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Tag Archives: Colin Firth

I read somewhere in my time wasting serious research online that the way to improve traffic to a blog was to cover certain topics so I thought I’d give it a try.

First, PETS. Here’s Samuel Johnson’s cat Hodge, of whom Boswell wrote:

362px-Hodgecat_flickrI recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;’ and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’

colin-firth111COLIN FIRTH Picture of Colin Firth with wet shirt for no particular reason.

1814 v11 Ackermann's fashion plate 4 - Promenade DressNext, FASHION. PROMENADE COSTUME. From Ackermann’s January 1814: A Plain cambric robe, with long gathered sleeve and high arched collar, trimmed with net lace or muslin. A Spanish lappelled coat of fine orange Merino cloth; full epaulette ornaments on the shoulders: the whole lined throughout with white sarsnet, and trimmed with a raised border of white velvet or swansdown. A small, provincial bonnet of the same material as the coat, ornamented with a full curled ostrich feather. White spotted ermine or Chinchilli muff. Gloves grey or light blue kid. Half-boots of orange-coloured jean, or velvet. But she still looks cold.

firth2You may not ever have considered that when COLIN FIRTH plunged into that pond he might have encountered certain aquatic life forms. His attitude of discomfort may well have been not because he appeared in a state of undress but because he was anxious to get rid of certain attachments to his person

There is actually a bit of dialogue, struck from the script that goes as follows:

Darcy: Madam (bows). Would you have some salt upon your person?

Elizabeth: Salt, sir?

Darcy: A match, then?

Elizabeth: Oh, certainly. (Takes a matchbook from her reticule)

Darcy: The Meryton Go-Go Swingers’ Club? Ridiculous. Matches haven’t even been invented yet. I suppose I’ll have to wait until I get into the house.

Sucking_leech… Bringing us onto the next hot topic of HEALTH.  I thought this picture spoke for itself. I hope you appreciate that I passed over some truly disgusting pics to find one that showed the business but would not make you lose your lunch.

RichardArmitage05Talking of which, FOOD is always popular too, but I thought that instead, for a change, we’d have RICHARD ARMITAGE. Although I did find several artistic shots of his behind, I hate to tell you that it looked OK but pretty much like anyone else’s. Unless you were on very intimate terms with Mr. Armitage (and someone certainly was) you’d never have known whether it was his or his bottom double’s.

So there you have it, the Big Popular Topics and I expect our numbers will soar.

But seriously, is there anything you’d like to see us blog about here that we haven’t yet covered? Any celebrity bottoms?

I love a man with a sexy voice. There are some actors I probably like as much for their voices as for appearance and acting talent. Although it’s not easy to convey in writing, I’m always thinking about how my heroes sound to my heroines.

Colin Firth’s voice has always been part of his appeal for me. I even thought he was the one male lead in Mamma Mia! who wasn’t painful to listen to.

In singing voices, I especially love a good baritone, whether it’s Jim Morrison of the Doors or a classical baritone like the Welsh Bryn Terfel. Here’s a clip of him singing “Vagabond” by Ralph Vaughn Williams.

I can’t end without mentioning my favorite bald hottie, Patrick Stewart.

My apologies for not having any more recent hotties in this list. When my husband had his stroke three years ago, I literally went into a cave for a while and I’m still slowly crawling out. So please help me out. So who do you think has a sexy voice? If I get enough suggestions, maybe I’ll put together a post for next week.

And congratulations to the following winners of a Kindle or Nook copy of THE WEDDING WAGER. Please send your email address, and if you wish, the email address of a friend who might enjoy a copy, to elena @ elenagreene.com (no spaces). Also, please be sure to let me know if you want Nook or Kindle.

marybelle
pixzlee
Barbara E
Na
G Bell

Elena
www.elenagreene.com
www.facebook.com/ElenaGreene

Did you watch the Academy Awards?

I really loved the show, mostly because Colin Firth and The King’s Speech won. Yippee!!! Wasn’t Colin Firth just so witty and charming? And handsome.
What did you think of Anne Hathaway and James Franco as hosts? I thought Anne was beautiful and I loved her changes of clothing, but I’ll leave the fashion assessment to Amanda.
I also thought James Franco had the most amazing smile. It totally transforms his face. He intrigues me, because in addition to being an Academy Award nominee for Best Actor, he’s a Yale Ph.D. student, and he really does seem to put his schoolwork above everything else.
This weekend I’m thinking about movies a lot. I spent the weekend at Inn Boonsboro, the boutique hotel that Nora Roberts renovated in her home town. Fifteen of my Washington Romance Writer friends filled the Inn for an informal writers weekend. More on that experience in my Thursday Blog.
One of the things we did was to watch the movie Die Hard and discuss its “Seven Anchor Scenes,” Lani Diane Rich’s concept about plotting. The seven anchor scenes are those where a turning point occur and the main character makes a decision that furthers his story arc.
I don’t know about seven anchor scenes, but it was fun to discuss the movie as we were watching it. Lots of fun.
While watching the Academy Awards it occurred to me that what movies and books have in common is that, in order for us to like them, they must have interesting characters undergoing some sort of transformation. When we use movie plot structure to help us plot our books (as we were when we watched Die Hard), we should also look to movies to see how they build characters we care about.
Take Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy….I think why we all love his Mr. Darcy was revealed in his face. Jane Austen didn’t write from the male point of view, so in the book, we only know Darcy from his descriptions and his dialogue. Firth gave us so much more in his interpretation of the character.
And in The King’s Speech, he “showed” us King George VI’s emotional and physical struggle in such a realistic way that we fell in love with the character. But it was because he performed the role so realistically, and that is another lesson for us writers. The emotions and behaviors of our characters have to ring true every time or readers will not be interested in them.
So…Did you see the Academy Awards? Any awards that surprised or disappointed you? If you write, do you look to movies to learn about plotting and character? If you are a reader, do you sometimes “see” books as if they were movies?
Come to Diane’s Blog on Thursday to see more about my weekend at Inn Boonsboro!
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No, we’re not talking ice cream…today we have one of my very favorite writers as a guest, in both of her manifestations, and with a fantastic prize. So let’s get chatting and exchange our metal folding table stories–I mean, our proposal or Valentine’s day stories… you’ll see what I mean. Read on!

Thanks so much to the Riskies for having me—both of me—back! I write under two names, Maggie Robinson and Margaret Rowe, and I’m between Maggie’s January book, Mistress by Midnight, and Margaret’s March release, Any Wicked Thing. While both books are hot historical romances, Margaret’s book is just a little scorchier. Or as I like to say in my house, Margaret writes about things that Maggie has never done. 😉

I do like to think, though, that I incorporate plenty of romance in my erotic fiction, and I love to give second chances to my heroes and heroines. As we all know—or at least Shakespeare said so and who am I to argue—“the course of true love never did run smooth.” That’s certainly true for Sebastian Goddard, the Duke of Roxbury and his childhood nemesis Frederica Wells in Any Wicked Thing. They could not have started off in a more humiliating fashion (really, I was absolutely evil making their first encounter a night to forget instead of remember), but somehow they manage after a decade to put the past behind them.

Their journey to The End is almost the opposite of Laurette and Con’s in Mistress by Midnight, who begin beautifully but are torn apart and have a whole lot of boulders to climb over as adults. But we must torture our characters, or the books we love would sputter out after the first chapter…or maybe even the prologue.

Some of my favorite books and movies incorporate the awkward and the angsty with the amorous. I think Lord Chesterfield had it right when he said: “Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.” Human beings are so…human. We’re all searching for our happily ever after, one clumsy step at a time and sometimes travel in circuitous routes to get there.

It may be Valentine’s Day tomorrow, but sometimes love feels more like April Fools. One commenter today will get both Maggie and Margaret books AND a new DVD, Romantic Favorites Collection, with four fantastic, funny movies that illustrate exactly how beautiful and bittersweet relationships can be. Of the four films on this disc, Love Actually is probably my favorite, as it is a kaleidoscope of emotion. I’m sure you can guess that my favorite scene has earnest Colin Firth proposing in fractured Portuguese—it makes me laugh and cry at the same time, my own personal romance rule.

Do you have a proposal story or a Valentine’s memory? Tell us!

I’ll share mine. My boyfriend and I threw a party so his friends could meet my friends, and he casually announced to everyone, “Yeah, we’re getting married.” He never really asked, but I guess I answered, because we were married three months later. This is the same man who gave me a metal folding table for the basement so I could stack laundry as a Valentine’s present. He’d better come up with something a little better tomorrow.

Jane Austen did not invent Colin Firth.

Shocking, but true.

I’ve been trying to work out for years the real relationship between Austen and romance novels of the early twenty-first century. She was not, sigh, “the first writer of Regency romances.” She wrote contemporary novels.

She wrote about marriage for love in a society where everything had its price, but the majority of established married couples in her books are mismatched. Her characters, middling gentry, would mostly do better with a little more money in their lives, and very few of her hero/heroine matches face abject poverty or marry across class lines–there’s always that living to be had with the comfortable income, or he’s stinking rich (Darcy). After all, she said a large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

And that’s the trouble with Jane Austen, or at least, quoting her. She is a mistress of irony and subtext which is why she’s read 200 years later and we still haven’t figured her or her books out. What did she really think? Was she Marianne or Elinor or Lizzie or any, or all of her heroines? When does the real Jane Austen speak in her novels? Or in her letters, for that matter, full of all that determined chatter of acquaintances and fashion and social events, knowing that although she might write to Cassandra, her letters were public property to be shared with other family members.

Imagine you’re at one of those country gatherings in Hampshire. Miss Jane Austen is in attendance with her sister Cassandra, the pretty one who would have married if the young man to whom she was engaged had lived. Miss Jane, though, is a bit of a mystery. She has the reputation of having been a dreadful flirt, she’s quite good-looking, well-read despite a somewhat patchy education, and is well if modestly dressed. There have been rumors of love affairs, and an inexplicably short engagement to a man five years her junior but exceedingly wealthy. Her family is well-connected, handsome, and clever.

Her glance over the rim of her wine glass rakes over you. She knows the price of every trim on your gown and the price of the fabric, too, having patronized the same shops in Basingstoke or Portsmouth or Winchester. You thought you could get away with a bit of reworking of your gown, hiding the panel your maid scorched with a too-hot iron, but she notices. She’s done the same herself.

You’d like to make her acquaintance, but of course you must wait to be introduced. You’re flattered by her interest, but something about that piercing hazel gaze makes you uncomfortable, and you wish she’d turn her attention elsewhere. It’s as though she is taking notes. She leans toward her sister and murmurs something in her ear and they both laugh…

So if purists gasp in shock and horror at monster mash books that have zombies in Meryton, sea monsters among the Dashwoods, TV adaptations full of sex and wet shirts, or even Austen as a vampire, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. She’s a tough girl. She can take it and so can her books.

Happy 234th birthday, Miss Austen.

Question: Do you think you would you have liked Jane Austen? And if you met her, what would you ask her?
Chat away for a chance to win a prize…