Once again, my life seems to be taking on a theme (though not on purpose!). This week the theme is Princesses, both fairy-tale and not-so-much.

Last week, of course, saw the 10th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana on August 31st. I was always something of a Diana-phile. The royal wedding happened when I was a little kid, and it was my first taste of “romance” (oh, the slippery slope! It started with a tiara…). I remember snuggling with my mom on the couch in the dark early morning hours to watch Diana make her way up the aisle of St. Paul’s with that monster train. (I then played Dress-Up Princess with my mom’s bathrobe and a bedsheet for days after, though really ‘princess’ never supplanted pirate/archaeologist/ballerina in my career plans). It was so completely enchanting, and that sparkly storybook atmosphere of it all just made the sordid fall all the sadder. And 10 years ago (was it really that long ago?) I again got up in the dark early morning to watch much more tragic pomp and pageantry (and those sad little boys) on the TV.

Recently I read Tina Brown’s dirt-dishing book The Diana Chronicles, which left no gossipy stone unturned. Majorly dysfunctional families, tragic ignorance on all sides, the worst judgment in men I have ever seen –it was a train wreck, for sure, but it kept me turning the pages all night. A very sad story indeed.

And, tonight, I’m going with a friend and her two daughters to see the Disney Princesses on Ice! I’m probably just as excited as them because (confession time) I love Disney movies. Especially Beauty and the Beast, with Belle wandering the village with her nose in a book. These same girls and I went last summer to see a road show of the B&B musical, and they wore their yellow tulle Belle dresses. I was jealous, though I have a large Disney princess pillow I lean on while I’m writing that is just as nice. Tonight they’re coming dressed as Snow White and Cinderella (maybe–the younger girl keeps changing her mind. Cinderella or Jasmine? Or Belle again?). There will undoubtedly be junk food and caffeine galore, vast quantities of princess merch, and a fabulous time had by all. (And, after all that sugar and grease, there’ll be hell to pay at bedtime, but I will be gone by then!). It’s a striking contrast between “real” princesshood, and Disney princesshood.

When I browse the romance book shelves, too, I often find myself drawn to titles with “princess” or “prince” in them. I do enjoy a good royal fantasy, though I haven’t yet had an idea for a “princess” book of my own. What about you? Do you like princess stories? And what’s your favorite Disney movie? (C’mon–you can tell me…)

So, I’ve been having computer woes all week (which explains the plain-vanilla, pic-free post!). Reading email quickly at work, or trekking to the library or my parents’ house to “borrow” computers has shown me how sadly addicted I am to the Internet. But not being able to peruse Go Fug Yourself or The Orlando Bloom Files has given me more time for reading!

And my reading this week took on a distinct theme, though not on purpose–they just happened to be the books I grabbed at the library after reading email. The theme was “Dysfunctional Families in Times of Great Historical Upheaval.” Or “Hoydenish Women From Dysfunctional Families, etc.” Two great books that I was really sorry to see end!

The first was Janet Todd’s Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation. This was published in 2003, and I’m surprised I missed it before! I enjoyed Todd’s bios of Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn, and coming from an Irish family I love tales of Irish history. Margaret and Mary King were the daughters of an immensely wealthy Ascendancy family. Their mother, Caroline. was a great heiress in her own right, and when she married she held her own vast estate at Mitchelstown (it didn’t pass to her husband). Caroline was friends with Queen Charlotte, and lived part of the year at Windsor. The Kings were neighbors of the famed Lennox sisters from Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats, the Duchess of Leinster, Lady Louisa Connolly, and Lady Sarah Napier. Strangely, considering her conservative leanings, Caroline hired Mary Wollstonecraft as her daughters’ governess for a time, which would have a powerful impact on their future lives.

Margaret, the eldest daughter, married an earl, despite being tall and plain. Mary was growing into a beauty, and all seemed well for the Kings for a while. Until 1798. Margaret was a fervent admirer of the United Irishmen (led by Wolfe Tone and the Duchess of Leinster’s son Edward Fitzgerald), writing pamphlets, hosting meetings, and later hiding fugitives in her cellar. Her brother George, meanwhile, was a loyalist officer known even in those violent times for being particularly atrocious. After the Rising failed, Margaret left her husband and lived with a lover in Italy for the rest of her life.

Mary, meanwhile, grew into more of a, er, domestic rebel. She had an affair with a cousin (a married cousin!), got pregnant, and tried to elope. She was hauled back by her parents and locked away in the country. When her lover came after her, her father shot him and ended up on trial for murder. Shocking!!!

I’ve long wanted to write a story set during the 1798 Rising, but it’s hard for me to see how to make it a romance. How to find a plausible HEA in the midst of so much violence? I’m not sure the King sisters could help me much with that, but they were fascinating.

The second book I read was Adrian Tinniswood’s The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in 17th Century England. Tinniswood also wrote the very good By Permission of Heaven, about the Great Fire, and he certainly knows his time period (I’d also love to write a Restoration story someday…). The Verneys were a large, rowdy, wealthy family who were also (luckily for us!) packrats, who saved over 30,000 letters, documents of the Civil War/Restoration period, which was the family’s heyday. Tinniswood’s style is very readable, and by relating these very complex times to one family, one set of characters, he makes it easy to follow.

The Verneys were also a varied lot. The patriarch, a dashing military officer, died in battle as standard bearer for Charles I. He left a stodgy heir (who waffled between king and Parliament before just running off to France for the duration); 1 ne’er-do-well and very annoying son who spent his life in and out of jail, begging his brother for money and marrying and abandoning women (I really hated him!); and 1 son who died at Drogheda. Plus a passel of unruly daughters.

This book had a little of everything! Pirate uncles, father/son conflict, madness (an heiress wife who started wandering around town taking her clothes off and laughing), dynastic marriages, a wife who fought for her exiled husband’s estate, and sometimes even tender love. Above all, the women were fascinating. There were a lot of them, and few were well-behaved. There were elopements (at least 3), an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, an aunt with a (gasp!) Catholic husband, a marriage in Fleet prison, another aunt who got into fistfights with her husband in public innyards. It’s stories like this that make me dispute whenever someone says “That would never have happened back then!” because it seems almost everything happened to someone at sometime. 🙂

This is a lot of info, I know, but I tend to get carried away by books I enjoy! And I felt like I really came to know the King sisters and the Verney bunch. When I put the books aside, I found myself wondering what they would be up to next! That’s the sign of great non-fiction for me, and I hope I can learn to put in just that sort of humanity and truth in my own characters. Though Margaret King and Tom Verney might be too eccentric to be believed in fiction!!

Who are some of your favorite “characters” in history? Can anyone offer me advice in plotting out a good Irish romance?? And be sure and send Good Vibes to my computer!

1) Tell us about Scandal’s Daughter! What inspired this book?

First of all, thank you ladies for having me on Risky Regencies. I love this blog! To answer your question, in Scandal’s Daughter, Sebastian, Earl of Carleton, promises his dying godfather he will find a husband for his childhood friend in three months or marry her himself. Sebastian quickly becomes the most determined matchmaker in England.

Gemma is the daughter of a notorious femme fatale. She doesn’t believe any respectable man will marry her, so she chooses to run her grandfather’s estate rather than enter the matrimonial mart. Her entire identity is bound up in being the honorary Squire. But her grandfather wants her married and provided for before he dies and he hires a land agent to take over Gemma’s duties. She desperately wants to regain her position on the estate, but in the meantime, Sebastian comes back into her life and she’s torn. I think what inspired me to write this book, though I didn’t know it at the time, was a similar upheaval in my own life. I recognized at the start of my marriage that I couldn’t continue as a corporate lawyer working crazy hours and bring up my children the way I wanted. Thus, a career as a writer was born! But so much of my identity was bound up in my career as a lawyer, it was a real struggle for me to come to terms with not having that any more. I learned that it’s who you are inside, not what you do, that counts. And I hope that’s what my heroine learns along the way, too.

2) We’ve heard you’re a great researcher! Were there any challenges in researching for this book? Any new or suprising historical facts you discovered?

Oh, where did you hear that? LOL Most of my research never makes it into a book. I try very hard to get the details right and I love delving into etymology–the history of words. All sorts of things came up in Scandal’s Daughter. For instance, I intended at first to base my heroine’s mother on Jane Digby, an intrepid Lady of Quality who never really fitted into London Society and ended up running away, eventually marrying a Bedouin prince. So I read about her fascinating life, but then I decided I wanted this wonderful character on stage, so I brought Sybil back from her travels (witha toy-boy in tow!) and she plays a significant role in the book. And there are always a myriad small details, like whether Japanese porcelain had entered England at the time my book was set, to the history of medieval stained glass.

3) What are some of your favorite sources?

Online, I love the Georgian Index http://www.georgianindex.net/fd/index.html#TOPand I use the UK National Trust site a lot to scope out locations:http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace.htm I have a good library of reference books which I’m adding to all the time. One I absolutely love is ‘Regency Style’ by Steven Parissien, which my wonderful writer friend Anna Campbell gave me. It’s visually stunning, and goes through a Regency house, item by item. It has sections devoted to staircases and wallpaper and bathrooms, so it’s incredibly useful. I regularly use Debrett’s ‘The Stately Homes of Britain’ and Carolly Erickson’s ‘Our Tempestuous Day’. I always read the background on the year in which my book is set in OTD before I begin, so I’m aware of any political or social issues that might affect my characters as the story unfolds.Still, there’s never enough time for research!

4) Tell us what’s “risky” or different from the norm about this book!

Gemma and Sebastian actually discuss the possibility of pregnancy before they make love the first time. And Gemma uses contraception, so I thought that was pretty risky! I’d seen so many romances where the couple fall into bed with no thought for the consequences that I wanted to do something different. I was worried an editor might want me to take it out, but my editor is very cool and didn’t even mention it. However, I don’t mean to criticize books where the heroine is swept away by passion. Of course, it happened all the time! I just relate a lot more to someone who does worry about the consequences and takes care of them as far as she can, given the circumstances and the era. It wouldn’t work in every book, but the discussion actually heightened the conflict in Scandal’s Daughter, so I felt justified putting it in.

5) What is it about the Regency that attracts you,makes you want to set your books in it?

Undoubtedly, it’s the wit. I’ve always loved that dry English sense of humour, the banter between hero and heroine that works so well in the Regency setting. And I love the subtext–all the things the characters can’t say but they can imply a great deal by their actions and what they do say,which is always fun for a writer.

6) What’s it like living in Australia? Is there a large romance community there?

I love Australia. I’m absolutely passionate about our wonderful lifestyle. I’m a real beach girl, so it’s great to be an hour’s drive from some of the best beaches in the world. The romance community here is not large by US standards, but the romance writing community is incredibly tight and supportive. There’s no spite or overt jealousy (or if there is, I’ve never come across it). I think it’s a lot to do with our veteran members, who are endlessly patient with newcomers and do so much to assist fledgling writerswith their careers. Authors like Anne Gracie and Trish Morey set the tone,and I’m very grateful for that.

7) Tell us what’s next for you!

My next book is currently scheduled for September 2008. It’s another Regency-set historical, about a duke who accidentally steals a lady’s erotic diary. It’s set against a background of political upheaval, when Liverpool declared a state of emergency and people were being locked up without trial for sedition. My heroine’s brother is a country vicar thrown in jail for aiding suspected arsonists. She threatens to expose government secrets by publishing her diary if the authorities don’t release him. My hero, the duke, steals what he thinks is that diary, only it turns out to contain the heroine’s secret erotic fantasies. I had a lot of fun with that one!

Be sure and comment on Christine’s post for a chance to win an autographed copy of Scandal’s Daughter! Winner will be announced Monday…

First of all, happy anniversary to my parents! They celebrated their 36th yesterday (that is them at their high school prom–I kind of wish my mom still had that dress, it looks so “Regency”!).

So, I am back at work this week, yet wishing I was still on vacation! Especially a great vacation that involves costumed guides and pretty carriages, apple cider, and fun writing friends. I had a wonderful time visiting Risky Diane, Deb Marlowe, and Michelle Willingham (both of them will be visiting RR very soon!). Williamsburg was a blast, as was Jamestown Settlement (where we got to tour the ships and wander their huge new museum–not to mention their huge new gift shop) and Jamestown Island. Seeing that place, so marshy and tiny, just emphasized the fact that, in many ways, those first settlers were a bunch of nincompoops (though, after seeing the movie The New World, nincompoops who look a lot like Colin Farrell and Christian Bale!). But I can’t help admiring that vast spirit of adventure and curiosity (and greed) that would make a person pack themselves into an itsy little wooden ship and launch themselves into the Atlantic, heading out for a new, strange place using a compass and some string to find their way.

In Williamsburg, they were featuring a reenactment program called “Revolutionary City,” depicting the fall of the royal government. I was hoping for some riots, maybe a bonfire or two, but it seemed to be mostly the royal governor riding around town in his fancy carriage (which we couldn’t ride in!) giving speeches. Great clothes, though. And I bought a hat to go with my costume for next year’s Beau Monde soiree at RWA (it pays to think ahead!).

Then I had to go home. But first, more fun! Thanks to the hurricance, air traffic was backed up, and I got to sit on the plane for over two hours before we took off. For a fearful flyer, this is not good. Too much time to worry. I distracted myself with one of the many books I bought in Virginia–Alan Haynes’ Sex in Elizabethan England. This was a fun book, not very long but full of all the scandal highlights of the late 16th century. The writing style made me wonder if it was a rather rambling university lecture transcribed into a book, as it had several asides with no info at all to explain them (like “not long after that lamentable fracas at Mrs. Bull’s…”, which, if you didn’t already know Christopher Marlowe was killed at Mrs. Bull’s lodging house in that year, would be meaningless. They could have at least had some footnotes). Then I read Vogue.

I’m sure you’ll be hearing lots more about my book purchases in the next few weeks, as I work my way through them! And more of the historical tidbits we gleaned from the tours (ask Diane about printing presses!!).

What would your ideal vacation be like?

(And don’t forget to join us this weekend for Christine Wells’s interview! Her debut book from Berkley, Scandal’s Daughter, is out next month…)

Greetings, everyone! Amanda, reporting from hot and sunny Virginia. I’m here until Monday, but Diane and I have already been having loads of fun touring everything historical we can find–and hitting every gift shop (the most important part, of course!)

Yesterday, it was Jamestown, touring the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery (trying to figure out how Balthazar and Bianca, the hero and heroine of my “Caribbean” romance, are going to get it on in that tiny berth), wandering the fort, and exploring the huge new museum where I got to ooh and aah over things like Elizabethan lutes and a recreated 17th century London street. I wanted to get one of the tour guides to let the ship slip its berth and head out for a cruise, but no one seemed willing to take that chance…

In the evening, we met Harlequin Historical author Michelle Willingham for an “authentic colonial dinner” at the King’s Arms Tavern in Williamsburg, where we closed the place down drinking apple cider and listening to lute music. It’s going to just be a “Harlequin festival” all week here, since Deb Marlowe is coming in this evening (and I hope she is also prepared for gift shop mania! Maybe I should say “gifte shoppe,” since every sign seems to add e’s to the end of every word here!).

We’re off to Williamsburg now! I need to get a tricorn hat and maybe some tankards. I’m sure Diane will share more of our historical fun Monday…