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I turned in revisions yesterday on my Waterloo-set book, Imperial Scandal (which will be out in April 2012). I love the revision process, a chance to hone and shape and refine the story and characters (though I get very nervous letting the book go, afraid I've missed something). Thinking back through the revisions, I didn't actually make that many major changes (though it certainly felt as though I was working on them long enough!). But I did make one significant change at my editor's suggestion. It involved reworking a scene which originally involved infidelity on the part of the one of the major characters. This was a scene I'd had in my own mind for a long time before I wrote I mperial Scandal , and I was sure that this was how this would play out for these two characters (two people who are devastated and cast adrift in the wake of the battle of Waterloo). But my editor was afraid it would destroy reader sympathy for the character committing infidelity and on refle...

One of the joys of participating in this blog is that I so often find inspiration in the posts of my fellow hoydens. "Yes," I'll find myself thinking as I read this or that post in the weeks preceding my turn. "Yes, that's true and interesting. But for my purposes, I'd like to look at it this way..." So, for example, qua Leslie's post about the Duchess of Windsor, her fabulous shoes and horrendous politics, some time I'd like to think more about the roots of today's romance (and mystery) genres in the Tory-ish habits of minds of writers like Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers, even P.G. Wodehouse, during the period between the wars -- the comforts (take that as you like) of class inequality in a period of political instability. For readers and writers of historical romance today, how much of the Regency England we've come to feel so much at home in actually got its polish and perfection during (and in the image of the high life of) 193...

There were a couple of fascinating posts and follow-up discussions on Dear Author in the last couple of weeks. The first was a post by Robin on Loving the Unlikeable Heroine , particularly interesting to me as I love to write and read about characters who are at least potentially unlikable. Especially heroines, I think because I love characters who are rule-breakers and heroines, at least in historical fiction, tend to face many more rules than heroes. Which leads to the follow-up post Jane wrote after Robin’s piece about whether there’s a double standard in the romance genre for what readers consider “allowable” behavior in heroines versus heroes and why. Both of these posts took me back to a blog I wrote a a couple of years ago on my own website about anti-heroines. I got the idea for the blog when Sarah, a poster on my website, wrote to me because she was reading The Three Musketeers and getting to know the fascinating Milady de Winter. Sarah wrote, “I know I tend to prefer heroi...

After I busy work-week, I finally wrestled the TV away from my 6 year old and insisted it was my turn---I invited her to watch "my show". Reluctantly, she settled on the couch next to me, but much to my amazement, she never peeped for the next two hours---watching "Emma" on PBS. Now this is child who can quote song and verse from High School Musical One, Two and Three, a child who will find the latest version of I Carly, or the Wizards of Waverly Place, and yes, sometimes even Hannah Montana, before she can find her shoes. I was shocked. But sat she did, all the way through, seemingly fascinated. Now the latest version of Jane Austen's Emma has been advertised as "more approachable"---as if it wasn't. And it was widely hoped that the lovely young actress and actor who play the leads were "more relatable" than those of the past. I guess if a 6 year old found something particularly view-worthy about this show, then PBS has far exceeded anyo...

The Jane Austen/Warren Hastings connection Lauren posted about recently got me thinking about another kind of Austen connection: Not, this time, of reach beyond the circumscribed geography of her life, but rather of the density of connection within her books, as three or four families in a country village (to use Austen's own words) become a palpable community that resonates with shared (if sometimes contested and often unspoken) experience. When I began writing romance, one rule I encountered was not to create too many minor characters. Which is a reasonable enough stricture for a beginning writer, and most particularly one bound by the Iron Law of Thou Must Foreground the Romance Plot. But as I continue, I find myself so taken with the idea of a world built upon the interlaced lives of its characters (major and minor), that I'm increasingly willing to stub my writerly toes on the boundaries of the genre (especially when I'm fortunate enough to have readers like Tumper...

In my last post , I wrote about needing to know about Regency boating attire. And how the good advice I got from generous colleagues in the romance writing biz helped me develop the boating scene I was writing. Which scene happily led to The Seduction Scene by the Sea. Mutual seduction, let me add, a good time being had by all including the author. Because I'm not the kind of romance writer who's given to protest that she writes the hot stuff purely in the Service of Plot and Character Development and at great personal cost to herself. Erotic writing, as I always stress in the Writing the Hot Historical workshops Janet Mullany and give from time to time, ought to be its own reward. While also, of course, carrying with it the feeling of its historically understood world, quite as fully as any other scene in the novel. My own shorthand for thinking this way is that while you probably need to get some of characters' clothes off (in this case, the boating costume I worked so ...