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Monthly Archives: September 2010

We welcome Shelley Munro all the way from New Zealand here at the Riskies today with her new release from Carina Press, The Spurned Viscountess. Your question or comment could win you a free download, so let’s get chatting.

Cursed with the sight and rumors of witchcraft, Rosalind’s only chance at an ordinary life is marriage to Lucien, Viscount Hastings. She doesn’t expect love, only security and children of her own. Determined to go through with the wedding, she allows nothing she encounters at the gloomy Castle St. Clare to dissuade her.

Recently returned from the Continent, Lucien has no time for the English mouse his family has arranged for him to marry, not when he’s plotting to avenge the murder of his beloved Francesca. He has no intention of bedding Rosalind, not even to sire an heir.

Though spurned by her bridegroom, Rosalind turns to him for protection when she is plagued by a series of mysterious accidents and haunted by terrifying visions. Forced to keep Rosalind close, and tempted into passionate kisses, Lucien soon finds himself in grave danger of falling in love with his own wife…

Shelley, welcome! Tell us about the book–your inspiration and how you came to write it. (And what a gorgeous cover!)

Thank so much for having me to visit today. The Spurned Viscountess is my first historical, and my story came about after I participated in a writing exercise at the Auckland chapter meeting. I’m a member of Romance Writers of New Zealand and we used to have writing exercises each month. I forget what the topic was now, but the first scene in my story came from this exercise.

I wrote about a long lost son who has found his way home after a long absence but he has no memory of his family. He’s scarred in mind and body and all he wants is to discover the identity of his wife’s killer. The last thing he needs is an arranged marriage foisted on him. He tries to scare off his intended bride, but the move to Castle St. Clare is a fresh start for Rosalind, one she’s determined to embrace.

Once I had my first scene, I needed to know what happened next. Eventually I ended up with a complete novel. This is the second home for The Spurned Viscountess, and I was thrilled to join Carina Press.

The Spurned Viscountess is set in 1720. What is it about the Georgian period you like and why did you choose it as a setting?

In my pre-published days, Jo Beverley was one of my favorite authors. I enjoyed her Malloren series, which is set during the 1700s. I find the Georgia era a little bit naughtier than the Regency era, and I adore the clothing from the Eighteenth century. 1720 England allowed me to use smugglers in my plot as well. I really wanted to write about smugglers.

What are your favorite research books for the period?

I did a lot of research, but some of my favorite books include: Historical Fashion in Detail by Avril Hart and Susan North, The Art of Dining – a history of cooking and eating by Sara Paston Williams, and The Art of Dress, Clothes & Society by Jane Ashelford. I also find Liza Picard’s books Restoration London and Dr. Johnson’s London very useful and interesting, although they didn’t quite fit my chosen time period.

I was really impressed by how much you’ve published. How hard was it to make the switch from contemporary/paranormal erotic romance to a historical romance?

I’ve always read different romance genres rather than concentrating on one so it seemed natural to me to swap around a little bit when it came to writing. It’s much easier to experiment in the e-pub world so experiment I did. I tend to write mainly contemporary and paranormal stories but recently my interest in historicals has fired to life. I’ve concentrated on the Georgian era (18th century) and World War II England, two time periods I find very interesting.
I think that swapping genres helps keep my writing fresh because I’m constantly challenging myself.

If you had to hire actors for a movie version of your book, who would they be?

This is a really hard question. I’m a real Sean Bean fan, but he doesn’t quite fit for my hero, Lucien. Joseph Fiennes would work, I think. Keira Knightley or Catherine Zeta-Jones would both make a very good Rosalind. Maybe even Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame would work for Rosalind.

What’s your favorite scene in the book?

I’m partial to the very first scene in The Spurned Viscountess since this was how my story started. It’s a short one.

 

East Sussex, England, 1720

“Hastings, the carriage is coming. Your betrothed has arrived.”

Lucien rose from a square-backed chair, flicked the lace at his cuffs and studied the elderly man stepping away from the window—the man who claimed him as son. “My name is Lucien.”

The earl ruffled up like a feisty bantam cock. “Stuff and nonsense! George is your christened name. If it’s good enough for the king, it’s good enough for you.”

Lucien strolled past shelves of books and paused to finger an amber figurine from the Orient. From what he’d heard since his arrival in England, people disapproved of the king, who hailed from Hanover. The man didn’t even speak English. Lucien looked the earl straight in the eye. “My name is Lucien,” he repeated, his tone implacable and determined. “Lucien. Not George or Hastings.”

“Damn it, boy, why do you persist with your gainsaying?” The Earl of St. Clare’s voice held a trace of pleading. “Can’t you see the likeness in the family portraits?”

Lucien grimaced. If he studied the portraits with one eye shut and the other squinted—certainly there were similarities. He replaced the figurine and stalked across a blue Persian rug to gaze out a window overlooking the courtyard.

The family and the faithful servants all backed up the Earl of St. Clare’s assertion, but the role didn’t feel right to Lucien. Living in the gloomy pile of rocks called Castle St. Clare made him edgy and apprehensive.

They were all mistaken.

He was not the Earl of St. Clare’s son.

The idea was laughable. Him—the long lost heir, Viscount Hastings. He didn’t recall any of the stories they told him of his childhood or growing up at the castle.

The study door flew open. Lucien spun around in a defensive stance, only relaxing when the honorable Charles Soulden bounded into the room. “Hastings…” He faltered when he intercepted Lucien’s glare. “I mean, Lucien! Your betrothed comes.”

“So I’m told.” Lucien sauntered toward Charles, his newly discovered cousin. “By all means, let us greet the woman brave enough to wed a man with no memory.”

What’s next for you?

I’m juggling several projects at present. I’m writing the final story in my Middlemarch Mates series (a group of feline shapeshifters who live in the small country town of Middlemarch), I’m working on a follow-up to my contemporary The Bottom Line and I’m busy plotting/researching my next Gothic historical romance. I like to keep busy.

Let’s get chatting! I’m dying to know the story behind the camel pic…

No sooner said than done, Carolyn!

I was wondering what to post about today because I’m all in a tizzy with Jane and the Damned and Bespelling Jane Austen released two days ago and I still haven’t gloated over them on a shelf in a store (although I may do so today even though it’s pouring with rain). I’m going to spend the entire weekend talking about them and giving away copies so I hope you’ll stop by.

So … regional accents. I’ve frankly never seen such bizarre treatments of regional accents as in romance, where a sort of one-size-fits all generic vaguely Cockney reigns, unless the character is Scottish, in which case he or she assumes the one-size-fits all generic Scottish accent. What complicates matters is that we know accents change over time. We don’t really know how people spoke two centuries ago. Should we care? Yes. Should we try to make them sound “right”? Yes, because an accent, or rather, the way someone speaks reveals a lot about them, not only where they grew up, but also their education, their background, and everything else that goes into defining their place in the English class system–and their role in your book.

Take a look, and listen, at Sounds Familiar? at the wonderful British Library website. This demonstrates particular pronunciations and dialects of the twentieth century, after radio and TV dulled things down a bit. It’s more likely in pre-industrial revolution England that there would be even more accents; I visited an area in the Midlands one time where there were subtle changes in accents every five miles or so.

Another good source may be IDEA, International Dialects & Accents of England, which I’ve just discovered (I’m at work with a computer that has no sound).

Yes, but … this is a huge scholarly research area. How did our characters speak? My theory–and it’s only a theory, and it’s mine (suppresses inner John Cleese)–is that it’s quite likely our aristos talked one way with their peers, but could lapse into local dialects when at home in the country. Why? Children were raised by servants, not by their parents. My sole source for this theory is Kipling’s Stalky & Co., a book about a group of cool, subversive, inventive boys at a public school in the late nineteenth century. They adopt the lingua franca of a Devonshire accent when they visit the local village; one of them, of Anglo-Irish descent, had his native accent bullied out of him when he joined the school.

We know that the Londoners of the Regency probably used the interchangeable Vs and Ws of Dicken’s characters, because Dickens was writing the dialect of his youth.

So how do we differentiate the way the lord speaks from his valet? If the valet was particularly ambitious, they might sound pretty much alike. It’s more a question of diction, vocabulary, phrasing, than anything else.

I find attempts to duplicate dialect are really annoying, particularly those generic Scottish ones. You don’t want your reader to have to slow down deciphering dialogue. Also, I don’t know how attuned the American ear is to English dialects anyway–I know that I can just about tell a southern US accent from a Boston one and I’ve been here for years.

Now you can hear me all over the place–I narrate my book trailer, for instance, and I have soundbites on my website (and a new contest, while you’re there). If you have the RWA conference tape to which Carolyn referred, you’ll hear me and Miranda Neville, who also has a new release this month and will visit weekend after next. Can you tell the difference between us? She’s much posher than I am. I have more of a multipurpose, upper lower middle class southeastern urban accent.

The pic I used for this post is also from the British Library site, which has a whole wonderful section on cookbooks and recipes from the past, very useful stuff. Enjoy.

What do you think about simulated dialects in books?

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I’m about to dive into what I will call The Next Historical until such time as I have a working title. I’ve also been listening to the RWA 2010 Conference DVD. Right now I’m going through the craft track sessions. For those who don’t know, the RWA National conference records nearly all the workshops which are then available for purchase as a DVD or individually. There are sessions on writing craft, the business of writing, chats with major authors, publisher spotlights and keynotes.

Quite often the craft workshops give me horrible hives and make me feel inadequate as a writer. I’ve skipped a few workshops because the subject matter was not something I was interested in (how to shop your MS, for example).

Today I listened to the workshop on historical dialog given by, among others, Madeline Hunter and the Riskies own Janet Mullaney. It’s a GREAT workshop. I could listen to Madeline Hunter talk about writing for hours, and I wish Janet had had more time to talk about regional dialects (please take this as a hint for a future post, Janet!) I’m not kidding when I say that so far this is one of the best workshops I’ve listened to so far.

There’s also a workshop on Pantsing that contained some really fascinating information backed up by solid research. This is dear to my heart because I am a pantser; a seat of the pants writer. I’ll listen to that one again. I cannot plot a novel in advance. Not if my life depended on it. That’s just the way it works for me.

Writing The Next Historical

All of which gets me back to The Next Historical. I can’t sit down with no idea whatever. Before I start writing, I will do things like set up the new folder and put in all the base documents. For a historical, that includes my chronology of Regency Events, a blank cast of characters where I will note the names of my characters (as they appear) their birthdates, eye and hair color so if I forget I can look it up. Subject to change and deletion. I also have a template for a list of scenes (set up to automatically number, which I use for about half the novel, after which I almost never need it.

As I write each chapter, I write a sentence or two about what happens  and whose POV it’s in (because so far I only do one POV per chapter.) This is also subject to massive change and deletion. It gives me a quick way to check for arc and see what chapters might need to move where as my writing fleshes out the story and the conflicts that arise. I also put in the master document template and the template for chapters and the document where I will track my daily word count. I also keep a list of Action Items which will be a list of Things That Need to be Fixed But Not Right This Minute. I’d say 80% of that list gets written out– that is the problem goes away as I continue writing.

Daydeaming and staring off into Space

 I also spend a lot of time doing things that aren’t writing, but are definitely thinking about my characters. In the car. In the shower. When I’m cooking, doing a crossword, reading some unrelated book. . . . I’ll jot what if notes, lots and lots of them. My mind wanders a lot. I’ll do some web surfing on things I think I might put in the story — historical facts, locations, events, etc. Basically, I muse and daydream because of course the synopsis I provided to my editor is fake, in that it’s not the story I will write because I cannot plan in advance.

For me, the characters drive everything. If my hero and heroine relate to each other in such and such a way, what things could happen that would stress that relationship– put the two of them in the kind of conflict in which they also learn about the things they admire in each other? I mull over these situations and imagine them in my head.

About now you might be saying, Carolyn, that sounds an awful lot like planning. Except none of that will happen. Here’s what happens instead:

I reach a point where the weight of the characters in my head is so great I have to start writing. Often there is a goodly measure of deadline panic involved as well.  So I sit down and start writing a scene where something has just happened and my hero and heroine are now in conflict with themselves and each other. It’s not likely to be any scene that I imagined. It will be a scene that is required in order for the nature of their relationship to explode.

I’ll write and someone will say or do something I didn’t think of before and I can see how that’s interesting so I follow. If it’s not interesting to me, I don’t write it. Or delete it as quickly as possible. Because it doesn’t matter if it’s a necessary precursor to their coming emotional and physical intimacy, it matters if it’s interesting to me because only then do I care about making it even more interesting for them. And me.

Right now, The Next Historical is a huge weight and I have to start writing about them. At the moment (completely subject to change) they don’t like each other. She has a very good reason (which I expect will be revealed much to my great surprise) to think he’s not nice. And he is in denial about something. Probably her. There’s only one way for me to find out and that’s to get the two of them on the page and let them show me.

Geeking out

As a somewhat geekish aside, I use a master document with each chapter a subdocument. Each chapter exists as a separate file, each of which can be worked on individually. When I’m done for the day, I expand all the chapters into the master document. This is awesome because I have set up automatic page numbering and automatic numbering of the chapters as well as all the necessary headers. I NEVER have to worry about having the wrong page number or chapter number anywhere in the document. When I’m done, I condense the master document so that any changes are saved back to the individual files.

With the master document expanded, I can do a quick word count, change ALL the instances of someone’s name to something else, spell check everything etc. This is how I quickly know if I’ve hit my word count, particularly if I’ve worked in multiple chapters. Moving chapters into the correct place to adjust the story arc is more or less trivial. (not quite but I won’t bore you with the details.)

Book due at the end of the week! Can’t think, can’t think! It’s Deadline Days at the McCabe/McKee house, and that means the place is a mess and there is no food in the fridge. So I am falling back on my favorite deadline blog post–looking at pretty dresses from the “Random Gowns” folder on my computer. I love all of these. Which is your favorite? (and bonus points if you can tell us the time periods…)

Back next week with a proper post, I promise!














Last night I watched a Netflix/History Channel documentary on the French Revolution .

The French Revolution must have impacted “our” time period. The English aristrocracy must have looked with horror upon the events of the Revolution, especially the Reign of Terror during which 16,000 to 40,000 people were guillotined.

Knowing what happened during the French Revolution helps me understand the draconian measures the British Parliament invoked during the social unrest after the Napoleonic Wars–suspension of habeas corpus, the Seditious Meetings Act, the restrictions on newspapers, etc.

(The conflict between social justice and social stability was essentially the conflict between my heroine and hero in Chivalrous Captain, Rebel Mistress, by the way.)

Random thoughts after watching the documentary:

1. Something had to give. The disparity between the suffering of the poor and the excesses of the monarchy were too great. Desperate people do desperate acts. I cannot blame the French people for the revolt, nor the French people’s pride in seizing control of their fates.

2. Helping to fund the American Revolution helped to bankrupt France and led to the suffering of the French poor. How ironic is that?

3. There was a mix of altruism and fanaticism in the Revolution. Marat seemed to always have been a fanatic, spurred on by his own internal rage, having little to do with reality. Robespierre seems to have been an idealist who was corrupted by his own power.

4. I don’t like Marat. He gratified his need to be important by stirring up the people with plots and conspiracies which did not exist. Ironically, his murderer, Charlotte Corday who only wanted to stop Marat’s influence, made him a Revolutionary icon.

5. How did the Revolutionary heroes like Robespierre justify the Reign of Terror? Even 16,000 people executed is a massive number. And how could he justify killing men who were once allies, just because they disagreed with him? (of course, he wasn’t the only one in history to do this…)

6. How scary it must have been for even ordinary people at the height of the Reign of Terror. It seemed like almost anyone could get a person guillotined just by saying they were against the Revolution.

7. Robespierre sealed his own fate. When those close to you fear that they are next on your list, you rise to number one on their list!


8. I feel sorry for Marie Antoinette. Surely she had no power and no understanding of what the lives of the poor were like.

Do you have any random thoughts about the French Revolution? What do you think was its affect on the Regency?

Remember. I’m blogging at Diane’s Blog on Thursdays.

And be sure to visit the new Harlequin Historical blog on eHarlequin.

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