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Author Archives: megan

On The Road!

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Happy Friday!*

I know it’s not very sporting of me, but I had no interest in Royal Wedding shenanigans (not maligning those who did!–just not for me), so I won’t be discussing it here today.

In fact, I haven’t seen any of it except for in my Twitter stream, since I am on a train heading to the New England RWA Conference, where I’m meeting up with my friend and fellow author, Myretta Robens.

It’s cool doing this traveling, and I’m thinking about the hours our heroines spent in carriages on the road heading to country estates, Scottish castles, or remote cottages where their old governesses live. That’s a lot of time to spend inside with not much to do; in this day and age, where free time is at a premium, it feels like a veritable treat not to have anything else one can do, but back then, for an active person, it must’ve been maddening!

Of course, there were always books to read, but as we also know from our heroines, there weren’t a lot of fun books. Maybe their stodgy uncles would have forced some uplifting sermon-y thing on them, or they could have snagged a copy of Ovid’s poetry or something if they were being daring.

But books in massive TBR piles? Not happening for our ladies. No wonder they had time to moon about the hero! But for me now, I’m working on the train (this isn’t work, I am doing other work), and I do have no fewer than four books with me for a long weekend trip. About enough, right?

What would you do with long hours of travel time? What else do you suppose our heroines did while traveling?

Megan

*I know this isn’t the right type of carriage I’m discussing; YOU try to find good images while on a train and slowish Wifi.

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Reading Delights: When Beauty Tamed The Beast

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I know I’ve gone on and on about how busy I am these days (really, people with full-time jobs: How do you do it?).

And also gone on and on about how great it is to commute by subway because I can read. So this week I read Eloisa James‘ latest book, When Beauty Tamed The Beast.

I’ve long been a fan of James’ work, and I marvel at how intricately she wraps up her great casts of people and finds small moments that become big events in the course of her books. But this book, I feel, is a game-changer for her, one that takes her talent and catapults it to the next level.

If you’ve paid attention to this new release at all, you know that the hero is modeled after the character of House, MD, played on TV by Hugh Laurie. And James gets it all right: The irascibility, pain, frustration, impatience, and despair at the thought of losing patients.

Her heroine is not normally someone with whom I would have a lot in common: She’s stunningly gorgeous and used to having men fall at her feet. But, and this is what is frustrating to her, she is also very clever, but no-one sees that because they stop assessing her after they see her beauty.

James does a few unusual things in this book, most notably not having an HEA when you would reasonably expect it to happen, and she strips away the things that each character holds most dear in order to make them vulnerable enough for love.

I appreciated, also, having the main romance be the Main Romance, not muddled by a lot of ancillary stories–speaks to the linear person in me, I suppose.

I did that delicious sigh of satisfaction as I finished the book, and I was really impressed that after writing for so long, James has improved with this release; it seems, sometimes, as though authors start to cycle downwards after a long and successful career.

Have you read this book yet? What’s the most recent book you sighed over?

Megan

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Will They Or Won’t They?

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Apologies for the delay in posting!

Anyway, onto the talk. Last week, I flew to LA for the Romantic Times Conference, and on the flight out, the airplane showed The Tourist, starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. A beautiful cast, on paper at least.

My flight companion Liz Maverick and I watched it, without the sound, and found it as execrably horrible as most, if not all, reviewers had said.

(Worse even was today when I realized Jolie affects this weird faintly European accent. Ugh!) There was zero charisma between the two of them, and we didn’t buy it for a second that either would fall in love with the other. Here is their first meet:

Now, we’ve all got our favorite swoony they MUST get together moments from book and film; why do some pairings work and others absolutely do not? It’s so hard to gauge, which is where good authors have to come in; for example, I’ve just finished reading Elizabeth Hoyt‘s Notorious Pleasures where, on the first page, the heroine meets the purported hero while he is in the middle of schtupping a married woman. And, somehow, Hoyt convinces us that those two–Lady Perfect and Lord Shameless, as each tag the other–are perfect together.

In one of my favorite meetings, North & South‘s Margaret Hale meets John Thornton for the first time. She’s brave enough to stand up to him–and his temper–and even though during this scene it’s hard to imagine it, it’s not impossible to imagine that by the end they’ll have fallen in love.

What is similar between Margaret and John is their passionate protection of people, even if during this scene they are diametrically opposed.

But in The Tourist–to come back to that atrocity–there is no question, at their first meeting, that Depp’s character will do absolutely whatever Jolie’s character wants him to. There’s no tension, no will they, won’t they? about it.

It’s the question that keeps us reading or watching–will they or won’t they?–even when we can predict the outcome (reading romance, and all).

Who are your most electric pairings on screen or in book?

Megan Frampton

Posted in Risky Regencies | Tagged | 8 Replies

Friday In Los Angeles

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Hey!

I am currently in Los Angeles, California for the Romantic Times Convention. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an annual event geared more towards readers than authors, although there are plenty of authors here. I’m exhausted–we return home today, and we’ve been busy spreading the word about our site, HeroesandHeartbreakers.com (I’m out here with Liz Edelstein, aka Liz Maverick, who runs the site. I work for her as Community Manager).
Anyhoo, it’s busy, and I’m tired, but also excited that so much fun, cool, ground-breaking stuff is pending on the horizon.
It makes me really long to get back to writing, which makes it equally frustrating since I don’t have time to do that much anymore.
Hm. Conundrum.
But meanwhile, I got to hang–in person–with people who read stuff I do, are smart, funny, knowledgeable and accepting. All very cool. In about a month, I head to New England for their conference, where I get to hang out with Myretta Robens, another writing friend. And in the summer is RWA’s National Conference, which is taking place in my hometown of New York City, and I’ll get to see most–all?–the Riskies. Yay!
Hope everyone’s Friday is going well.
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I ♥ Language

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There’s nothing that can pull you out of a good historical like an anachronism.

Of course, that can be taken too far; which among us has not rolled our eyes (if not literally, then mentally) when some member of the Historical Police has said that something could not POSSIBLY be because it didn’t exist until a year later.

To which I always say, “It’s fiction. Deal with it.”

(That doesn’t excuse just missing or poor research, such as when a Duke is called My Lord instead of Your Grace, or if a divorce is regarded as blithely in a Regency romance as it is today.)

But there are circumstances, certainly, where things existed prior to being documented. For example, language. Many of us Regency authors own Captain Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (I have two copies, myself), and it’s fun to skim through and realize many words were in existence then that you wouldn’t have thought.

And just this week comes news that the Oxford English Dictionary has added new words to its definitive tome: he words “OMG,” “LOL” and “FYI,” as well as ♥, as in “I ♥ NYC.”

The last one is just nuts! It’s the first time a symbol has been defined as a word. But certainly it has been around for much longer than its acknowledgment within the OED, and one can surmise that certain words and phrases were around a lot longer in Regency times than documentation allows for.

What words jar you from a story? What words surprised you by being extant at the time? What word do you think the OED should add next–or never allow within its pages?

Megan

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