I’m late for an important date!  I finally got around to drawing a winner for a signed copy of The Runaway Countess!  It’s…Barbara Elness!  Congrats, and I hope you enjoy.  Email me your address at amccabe7551 AT yahoo….

As I know I’ve talked about here before, I love-love-love Pinterest!  I have to be very careful whenever I get onto the site, because it can easily be hours later by the time I’ve finished following trails of pretty dresses, rooms furnished with many bookshelves, yummy cocktails, and funny “Hey Girl” memes.  But the one most useful thing about it, I’ve found, is that it helps me keep all my book inspiration images in one easily accessed spot.  Here are a few pins for my Murder at Hatfield House book (out in 2 weeks!):

Images of Hatfield House itself…

Musical instruments of the period (my heroine/sleuth, Kate Haywood, is a court musician to Elizabeth I!)

Elizabethan jewelry…

Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald (“the fair Geraldine,” a kinswoman to Elizabeth, who appears in one scene…)

The actress Lily Collins, who looks a bit like Kate in my mind!

Tudor humor (this one is Anne of Cleves, but hey, it’s funny, even if it’s not quite period-correct for my story!!)

So I am not always wasting time on Pinterest!  Sometimes it is Very Important Research.  Are you on Pinterest?  What do you like about it?

(and I am extending my Hatfield House contest at my Amanda Carmack site for a few more days!  Sign up for my newsletter for the chance to win an ARC of the book and an Elizabethan Queen Barbie!!)

First of all, get better soon to Diane!!!  Cat bites are nothing to mess around with.  Hopefully we will hear from her later today and find out she is resting at home….

Around here (luckily) there are no animal bites or illnesses of any kind!  But I am NOT looking forward to moving my two homebody cats.  They don’t even like to get up off their couch most of the time, and getting them into carriers for trips to the vet is always an ordeal.  They are only moving about 45 minutes away, but still.  And I am about to sit down in the middle of the floor and give up on this moving idea anyway.  I have most of my books packed (65 boxes!  And I just realized I packed a couple of research books I now need), but I have lots more stuff that needs to be consolidated and packed somewhere.  Seriously, if anyone has any moving tips, let me know.  (no wonder most people in the Regency stayed put in their houses for most of their lives.  Except for people like Jane Austen.  I wonder what she did about packing…)

In the meantime, I am about 1/4 of the way through the new WIP, an Italian Renaissance romance.  as part of my Important Research Process, I spent the weekend laying around eating potato chips and re-watching DVDs of The Borgias.  I love this show.  I think it’s what The Tudors wanted to be, and just couldn’t quite hit the mark.  Scandal!  Murder!  Intrigue!  Sex!  Gorgeous clothes!  More sex!  More gorgeous clothes!  And a soupcon of historical accuracy.   But I realized something rather disturbing.  I absolutely adore the pairing of Lucrezia and Cesare, and, well….they are sorta brother and sister.

I know!  I think I came to romance reading too late to really appreciate the “old skool” stylings of books like those of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers.  I had already been reading stuff like lighter Regencies and historicals where the heroines were pretty much the equal (at least emotionally) of the heroes when I finally picked up a copy of The Flame and the Flower (because people kept telling me I HAD to read it).  Well–I hated it.  And to this day I can’t stand jackass heroes and half-their-age doormat/simper-y heroines.  I hate “forced seductions” (I grew up with college campus campaigns against just that sort of thing, after all).  Everyone has their fantasies, which is great, that’s just not really mine, so I found other stories I preferred.   Why, then, do I love Lucrezia and Cesare so very, very much?

Hmmm, maybe it’s because I have a deep love of something not often found in romance novels–dark, tragic, desperate, doomed love, a la “Romeo and Juliet.”  (Though certainly there are a few–maybe that’s why my all-time fave romance novel is For My Lady’s Heart).   And you can’t get more desperate and doomed than C&L.  In a crowded ensemble drama chock full of intriguing characters, I always found myself looking forward to their scenes together.  Let’s face it, they are just so beeeeauuutifuuul, separate and together, and charismatic.  It’s like the two of them against the world, true soulmates.

In Sarah Bradford’s excellent biography Lucrezia Borgia, she says of the real-life figures, “Incestuous or not, there is no doubt that Cesare and Lucrezia loved each other above anyone else and remained loyal to each other to the end.”  (note here: I am thinking only of the fictional TV characters, not the real life ones, who were probably considerably more reprehensible, at least Cesare.  I think Lucrezia is the victim of a historical hack job)

What are some couples (fictional or historical) you hate to love???

OMG, I can’t believe I almost forgot it’s Tuesday!!  I have two projects with revisions that just landed on my desk, plus the packing saga continues.  But today I have a new book out!!!  Book one in my new Elizabethan Mystery series (writing as Amanda Carmack), Murder at Hatfield House.  (see it on Amazon here or visit my website for excerpts, historical info, etc)

In the meantime, I am having an Elizabethan Week all week at my own blog!  Visit today to vote on your favorite Elizabeth on film….

Do you read many historical mysteries??  What are your favorites?

So what is going on around here??  Still revising, still WIPing, still packing for next weekend’s move.  Seriously, I hate moving!!!  Where did all this stuff come from?  How will I ever get it all packed?  I need one of those Regency yard sales Gail talked about a few days ago….

In the meantime, I’m reading a very interesting book, Sara Wheeler’s O My America! Six Women and Their Second Acts in the New World, all about women in history who found new lives and new beginnings in America.  I always love histories of women who lived their lives outside the lines.  It includes Fanny Trollope (mother of Anthony, she wrote a bestseller that has a scathing review of American manners and craziness…I’d love to see what she had to say about the government right now), actress Fanny Kemble, who married a Southern plantation owner and wrote moving about the tragedy and complexity of slavery, famous traveler Isabella Bird–and Jane Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubback, a woman I knew very little about.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about her:

“Catherine Anne Hubback (1818 – 25 February 1877) was an English novelist, and the eighth child and fourth daughter of Sir Francis Austen (1774-1865), and niece of Jane Austen.

She began writing fiction to support herself and her three sons after her husband John Hubback was institutionalized with a breakdown. She had copies of some of her aunt’s unfinished works and, in 1850, remembering Austen’s proposed plot, she wrote The Younger Sister, a completion of Jane Austen’s The Watsons. In the next thirteen years, she completed nine more novels.

She emigrated to California, USA in 1870. In the autumn of 1876 she removed to Gainesville, Prince William Co, VA, where she died in 1877. Her novels, which enjoyed some popularity in their time, are no longer well-known. Her most important contribution is to literary history where she, and later family, perpetuated Austen family history.”

But it sounds like there was so much more to her life.  The 8th of 11 children of Frank, one of the Navy brothers, she was born the year after Aunt Jane died.  She married a respectable, prosperous attorney, had 3 sons, gained a reputation as a good hostess–then her comfortable, expected life shattered when her husband went insane and had to be committed to an asylum.  Catherine, left with her sons to raise, took to writing (it seems someone said “Hey, you remember Aunt Jane?  She had this unfinished manuscript.  Why don’t you finish it?” and she did her own version of The Watsons to start).  She wrote vast Victorian tomes of about 800 pages, which I have never read or even seen, and she herself knew they weren’t all that great.  But they put food on the table and sent her sons to school, which is all she wanted.  When her eldest son moved to San Francisco, then a half rough-and-tumble frontier town and half up-and-coming cosmopolitan city, with a strong Spanish flavor, she went too.  And she made a whole new life for herself in a whole new place.  (There’s a good post about her on the Austen Authors blog, too)

It looks like there is a volume of her letters, An Englishwoman in California, which I’m going to look for.  And now back to revising…

Who are some adventurous women you admire??