Today I’m flying to San Francisco.

Tomorrow I’m attending the conference put on by the Beau Monde (the Regency chapter of Romance Writers of America) and Hearts Through History (RWA’s historical romance chapter).

Then Thursday through Saturday is RWA’s annual conference!!!

Busy, busy, busy. And I can’t wait!

I’ll see friends I haven’t seen in years.

I’ll be a suave gamester, and teach piquet and cassino and loo at the Beau Monde’s soiree. (I’ll wear my Regency gown, and maybe I’ll even have time to dance, too!)

I’ll attend fantastic workshops, acquire fabulous novels and research books, and probably share friendly mutual gripes about the elevators or the air conditioning or some other hotel feature. (Griping about elevators is a great way to bond.)

I’ll try desperately to write more of my novel-in-progress.

And I will buy many, many books.

Now off to write madly…

Cara
Cara King, author of MY LADY GAMESTER, which contains huge tracts of piquet

I’m in San Francisco!
I flew in yesterday and my travel was about as problem-free as you could expect. Then my niece Leila, who lives here, came to take me on the town. We walked from the hotel to Pier 39 for dinner, stopping at a Craft Fair on the way and lots of little shops. Then we went on the Alcatraz night tour and received real VIP treatment, because Leila works there. We went on a special private tour of Alcatraz, including the hospital wing where the movie, The Rock, was filmed, and underground, where the foundation for the original Civil War era fort can still be seen.

While we were on the boat I heard, “Diane!” It was Lori Wilde, who writes for Blaze and Grand Central. She and her husband joined our little private tour of Alcatraz.

Some pics:
Entrance to Alcatraz

Diane and Leila

Lori Wilde and Bill

Lori and Diane in jail

Today Leila and I will explore the city and ride cable cars. And tomorrow Keira and I will do our own tour of San Francisco, meeting up with Amanda and later with Deb Marlowe, Michelle Willingham and a bunch of others to end our day at O’Neills Irish Pub.

I wish you were all here, but I’ll take comfort in knowing all the Riskies will be together and we’ll see many of our Risky friends at our ‘breakfast’ at the RWA conference. More about that next Monday…..

Congratulations to Santa and Cheri2628!

If you haven’t done so already, please email riskies@yahoo.com your snail mail addresses to receive your magnets and copies of LADY IONA’S REBELLION by Dorothy McFalls.

Sara Lindsey, please email riskies@yahoo.com to receive your copy of THE LAST RAKE IN LONDON by Nicola Cornick. If we do not hear from you by Friday we will pick another winner.

Thanks to everyone for checking out these great interviews!

The Riskies

Because I’ll be teaching Regency card games at the Beau Monde soiree next week (ack! NEXT WEEK?), I’ve been refreshing my memory of the rules of cassino, speculation, and the like.

Which leads me to the question of the day, which is:

Were Regency gamesters sophisticated?

It is your job to examine the evidence!

FACT ONE: Piquet players kept score (and piquet scores go quite high, and are constantly changing) without writing anything down, or pegging anything, until the end of the hand. This is HARD. Even Trusty Todd, who can do Tensor Calculus in his head, can’t do this.

Okay, yes, in the “old” days, people were a lot more accustomed to doing arithmetic in their heads. But still. This is HARD.

FACT TWO: Read the game rules in a Regency Hoyle’s, and you’ll constantly trip over passages like the following:

Any person playing with less than four cards must abide by the loss, and should a card be found under the table, the player whose number is deficient, is to take the same.

I guess rules like “don’t drop your cards under the table” are a little too hard for these folks.

So, here we have two warring pictures:

That of the very clever, James-Bond-like gamester…

And that of the Three Stooges, constantly dropping cards on the floor.

So: which is it? Let the voting begin!

Cara
Cara King, author of MY LADY GAMESTER, who neither counts piquet in her head nor drops cards on the floor…

Something occurred to me today.

I can understand collecting pristine, unused stamps — keeping them safe, away from light, and only looking at them now and then.

And I can understand collecting postcards which have never been sent, never manhandled or crushed or stained in the mail.

I can even understand keeping collectible action figures in their original, unopened packages. (My Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde action figures are still in theirs, though I have very nearly decided to let them free so they can run about the house and nibble on erasers and whatever else unsupervised action figures do…)

But for some reason, I am quite disturbed by the thought of books remaining untouched and unread so that they keep their value.

To me, an antique book with pages that have never been cut, and must never be cut (to keep the value high), is like a bottle of fine wine which is kept so long it spoils. It just seems wrong.

I’m not certain if there’s a logic behind this feeling of mine, or only my emotional attachment to reading. After all, why not have an unblemished first-edition on the shelf, and read a cheaper, battered copy?

And am I being hypocritical? After all, I have on occasion read a library copy of a book I own, to keep mine in tip-top shape. (Or, as tip-top shape as my books are ever in. I do try, but I’ve moved too many times to keep the dust jackets perfect.)

So…what do you think? Do you approve of can’t-be-read collectible books? Do you ever read cheaper/newer/library copies to keep your treasured books in good shape?

All answers welcome!!!

Cara
Cara King, who thinks people should feel free to read a first-edition copy of MY LADY GAMESTER anytime they wish