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Category: Writing

Posts in which we talk about the writing craft and process

Laurels and Friends by Diane

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This week some of us will be doing Announcements. Nice things have been happening to the Riskies and we want to share our good news with all of you.

Last Monday, I broke some of the good news from the RWA conference, but that really didn’t give it the attention it deserved, so we are going to toot our own horns just a little this week.

Of course, I’ve had lots to toot about. My A Reputable Rake winning the RITA for Best Regency Romance, brought me lots of emails from friends happy for my good fortune. This is truly a great honor and I am overwhelmed at receiving a RITA in only my second year of eligibility. My Rake was a truly a risky regency- a lady running a courtesan school right in the heart of Mayfair- but it won!

I’m also so happy that The Mysterious Miss M won the National Readers Choice Award for Best Regency. Before Mills & Boon bought Miss M through the Golden Heart contest, editor after editor from other publishing houses rejected the book, saying that readers would not accept my prostitute heroine. I always believed readers would love Maddie as I did and I felt the NRCA, judged by readers, finally proved it!

Life has a way of bringing a person back down to earth, however. As soon as I got home from the conference, there was a little family stuff to deal with. Nothing serious, but it needed me to rise from my laurels and do something! Then Melanie, my Warner editor phoned me about my revisions. LOTS of them. Major rewrite of Blake’s story, now titled Desire in His Eyes and slated for release sometime in 2007. And, of course, there is the next Mills & Boon/Harlequin Historical to write by the end of October. And the persistent congestion I was experiencing was a little sinus infection (much better now).

Last week blogger wouldn’t let me post photos, but this week is kinder, and I wanted to show off the real joy in this business – the people. The friends. So here are some photos from the conference.

Me, accepting the RITA. (for more on this moment, see my Wet Noodle Posse blog)

And the awards themselves, with lovely flowers sent by my friends.

Right after the RITA ceremony, the Mills & Boon folks took me in search of champagne for a toast to our good fortune. Here we are after our long and arduous search for bubbly. From Left to Right: Sheila Hodgson, Karin Stoeker (editorial director), Jenny Hutton, me, Joanne Carr

While we were on our search for champagne, I missed the annual Wet Noodle Posse photo with other WNP RITA winners Stef Feagan and Dianna Love Snell (The WNP are the Golden Heart finalists from 2003. We’re still together–except me, I’m still looking for champagne)

This is a photo of me with Kathy Caskie and Sophia Nash–now both Avon authors and my friends from Washington Romance Writers. In 2003 Kathy awarded me the Golden Heart for what became The Mysterious Miss M. This year Sophia awarded me the RITA!

Here am I with my dear friend Julie Halperson. Years ago, Julie and I met in a creative writing class at our local community college. She’s been a writing friend and critique partner ever since, with me through this whole journey.

Two more great friends from WRW. Mary Blayney (Poppy’s Coin in J.D. Robb’s anthology Bump in the Night)and Lavinia Klein, a double Golden Heart finalist in Long Historical this year.

And my wonderful Sisters of the Moon, my critique group including (R to L) Karen Anders, Blaze author; me and RITA; Darlene Gardner, Superromance (A Time to Forgive, July 2006); Lisa Dyson, about to break in at any moment!

And finally, three friends who came to the Literacy Booksigning. These are my high school classmates, Wayne, Sandy, and Peggy, who were surprised to learn at our high school reunion in June that the shy, studious Diane became a Romance Author. They were dear enough to come see me at the signing and were so happy for me. It was very touching.

The friends are the greatest reward! I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Cheers!
Diane

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Considering Culinary History

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Susanna here, rejoicing that it’s Friday at last. I’m hard-pressed to think when I’ve been more eager to see a week come to its end.

I’m currently reading Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by Bee Wilson. It’s a fascinating look at the history not of food, but of the implements we use to cook and eat it. I’m only about a third of the way through, but I’ve already learned so much. For example, 19th century vegetables weren’t anywhere near as overcooked as you’d expect based on the long cooking times advised in early cookbooks, because cooks were advised to simmer vegetables rather than cook them at a fast boil, and also because they’d pack a lot of vegetables into a small saucepan rather than a smaller amount in a larger pot like we do today.

Consider the Fork

And here’s another fact that surprised me tremendously: You know how most people have a natural overbite, and if you don’t, your orthodontist will work to give you one? Apparently that’s a recent development in human history, and isn’t the result of a genetic change–it’s developmental, based on how we eat. When you look at older skeletons, you generally see incisors that meet edge-to-edge. The overbite starts to emerge 200-250 years ago in Europe, but 800 to 1000 years earlier in China. In both cases, the change happened first among the upper classes.

The probable explanation? Forks and chopsticks. Once people started carrying food to their mouths already bite-sized rather than tearing it apart with their teeth, their incisors started to grow in differently.

I’ve long been fascinated by culinary history, and I’m starting to incorporate it in my writing. In my July release, A Dream Defiant, my heroine is a naturally gifted cook. She’s a commoner, an ordinary English village girl following the drum in Spain with her soldier husband, and her dream for after the war ends is to take over the inn in her home village, which has a reputation for dreadful food, and turn it into a place all the travelers on the Great North Road will stop to linger over their dinners. And I have an unfinished manuscript I’m thinking of dusting off where one of the characters is a French chef I created to contrast with every fussy, melodramatic French chef ever written. The manuscript in question is a paranormal, so if you picture Anthony Bourdain, Vampire Hunter, armed with garlic and cleaver, you wouldn’t be far off.

What delicious things are you hoping to taste this weekend? I’m planning to bake cookies for the first time in ages.

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Horn Tooting and Evolution of a Sale

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I blogged a few months ago on a post called Where do you get your ideas? about how a story starts for me, and I’m very happy to announce that that book, now called Chained, has sold–details were thrashed out by the agent and editor while I traveled to Atlanta–a great way to start the RWA National Conference! Or rather, an almost completely different version of that book has sold.

Then, the story was called, tentatively, The Story of Miss O. I renamed it Chained as I realized the story was about the English abolitionist movement. Here are the pics I found of the hero and heroine (courtesy of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s portraits of Russian aristocrats), although being my characters, they do not look nearly as cleaned-up and glamorous:


Now the editor liked the idea, she particularly liked the naughty goings-on that occurred in a carriage in chapter three, but she glommed onto something I was hoping to avoid because it involved real research, and gasp, I have a deadline of the end of the year. This year. My original story started off in England and after a while and many more naughty goings-on in a variety of locations, the action moved to a Caribbean sugar-producing island, where, um, more of the same took place, and then they sailed for home, by which time the hero/heroine are not speaking to each other. This is a two-month voyage. That’s a long, long sulk. This is not terrific plotting. It bothered me. I was afraid I’d write a book that contained something like this–Two months later, as they stepped onto English soil again… And I wasn’t really sure how it would end.

My local RWA chapter, bless their hearts, had a plotting session at one of our meetings. To a woman, they said I should have a raging mob with pitchforks and the hero performing heroic deeds to win the heroine. Um, yes, I said, but the English abolitionist movement wasn’t like that. It was housewives boycotting sugar, and earnest Quakers distributing pamplets and getting names for petitions–the Georgian equivalent of envelope-stuffing for a political campaign.

The editor–who of course zoomed in, eagle-eyed, on the terrible weakness of the original plot– told me she wanted it set on the Caribbean island, with the story beginning on the voyage out, and could I send her a couple of paragraphs on how I would rewrite it. Later that day, if possible, certainly before the weekend (this was the Wednesday of the week before National). I produced a cold sweat instead, went home, and thought about more sin in the sun and less about earnest Quakers in appalling weather. I thought about raging mobs. Raging mobs with machetes…a slave revolt. I sent an email to the editor the next day, she liked it, and she and my agent began thrashing out the stuff we writers are too timid to attempt. Less than a week later, the day before the conference started, we had a deal.

So now all I have to do is rewrite and write and go to see “Pirates of the Caribbean” because I can write it off as a legitimate business expense! Chained will be released in (probably) Sept. 2007 under the name of Jane Lockwood for NAL’s Heat line.

And now I really must write!

Posted in Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged , | 5 Replies

An excerpt with obligatory flashback

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Here’s an excerpt from something that may or may not ever be written. (Warning: there is a flashback that may injure the tenderhearted)

Time passing.

Ben spent a lot of his life watching time pass, looking interested or uninterested as they talked on about their concerns or business. He’d learned long ago that they didn’t necessarily expect an answer and sometimes not even a response, but a look of quiet concern and interest would do the trick.

And when an upward inflection indicated an agreement was necessary, the words came automatically. “Very true, my lord. Exactly so, sir. Indeed.”

And meanwhile his mind would wander where it would as his hands dealt with buttons and folds and all the niceties of milord’s dress.

Time passed. He waited for the time when his life, his real life would begin, a life that had started some twenty years ago, when first he met Marie.

He, wasting time (they’d say) or exploring (he’d say) his lordship’s library, with the buzz of a bee against the mullioned windows, the comforting rich smell of leather and beeswax, shafts of light with dust dancing like he was in church. But this was better than church, and with the added excitement of getting caught. Running his hands over the spines of leather books, daring to take one down and open it to pictures of strange lands and creatures, and row upon row of words. Or this, spinning the great globe, watching continents and seas blur into brown and blue and green, the surface smooth beneath his fingers, sunlight dancing off the golden bonds that held it in place..

Another hand, small and clean, reddened by daily immersion in soap and water, stilled the globe.

“That’s where you come from, Ben.” Pointing to a great brown mass like a pear upside down.

“No, t’aint. I come from here. I always been here.”

“No you don’t. Here. Africa. That’s what they says in the kitchen.”

He looked at their hands together on the globe, hers so pale and his dark, dark as the ink that named the continents and countries and cities and that he couldn’t read.

“I always been here,” he repeated. “I was born in this house, I was.”

“Silly,” she said and she touched his hand with one of her delicate fingers. The globe shifted at the movement.

The globe revolved again at her touch, and she moved it just a little more, and more again, halfway round the world.

“Here,” she said. “Here’s London. That’s where I was born.”

He looked at the familiar triangle of Britain. Yes, London. He could read that. You watched it on the milestones when milord and milady traveled to town with the servants and where he saw all sorts of people, strangers and foreigners and some even like himself.

“I’ll go back to London.” She tossed her head and removed her hand from the globe to take some of the weight of the folded linens she carried. “When I’m a grown woman, I shall be maid to a great lady and dress as fine as she, and eat meat three times a day.”

He darted in and kissed her rosy cheek. “And I’ll marry you.”

She shrieked and giggled and ran off, shoes slapping on the wooden floor, her fair hair tumbling out from under her linen cap. Her shoes were a little too big for her, just as her gown was a little too faded and short.

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Writing a Different Kind of Regency

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Hero of My Heart by Megan Frampton

Hero of My Heart by Megan Frampton

In about a month, my Regency-set historical, Hero of My Heart, will be available for your e-reader of choice. Meanwhile, I’ve just finished the revision of the first draft of What Not to Bare, which is due to my editor next Friday (yay for making a deadline!).

Hero of My Heart is an angsty book, filled with Life-Altering Decisions. What Not to Bare‘s biggest decision is what horrible outfit the heroine will choose to put on–and how the hero will manage to get it off her.

The two books are completely different in tone, and so writing WNTB was refreshing after dealing with the sturm und drang of HoMH. I’m including the description of the–of course!–stunningly gorgeous hero from WNTB:

He was even more stunning the closer he got. From far away, of course she’d noticed his commanding presence and brooding good looks; he’d walked into the room like he owned it, his height and dark hair making him stand out from the shorter, lighter-haired men. Which were all of them. He was the darkest and tallest. And definitely the handsomest.

Up close, she could see his dark eyes, which she’d assumed were brown, were deep blue, like a lake under a full moon. His hair was so dark brown as to be almost black. And his mouth, dear lord, his mouth was sinful to look at, with full lips curled into a knowing smile, which of course meant Charlotte couldn’t look away.

And he was speaking now, which meant she had to stare at his mouth, didn’t it? “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Lady Charlotte. Perhaps you would save me a dance for later this evening?” His voice was low and husky, as though he’d recently recovered from a cough.

Charlotte wanted to giggle at the thought of offering him a poultice for his throat. “Yes, of course, my lord. I would be honored.” She stood silent, feeling as awkward as she ever had. What did a young lady say to such an impossibly handsome man: Goodness, you are lovely. Perhaps you would care to undress so I might compare you against all those statues my mother never wants me to see?

She felt her cheeks flush up a bright red; unlike Emma, Charlotte didn’t get a delicate lady-like blush, but instead looked as though she’d been sticking her face directly into a blazing fireplace.

And next up, I have an entirely different piece of writing, the potential second book to follow my contemporary women’s fiction title, Vanity Fare. Vive la difference (in writing!)

Megan

Posted in Risky Book Talk, Writing | Tagged | 3 Replies