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Diane’s Beach Reads

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Amanda, Megan, Janet and I are bound for the RWA Conference this week, not exactly a “day at the beach,” but a lot of fun in its own way. Still, it did get us thinking about vacations, especially beach vacations. Instead of proceeding through our hectic lives or the hectic conference, we imagined going to the beach and sitting under a beach umbrella, listening to the waves and READING!

What books, we asked ourselves, would we pack?

In each of our blogs this week, we are going to tell you!
Starting with me.

Traveling to Atlanta today, Monday July 24, I will worry only about what book to take on the airplane. (That’s not all I’ll worry about. At the conference I’ll discover if The Mysterious Miss M wins Best Regency in The Bookseller’s Best or The National Reader’s Choice Awards. And if A Reputable Rake wins the RITA for Best Regency. Yipes!)On my return flight, I’ll likely pick one book among the many freebies we’re bound to receive.

But if I were going to the beach? I scoured my To-Be-Read piles and selected the books I’d most want to read if I could spend this week sitting under a beach umbrella. My choices are confined to friends’ books. I don’t even dare to consider widening the book pool to include all the possibilities.

Regency Books:
Lady Midnight by Amanda McCabe – “our” Amanda. I’ve had the book for ages and it is on the top of my pile and is a Booksellers Best finalist for Best Historical.
The Naked Marquis by Sally MacKenzie – I enjoyed her Naked Duke and want more!
Love is in the Heir by Kathryn Caskie – her conclusion to the Featherton sister series
To Love a Thief by Julie Ann Long – her RITA finalist for Short Historical

Others: (these are all by my pals in the Wet Noodle Posse, who are way too prolific for me to keep up)
A Rogue in a Kilt by Sandy Blair – I loved her debut, A Man in a Kilt
Run for the Money by Stephanie Feagan – Again, I loved Show Her the Money, up for Best First Book in the RITAs.
Learning Curve by Terry McLaughlin – a Harlequin Superromance I peeked into and can’t wait to finish
The Runaway Daughter by Anna DeStefano – ditto
The Mancini Marriage Bargain by Trish Morey – one of those delicious Harlequin Presents
Oh, there are so many more I could list! I could not possibly get through all of these on my beach week, but these are the ones I would pack.
(speaking of packing……did I remember everything?)

Cheers!
Diane

Stargazing

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Last week, Megan posted about birthday parties. We’re about to celebrate my oldest’s, and having it a local observatory, the Kopernik Space and Education Center.

Did you know there was an important woman astronomer during the Regency? Caroline Herschel was born in Germany, in 1750. She accompanied her brother, William Herschel, to England, to serve as his housekeeper and also his assistant, and continued to study the stars until her death in 1848.

I found this letter from Caroline to her sister and thought I’d share.

William is away, and I am minding the heavens. I have discovered eight new comets and three nebulae never before seen by man, and I am preparing an index to Flamsteed’s observations, together with a catalogue of 560 stars omitted from the British Catalogue, plus a list of errata in that publication.

William says I have a way with numbers, so I handle all the necessary reductions and calculations. I also plan every night’s observation schedule, for he says my intuition helps me turn the telescope to discover star cluster after star cluster.

I have helped him polish the mirrors and lenses of our new telesope. It is the largest in existence. Can you imagine the thrill of turning it to some new corner of the heavens to see something never before seen from earth? I actually like that he is busy with the Royal Society and his club, for when I finish my other work I can spend all night sweeping the heavens.

Sometimes when I am alone in the dark, and the universe reveals yet another secret, I say the names of my long lost sisters, forgotten in the books that record our science:

Aganice of Thessaly,
Hyptia,
Hildegard,
Catherina Hevelius,
Maria Agnesi,

–as if the stars themselves could remember. Did you know that Hildegard proposed a heliocentric universe 300 years before Copernicus? That she wrote of universal gravitation 500 years before Newton? But who would listen to her? She was just a nun, a woman.

What is our age, if that age was dark? As for my name, it will also be forgotten, but I am not accused of being a sorceress, like Aganice, and the Christians do not threaten to drag me to church, to murder me, like they did Hyptia of Alexandria, the eloquent young woman who devised the instruments used to accurately measure the position and motion of heavenly bodies.

However long we live, life is short, so I work. And however important man becomes, he is nothing compared to the stars. There are secrets, dear sister, and it is for us to reveal them. Your name, like mine, is a song.

Write soon
–Caroline

Doesn’t she sound like someone we’d like to meet? I would love to tell her that in our day, there are little girls who think it’s cool to celebrate a birthday at an observatory. I think it would make her smile.

Elena
LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, RT Reviewers’ Choice Award, Best Regency Romance
www.elenagreene.com

Regency Weather 101

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“It is commonly observed that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm” –Samuel Johnson

This past week, my town, like everyone else’s, has been in the grip of a massive heat wave. Today we are back to our usual low 90s, but yesterday peaked at 109. I dread getting my next electric bill! Anyway, with the heat and humidity the way it was, I couldn’t think about anything but the weather. Hence today’s post!

I wondered “what were the predominant weather patterns in the Regency?” (believe me, this is not something I am generally concerned about, unless I happen to need a huge storm or something for plot purposes, and even then I just generally make it up. Shhh! Don’t tell!). One thing I dug up was the fact that their weather was not much like ours in these past few weeks. They were on the tail-end of something called the Little Ice Age, which lasted approximately from the fourteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Three years of torrential rain starting in 1315, plus something to do with glaciers that I don’t understand, began a long era of unpredictable weather. The first Thames freeze came in 1607, the last in 1814. In the winter of 1794/5 the French army could march on the frozen Netherlands river on their invasion, while the Dutch fleet was fixed in ice at Den Helder harbor. In 1780, New York Harbor froze; a person could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice. On a sidenote that is interesting probably only to me, there is a theory that the denser woods caused by the colder climate is partially responsible for the superb tone of the instruments of Antonio Stradivari.

Check here for more on the Little Ice Age
And here for more on Stradivari

Another interesting thing I found was the growing popularity of the “weather journal” and memoir in the late 18th/early 19th century. It was probably something to do with Enlightenment ideas of “civilizing” nature, which segued into Romantic notions of the wild perfection of nature. A few of the tidbits:

John Locke kept a weather diary between June 1691 and May 1703, often recording two or more readings of thermometer, barometer, and wind gauge in one day!

In 1770, the Irish Quaker physician John Rutty published the surprisingly popular Chronological History of the Weather and Seasons and of Prevailing Diseases in Dublin.

In 1779, Thomas Short wrote a General Chronological History of the Air, which goes back to the biblical flood. It’s a long catalog of plagues, floods, pestilences, earthquakes, famines, and other fun events.

One of the most prolific of these “weather watchers” was the Quaker social reformer Luke Howard. He published (among others) On the Modification of Clouds (which seems to have had a great influence on Romantic visual arts) and his most famous work The Climate of London (1818–20). A few of his quotes:
“Night is 3.70 degrees warmer and day 0.34 degrees cooler in the city than in the country (which he attributes to the extensive use of fuel in the city)

“At 1:00 yesterday afternoon the fog was as dense as ever recollect to have known it..the carriages in the street dared not exceed a foot pace. At the same time, five miles from the town the atmosphere was clear and unclouded with a brilliant sun”

“The sky too belongs to the Landscape. The ocean of air in which we live and move, and in which the bolt of heaven is forged, and the frucifying rain condensed, can never be to the zealous Naturalist a subject of tame and unfeeling contemplation”

To close, I’ll give a link to an interesting site that has some antique barometers for sale, if you happen to have a few thousand dollars you’re wondering how to spend. 🙂

HEA, STAT!

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Janet’s post yesterday dovetails in nicely with what has been on my mind lately: Finishing the darn book.

I don’t mean finishing reading it, but finishing writing and editing it. See, I’ve had this Regency-set historical I’ve been editing, and last night I officially finished editing it. Until my last reader reports in with her feedback.

Like Janet, I like the quick ending. I despise epilogues, especially if there are little bundles of joy around. Not that I don’t like kids (I have one, after all), it’s that I don’t romanticize parenthood. Overweight, exhausted women who resent their husbands for sleeping through the night? Not romantic. But I digress.

I do have problems with some authors rushing too quickly to the end. Janet mentions Judith Ivory in her post, and some of Ivory’s books seem like she just wants to get out of there.

Until recently, I wondered why she just didn’t take as much careful time to craft her story at the end as she had all the way through the book.

Until recently.

I was so excited to get towards the end of my book that I totally rushed through the ending, wrapping up all sorts of plotlines in a few quick sentences. I know I’ll have to go back and flesh things out a bit, but right now? I’m just happy to be done. My last reader is starting to read the ms. today, will have feedback over the weekend, so it’s not like I have a whole lot of time off from it. But it’s enough.

Not all of you are writers, but all of you do things in your lives that you start and finish. Do you find yourselves rushing to get to the end? Delaying it as long as you can because there’s just another task waiting beyond this one? Or are you that pinnacle of perfection, taking as much time and energy–but not too much–with the end as you did the previous 95%?

Meanwhile, wish me luck this weekend with the editing. I thought I was done.

Megan
www.meganframpton.com

Happily ever after

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Borrowed from fairy tales, known as the HEA in romance–does it always work? Do you appreciate the book that ends like a slow fade on camera, moving away from h/h? Or do you prefer the full monty of explanations, apologies, tears, laughter, the whole package of loose ends and subplots tied up with a pretty ribbon , followed by an epilogue where h/h are surrounded by babies and all’s well with the world? I have to admit I can’t write endings worth a darn. I write and rewrite the last few lines, then shrug and type in The End, and put myself out of my misery (several nights in a row for a week or so).

Here’s a technique for The End which I’m rather fond of: Black Ice by Anne Stuart, where you realize the heroine is indeed going to take up with that thrillingly scruffy French psychopath. All in one sentence. Any/all of Judith Ivory’s thrilling throwaway one-sentence enders–yes, I rather like the sensation of leaping off a cliff, particularly if h/h have spent the entire book jumping off minor cliffs and are now going for the Big One, the Commitment–marriage, the final frontier. I don’t want cosiness and domesticity and the patter of tiny feet. Let the dysfunctionality thrive beyond the endpages!

Some readers got very upset about the end of Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me where the h/h married but had a dog instead of children. It was seen as breaking the rules in some strange sort of way; even stranger is that Ms. Crusie claims she wrote it that way because the book is a fairy tale (lost shoes! Princesses in towers! Yes, the elements are all there). I think the only sort of dog that appears in a fairy tale would be a magic one, with eyes that roll round and round, for instance, and guards treasure. Well, maybe there was more to the dog than we knew.

Share your favorite endings–without giving away the plot, if you can.

Janet