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Monthly Archives: August 2012

Male duds as in clothing.  Why? What were YOU thinking? If it’s colorful, please mention in the comments.

What Color Is your Boa?

Most of you know that last week was the Romance Writers of America national conference, in which Romance authors the world over meet to eat bon-bons, compare our boas, and send our assistants off to do all the work. I drove down to Anaheim with the marvelous Isobel Carr, by the way.
Anyhow, the weekend before the road trip, Isobel, Miranda Neville, and Pam Rosenthal drove up my way so we could have High Tea at Patisserie Angelica.  (OH MY GOD! I am officially a name dropper.) Have I mentioned that Jo Bourne once came to Patisserie Angelica for High Tea? She did. And then she won a RITA. Just saying.

Patisserie Angelica: where all the cool historical romance authors have High Tea.

I’m still working on Jennifer Haymore. I got Grace Burrows as far as Petaluma after RWA. We had an amazing dinner, but the meeting was a bit ad hoc and she had Big Trees to see so the jaunt to Sebastopol was not possible. Not so long ago, Liz Maverick was here and now her life is sparkly. Our very own Risky Megan has been here.

Sonoma County:  Where all the cool writers come to visit. Or live. (I am not kidding.)

 
If you’re ever in Sonoma County, hit me up and I will show you the awesome.

Right. So, Isobel Carr, on the pre-RWA trip to Sebastopol, was telling me all about this book about male fashion that was super cheap for some reason she couldn’t fathom. Isobel Carr is, as many of you probably know, something of a history of fashion expert, so when she identifies a great reference book, it’s wise to listen up.

Since I had my iPad handy I immediately went in search of the book, found it after a bit of trouble with the spelling of the author’s last name and saw it was indeed available for $5.00.

Dear Readers, I bought it.

My Book Has Come In

Today, the book arrived. It had to come all the way from Canada. I think a dog sled was involved. The Male Image, Men’s Fashion from 1300-1970 by Penelope Byrde. It’s hardback and in excellent condition since it has a library binding. And guess what??? This is so low tech I’m giddy.

It’s an old fashioned Library Book!
Look! The pink thing comes out.

I can’t wait to go through it looking for pictures of men in high boots (definitely not male duds!) or gentlemen in tights and that dead sexy frac. Also, I see there is a lengthy section on the history of the neckcloth.

Also, I can’t wait for publishers to get their acts together and start doing books like this in color.

Do I have links for you!  And stories.

Swallow!

Here’s the strange thing. This first link goes to the blog of my good friend SonomaLass. (Not her IRL name!). Her partner is British and they go to the family farm in Scotland or to Britain proper once a year. This year (and last, actually) they did a canal boat trip and her pictures are wonderful. You will love them. By the way, she brought me back the most beautiful coffee cup:

I LOVE that coffee cup. She says considered getting me the Blue Tit, but decided Swallow was better for a romance author. She is very wise.

Go look at her Canal Trip Pictures, think about Regency folk floating along, but also read about her trip. When you come back, I’ll tell you how we got to be friends.

Fun, eh? Yes, I want to go, too!!

How I met my Good Friend

Two or three years ago now, I kept seeing someone in the comments at Dear Author saying funny, smart stuff and given her handle of “SonomaLass” I finally replied to one of her comments and asked if, by any chance, she lived in Sonoma County. The answer was yes! So, short story even shorter, she lives about 20 minutes from me and works in my town. We’ve been meeting up for conversation and European Sipping Chocolate ever since. And, also as it turns out, someone else turned out to live very close by and now we all three meet regularly and talk about romance novels and all kinds of stuff. I love the internet.

All About Lace

My next link is to A Most Beguiling Accomplishment for a post about lace. I love her blog. Don’t forget to check out the side bar (left and right) for more great links.

When I was 16, our Italian-born neighbor took my sister and I with her when she went to Italy to visit relatives. Some of her relatives lived in VERY small villages in the Alps. It was like sitting in the middle of someone’s ridiculous fantasy about quaint Italian villages. We sat outside their stone house at a table shaded by enormous grape vines and I watched a plump old woman hand make this lace:

Hand tatted Italian Lace. Photo by Moi.

She was unbelievably fast at the lace making (done with bobbins). Like an expert knitter, she didn’t even have to look. She sat with us, chatting with her relative and her American visitors and her hands were constantly moving. My sister also got a lovely hand made lace doily.

Maps

From lace to maps: The David Rumsey Map Collection. Connected to Google maps, too.

Oh, my goodness. I have a thing for maps. It’s almost worse than my thing for looking at vacation photos.

Extraordinary People

My next link is outside our period but it’s an article well worth reading about an American woman physician who also did some early sex research beginning in 1892. Celia Mosher was an extraordinary woman, and this Stanford Magazine article makes me wish I’d know her or that she’d lived miraculously long enough to know that other women came after her and they did not have to make the sacrifices she did. Because of women like her, other women got to have bigger dreams and to see them come true.

What strikes me about this article about Dr. Mosher is the sense of how isolated she felt. How many extraordinary women of the past also felt isolated by their ambition and brilliance? It’s a tragedy.

Which leads me to my last post, which is totally outside our period because it’s from just a few days ago (August 2012). An Unexpected Ass Kicking. A touching and inspiring article. I hope you take the time to read it.

Stories

When I was young, my grandmother came to live with us for a few years. She got homesick and eventually went back to Oregon where, a couple weeks after locking herself out of the house and climbing through a window to get in, she passed away of a heart attack at age 87.  She was a woman who talked a lot. And I mean a lot. It could be very tedious, to be honest.  As a young woman, my grandmother, not that it matters, was heart-stoppingly beautiful. She certainly is in her wedding picture.

But over several evenings, I sat with my grandmother (who was in many ways an extraordinary woman) and listened to her talk. I didn’t have to say much, but I learned an awful lot about her her family that no one else knew. In fact, I was the first one to hear the story of the family ax murderer, later confirmed by my sister who found the article about his trial. But I LOVE listening to stories.

In fact, I once went to a party where I sat next to a man I figured was probably approaching 80, and he started telling me all about his life growing up in Poland. His family tried to rescue me, but I didn’t want to be rescued. I’m sure they’d all heard the stories before, but they were new to me. It turns out he was 104. Which is why all his stories had no cars or electricity.

I hope to make it to a doddering old age without doddering, and I hope there’s someone around to listen to my stories.

Got any stories about extraordinary people? I would love to hear them!

Super Secret Surprise for people who read this far:

I’m giving away a copy of my September historical Not Proper Enough here.

Rules: Void where prohibited. Must be 18 or older to enter. No purchase necessary. Post a comment to this post by Midnight Pacific on Friday August 17, 2012. International OK.

 

Keyboard: Photo By Moi

Since this weekend I sent off the final-final-FINAL version of an anthology story, you get my thoughts on editing, revision, copy-editing, and proofreading: that is, what happens before a story gets to the reader.

Things that Get Bumped Around

Courtney Milan, Sherry Thomas and I are putting out a historical romance anthology called Midnight Scandals.  We are self-publishing it, by the way, using a service provided by our agent that will allow us to get a pre-order button on Amazon. For various reasons, the anthology MUST be on sale in August or else not until November. And THAT means our final files must be uploaded to Amazon by a certain date if we want that pre-order button.

Schedules, Titles, Ack!!!

At first, the hero of my story was the earl of Daunt. I had a little joke going on about his country estate being called Dauntless because he was never there. I liked that a lot as a title for my story, and for quite a while it was my working title.

Then it finally dawned on me that in this anthology, one of the unifying elements between the three stories is that they all take place at Doyle’s Grange, a modest estate near the Exmoor mountains. Oops. Dauntless and Doyle’s Grange. That’s not going to work and Doyle’s Grange could not be changed.

So then I changed my main character to the Viscount Northword and called his estate Wordless. That maintained the play on the various meanings of Dauntless that I’d been using and still echoed characteristics of people. So, for another while, the title was Wordless.

Then I saw the titles for all three stories, and the other two played off the anthology title of Midnight Scandals. My one word title stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. So, late Friday — two days before one of the drop dead dates, I brainstormed ideas for a different title that matched the others and came up with One Starlit Night.

Revisions

The three of us used the same editor for our stories so that we’d have a consistent hand across the stories. She’s a really, really good editor. The three of us shared our unedited stories with each other — necessary so that we could catch continuity issues etc. We’ve also shared the revisions among ourselves.

I’ve heard some authors say they don’t feel editing is necessary. To be blunt, I have heard this said on twitter and on a writing-related email list. One author gave the opinion that since editors are doing less editing, and since she had herself been lightly edited or not edited at all with her traditionally published works, then perhaps editing was not necessary. Another author in a different venue said much the same thing.

Maybe those two people are fantastic writers who really don’t need another eye. Rex Stout can’t be the only author to write a one and final version. But that writer is not me.

I can only speak about my own experience, but I know that my writing goes through a progression even when no one sees it but me. I’m pretty sure I’m hard on myself. I turn in a story that I think is good. And while it’s off in editor land, and I’m working on something new, things start nagging me. I worry about a certain scene or wake up in the middle of the night thinking, why didn’t I think of THAT? I will often start revising before I get a revision letter.

My editor may say certain things or make certain observations about my story. I read through all that, absorb and assess it and then I go back to work. When I am done, the story is likely to have changed in small ways that have a huge impact. It’s also possible that I will have done a massive re-write that uses almost nothing of what’s in the editorial letter. But many of those changes are unlikely to have happened without that editorial input.

What comes out of that is always better than what I turned in. Even though what I turned in originally was good to better-than-average. Suddenly, the story is tighter, the themes more cohesive, the emotions are alive. I always want a re-revision opportunity in order to assess the status of the revised story and make sure the story is doing what I want it to.

To writers who question the value of an editor, I say: How good do you want your work to be? Revision letters make me dig in and dig deeper.

One last remark: I have had three manuscripts that had none-to almost no editing. The editor of DX, my Crimson City novella, had only one fairly minor suggestion, and this person was famous for LONG revision letters. The editor of Scandal said she didn’t want to change a word. I did change a few things, and added once scene based on other input.  Indiscreet was also lightly edited, but I ended up rewriting the ENTIRE second half of the novel.

One Starlit Night was close when I sent it to my editor. But I knew it needed something to pull things together better. Based on the input, I did a pretty extensive rewrite, but I changed things that were never explicitly touched on in the editorial letter. I knew they would address the weaknesses.

Copy-Edits

I LOVE the Oxford comma. I think writing requires the Oxford comma. And I am CONSTANTLY abusing it. I am the em-dash queen. I often make mistakes with colons and semi-colons even though I actually know the rule. Sometimes I have read a sentence so often that I lose the ability to tell when I need a comma or other punctuation. What rules of capitalization are in place? Did I miss name changes? (Why, yes! Yes I did! I changed one character’s name several times and somehow, even with search and replace, I missed some.) Did I say “two weeks later” and then say something that makes it clear it CAN’T be two weeks later?

Oops.

What new errors did I introduce during revision? Thank you, copy-editor.

Proofreading

No matter how many errors I catch, there are always errors I missed and so did everyone else.

Whoo boy. Errors get in there and the human brain very kindly fixes all those errors for you.

Concluding Thoughts

I can’t imagine, or more accurately, don’t want to imagine putting something out there that hasn’t been edited, copy-edited and proofread. An editor gets my writer brain going. I challenge myself, I see exciting things and I want to make sure that gets down on the page.

An editor does not write my book. I do. I make the decisions about how or even whether to solve any issues.

A Writing Truism

Every writer dreads a revision letter that says, I only have a couple of changes. I’m sure this won’t take long. Revision letters like that mean you will need to rewrite the ENTIRE book.

The revision letter that’s 20 pages and contains apologetic language for the all requested changes, and if you need an extra month, that’s OK, because this will be a lot of work… Those revisions go like this: Delete three sentences and change the villian’s shirt from red to blue. Done.

Midnight Scandals

Cover of Midnight Scandals
Pre-Order at Amazon | Apple

Find out more about all three stories.

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