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What are you looking forward to reading this year?

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I hope everyone is having a good 2014 so far–or at least has gotten used to writing “2014” on checks and forms. It still looks weird to me, even though the day job requires me to date documents all the time.

I’m embarrassed to admit I almost forgot today was my Risky blogging day, even though it’s on my calendar, and I noticed it on Monday and spent a few minutes trying to think up a good topic. By the time I thought of it again, it was too late to come up with something deep and thoughtful about my current manuscript and my research for it, or anything along those lines. So I thought, “Hey! The year is still new. I’ll talk about the books I’m looking forward to reading in 2014!”

Sweet Disorder Cover

My critique partner, Rose Lerner, has a new book coming out in March called Sweet Disorder. It’s a tale of love and politics in an English village, and it’s smart, beautifully written, and very sexy.

My 9-year-old daughter and I are equally enamored with a series of snarky (yet highly educational!) graphic novels on American history called Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales. To give you a sense of the tone of the series, I’ll just mention that the most recent entry was called Donner Dinner Party. This time he’s tackling World War I:

NHHT

Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood is the latest entry to my preorder list at Amazon.

I’m also eager for Lindsey Davis’s second Flavia Albia book and Diana Gabaldon’s Written in My Own Heart’s Blood. For the rest, I’m sure I’ll make many delightful discoveries as the year goes on, though I figure I’ll be waiting till at least 2015 for Naomi Novik’s latest, and God only knows how long for the next Song of Ice and Fire book from George R.R. Martin…

What about you? What books are you awaiting eagerly? Have you already preordered any of them?

Posted in Reading | Tagged | 5 Replies

My first Jane Austen

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I’m closing out Jane Austen’s birthday week by offering copies of the Cozy Classics board book editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, along with my novella A Dream Defiant in your choice of electronic format. Comment by 9 PM Pacific Standard Time on Sunday (that’s midnight Eastern) for a chance to win!

Emma image

I have a humiliating confession to make:

The first time I read Jane Austen, I got about a chapter in and then quit.

I was 14 or so, and I’d taken to reading my hometown library’s extensive collection of Georgette Heyer, Clare Darcy, and Marion Chesney. They were real, adult love stories I didn’t have to hide from my mom. Which wasn’t the case with historical romance in general. Anything with the lurid “bodice ripper” covers so prevalent in the 1980’s wasn’t quite forbidden to me, but they led to lectures on appropriate entertainment, the importance of waiting till marriage to have sex, etc. I occasionally snuck such books into the house regardless, but for the most part I just found ways to read what I liked that flew under Mom’s radar–e.g. you’d never guess how much sex is in the Earth’s Children series by the covers.

But I digress. Our librarian noticed me working my way through Heyer, Darcy, and Chesney and said I really MUST try this book called Pride and Prejudice.

So I checked it out, took it home, and tried to read it. But I couldn’t quite follow what was going on somehow, and the arch wit of the writing completely went over my earnest, angsty young head. So I gave up and set it aside.

I didn’t try Austen again until just after college, when I was 23 or 24. Again I started with Pride and Prejudice–and this time it instantly clicked. I plowed through all six of her novels one after the other, and I’ve re-read them more times than I can count in the years since.

P&P illustration

I’m still baffled and not a little embarrassed by my adolescent self’s failure to Get It. It’s not like I was a poor reader–I loved Jane Eyre, and I read Romeo and Juliet for fun at 12, albeit an annotated version with footnotes clarifying all the language and references I didn’t yet have the maturity and experience to pick up on my own. Maybe I would’ve done better with an annotated Austen to explain the entail, the relative social positions of the Bennetts, Darcys, and Bingleys, and everything else that baffled me then but made perfect sense a decade later.

Or maybe I just wasn’t for anything that wry and subtle. Those Regencies I was plowing through were by far the least angsty and dramatic fiction I was reading at the time, and even Heyer isn’t quite in the same league as Austen for subtlety, IMHO.

What about you? How old were you when you got your first taste of Austen, and did you immediately connect to her stories? Do you have a favorite book by any author that didn’t work the first time you read it?

Posted in Giveaways, Jane Austen, Reading, Regency | Tagged | 17 Replies

Christmas Past (and yet to come!)

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I’m normally the type who keeps all Christmas activities strictly confined to the six weeks or so between Thanksgiving and Epiphany. I never Christmas shop before Black Friday. I wouldn’t dream of putting decorations up before the first Sunday in Advent. But this year I spent a good chunk of February and June with Christmas on the brain–I was writing Christmas novellas!

My February project will be a Carina release in 2014. Since that’s so far away, and it doesn’t have a release date or title yet, all I’ll say about it for now is that it’s the story of star-crossed lovers reunited after a five-year separation at a Regency house party…with wassailing and mistletoe and a thick coat of snow on the ground.

But my June project, Christmas Past, releases in less than two weeks, on November 25!

Christmas Past cover

As the title hints, it’s a time travel story. The heroine is from my own adopted hometown of Seattle in 2013–only in her version of the present, time travel has been invented and is largely used for medical and other scientific research. Sydney is a PhD student in historical epidemiology, making her first trip to the past to collect blood samples from soldiers in Wellington’s army for her mentor’s study on the epidemiological impacts of the Napoleonic Wars.

Time-traveling PhD student Sydney Dahlquist’s first mission sounded simple enough—spend two weeks in December 1810 collecting blood samples from the sick and wounded of Wellington’s army, then go home to modern-day Seattle and Christmas with her family. But when her time machine breaks, stranding her in the past, she must decide whether to sacrifice herself to protect the timeline or to build a new life—and embrace a new love—two centuries before her time.

Rifle captain Miles Griffin has been fascinated by the tall, beautiful “Mrs. Sydney” from the day he met her caring for wounded soldiers. When he stumbles upon her time travel secret on Christmas Eve, he vows to do whatever it takes to seduce her into making her home in his present—by his side.

I had a lot of fun writing this story, particularly going back and forth between Sydney’s contemporary voice and Miles’s Regency voice–and I’m so used to shifting into Regency vocabulary and diction the instant I open a manuscript file that Sydney’s was far more challenging to achieve!

When writing my Christmas novellas, I found myself imagining reader busy with everything that makes November and December such a joyous yet challenging time of year. Maybe she’s flying home to her family and wants a good story to take her mind off a crowded, turbulent flight. Maybe she just put her pies in the oven and wants to put her feet up and read while her house warms with the aromas of pumpkin and spice. Maybe she’s snowed in, unable to make it to work or school, and is elated to finally have time to escape into fiction.

What about you? When do you read holiday novellas? What are some of your favorites? And when do you put up and take down your decorations?

Christmas Past is now available for preorder from multiple sources, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play.

Posted in Regency, Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged , , , | 4 Replies

Are you ready for Halloween?

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Hopefully by my next post I’ll have Exciting Book News to share, but today I have a seasonal question for you:

Are you ready for Halloween?

A Jack o' Lantern made for the Holywell Manor Halloween celebrations in 2003. Photograph by Toby Ord on 31 Oct 2003.

For practically the first time since Miss Fraser was born in 2004, I can answer that question with a yes, and before October 30, too. After some discussion, Miss Fraser has elected to go as the goddess Athena this year, so we found a generic Greek goddess costume, which we’re accessorizing with a helmet, a toy spear, and a stuffed owl. And just in case she backs out of being Athena at the last minute because she has to wear a dress, I ordered a mockingjay pin, which, along with her bow and arrow set and carefully chosen clothes from her everyday wardrobe, would make a credible Katniss Everdeen costume.

Her first choice was actually Avatar Korra from The Legend of Korra, but I couldn’t figure out how to bring the costume together given my utter lack of crafting or sewing skills. I have to say, I’m proud of having raised a daughter who’s so fond of strong women in myth and literature that her heroines are Korra, Athena, and Katniss.

I even have a costume of my own planned for the first time in over a decade! I’m part of a fantasy football league at work, and we’ve decided to all dress up as our teams. My team is the War Tigers, a riff on my favorite college football team, the Auburn Tigers, whose battle cry is, “War Eagle.” If you watch an Auburn game, you’ll see both an adorable mascot in a tiger suit and an actual eagle who swoops around the stadium before the game and then perches on his handler’s arm on the sidelines looking menacing during the game.

War Eagle!

So I’m going to wear my Auburn shirt and baseball cap, and carry a stuffed tiger perched on my wrist like that eagle. Granted, maybe two of my Seattle coworkers watch enough college football to get the reference, but still.

One of these years I’m going to invest in a Regency dress–or maybe a redcoat officer’s uniform, so I can go in Napoleonic-era drag–and make that my costume.

What about you? Are you dressing up for Halloween this year, or do you have a kid to costume? If you dressed as a Regency and/or literary figure, who would you choose and why?

Posted in Frivolity | Tagged , | 5 Replies