Back to Top

Category: Former Riskies

Guess Who?

Updated on by

Ammanda cannot be here with you today so I, Risky Carolyn, am filling in for her.

Can you guess who I’m thinking of? Here are some clues.

1. A man who was born in Dublin, Ireland.

2. He’s a Gemini. His characteristics are: Communication, Indecision, Inquisitive, Intelligent, Changeable

3. He died in 1822.

4. College: Cambridge.

5. If you take the first 3 letters of his Christian name, change that 3rd letter to the first letter of a word that is the opposite of “cat” and leave his last name alone, you would have the name of a blond Rock Star from the 80’s who is still touring today.

6. He was once a Whig

7. From 1797 to 1800 he was a member of the Privy Council of Ireland

8. He was involved in an infamous duel and shot his opponent in the thigh. His opponent had never fired a gun before.

9. In 1821, he became the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry

10. in 1822, his half brother became the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry.

11. Byron had these unkind words for him:

Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of [XXXXXXXX]:
Stop, traveller, and piss.

12. Per Wikipedia: In a profile of XXXXXXX published within months of his death, he was reported to have had, prior to his marriage, a son by a maidservant who lived near the Mount Stewart estate, and whom it was rumored he supported.

Leave your guess in the comments.

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged , , | 7 Replies

Do you Listen to Audio Books?

Updated on by

First, allow me to apologize for missing two Wednesdays in a row. Crazy times at RWA, but I warned you-all and expected I might not be able to post that week. But last week? I didn’t go back to work until that Wednesday, and I just totally forget. Tuesday felt like Monday, you see…

So, about Audio Books. I’ll have to get you there the long way because I’m going to tell you my story.

There are a few things you need to know first:

1. In the olden days, I was given several audio books on DVD, and I listened to them in the car and I enjoyed that. But I always lose the DVD and … too many steps. Too many things to lose so I didn’t pick up the habit. Besides I don’t take very many long car drives. I’m also really the only person in the house who could listen to the DVDs because everyone else is deaf or hearing-impaired, except my son, and part of my strategy for not having STUFF is the ability to give stuff to someone else.

2. I live where there is sucky internet so by and large, in the medium olden days, it wasn’t possible to download an Audio book unless I wait to start the download very late at night, so again, never got into the habit.

Time passes and authors everywhere are doing well with audio books because of Amazon making it easy for customers to get them. Also: 4G for the iPhone and iPad which is a LOT faster than the internet in the house. On the iPad, I can watch YouTube videos like the one below (which blew my mind for reasons I will shortly disclose) without waiting for buffering every 30 seconds.

The video below, which is the funny, smart, and talented Kevin Gisi telling us How to Be An Insomniac blew my mind because apparently, as I learned from this, you can listen to audio books and set a timer to turn it off. I had no idea.

Normally, if I can’t sleep, I plot in my head so I often find insomnia useful until I have to go to work on way not enough sleep. From time to time, though, I experience plotting-proof insomnia. No fun. But the audio book thing. MY GOD!!!  I realize this is blindingly obvious, but it just wasn’t in my world.

Right. So I’m working on getting an audio book for Lord Ruin. This is a wonderful thing at the moment because mostly it involves no work on my part. A good friend of mine’s daughter is an actress, mostly Shakespeare, and she’s narrating the book for me. And while I was at RWA, she and her producer sent me the first chapter to listen to. And it was awesome. They sent chapter two a few days ago and that was awesome, too. There I was lying in bed listening via the iPad and now I want complete audio books to listen to.

A few months ago, the company that did the original audio book for A Darker Crimson contacted the series authors about re-upping– he wanted all the authors’ books so we had to make a group decision. After some dithering around we said sure and my agent took care of all the contract stuff and a couple of months ago, the company sent me a copy of the audio book. On 11 CDs. My reaction then was oh god. more STUFF but now I’m thinking, WOOT! I can rip the CD’s and get it to the iPad!

The Poll

[poll id=”11″]

Now I’m curious. What do you think of audio books? If you don’t listen to them, why not? If you do, what got you listening?

Posted in Former Riskies, Writing | Tagged , | 13 Replies

The Kindness of Friends and Strangers – Author Jackie Barbosa

Updated on by

Some of you may already know that Romance author Jackie Barbosa’s teenage son was killed last week in a car accident. There is no recovering from a loss like that. We — all of us — are a community, and we reach out to others in times of need and sorrow.

There is a memorial fund for him, which the family would like to turn into a scholarship fund in his memory, link here. Fellow authors Beverly Kendall and Courtney Milan came up with the idea of authors highlighting Jackie’s books the week of March 21st.

So, here are some links:

At my blog I have a post about The Lesson Plan, one of Jackie’s historical romances with links to various vendors (any associate links at my site are Jackie’s, not mine. I don’t think there were any, though.)

Beverley Kendall has a post about Behind The Red Door, which Kensington Publishing has kindly put on sale for $2.99 until April 1st.

By the time you read this, there will be another post at my blog about Skin in the Game, one of Jackie’s erotic romances… in case you like something spicier.

It is an unspeakable tragedy to lose a child, and I want to do what I can to support her during this terrible time. I hope you will, too.

Posted in Former Riskies, Risky Regencies | Tagged | 5 Replies

Caption This Picture!

Updated on by

Caption This! Leave your suggested Caption in the comments. I have a few of my own below.

1811 Regency Fashion picture

“Title Me”

“Title me” is actually pretty dang funny caption because, you see, she’s coming downstairs to greet the handsome Lord Rakesalot….

What else? How about this?

Gown: check
Coat: check
Hat: check
Shoes?

What are yours? Feel free to add facts if needed.

Posted in Former Riskies, Frivolity | Tagged | 8 Replies

News!!! And Commentary

Updated on by

If you look over there — there. In the sidebars …. You may see the covers of my historicals Scandal and Indiscreet. Those are the US covers done by Berkley Books, and they are lovely. That’s John Marron, by the way, on the cover of Indiscreet. ::waving:::

I’ve spent the last year being silent about that fact that the books were, until about last week, unavailable in the US or Canada. Berkley mistakenly took them off sale in the latter half of 2012.

Long story short, by February of 2013, I instructed my agent that we should stop our (fruitless) efforts to get them to fix the mistake and simply request a reversion after the next royalty statement. And that is what we did.

My reversions arrived last week. I have been working to get them on sale in the US and Canada with the covers I commissioned for my non-North American version of the books. By “version” I mean different covers, a couple of typos fixed, and a reformatted interior. Some of you may recall that the original eBook version of Indiscreet was unreadable. The corrected file, when it was finally produced, was … readable. I’ll leave it at that.

It’s odd. I loved writing for Berkley. I loved my editor, I’ve adored all my covers. The copy-editor for Scandal was amazing, and I did have regrets about declining the opportunity to do additional books for them. But the fact is that Scandal and Indiscreet mean more to me than they did to Berkley– the company. The economic harm during the nearly year and a half the books were not on sale was disproportionately mine.

Then there’s the harm to my writing career. When Dear Author had long threads about historicals with exotic locations, I know for a fact people tried to buy Indiscreet (because the book was mentioned in the threads) and could not. I know because a couple of them emailed me. How many didn’t? Not so long ago, Scandal was again reviewed on Dear Author. Not to sound too vain, but Scandal was a RITA finalist. It made a list of one of the 100 best Romances. My agent called it a tour-de-force. And a website that gets hundreds of thousands of hits from romance readers reviewed it again, nearly four years after its release. And nobody in North America could buy the book when it should have been available.

When those two books disappeared from sale, Berkley wasn’t motivated to fix the problem. I, on the other hand, was fielding emails from readers who’d heard about the books and could not get them, and there was nothing I could do. My agent and I had already made multiple requests to get the books back on sale.

To everyone in  North America who wondered why there was no eBook and practically no print availability, this is why. I’m sorry for the long wait and the silence, but once I decided I was done with the situation, I was worried that Berkley would (at last) notice what had happened.

Scandal and Indiscreet are both good books. Really good books. If you like angsty books, then hey, I’m your gal. And at last, if you’re in North America, you can get the books for $4.99 US.

Here are the links I have so far for Scandal:

Here are the links for Indiscreet:

I’m not sure why Kobo hasn’t managed to get the books on sale yet. Hopefully soon. Google Play and Print versions will be coming shortly.

Posted in Former Riskies, Writing | Tagged , , | 10 Replies