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Saturday night I re-watched the 1982 Anthony Andrews/Jane Seymour Scarlet Pimpernel . I was hoping Percy’s league would help me make sure the band of aides-de-camp in my Waterloo book are properly differentiated (which it did). I love the banter among Percy, Tony, Andrew, and Timothy Hastings. It has a tone I’d love to capture in some scenes in my book. Even though I practically know the dialogue to the film by heart (I actually had a tape recording of it before I saw it, because when it first aired I was at a rehearsal, and my family didn’t have a VCR yet, so my mom tape recorded it), the magic still works. I was also reminded what a wonderfully romantic movie it is, with scenes such as the heart-melting scene where Marguerite visits Percy in prison (which is actually based on a scene in Eldorado , one of the Scarlet Pimpernel sequels; the 1982 film is based on both The Scarlet Pimpernel and Eldorado ). One of the scenes in my April release, Vienna Waltz , is an homage to tha...

As you’ll know if you’ve seen my Twitter updates, I spent the last week in July at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. H0me for more than a week, and I confess a good portion of my brain is still in Messina, River City, the Globe Theater, and assorted other settings from the plays we saw. I blogged about some of plays the last two weeks on my own website , and as the posts touched on story-telling and history, I thought I'd repeat them here. My good friend, fellow writer, and plotting partner Penny Williamson and I have been going to OSF together for years (that's us above at the Howard in Edinburgh, since I didn't have a scanned picture of us in Ashland). When we're not in the theater on our Ashland trips, we're usually discussing and analyzing the plays over brunch or drinks or dinner or while strolling in and out of shops. Over dinner the last night of our trip, we found ourselves discussing the heroes of two of the plays we'd seen and the transform...