nineteenth century (in)famous classic, Wuthering Heights. I have a friend, an old friend from high school, who comes over every so often to watch period dramas and drink wine. One evening we chose Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier. I was in midst pour when I said, “Hey, how about Mothering Heights?”
And the idea for the book was born.
I then giggled a lot, told a few people–including an acquaintance of mine, a literary agent–and they all said, “Wow! You have to write that!” The literary agent was very enthused, which gave me impetus to go on.
Then I employed the Carolyn Jewel method: The “What If?” application.
What if my husband left me?
What if I had to do something to make money?
What if I met a few good-looking men?
What if I had to do things I wouldn’t do in a million years?

I started writing. The book was originally titled Mothering Heights, but we changed it as we got closer to a deal.

So in about a year, a trade paperback will come out, all started by some wine, a good friend, and my ability to rhyme.
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Sex, money, and physicality

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Amanda mentioned in her post about JASNA that one of the highlights was Andrew Davies’ presentation in which he talked about his Austen screenplays. He’s such a good speaker that I found myself writing notes–oh my gosh, I must tell the Riskies about this!–and so I thought I’d share what he said about his various screenplays, and also about the cast and crew comments that prompted changes and rewrites (as well as the inside jokes). First, he has a huge oeuvre–minds out of the gutter ladies, although he’d probably appreciate it–check it out. He’s got a lot of projects on the boil including a novel based on his childhood as well as other screenplays. I asked him if he’d tackle Mansfield Park because I think he could do amazing things with it and he said he was asked that fairly often. (I also told him I was chaperoning Amanda and not to squeeze her too tightly when we were photographed together.)

Talking of photos, mine were abysmal, so I borrowed this one from Austenprose (thanks, Laurel Ann!). This was taken on the grand parade in Sundance Square. Now I do have to admit that some things about the conference were a bit weird, like running into people who wore their regency stuff all the time even outside the hotel. But on Sunday night when we were all dressed up we had an official parade outside where people took our pics and seemed entertained/bemused. Mr. Davies, as guest of honor, was escorted by two lovely tall blonde Texans who were dressed up in their western gear (and honest, in Texas you do get dressed up in a stetson and cowboy boots. It can look very chic). You can’t see it in the pic but their Stetsons featured flashing jewels and they claimed to be the Blingley Sisters.

The conference was about Sense & Sensibility and Mr. Davies explained that he started his screenplay with Willoughby seducing Eliza because this–not the Dashwood deaths with which the book begins–for him is the real start of the story. It was very much an anti-Willoughby interpretation–he described him as “a glamorous shit”–but like many of us he had problems with this novel. It’s too much “about girls filling in their time waiting by the phone for unsatisfactory men who don’t respond in the right way.”

And then there’s Edward–how do you explain a hero who’s too scared to break off an engagement to a woman he no longer loves, and lies to and deceives both her and the woman he really does love? So he inserted a scene in which Edward pours out his heart to Elinor about his family’s expectations and how he wants to be a simple country parson–heck, they virtually do each others’ nails–which naturally led the women involved in the production to complain that now he wasn’t butch enough. Hence the woodchopping scene (ooh, wet shirt), inspired by a woodcutting scene in Davies’ favorite movie, Shane. Incidentally, if you are familiar with English slang you’ll appreciate the hilarity of the cast when Fanny[‘s] hair was mentioned.

I also loved what he had to say about Emma, which was the underappreciated version starring Kate Beckinsale. There’s a very long and funny story about the scene with Emma, Knightley and the baby which I won’t relate here, but he had these extremely perceptive comments about the novel:

She’s a fearful snob with no insight whatsoever who treats other people as though they were dolls or toys. Either she’s very young and a slow developer, or she’s an artist, a creator, a novelist who’s too lazy to write… Austen always has a girl or two who are disadvantaged and succeed despite the efforts of a rich bitch…

in this case the rich bitch is our heroine Emma and the disadvantaged girl Jane Fairfax:

Jane Fairfax is possessed of a deep and passionate nature. She’s had the misfortune to fall in love with a handsome psychopath; she’s sexually in thrall to a man she has little respect for.

He believes Frank did seduce her in Weymouth and he also mused on Mr. Knightley visiting the Woodhouses every day for years. Why? Not to visit Mr. Woodhouse, surely. He proposed a Tennessee Williams-like scenario in which the young Mr. Knightley visited Mrs. Woodhouse and then transferred his affections to her daughter (hopefully after Emma was 16 or so). Yikes.

And, oh yes, P&P, wet shirt and all, and the title of this post is what Davies saw as the governing idea behind the book–sex, money, and physicality. It explains why he saw the beginning of the story, not with the famous quote, but with Bingley leasing Netherfield, hence masculine guys galloping around on big horses (with Elizabeth being “strangely excited” when she sees them from a distance).

After that it was a question of finding as many opportunities as possible for undressing. The film crew referred to his frequent scenes where Lizzy and Jane exchange confidences in their nightgowns as “hair and shoulders shots.”

He decided to bring Georgianna much more into the story, originally to show “Darcy being tender with girls.” As he pointed out, until Georgianna shows up we’re not even sure Darcy likes women. But I was surprised to learn that his favorite scene is with Georgianna, Elizabeth, Darcy and the Bingleys and as it opens Elizabeth sings an aria from The Marriage of Figaro. As Georgianna plays next, Miss Bingley makes snide comments about the regiment moving to Brighton and brings up Wickham’s name. Georgianna stumbles on a note at the piano and Elizabeth moves in to protect her, apologizing that she should have realized the music was too difficult to play without someone to turn the pages. She and Darcy exchange one of those long, significant glances (ooh).

What’s your favorite Davies’ screenplay? And do you agree or disagree with what he said about the novels?

Alert! Last day to enter the contest on my website (yes I know it says October 26 but it’s still up so go for it) and you have a chance to win a copy of Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion at My Jane Austen Book Club.

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