Author Archives: Sandra Schwab

Oh What a Circus … er … um … or Not

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

When you’ve spent more than a decade reading books from the 19th century, reading books set in the 19th century, writing books set in the 19th century, and researching everyday life in the 19th century, you’ve got a fairly good idea what life was like in the 19th century. Or at the very least, you’ve got a fairly good idea where you can look stuff up, and chances are, you have the relevant research books somewhere on your bookshelves.

You are familiar with all the itty-bitty details: ice cream from Gunter’s, betting book at White’s, weak punch at Almack’s, circus at Astley’s. You also have a fairly good idea what kind of clothes your characters would have been wearing, from what kind of tableware they would have been eating, and what their homes would have looked like.

But one day you let yourself be persuaded by a bunch of people on Twitter that it would be an awfully good idea to write a book set in a time period you’re only superficially familiar with (let’s say … um … how about the time of the Roman Empire?). You’re suddenly faced with all these questions about things like underwear (what the heck did a Roman legionary wear underneath his tunic??? a loincloth or the kind of thing that real men wear under a kilt?), normal everyday clothes (to wear a toga or not to wear a toga, that is the question!), food (fried dormice – really????), about tableware (glass – thumbs up or down?), sexual practices (eh … um …), or names (yes, that’s right, names; the naming problem alone would justify that I hide behind my couch sobbing quietly).

And then there are the things that you think you know (haha!) like, say, gladiators. After all, everybody knows that the Romans loved going to the circus in order to watch guys kill each other in interesting ways and people being torn apart by wild animals, right? We have seen Spartacus, after all! (Well, as far as the TV series is concerned, one might have at least watched a few bits and pieces – not all the ugly, bloody fighting stuff, mind you! – but the romantic bits. They had some truly great romantic subplots in that show!) (Unfortunately, nearly all of the romantic couples died in gruesome ways – except for the cute gay couple. Yay for the cute gay couple!!!)

So there you are, thinking you know all those wonderful things – until you decide that it wouldn’t hurt to properly check up on them, say, one or two days before you’re supposed to send the manuscript to your editor.

OMG! *breaks down*

And suddenly you have a host of horrible problems at hand:

Nope, gladiator fights were not held at the circus. (Duh, Sandy, duh! You’ve seen Ben Hur! You’ve read Ben Hur!) (Okay, so the latter was when you were 12 or 13 and you were mostly impressed by the intriguing bits about Ben Hur’s manly beauty.) The Circus Maximus was a purpose-built building for chariot races. If you wanted to see gladiator fights, you needed to go to the Colloseum.
In Imperial Rome, the staging of gladiatorial games was actually quite rare (in contrast to how such things were organized in the republic) and typically happened on specific holidays (*frantic googling for exact dates ensues*)
Trying to find out on which days of the year (or at least around which time) the gladiatorial games were held, you stumble over a lot of extremely vague info as well as a lot of conflicting info: gladiatorial games happened only during the Saturnalia in December – happened during the Saturnalia and in March – were put on as often as possible!!!!! (*sobs quietly*)

Why exactly did I think it would be a good idea to write a romance set in ancient Rome????? That book is killing me!!!! And it’s still not finished!!! I’m still working on one scene that seems to go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and…. *runs out of breath*

In happier news: the digital art experiment is progressing nicely and apart from the occasional guy with skin made of green brocade, I’ve actually managed to produce a number of pictures with people who look like real (!) people. I’ve already put together one new cover that I rather like. It’s not live yet, and you’re the first to see it. I hope you like it! Also, please wish me luck with that dratted manuscript!

Edited to add: I’VE FINISHED THE BOOK!!!!!!!!!!! FIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNIIIIIIIISHHHHHHHHHD!!!!!!!!! And it’s already with my editor! Woooohooooo!!!! *hops around the room waving her arms*

(Of course, as always, I now worry that the book is utterly horrible and that reading it will probably kill of my poor editor. *sigh*)

Posted in Former Riskies, Rant, Writing | Tagged Sandy in Deadline Hell | 6 Replies

On the Road, or, Stuck in Research

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

I have the unfortunate habit of getting rather obsessed with minor points of research – like travel. When I wrote my second novel, Castle of the Wolf, I spent at least a week if not more (probably more given that I have a fat folder full of notes and research material) reading up on travels on the Rhine. I pushed the date of the story back several years in order to make it feasible that my heroine would take one of the early steamships for traveling to the south of Germany. Indeed, I even unearthed timetables for the steamers that transported people up and down the Rhine.

And all of this for not even half a chapter. Wheee!

(On the left you can see a part of a map of the Rhine that was included in the third edition of Baedeker’s guide book Die Rheinreise from 1839. You can view the whole map here.)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ease with which people were able to travel was, of course, largely dependent on their income. Indeed, most people would have never traveled far from home: just as far as their feet could carry them. Hiking tours were apparently quite popular among students, and in the 1790s it was one such tour – a trip of the two friends Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder through southern Germany – that brought about the birth of German Romanticism.

In Britain meanwhile, the eastablishment of a network of turnpike roads in the 18th century improved travel considerably. Turnpike roads opened up the countryside and made the country estates of the aristocracy and the gentry more accessible. Various new forms of passenger transport came into being, with the fastest form of transport being the mail coach (they didn’t have to stop at toll gates, and horses were changed frequently), followed by stage coaches, which could carry up to 18 people. Moreover, several inns specialized in the renting of post coaches and horses to wealthier travelers. Yet the cost for carriages, horses, and toll fees made traveling still expensive.

Thus, perceptions of distances could vary widely as the following conversation between Lizzie and Mr. Darcy from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice shows (from Chapter 32; they’re at the Collinses’):

“It must be very agreeable to [Mrs. Collins] to be settled within so easy a distance of her own family and friends.”

“An easy distance do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles.”

“And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day’s journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance.”

“I should never have considered the distance as one of the advantages of the match,” cried Elizabeth. “I should never have said Mrs. Collins was settled near her family.”

“It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Any thing beyond the very neighbourhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far.”

As he spoke there was a sort of smile, which Elizabeth fancied she understood; he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane and Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered,

“I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many varying circumstances. Where there is fortune to make the expence of travelling unimportant, distance becomes no evil. But that is not the case here. Mr. and Mrs. Collins have a comfortable income, but not such a one as will allow of frequent journeys — and I am persuaded my friend would not call herself near her family under less than half the present distance.”

(Hmmm…. It might be time for another re-read of Pride & Prejudice.)

When I dug into travel in Roman times this weekend, I was quite surprised to find a number of parallels to Georgian and Regency England: not only do several of the major roads in Britain (and in other parts of Europe) still follow old Roman routes even today, but along the Roman roads you could also find a network of inns and way stations. Ideally, every 6 to 12 Roman miles you would have had a way station, where you could change horses, and every 25 Roman miles an inn where you could spend the night. 25 Roman miles, approximately 37 km or 23 modern miles, was probably meant to be the distance somebody walking on foot could cover in a day.

Many of these stations were meant to be used by traveling officials or by merchants transporting goods like fabrics or building material. They could change horses for free and could also spend the night at the inns for free. The costs had to be covered by the local towns and communities, which led to many tensions between the provinces and Rome.

But what perhaps surprised me most was the fact that maps were already available in Roman times: they listed all the towns along the chosen route and also gave the distances between towns. Here is a snippet from one such map, the Tabula Peutingeriana from 250 (from a facsimile from 1887/88; the whole map can be found here):

Posted in Former Riskies, History, Regency, Research | Tagged Romans, Sandra Schwab | 3 Replies

A Seekrit Project & the Growing of Sandy’s Research Library

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

So I spent most of the day staring at my computer screen half-petrified because I realized this morning that today is April Fool’s day & I have to write a post &, oh my gosh, do I need to write something funny?!!?!? I’ve toyed with several amusing headlines – “The Riskies Will Only Write Zombie Books From This Day On! (and our heroes’ manly appendages will all fall off all the time!!) (or something),” or, “We Just Wanted To Tell You That We Are All Aliens From Outer Space Pretending To Be Romance Authors, But Please Don’t Mind Us & Carry On” – but, well…

Instead of talking about zombies, wonky manly appendages, and aliens, I’ve decided to turn to much nicer things, like my super-seekrit project: I’ve taken part in a multi-author box set of sweet romances, which came out earlier this week. And did I mention that the box set is free? 🙂

I also caved in and added a few more titles to my research library. Among other things, I’ve finally ordered Chatsworth: The Attic Sale, the catalogue of the auction at Sotheby’s in 2010. In expect to find many interesting items in there! Here’s a short YouTube video about the auction:

Moreover, I also stumbled across a number of fascinating research experiments in the form of historical enactments, of which two are of particular interest to the Regency period: in Pride & Prejudice: Having a Ball a Regency ball is staged at Chawton House, the estate of Austen’s brother. The documentary is only 90 minutes long (or rather, short), but it still provides some fascinating insights into the practicalities of preparing the food, of the dancing itself, and the supper that followed.

And then I also found a series about music in the country house. I briefly dipped my toe into this field when I wrote Springtime Pleasures and had my heroine swapping music books with her new friend. “Music’s Hidden Histories” is a joint project of the University of Southampton and Tatton Park. The short videos are all available via the Humanities Southampton YouTube channel:

For now, though, I’m going to return to Roman antiquity and my dashing centurion Marcus Florius Corvus. I’m really looking forward to celebrate the launch of this new series with you next month!

You can find Love Is All You Need on Amazon US, UK, CA, Kobo, Apple, B&N. Happy reading!

Posted in Former Riskies, Music, Regency, Research, Writing | 5 Replies

Fictionalizing the Past

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

[My apologies for this late post. After coming home from university, I spent the late afternoon recording a video of me reading bits of my new book to you lovely people (this involved an accident with the retractable desk and making faces at the camera and checking whether “lamp” is really pronounced with a “p” or not). Then I spent the early evening editing the video, watching the software crash, editing the video again, finally starting the process to upload it to YouTube only to be told it would take 900 minutes to upload this lovely 5-minute video. At which point I nearly broke down and cried. After four hours, I eventually abandoned all hope & decided to do this post without a reading. *sigh*]

sketch of the Saalburg, by Sandra Schwab

The main gate of the Saalburg, a reconstructed Roman fort

When you’ve been reading and writing Regency-set historical romances for more than a decade, chances are that you’ve become quite familiar with the conventions of the genre, including the way the genre fictionalizes the Regency period. In other words, you know how the construction of this particular romantic fantasy works: the characters are typically from the upper classes (with an abundance of dukes *g*); the stories are typically set in London during the Season and / or on a lavish country estate; the hero is often tall, dark, and dangerous and might be a rake, but doesn’t suffer from syphilis; everybody has excellent teeth; nobody has any fleas nor lice. You also know exactly what kind of things are typically not touched upon: e.g., child labor, the massive economic problems after the Napoleonic Wars, the often dire situation of domestic servants.

You know this framework inside out, you know exactly what does and doesn’t work and what needs to be tweaked to fit the fantasy.

And then somebody on Twitter talks you into writing a romance novel set in ancient Rome.

And thus, you find yourself, for the most part, without any kind of framework.

For me this was certainly one of the most difficult parts of writing my Roman romance. It didn’t help that during the first few weeks I kept comparing my work to that of Rosemary Sutcliff, whose books I’ve adored since I was eight years old. No, this didn’t help at all. Instead it threw me into full-blown panic mode. How preposterous of me to think I could even begin to imitate Sutcliff’s work!

It took me a few days to realize that of course I wasn’t imitating Sutcliff’s novel. I was creating my own version of the Roman period, which in turn forced me to consciously think about how to fictionalize the past — something I hadn’t really done in years because I am so very familiar with the Regency period and the Victorian Age.

But suddenly I was forced to think about things like

How do you write about a world with completely different religious principles? (Funnily enough, my Roman hero ended up being the most religious character I have written to date.)
How do you write about a city that, for the most part, no longer exists? (The perfectionist part of me had a little melt-down over this.)
How do you write about slavery? How do you convey the full horror of slavery while at the same time making it part of the everyday life of your characters?
How do you explain an understanding of sex that was in many ways radically different from our own?
And why the heck wasn’t the Colosseum called Colosseum?!!?!? (This came up during a frantic bout of last-minute research last weekend.)

Roman military standards

Writing my Roman romance thus became a true adventure, which allowed me to not only explore a different time period, but also to question and challenge my own writing process and my process of translating the past into fiction.

Indeed, it also challenged me to rethink my own view on history and made me realize there are many aspects of the past we know little or nothing about.

A good example of this is the question whether or not centurions were legally allowed to marry. Though there are a good many grave stones that were erected by a centurion’s “wife”, they are not conclusive proof because the terms maritus (“husband”) and uxor (“wife”) were also used by partners who were not formally wed. Apart from formal, legal marriage, there were two other forms of socially accepted long-term relationships, namely concubinatus and contubernium. While the former refers to “lying together”, the latter term was used for a relationship where the partners lived together in one house. (Initially, the term denoted a community of people sharing a tent, and as such it was also used in a military context to refer to a group of eight soldiers sharing a tent during campaign or a room in the barracks in the fort.)

I have to admit that I found it slightly disturbing that my research often didn’t turn up hard facts, but forced me to make decisions about (key) aspects of my characters’ lives. (It gets even worse when you move beyond the borders of the Roman Empire!) (But hey, who would be stupid enough to do such a thing???) (Eh…um…)

Giving all the challenges of writing a romance set in a completely different period than what I’m used to, I am so thrilled that my first Roman romance it out in the wild. 🙂

Here’s the blurb:

A proud warrior.
A brave woman.
A forbidden love that is tested by the intrigues of ancient Rome and the hostilities at the northernmost edge of the empire.

Centurion Marcus Florius Corvus has a splendid career in the legions ahead of him. Yet a visit to Rome and a chance encounter with an old friend change his whole life: He falls in love with one of his friend’s pleasure slaves and becomes entrapped in an evil scheme designed to destroy him. And yet—he cannot help risking everything for Lia, the woman he has given his heart to, even if it means he will be banished to one of the most dangerous places in the Roman Empire: the northern frontier of Britannia.

Do you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription? Then you can now grab a copy of the first part of the serialized edition of Eagle’s Honor: Banished: www.amazon.com/dp/B00X50PXC2/

If you don’t have a KU subscription, you can also pre-order the complete edition, which will be cheaper for you: www.amazon.com/dp/B00WMAKH4K/

Please note that this is a steamy historical with explicit sex scenes, some graphic language, and shocking questions about a centurion’s vine staff. And people eat, like, the STRANGEST things! 😉

Would you like to be among the first to read Marcus & Lia’s full story? Then leave a comment for a chance to win a digital copy of the complete edition of Eagle’s Honor: Banished.

Posted in Former Riskies, Writing | 7 Replies

Enter the British Tourist: The Romance of the River Rhine

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

A few days ago I celebrated my 10-year blogiversary. I started blogging only a few weeks before my debut novel was due to hit stores in July 2005. (Ten years ago — gosh!) At the time I was working on my second novel, Castle of the Wolf, a gothic romance (or at least it was intended as a gothic romance) in which my English heroine inherits a castle in the Black Forest, but, alas, finds it inhabited by the grumpiest man imaginable (but sort of hot, too) (of course!). And she has to marry him (of course!). There’s an unfortunate incident with a dead mouse, another unfortunate incident with a not-dead bat, and a lady with sturdy boots who stomps all the gothicness to dust. Quite… eh… literally.

And because my heroine needed to somehow get from England to the Black Forest, I decided it would be awesome (AWESOME!!!) if she traveled up the Rhine, past the lovely castles of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley. And maybe I could put in one of those gruesome folk tales? (Because, see above, gothic romance.) Like, the story of the evil Bishop Odo of Mainz being devoured by mice in his tower in the middle of the river? Awesome.

So I spent about two weeks (or more) doing research on traveling on the Rhine and, incidentally, also on British tourists on the Rhine. (Two weeks of research for half a page in the finished book. Just saying.) I pushed back the date of my story to 1827 because that was the first year which saw steamboats on the Rhine, and even tried to see if I could dig up a timetable for said steamboats. (In case you needed any further proof that I tend to go a bit batty where research is concerned: there it is.)

The rising interest in the Rhine and in particular in the Upper Middle Rhine Valley (the super-beautiful part between Bingen and Koblenz, with all the pretty castles clinging to the hills on each side of the river — now a UNESCO World Heritage site) at the end of the eighteenth century was in large parts due to Romanticism as well as to the new aesthetic ideal of the picturesque.

A sketch of Castle Sooneck

The first wave of British tourists arrived in the late eighteenth century — among them Anne Radcliffe, who afterwards wrote a whole book about her trip, Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany with a Return down the Rhine, published in 1795. And it seems that she was quite enchanted by what she saw:

“Sometimes, as we approached a rocky point, we seemed going to plunge into the expanse of the water beyond; when, turning the sharp angle of the promontory, the road swept along an ample bay, where the rocks, receeding formed an amphitheatre, […] then […] we saw the river beyond […] assume the form of a lake, amidst wild and romantic landscapes.”

The steadily increasing stream of tourists came to a halt during the Napoleonic Wars, but immediately resumed afterwards. Going to see the castles of the Rhine became so popular that later in the century the author Thomas Hood remarked,

“It is a statistical fact that since 1814 an unknown number of persons have been more or less abroad, and of all the Countries in Christendom, never was there such a run as on the Banks of the Rhine. It was impossible to go into Society without meeting units, tens, hundreds, thousands of Rhenish tourists. What a donkey they deemed him who had not been to Assmannshausen!”

Incidentally, the most wildly popular English poet also happened to write the most wildly popular account of a journey on the Rhine: since the publication of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, many British tourists would drag a copy along on their travels so they could trace Childe Harold’s steps. This becomes obvious in the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour from 1817:

“The part of the Rhine down which we now glided, is that so beautifully described by Lord Byron in his third Canto of Childe Harold. We read these verses with delight, as they conjured before us these lovely scenes with the truth and vividness of painting, and with the exquisite addition of glowing language and warm imagination. We were carried down by a dangerously rapid current, and saw on either side of us hills covered with vines and trees, craggy cliffs crowned by desolate towers, and wooded islands, where picturesque ruins peeped from behind the foliage, and cast shadows of their forms on the troubled waters, which distorted without deforming them.”

Soon, a whole tourist industry grew up around Rhine travels: 1822 saw the publication of the first panorama of the Rhine, consisting of a folded map of the river with larger pictures of the most important sights. Three years later, a publisher in Frankfurt released a panorama of the river and included a small leaflet with explanations of the sights in French, English, and German. (You can take a look at it here.)

Soon, proper guidebooks followed, like Baedeker’s Die Rheinreise (Journey on the Rhine) of 1832. On the other side of the Channel, the firm of John Murray, one of the most influential British publishers with authors like Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, started to publish the famous “Red Books”, the Handbooks for Travellers. And again, not surprisingly, the first of the series was the Handbook for Holland, Belgium and the Rhine.

A picture of Baedeker's Traveller's Manual of Conversation

Another of Baedeker’s early publications: The Traveller’s Manual of Conversation in Four Languages

Murray and Baedeker soon joined forces and started to distribute each other’s guidebooks. To make them more uniform, Baedeker also used red cloth for the covers. Indeed, their guidebooks were all standardized, were regularly updated, and were made to fit comfortably into a coat pocket.

But that’s not all.

The star-based rating system that’s now used by online retailers, booksellers and review sites?

That was invented by John Murray for his guidebooks. (So now we know who’s to blame for that!)

The steamboat that were introduced in 1827 formed yet another part of the new tourist industry focusing on Rhine travels. The traditional way of traveling on the river was on boats dragged by horses, and the owners of the horses were not particularly happy about the new steamboats that took business away from them. And so, in 1848, the stable owners of the town of Neuwied fired cannon balls (!!!) at one of the steamboat to express their displeasure — a rather drastic measure (and not a particularly successful one: the boat was hardly damaged and, of course, the steamboat didn’t go away).

Have you ever been on a river cruise? And fellow authors, do you use guidebooks for your research?

Posted in Former Riskies, Places, Regency, Research | Tagged Rhine, travel, travel books | 2 Replies