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Monthly Archives: July 2012

Nine Days Queen

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Happy Tuesday, everyone!  I hope you all had a great holiday last week.  I ate too much junk food and drank too many weirdly concocted cocktails, but I think I have recovered now…

At the moment I am 1) working on a new Regency-set romance for Harlequin.  It’s been a while since I dipped into the Regency world, and this is a new sort of story for me (a marriage-in-trouble plot) so I am enjoying it! and 2) I am researching and plotting the first in my new Elizabethan-set mystery series for NAL! (I have a new pen name too–Amanda Carmack).  The catalyst for the story is the death of Lady Jane Grey.  Even though my story starts in 1557, on the eve of Elizabeth becoming queen, I’ve had to research Jane’s tragedy as well.  And I found out that today, July 10, in 1553, she began her short-lived reign.

Jane was born in 1536 or ’37, the eldest of 3 daughters of Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, and his wife Lady Frances Brandon (the daughter of Henry VIII”s sister Mary, dowager Queen of France, and her husband Henry Brandon).  Jane was very well-educated, speaking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as modern languages like Italian and French.  She was a devout and committed Protestant, corresponding with European theologians like Bullinger.  She would prefer to hide away with her books rather than join in her party-loving family’s ways, and often complained about her strict upbringing (like in this letter to Roger Ascham):


“For when I am in the presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it as it were in such weight, measure and number, even so perfectly as God made the world; or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea presently sometimes with pinches, nips and bobs and other ways (which I will not name for the honour I bear them) … that I think myself in hell.”

But her quiet life wouldn’t last.  On May 21, 1553 she was married against her will to Lord Guildford Dudley, son of the Duke of Northumberland (King Edward’s chief advisor).  Her sister Katherine was also married to Lord Herbert, heir to the Earl of Pembroke, and Guildford’s sister Katherine to Henry Hastings, heir to Earl of Huntingdon.  It was a lavish ceremony, and widely perceived to be a consolidation of power since things were about to change.

In the Third Act of Succession, passed by Henry VIII and Parliament in 1544, Henry restored his “illegitimate” daughters Mary and Elizabeth to the succession, after his young son Edward.  But in 1553 Edward knew he was dying.  He was a devout Protestant like Jane, and his ardently Catholic sister Mary was his heir.  He drafted his will to leave the throne to the descendants of his aunt Mary (ie Frances and her daughters), and it was signed by 102 nobles.  Edward intended to have this declaration passed when Parliament met again in September, but he died July 6.  His death was kept a secret until Jane was told she was queen on July 9 (legend has it she wept and refused), and was taken to the Tower with her husband and officially proclaimed queen to the bewildered public on July 10.

But her claim was weak from the start.  (Legal experts of the time said a king could not contravene an Act of Parliament without passing a new one.  Plus it was pretty clear Henry’s daughter should have precedence over his great-niece).  Northumberland also made a key miscalculation when he didn’t move fast enough to capture Mary.  After years of living quietly (except for bitter quarrels with her brother over religion), she surprised everyone by escaping and putting up a stiff fight.  She was helped by the fact that the public saw her as the rightful heir, and the tide quickly turned against Queen Jane.  Mary was proclaimed queen on July 19 among much rejoicing, she entered London on August 3, and Northumberland was executed on August 22.

Mary at first was merciful to her cousin, and even released Jane’s father.  It was thought that eventually Jane would be released as well, and left to live a quiet country life with her books.  Until the Wyatt rebellion, which used Jane as a figurehead and which her father foolishly supported.  Jane was executed on February 12, 1554, a deeply sad day which sets in motion the plot of my own book…

Jane became a romantic legend after this, a Protestant martyr and “sweet young thing” (though many of her letters show that she was a pretty normal, though very precocious, sulky adolescent).  For more info on her short, complicated life, I really liked Eric Ives’s Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery (2009) and Leanda de Lisle’s The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine, and Lady Jane Grey (2008).  Jane’s sisters had equally sad lives, trapped by their situations of birth into unhappiness.

Are you interested in Jane’s sad life?  Who are some of your heroines this summer??

Posted in Former Riskies, Research | Tagged | 2 Replies

Sometimes the Internet Surprises Me (Regency Related)

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I was trying to figure out what I would blog about and I thought that, in honor of it being Wednesday (“Hump Day”) when you read this, I would find out something about camels in the Regency. So I Googeled Regency Camels. Sometimes the Internet surprises me.

The #1 Regency Camel related result?

Regency Camel Toe.

I am not kidding.

Of course I clicked. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/regency-camel-toe So should you. It’s safe for work except for the part where if you click it won’t look very work-related.

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I almost died laughing. Camel toe indeed. Pink breeches!

It Gets Better

The link above will guide you here: Regency Camel Toe. Essentially safe for work except for the not working part.

Here is a picture of a real camel.

Via Adam Foster | Codefor

You may read about Camels here:

Yup. Sometimes the internet surprises me.

Posted in Former Riskies, Frivolity, Regency, Research | Tagged , , | 2 Replies

Book Review: The Last Duel

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First some News

I just turned in my story for Midnight Scandals, a historical romance anthology with Courtney Milan and Sherry Thomas. I immediately started work on Book 5 of the My Immortals series. Now that Free Fall, my My Immortals novella is out of Kindle Select, I’ve also worked on getting it published to all other vendors. It should start showing up shortly.

Naturally with all this writing to do, I’ve been reading a lot because I can tell myself it’s practically work and almost writing! Writers need to read!

One of the many books I’ve read recently is Eric Jager’s The Last Duel. I’m really surprised I never heard about this book when it first came out in 2004. It’s exactly the sort of book I would have bought right away.

The gripping, atmospheric true story of the “duel to end all duels” in medieval France: a trial by combat pitting a knight against a squire accused of violating the knight’s beautiful young wife.

I loved this book. It’s everything I adore about history books and more. While I read the Kindle version– more about that later –I bought it in hardback for my dad, who I think will like it a lot, too and will also get my mom a Kindle copy. I’ve been pimping it to everyone. Even you. Especially YOU!

Based on extensive research in Normandy and Paris, The Last Duel brings to life a colorful, turbulent age and three unforgettable characters caught in a fatal triangle of crime, scandal, and revenge. It is at once a moving human drama, a captivating detective story, and an engrossing work of historical intrigue.

The quote sounds like it’s overblown, but you know what? It’s not. I finished this book nearly 10 days ago, and I read it steadily until I was done. I’m STILL thinking about it. At times I forgot I was reading about something that really happened. And then I remember that lives were truly at stake.

One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was the meticulous research. The duel and the circumstances surrounding it were sensational at the time and for centuries afterward. There is, therefore, an unusual amount of surviving documentation.

I fell in love a little with LeCog, the attorney for the defendant in the matter. It was plain that he was a meticulous man and quite insightful. I changed my mind once or twice about the two men, by the way. When the duel took place, I was glued to my chair, because not only did I have to know what happened, I was very much aware there was no guarantee that the outcome would be the one I hoped for.

The Kindle version was, in the main, very well put together. The footnotes actually worked, for example, in that I ended up at the right footnote and that footnote took me back to my place.

My Gripes

I have two gripes and one of them is a big one. At normal size, the images in the text were crisp and clear, but too small to read. Once I expanded them to examine maps and artwork in more detail, the images were blurry. Text in the images was unreadable.

My other gripe is that the images were in black and white. I was reading on my iPad 3, by the way, so this mattered to me a lot. Unlike print, color in an ebook does not cost a cent.

Let me say that again: color in an eBook does not cost a cent.

Those source images, many of them contemporary artwork, are in color in real life and my guess is that the original photographs were probably submitted in color, too. The image IN COLOR on the cover is also in the book. In black and white.

I would have paid extra for an eBook with those images in color and in high-resolution.

If you have any interest in the Medieval period, this is a great book to have.

Posted in Former Riskies, Reading, Research | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Replies

Passion’s Song: To The Tune of Shameless Self-Promotion

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My Very First Novel – Passion’s Song

At last, my reversion for the first novel I wrote, Passion’s Song, came through. And now you can read it. (I’m working on the POD version). Cover art by the wonderful Patricia Schmitt.

Passion’s Song was originally published in 1987. Yes. That’s right. 19 and 87. Before the internet was anything but a really neat tool for academics and DARPA. Before the World Wide Web. “Portable” computers were the size of 3 breadboxes end to end.

I was shaking after I heard the message on my answering machine tape offering to buy my book. Shaking. I had to go walk around the block just to calm down enough to think straight.

I wrote it on an Apple IIc using a nifty program called Word Juggler. I once wrote to the developer of Word Juggler about a problem I felt was a bug and he wrote me a very long personal reply explaining how hard he worked on his program. Then he called me an idiot.

It took 9 hours to print out the manuscript. NINE hours. I had to wait for a weekend to print it out. Editorial comments were actually in red pencil and queries were on special pink tearaway flags pasted to the MS page. I had to MAIL the MS and there was no overnight delivery option.

It reflects the writer I was then. I look at it now, and well. There is is. The book I wrote in 1987. Bought two weeks after my one query made it to NY. Edited to DEATH and then given back to me with instructions to “put it back the way it was.” So, yeah.

The Neo-Blurb

American orphan Isobel Rowland learns she is the illegitimate daughter of an English aristocrat only when her father at last locates her and brings her to England. Her father intends to find her a husband, and if she can catch the interest of Alexander, Marquess of Hartforde, all the better. She hopes to continue her musical studies but finds it impossible unless she masquerades as a young gentleman. Alexander’s interest in remarriage is close to nil, though he finds Miss Rowland intriguing. He is more than happy to act as patron to a promising American musician, Ian Rowland. When Alexander discovers that Ian and Isobel are the same person, their lives collide and before long, they have no choice but to marry and attempt to make a life together.

I couldn’t really read it because then I’d want to completely re-write it. Because I am not the same writer. I’ve learned a lot about writing and the business and, of course, changed as a person and a writer.

Passion’s Song is my words in 1987, and I totally own them. It’s a fun story, with an evil step-brother, a (late) wife who wasn’t very nice, a perky younger sister, and a jaded aristocrat hero with blond hair and a queue. There’s puppies, too.

All I’ve done is had it proofread and corrected some typos that were in the original. Like, somehow the copyeditor (and me!) missed that Brooks’s is s’s. I had to scan it from paper, so there were a lot of OCR errors to correct. My proofreader did an amazing, amazing job of catching OCR errors and original typos. Of course, I did my own proofing for errors with the digital display. I’ve already re-uploaded to correct a few more errors I made.

It’s $3.99, no DRM, available worldwide.

Where you can get it now:

Hopefully SW will get the book on sale at places like Sony, Diesel Books and other wonderful sellers of eBooks.

Posted in Former Riskies, Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged , , | 2 Replies