OMG, I can’t believe I almost forgot it’s Tuesday!!  I have two projects with revisions that just landed on my desk, plus the packing saga continues.  But today I have a new book out!!!  Book one in my new Elizabethan Mystery series (writing as Amanda Carmack), Murder at Hatfield House.  (see it on Amazon here or visit my website for excerpts, historical info, etc)

In the meantime, I am having an Elizabethan Week all week at my own blog!  Visit today to vote on your favorite Elizabeth on film….

Do you read many historical mysteries??  What are your favorites?

So I am finally settled in the new place (sort of–all the books are out, so that counts as settled in to me!), and the Internet finally got up and running yesterday, so I am getting back in the online routine.  And I have winners!

The winner of Love Letters is… Jo’s Daughter!

The winner of The Secret Wife of George IV is…Cyn209!

The winner of The Art of Romance is…Amanda Ward!

The winner of the fabulous Lady and the Highwayman is…Anna Bowlins!

And a copy of Running From Scandal to Stefanie D!

Congrats to all!  Email me your snail mail address at amccabe7551 AT yahoo, and I will get them sent out.

I found a few other duplicate books while I was unpacking, so I will probably have another giveaway soon.  And I’ll be back next week to talk about not one but TWO Christmas novellas I have out this year….

I am in the middle of piles of boxes here, and trying to figure out how to get all my shoes packed–AND I have a WIP due at the end of next month!  So, since i am brain-frozen, and have lots of stuff I need to get rid of after the big clean-out, let’s have a giveaway.  Here’s what I have:

Love Letters by Antonia Fraser (lots of lovely paintings, as well as beautiful excerpts from famous love letters)

The Secret Wife of King George IV by Diane Hager (a novel about Mrs. Fitzherbert)

The Art of Romance (a great book of vintage Harlequin covers)

And last, but certainly not least, a DVD of The Lady and the Highwayman–Hugh Grant (in a mullet hairdo!) plays a Barbara Cartland hero.  Seriously, people, you must see this…

I’ll also throw in a copy of Running from Scandal, since I just got my author copies yesterda!

Just leave your name and email, plus which book you want, in the comments, and I will pick winners at random later this week!

So what is going on around here??  Still revising, still WIPing, still packing for next weekend’s move.  Seriously, I hate moving!!!  Where did all this stuff come from?  How will I ever get it all packed?  I need one of those Regency yard sales Gail talked about a few days ago….

In the meantime, I’m reading a very interesting book, Sara Wheeler’s O My America! Six Women and Their Second Acts in the New World, all about women in history who found new lives and new beginnings in America.  I always love histories of women who lived their lives outside the lines.  It includes Fanny Trollope (mother of Anthony, she wrote a bestseller that has a scathing review of American manners and craziness…I’d love to see what she had to say about the government right now), actress Fanny Kemble, who married a Southern plantation owner and wrote moving about the tragedy and complexity of slavery, famous traveler Isabella Bird–and Jane Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubback, a woman I knew very little about.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about her:

“Catherine Anne Hubback (1818 – 25 February 1877) was an English novelist, and the eighth child and fourth daughter of Sir Francis Austen (1774-1865), and niece of Jane Austen.

She began writing fiction to support herself and her three sons after her husband John Hubback was institutionalized with a breakdown. She had copies of some of her aunt’s unfinished works and, in 1850, remembering Austen’s proposed plot, she wrote The Younger Sister, a completion of Jane Austen’s The Watsons. In the next thirteen years, she completed nine more novels.

She emigrated to California, USA in 1870. In the autumn of 1876 she removed to Gainesville, Prince William Co, VA, where she died in 1877. Her novels, which enjoyed some popularity in their time, are no longer well-known. Her most important contribution is to literary history where she, and later family, perpetuated Austen family history.”

But it sounds like there was so much more to her life.  The 8th of 11 children of Frank, one of the Navy brothers, she was born the year after Aunt Jane died.  She married a respectable, prosperous attorney, had 3 sons, gained a reputation as a good hostess–then her comfortable, expected life shattered when her husband went insane and had to be committed to an asylum.  Catherine, left with her sons to raise, took to writing (it seems someone said “Hey, you remember Aunt Jane?  She had this unfinished manuscript.  Why don’t you finish it?” and she did her own version of The Watsons to start).  She wrote vast Victorian tomes of about 800 pages, which I have never read or even seen, and she herself knew they weren’t all that great.  But they put food on the table and sent her sons to school, which is all she wanted.  When her eldest son moved to San Francisco, then a half rough-and-tumble frontier town and half up-and-coming cosmopolitan city, with a strong Spanish flavor, she went too.  And she made a whole new life for herself in a whole new place.  (There’s a good post about her on the Austen Authors blog, too)

It looks like there is a volume of her letters, An Englishwoman in California, which I’m going to look for.  And now back to revising…

Who are some adventurous women you admire??