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When I think of risky Regencies….

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Hello! This is Laurie Bishop. Great cover, Cara!
I’ve been reading everyone else’s comments and trying to decide how I would qualify what makes a Regency risky. I find it isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. But since I have to come up with something 😉 , to me a risky Regency is one in which the heroine, and/or the hero, do something extraordinary for their sex/time/station—or must act in an unexpected way to address their dilemma. Also, in addition to this, they must do or be in this way without violating the attitudes of the time.Hence the trickiness.Let us say that I want my heroine to be courageous and able to take command to save the family estate. She might come to the traumatic conclusion that she must ruin herself by becoming the mistress of Snidely Whiplash; and she can acknowledge this by having all of the appropriate thoughts and feelings about what she feels forced to do. But…she will not use language that a gently reared young lady does not use, and she will otherwise behave with all the decorum within her power that she has been raised to use. And she will not know something that a gently reared young lady does not know.

Of course, if she is not a gently reared young lady, we have a different bucket of peas. She will have the perspective of a farmer’s daughter, a soldier’s daughter, or what have you. And that can be quite different. Even middle class daughters were different than the daughters of the highest peers. In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the Bennett daughters walked to town alone. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s daughter would never been allowed to do such a thing.

In my first Regency, THE BEST LAID PLANS, the heroine was a very independent-thinking American heiress who was not raised in high English society. She was therefore allowed to be a little outrageous—and was a ball to write!

Laurie

WHEN HORSES FLY Oct. 2005
LORD RYBURN’S APPRENTICE Jan. 2006

Cara’s Cover!

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Here’s my cover! Hmm…does anyone want to talk about covers? Good covers? Bad covers? How you can have a cover that all your author friends tell you is really good, and you should be really grateful, but somehow you still whine about it? (Aw, come on, don’t say I’m the only one!) 🙂

Cara
Cara King, www.caraking.com
MY LADY GAMESTER — Signet Regency, 11/05

What are your favorite Regencies?

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So — what are some of your favorite Regencies? I’m not asking for a definitive list, just list any that occur to you. Are they particularly risky ones, or classic Regencies, or does it vary?

I love many many Regencies, but included on my favorites list would be:

— “Sweet and Twenty” by Joan Smith. I suppose it’s risky in a way, in that there’s a lot of politics involved, and perhaps less romance than in a “classic” Regency. But for an older Regency, I wouldn’t exactly call it unusual (except that I like it so much!)

— “Poetic Justice” by Alicia Rasley. Again, this isn’t a book with just a romance plot — there are a lot of other things going on. But again, I’m not sure it screams “different!” (And if it did, wouldn’t that be odd? My other books would be so annoyed when they were trying to sleep.)

— “An Ideal Bride” by Nonnie St. George. Stylistically this is somewhat risky, I think — it’s delightfully weird in some ways, almost farcical at times, and occasionally just a tiny bit surreal. I think she made a big splash with this book partly because it was a bit unusual — but it’s so very funny (and sexy too) that that alone could have made the book so popular!

Well, there are three from me. How about you?

Cara
—
Cara King, www.caraking.com
MY LADY GAMESTER — Signet Regency, 11/05

Risk-taking…and a few mistakes

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Risk-taking . . . and a few mistakes

Hi, it’s Megan Frampton, another dangerous risk-taker here. I have many, many theories about what makes a traditional Regency different from a Regency-set historical (not all of which I’ll share, thank your lucky stars), and when I wrote A Singular Lady (which comes out October 4, mark it on your calendars), I thought I was writing a Regency-set historical. I have since figured out I did not, not least of which is because Signet bought my book to publish it as a trad.
What makes my Regency different from the pelisse-and-Almack’s crowd? Well, first of all, my heroine is out to marry for money. Her father’s reputation means she is not allowed into Almack’s, she is not classically beautiful, and she swears on occasion. My hero wears scuffed boots, worn clothes, and hates the social scene. Plus they have sex before they’re married, and she doesn’t yelp about how much it hurts the first time.
Oh, and I screwed up my hero’s title, big-time, which means I’ll be getting plenty of finger-wagging mail from folks who know a lot more about titles than I do. But I hope people enjoy the story, because it’s fiction, after all.
I’m looking forward to meeting my fellow risky Authors, and whomever stumbles across our blog. Enjoy, post, share, discuss!

Megan

Another Risky Regency Writer here

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Hi, I’m Janet Mullany and my book Dedication comes out next month. What makes my book a risky Regency? It’s actually like a blueprint for what not to have in a romance:
1. Older, almost celibate hero.
2. Older and not at all celibate heroine.
3. Character who is a writer.
4. Character who is an artist.
5. The higher in rank my characters are, the worse they behave.
6. Unless they’re French.
7. And for a regency, sex.
Frankly I’m just confused by what makes a traditional regency. I always thought it meant a short book with no sex and Mr. and Ms. Middle America wearing their regency costumes on the cover, smiling idiotically. Lots of regency slang, descriptions of clothes, aristos being polite in drawing rooms, and the only balls mentioned were the ones that include dancing.
But let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
I’m gonna see if I can upload my cover art now.