Holidays of the season are right behind us — Happy Hanukah — and just ahead — Merry Christmas. Please lets share with each other a gift of the season. Tell us your favorite holiday romance, historical, contemporary and/or Paranormal. I’ll give you one of each. The Regency is first.
Riskies own Diane Gaston’s ‘Twelfth Night’s Tale” in the anthology MISTLEOE KISSES. I love the story and from it I learned it’s easier to write a novella if you start in the “middle” of the relationship.
Contemporary has to be the novella ‘December Wedding’ Emelle Gamble’s final pages of the Molly Harper story. A wonderfully happy ending for two characters who worked had to get there. It’s a stand alone novella available in all formats including audio.
My paranormal choice is in the anthology IRRESISTIBLE FORCES, the novella ‘Winterfair Gifts’ by Lois McMaster Bujold. Not a Hannukah or Christmas story but Winterfair, on a far away planet, is cast in a similar holiday tradition. Like Gamble’s novella this one is a gift to readers ending a two book arc in typical Miles Vorkosigan style with chaos, mystery and humor.
It is with extremely mixed feelings that I announce that this will be my last post as a Risky, at least for the foreseeable future. This is a wonderful community of authors and readers, and it’s been a privilege to be a part of it. I’ll miss this place. But my writing is going in a new direction, one that I’m excited to embark upon.
Around this time last year, I developed a bad case of burnout as a writer. I took some time off to reflect on the current state of career and my hopes for the future. After a few months of soul-searching (and some time off to travel around Europe!), I came to the conclusion that what I really wanted to do was switch genres from romance to fantasy, and that the only thing holding me back was fear of change.
So I’m currently hard at work on what I hope will be my first fantasy novel. It’s urban fantasy with romantic elements, and it reflects my love of baseball, American history, and TV shows like Doctor Who, Sleepy Hollow, The Librarians, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My goal is to write something big, crazy, smart, and, above all, fun!
I’m sure I’ll still be reading a ton of romance, and I expect my fantasy novels will contain strong romance arcs, since there’s few things I love more than a story of two people falling in love as they work together for a common cause or to fight a shared enemy. Thanks again for welcoming me as a part of the Risky community!
It has sections on types of tea, judging tea quality, and the making to tea, all of which is great fodder for scenes in books where you need someone to be doing something nonconsequential while events unfold. So while the hero might expound upon snuff, the heroine (or indeed the hero, as men like tea, too!) can talk about tea, or have a calamity where the housekeeper has purchased adulterated tea, or talk about the blending of tea (of which he also gives advice).
I found his opinions about black verses green tea interesting as well. Black tea, he maintains, is injurious to those with coughs, asthma, or other issues with their lungs. In particular, he believes bohea (the lowest quality black tea) will particularly add to your suffering if drunk while ill with any such issues. Green tea on the other hand he says is “of great disadvantage to shattered constitutions, and those that are worn down by long and continued fever.”
What I find most interesting though is his lumping tea in with drugs and warning people not to consume too much of it.
So happy tea drinking! Is there any tidbit of tea history you’d like to share? Please let us know what your favorite obscure tea fact is in the comments. Or just talk about your favorite kind. Mine is Numi’s Basil Mint Pu-Erh, which they have sadly discontinued. I went a little nutty when they did and bought 20 (100 tea bag) cases. It will be a sad, sad day at my house when those bags are gone…
Long time visitors to the Riskies know I have a complicated relationship with Christmas. I detest the whole commercial aspect and I also despise the idea that the season magically fixes things. However, I embrace the season in my own way—which is to accept the darkness as well as the light.
Each year, I think of people who are lonely, and of the various wars, large and small, raging through families and countries. Right now it feels as if the whole world is bleeding, and it seems that every day brings more heartbreak.
I know some people like to look away, to lose themselves in a blaze of Christmas lights, of shopping, even of obsessing about “not being ready” for Christmas. (What does “ready” really mean?)
My own way of coping is to allow the sadness in as well as the joy. Music is one of the ways I can stay in touch with both.
This year I found another version of the Coventry Carol, arranged by Ola Gjeilo, performed by the CORO Vocal Artists. Its haunting melody helps me find that stillness where I can feel the heartbreak and then let it lead me toward whatever healing action I can take for myself and others.
On the more joyful side and in the spirit of the Regency, here’s a version of the Gloucester Wassail and the Holly and the Ivy by the Waverley Consort, with assorted interesting Georgian and Regency imagery. The Gloucester Wassail was first published in the Oxford Book of Carols in 1928, but it believed to date back to the Middle Ages, so it could definitely have been part of a Regency Christmas. An early mention of The Holly and the Ivy is in a book dated 1823, and the lyrics are reprinted in an 1861 collection, A Garland of Christmas Carols, where it is stated that it was found in “an old broadside, printed a century and a half since” (around 1711), so this is another carol that our Regency characters might have sung.
Here’s the refrain from “The Gloucester Wassail”:
Wassail! wassail! all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing bowl, we’ll drink to thee.
If you enjoyed this post, you may want to visit some of my posts from past years about traditional Christmas music that hasn’t been used to sell cars, watches, or anything else:
I’ll bet if I say “Robert Adam” most readers and writers of Regency romance will know that he was a famous architect who greatly influenced architecture, interior design, and furniture design of the times–mostly Georgian times, but I imagine my Regency characters in houses designed by Adam all the time.
On my England trip last year, though, I learned of another architect of the same period, even more prolific than Adam–John Carr.
John Carr designed Basildon Park, one of the houses we visited on the Duke of Wellington Tour and one I blogged about here shortly after. He, too, was a neoclassicist like Adam.
If you saw this, would you guess it was by Robert Adam?
It’s an interior of Basildon Park by John Carr.
Carr was born in Yorkshire and decided to remain there rather than settle in London, thinking there was plenty of wealth in the area to support his business. He lived into his eighties and produced an incredible number of projects.
Tabley House is another house designed by John Carr similar to Basildon Park.
One characteristic of both these houses is that you have to go up stairs to reach the front entrance which is on the first floor, not the ground floor. I thought that was rather grand when we visited Basildon Park.
In my current work in progress, Genna’s story in the Scandalous Summerfields series, I used Basildon Park as my model for Summerfield House. It was especially helpful to find floor plans online.
There was one famous house that both John Carr and Robert Adam designed–Harewood House near Leeds.
Carr designed the building and Robert Adam, the interiors. Adam also slightly altered Carr’s exterior, including internal courtyards.
Who is up for visiting all these houses? Don’t you sometimes wish we really had a Transporter like in Star Trek?
Riskies own Diane Gaston’s ‘Twelfth Night’s Tale” in the anthology MISTLEOE KISSES. I love the story and from it I learned it’s easier to write a novella if you start in the “middle” of the relationship.
Molly Harper story. A wonderfully happy ending for two characters who worked had to get there. It’s a stand alone novella available in all formats including audio.
Not a Hannukah or Christmas story but Winterfair, on a far away planet, is cast in a similar holiday tradition. Like Gamble’s novella this one is a gift to readers ending a two book arc in typical Miles Vorkosigan style with chaos, mystery and humor.
