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I was thinking about baby names long before I was pregnant, though I was several months into my pregnancy before I settled on my daughter's name. I would try out different names, think about them for a while, try to imagine calling my child that as she grew up. By the time of my baby shower I was sure enough to tell my friends. At the end of the shower a friend's ten-year-old daughter patted my pregnant stomach and said "goodbye, Mélanie." The name was starting to seem inextricably intertwined with this little creature who kicked with increasing vigor. My daughter, Mélanie Cordelia, is named after two characters in my books, with a nod to Shakespeare. Just a couple of yeas ago I was naming the character Cordelia, who appears in my recently released Imperial Scandal . I went through a similar process to the one I went through naming my baby - making lists, trying out names. Save that the character who would become Cordelia already had a very clear personality in my mi...

I just finished going through the galleys for Vienna Waltz . Reading the final chapters in which the villains are unmasked, I was reminded of a conundrum I face writing historical suspense. What to do with the villains after try are caught. One problem I find with historical settings or perhaps with the kind of plots I write is that prosecuting the villain often entails revealing secrets that would cause scandal and ruin numerous lives. Which can be a dilemma for a hero/heroine who wants to see justice done but doesn’t want innocent lives destroyed. Also in many of my stories the villains prove to be closely connected to the central characters, which means ending with an arrest and the prospect of a trial leaves a great many dangling ends that I don’t necessary want to be the focus of my next book. In Secrets of a Lady Edgar and Jack both die in the dénouement, leaving Meg to go to prison (I’d still like to deal with Meg more in a subsequent book). In Beneath a Silent Moon...

Pam had a great post last year about period clothing in the wonderful movie Milk and the fascinating television show Mad Men and in historical fiction. As I blogged about around the same time, one of the things I loved about Milk was its wonderfully vivid recreation, in settings and costumes, of San Francisco in the 70. At times I felt I was watching scenes from my childhood. I recently caught up on seasons one and two of Mad Men and then was riveted to season three (and am now eagerly awaiting season four). It's a fascinating, layered show, that brings to life New York in the early 1960s. It's the era when my parents were dating and first married. I have pictures of them in similar clothes to those in the show, my dad in suits and ties and gleaming white shirts, my mom in fitted dresses and suits that required a girdle and a structured bra. By the time I remember them, in the 70s, my dad's version of formal was a turtleneck under a sports coat, and my mom usual...

San Francisco Opera’s season last fall opened with a fabulous production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore . I was lucky enough to see it three times (the final dress rehearsal, a simulcast at ATT ballpark, and the closing performance). The production updated the setting from medieval Spain to the Peninsular War, which of course I loved. The Goya-inspired setting fit well with a story of war, divided families, and one atrocity leading to another. At the heart of Trovatore’s tangled, over-the-top plot are two brothers, separated at birth, now unknown to each other fighting for opposite sides and rivals for the love of the same woman. Watching the opera, I found myself thinking about brothers in literature. A topic which was also on my mind watching tonight's episode of Lost . Sibling relationships are fascinating, but in historically set stories, inheritance can make the the rivalry between brothers particularly intense. Perhaps especially so in British-set historical stories because of t...

In her recent post Pam talked about writing a seduction scene. Which got me to thinking about writing love scenes. Or to be more accurate, sex scenes, as there are certainly love scenes that don’t involve sex, except as subtext. Sex scenes are perhaps a particular challenge for the historical novelist because, as Pam said, of the need to carry "with it the feeling of its historically understood world, quite as fully as any other scene in the novel." Which includes everything from the mores of the time to contraception or the lack of it to details of clothing as it is removed (with which last issue Kalen is a wonderful resource). When I first began co-writing Regency romances with my mom, under the name Anthea Malcolm, my friends teased me that our books started very chaste and slowly got more explicit. In our first book, The Widow’s Gambit , the characters barely embraced. In the second, The Courting of Philippa , there were more detailed kisses. (There was also a descriptio...

As I've mentioned in prior blogs, a lot of my nonwriting time is spent working as a board member of the Merola Opera Program , a training program for opera singers, coach accompanists, and stage directors. On March 28, we had our annual Spring Benefit fundraiser. This event is about as close I get to the parties and balls that are so important in many of our novels. I got my hair done (with a ceramic curling iron rather than metal tongs heated in an Agrand lamp); I helped with decorations (laying out Silent Auction items rather than arranging flowers and lighting wax tapers); I scrambled into my dress and helped do up the hooks on friends' dresses (in a hotel room not a boudoir in someone's Mayfair town house); sipped champagne (some things never change); filled a supper plate from a buffet (artichoke ravioli rather than lobster patties); listened to a wonderful concert (some of which, Mozart, might have actually been performed at an entertainment in one of my books); and...