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Monthly Archives: December 2015

Happy December, Risky readers!  It’s been a busy month around here, with family visits and some lovely concerts (like Elena, there are aspects of Christmas that always make me feel a bit melancholy, but music is one of my favorite things about the season).  I have also had a flurry of new releases.  The latest is the 4th in my Elizabethan Mystery series, Murder at Whitehall (which takes place, of course, at Christmastime 1560).

So, how did the Elizabethans celebrate Christmas?

MurderWhitehallCoverOne thing I learned as I researched Murder at Whitehall is that the Elizabethans really, really knew how to party at the holidays! The Christmas season (Christmastide) ran 12 days, from December 24 (Christmas Eve) to January 6 (Twelfth Day), and each day was filled with feasting, gift-giving (it was a huge status thing at Court to see what gift the Queen gave you, and to seek favor by what you gave her), pageants, masquerades, dancing, a St. Stephen’s Day fox-hunt, and lots of general silliness. (One of the games was called Snapdragon, and involved a bowl of raisins covered in brandy and set alight. The players had to snatch the raisins from the flames and eat them without being burned. I think the brandy was heavily imbibed before this games as well, and I can guarantee this won’t be something we’re trying at my house this year!)

Later in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, she mostly kept Christmas at Greenwich, or sometimes at Hampton Court or Nonsuch Palace, but in the year my story is set, 1559, she spent the holiday at Whitehall in London. Elizabeth had only been queen for a year, so hers was a young Court full of high spirits. This was also one of the coldest winters in memory, so there would have been a lot of sledding and ice skating . It was fun to imagine this scene, and put my characters, Kate and her friends (including the real-life Lady Catherine Grey and her suitor Lord Hertford) into the action!

Even though there were no Christmas trees or stockings hung by the fire, I was surprised to find we would recognize many of the traditional decorations of the time. Anything that was still green in December would be used–holly, ivy, yew, bay. The Yule log was lit on Christmas Eve using a bit of last year’s log saved for the purpose. It was brought in by the men of the household, decorated with wreaths and ribbons, and set ablaze so everyone could gather around and tell tales of Christmases past.  Music, as it is now, was one of the big mood-setters of the season, and since Kate is the queen’s favorite musician I listened to many CDs of period music and imagined what she might play every day.

ElizabethIFood was also just as big a part of the holiday as it is now! Roast meats were favorites (pork, beef, chicken, fricaseed, cooked in broths, roasted, baked into pies), along with stewed vegetables and fine whit manchet bread with fresh butter and cheese. Elizabeth was a light eater, especially compared with her father, but she was a great lover of sweets. These could include candied flowers, hard candies in syrup (called suckets, eaten with special sucket spoons), Portugese figs, Spanish oranges, tarts, gingerbread, and figgy pudding. The feast often ended with a spectacular piece of sugar art called (incongrously) subtleties. In 1564, this was a recreation of Whitehall itself in candy, complete with a sugar Thames. (At least they could work off the feasting in skating and sledding…)

A couple fun reads on Christmas in this period are Maria Hubert’s “Christmas in Shakespeare’s England” and Hugh Douglas’s “A Right Royal Christmas,” as well as Alison Sim’s Food and Feast in Tudor England and Liza Picard’s “Elizabeth’s London.”  Be sure and visit my website,http://amandacarmack.com, for more Behind the Scenes history on Kate and her world, and a few Christmas traditions and recipes.  (Anyone going to try and cook the roasted peacock??)  If you’d like to give Murder at Whitehall a read, or see an excerpt, you can find it right here….

BlusetockingXmasCoverAnd And–if you are more of a Regency fan (I told you I had a flurry of new things out!), I have a little Christmas novella, The Bluestocking’s Christmas Wish!  If you’re like me, you don’t have a lot of time for deep reading this time of year, and I’ve always found a Regency Christmas novella fills the slot nicely.

What are some of your favorite holiday reads???

Limited Time Sale

Cover of Dancing in The Duke's Arms, an anthology. A couple is dancing outside. He gazes fondly at her, she is perhaps a little shy. They are outside because it is summer and who doesn't want to dance outside with handsome duke?

Dancing Dukes!

For a limited time — even more limited by the time you read this, Dancing in the Duke’s Arms is on sale for $0.99 (or the currency equivalent, less VAT). So, if you don’t have this yet, now would be the time to check out four original stories, including An Unsuitable Duchess, by Yours Truly. . . with Dukes. <grin>

Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Google Play | Kobo | All Romance

Other News

I have been frantically trying to finish My Demon Warlord, Book 7 in the My Immmortals Series. It’s in final stages and I’m hoping to get it to the copy-editor next week sometime. I hope.

That means I have had my head in demons and witches and not historicals except for when Risky Rose Lerner forced me to buy the soundtrack for Hamilton and OMG. Just… so so so wonderful. I want to fly to NY and see it. OK, so Rose didn’t actually force me but I blame her anyway.

Interestingly, in the shower this morning I ended up washing my hair and plotting Book 3 in the Sinclair Sisters Series (for fans, that’s Emily and Devon’s story). It’s my next project and it is a historical.

Holiday Wishes

I believe my next post will be in 2016 so I wish all of you the very happiest of holidays and a wonderful New Year.

ETA: The giveaway is now closed (as are cover requests–if I didn’t get to yours, see you next year!). Rube won the book!

So way back in 2013 I noticed that Booklikes was using the wrong cover for Cecilia Grant’s A Gentleman Undone: a Polish-language scholarly book on medieval history with a distinctly scholarly-book cover. And then, a meme was born: re-cover romance novels to look like academic works. The rest is history. I’ve done all my own books:

In for a PennyA Lily Among Thornssweet disordertrue pretenses

I’ve done a bunch of other people’s books:

The Corinthian by Georgette HeyerLord of Scoundrels by Loretta ChaseThe Black Moth by Georgette HeyerSecrets of a Scandalous Heiress by Theresa RomainA Lady's Lesson in Scandal by Meredith DuranThe Sergeant's Lady by Susanna FraserDark Lover by JR WardCrazy Thing Called Love by Molly O'Keefe

(See previous posts in full: 1 2)

So of course I had to do one for Listen to the Moon! Continue Reading

Posted in Giveaways | 29 Replies

I don’t know about you but I’ve become a bit jaded about Pride & Prejudice retellings. All that marital bliss, all that Darcy-Firth-wet shirt angsty goodness, but none of the wit and snarkiness of our dear Jane’s original. Until that is, I was offered, and read, an advance copy of Prejudice & Pride by Lynn Messina. Reader, I loved this book. It has style and wit and funny stuff in spades, and it’s just plain clever. As the blurb says:

PPYou know Darcy: rich, proud, standoffish, disapproving, one of the greatest romantic heroes of all time. But you don’t know this Darcy because THIS Darcy is a woman.

In Prejudice & Pride, Lynn Messina’s modern retelling with a gender-bendy twist, everything is vaguely familiar and yet wholly new. Bingley is here, in the form of Charlotte “Bingley” Bingston, an heiress staying at the Netherfield hotel on Central Park, as is Longbourn, transformed from an ancestral home into a perennially cash-strapped art museum on the edge of the city. Naturally, it employs an audacious fundraiser with an amused glint in his eye called Bennet.

And about the author:Lynn Messina is the author of 14 novels, including Fashionistas, which has been translated into 16 LM headshot 12_15languages, and The Love Takes Root series of Regency romances. Her essays have appeared in Self, American Baby and the Modern Love column of The New York Times. She’s also a regular contributor to the Times Motherlode blog. Lynn lives in New York City with her husband and sons. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Lynn, welcome to the Riskies. You’ve written Regency Romance and several other genres, but why did you take on P&P?
Because I had the idea. When I saw Bride and Prejudice, I was struck by how rude and unpleasant the Elizabeth character was. It seemed to me almost as if the writer had swapped the characters. And when I noticed how neatly their names flipped—Fitzwilliam Darcy becoming Darcy Fitzwilliam—I got really excited. I went home and immediately wrote up a pitch for my agent, who just as quickly shot it down. So I put the idea aside and honestly forgot about it. That was in 2004. Then, recently, I had a nice run with Regency romances, and remembered the idea and thought, Hold on, I can do it myself now.

Which is your favorite character in Austen’s? And in your own?
Elizabeth because she’s so clever and undaunted. As someone who’s sometimes clever and frequently daunted, I admire those traits greatly. In my version, Bingley is easily my favorite. She was an absolute delight to write—funny and frivolous yet smart and astute. In the early drafts, that was actually a problem—she was a little too likable. Obviously, she has to be more amiable than Darcy, but I couldn’t have every reader, including myself, wondering why Bennet doesn’t fall in love with her.

How have die-hard Austen purists responded?
For the most part, the response has been very positive, so I have to assume no die-hard Austen purists have weighed in yet. In 2010, I wrote a mashup of Little Women and vampires, and a woman posted on her blog that when she’d heard about the book, she wanted to chop off my fingers. So I’m prepared for the worst.

What have you learned most from Austen about writing?
Honestly, the thing I learned most was to relax a little. When Austen’s characters speak to each other, they just speak. That is, they converse back and forth without the insertion of attributions or what I like to call tasks. In my books, one character is always doing something while she’s talking—say, pouring tea—and the conversation is interspersed with descriptions of this process. I can’t tell you the hours I’ve lost trying to come up with new tasks. (This partly explains my affinity for historical romance: It’s always teatime in Regency England.)

And about relationships?
That they’re always more complex than I give them credit for and that sometimes in order to remain emotionally true to a character you have to deny yourself a little emotional satisfaction. Naturally, I’m talking about Wickham and how genteelly and calmly Elizabeth registers her disgust of him when they meet after the wedding. I want her to pop him in the nose or at the very least give him a cutting set-down, but it’s not just about her. It’s also the complex web of familial relationships.

Which is your favorite Austen?
I want to say Persuasion because I identify so much with Anne Elliot and the scene where Captain Wentworth writes her a letter while listening to her conversation is one of my most favorite moments in any book ever. But I’ve been reading and rereading Pride & Prejudice at regular intervals since I was thirteen, so clearly that’s the sentimental favorite.

Would you consider another modern interpretation?
I would never say no to anything if I got an idea. But I’m been ransacking the classics for a while now. After Little Vampire Women, there was an updated version of Dickens’s Bleak House, which replaced the court case that never ends and ruins every life it touches with a movie option that never ends and ruins every life it touches. (Um, can you tell I had a movie options that went on for almost a decade?)

What’s next for you?
Omigod, I ask myself that every day. I’m really not sure. I have an idea for something modern that rifts on Emily Post’s Etiquette book from the 1920, which I read because etiquette stuff fascinates me. But the book also gave me an idea for another Regency, so maybe I’ll work on that next. But I’ve had an idea for a screenplay kicking around in my head for a while, so maybe I’ll do that.


Lynn is giving away three digital copies (US only) and one hardback copy (worldwide) and you have various options to win a copy by participating. Easy, fun, and probably even Catherine de Bourgh, assuming she had the taste, could manage it. Please ask Lynn questions, or, since it’s (still, just) December, and we celebrated Jane’s birthday on December 16, answer the question I asked Lynn: What have you learned from Austen about writing and/or about relationships?

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