Susanna Fraser

52 Cookbooks - Week 16, Colorado Cache

2012-01-28T20:32:00.000-08:00

Though Mr. Fraser grew up in Oklahoma, he has family in Denver (and he's an alum of the University of Colorado). Because of that connection, one of our 52 cookbooks is the Colorado Cache Cookbook, a 1978 production of the Junior League of Denver.

I'm trying to up my vegetable intake and get out of the habit of eating the same round of carrots, bell peppers, green beans, and caesar salad again and again, so I decided to try Honey-Glazed Acorn Squash. It reminded me of a recipe my mother used to make with butternut squash and molasses:

Honey-Glazed Acorn Squash
4-6 servings

2 or 3 acorn squash
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 c. honey
2 T butter, softened
1 T Worcestershire sauce
1/4 c. chopped walnuts
1/4 c. raisins

Cut squash in half, remove seeds. Place cut-side down in shallow pan. Add 1/2 inch hot water to pan. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes or until almost tender. Turn cut-side up, season with salt and pepper. Combine other ingredients and spoon into cavities of squash. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or until filling is heated.

The good: It's a simple, straightforward preparation. The hardest part was sawing through the squash.

The bad: It's edible, but I wouldn't go beyond that--on the bland side, and the squash is somehow squishy AND stringy. I think my mom's butternut squash with molasses tasted better, and I didn't even much like squash when I was a kid.

Books read, week of 1/24

2012-01-24T22:12:00.000-08:00

I continue on my journey toward reading 75 books in 2012:

10) Tough as Nails: One Woman's Journey Through West Point, by Gail O'Sullivan Dwyer.

I have a much-older brother who was in West Point Class of '80, the first US Military Academy class to admit women. He was my idol and my measuring stick when I was little. I remember going to his high school graduation, and on the way home asking my mom why Jim got to give a speech when none of the other students did. She said it was because he was valedictorian, which meant he had the highest grades in the whole class. I decided on the spot that I would be valedictorian of my class, too. I was five. But 13 years later I made good on that vow.

All through elementary school, I dreamed of going to West Point too. Jim left his cadet sabre with us after graduation because he moved so often as a young officer, and I used to get it out and pose with it. I even think some of my interest in the Napoleonic Era might spring from having imprinted on West Point dress uniforms, which wouldn't have looked at all out of place at Austerlitz or Waterloo!

I ended up changing my mind about the military by the time I got to high school, which is just as well. I'm allergic to chains of command. I can fake it in my day job, but one of the reasons I hope to write full time someday is if I'm self-employed I neither have to boss or be bossed. Gail O'Sullivan Dwyer, however, did follow her brother to West Point. She's Class of '81, so just behind my brother (and her husband is one of his classmates). Her memoir is mostly a straightforward account of her years at the Academy and how she toughed her way through as part of the second class to include women despite being tiny, not particularly athletic, and having almost no practical knowledge of Army life when she went in. I'd love to read a follow-up about her post-West Point years, how she managed as an officer despite not having what I think of as a typical officer's personality (she doesn't come across as assertive as most of the officers I've known, either in my family or on the pages of history), how she came to terms with the disordered eating habits she picked up during her education, and what it was like making the transition from officer to Army wife. (Two VERY different roles. I'm glad I never seriously tried to date any of the cadets I met when my brother was a math instructor at West Point while I was an undergrad at Penn, because if a lone wolf like me would be a less than ideal officer, I'd be even worse as one's wife.) I'd also like to read about other women's West Point experiences, because hers is very much an individual story.

11) Book Which Must Not Be Named (#1 of 8). I'm a first-round judge for Romance Writers of America's annual Rita awards, and the contest rules obligate me to keep strict confidentiality about the books I'm assigned to judge. Since I want these books to count toward my 75, I will just say that it was indeed a book, which I read and formed an opinion of in the form of a score somewhere between 1 and 9.

12) Mighty Be Our Powers, by Leymah Gbowee. The memoir of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner and a leader of the Liberian women's peace movement. A moving book, and all the more so because Gbowee isn't the kind of person you'd expect to take on such a role--after escaping an abusive relationship, she was a single mother with four young children, she struggled with alcohol abuse, etc., but she kept fighting to get an education and then to organize women from across tribal and religious boundaries to work together for peace.

A cancer awareness post

2012-01-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

I have a fairly significant family history of colon cancer, including a brother and a cousin who were diagnosed in their mid-40's. As a result, I had my first colonoscopy four years ago when I was 36, and my second one yesterday, a couple weeks after my 41st birthday.

I'm not going to go into details, because I'm naturally squeamish and unwilling to publicly discuss bodily functions--it isn't ladylike, gosh darn it, and I was Raised Right. I will say that I'm glad that between my primary care doc's persuasiveness and my utter terror of cancer (when we say "the C-word" around my house, that's the one we're talking about), I was able to overcome said squeamishness and have the test done.

I'm also not going to lie to you and claim it's an easy process. The prep is pretty much 24 hours of misery. The procedure itself, though, is not so bad, because you're sedated, and at least where I had mine done, they're very kind and understanding about the fact you're scared and feeling like every last shred of dignity you have is being taken away.

But it's still worthwhile if you have a family history like mine or you've turned 50 (the age at which screenings are recommended for everyone). Either you find out you don't have any signs of cancer, as has fortunately been the case for me so far, and you get to go home with one less thing to worry about, or the fact you're having it done as a screening rather than waiting to develop symptoms means they'll be able to catch any issues while they're still at the easily treatable and highly survivable stage. And isn't that worth an uncomfortable and undignified day or two out of your life?

52 Cookbooks - Catching up

2012-01-19T14:19:00.000-08:00

I've still been cooking a new recipe from one of my randomly chosen cookbooks every week except when we were out of town for Christmas, but between one thing and another, I've neglected to blog about it. I intend to go back to proper blogging with recipes and pictures next week, but here's a quick summary of the cooking I've been doing in the meantime:

Mom and Me Cookbook, by Annabel Karmel. I made spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce with Miss Fraser, age 7. She enjoyed it, and I mean to find ways to cook with her more often, at least once or twice a month, so she'll learn.

Calling All Cooks Two, by the Alabama Telephone Pioneers. Lesson learned from this week: if you're making a chocolate-pecan pie, choose one with more pecans than chocolate. Otherwise it's so chocolatey you can't taste the pecans.

How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman. I also have the mobile app, so I decided to make the two top-rated recipes. The meatloaf turned out tasty, if a smidge on the bland side, but I'm baffled by the popularity of the "boiled water" soup. It's sort of like French onion soup, but with garlic. To me, it's boring and a waste of good garlic.

Good Eats 2: The Middle Years, by Alton Brown. I think this is my favorite of the cookbooks I've attempted so far. I made broiled steak, German hot slaw, and chipotle-mashed sweet potatoes, all of which I'd gladly make again.

Another week's reading

2012-01-17T18:13:00.001-08:00

I've been neglecting this blog shamefully of late, largely due to a pinched nerve flareup. I'm trying to save my best computer time for my writing. But I never stop reading, and here are books 7-9 toward my goal of reading 75 books in 2012:

7) Margarita, by Joan Wolf. This is a traditional Regency romance--i.e. a subgenre with less sex and often a bit more history than you generally find in historical romance. They're rare in print publishing nowadays, but more and more trad authors are reviving their backlists as ebooks, as is the case with this book, originally released in 1982.

Wolf delves deeply into the actual history of the time period even by the standards of the subgenre. In this case the heroine is the daughter of a Venezuelan man and an English woman, and she loses all her family fighting in Bolivar's revolution. She goes to her English grandfather for lack of any other options, and after he dies she finds herself married to the cousin who inherited his title and estates. It contains multiple elements that would be a tough sell in today's market--very young heroine (17 when she marries), a rather distant omniscient POV, a hero who doesn't give up his mistresses until long after marrying the heroine, and a hero and heroine who are cousins (anathema to your typical American reader, though I've read Mansfield Park and Rose in Bloom often enough that I can put on a 19th century brain for the duration of the read and not be bothered by it). I enjoyed it, though I don't think I'd want omniscient POV in most of my romance reading.

8) Cinderella Ate my Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein. I heard Orenstein interviewed on Fresh Air a few weeks ago and knew I had to read this book. She's a few years older than I am, and her daughter is about the same age as mine, so we're both experiencing a certain disconnect in seeing the very pink, princessy, and girlie-girl culture our daughters are pushed to conform to--one that's in many ways more constricting than what we knew in the 70's despite all the strides women have made in the past 30-40 years.

It's a quick read, and one that doesn't pretend to have all the answers, either to why the cultural shift happened or how to raise a confident, true-to-herself daughter in the midst of it. (For the former, she points to similar moves to shelter and cherish daughters during previous economic and cultural crises.) Speaking from personal experience, one of the persistent and unexpected challenges of parenting Miss Fraser has been the fact she DOESN'T embrace her surrounding culture. She's a tomboy--not unusually so, but she reminds me of myself at the same age, more interested in animals and animal stories than dolls or fairy tales, and she doesn't like pastels or fussy, dressy clothes. One day when she was barely 2 and just starting to get really verbal, she pushed away a pink floral-print set of overalls I was trying to dress her in and said, "No flow-flers! No pink!" And she has stuck to that line ever since, though she'll wear fuchsia or raspberry shades. When her grandmother or aunts and uncles try to call her princess, she frowns and says, "I'm NOT a PRINCESS!" I wouldn't have her any other way, but it makes her surprisingly hard to shop for, given how gender-coded and branded so much children's merchandise is these days.

Obviously, this isn't a major problem. My daughter is happy and has plenty of friends at school. It just bugs me that this pattern exists and is so strong. Miss Fraser is fully aware that the mold exists and she doesn't quite fit it. We've talked a lot, at her initiation, about the different ways of being a girl, and how it's fine for her to be, as she puts it, "a little bit girlie," because she enjoys Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony and the like, but that above all she needs to be herself and accept other people for being themselves.

9) The Hundred Days, by Antony Brett-James. More Waterloo research, this one a compilation of various eyewitness accounts. In many cases I wished I could know more--e.g. the young Prussian volunteer who talked in a matter-of-fact way about his female sergeant, who was so brave that when she married another sergeant after the war she had three military honors pinned to her gown. And I was flabbergasted by the account of the woman hosting the ball where the Prince Regent was when the officer bringing the victory dispatches and captured French eagles caught up with him--she called it a dreadful night because everyone deserted her ball to either celebrate or try to get hold of a casualty list. She actually said she thought it would've been better for the messenger to wait quietly until the morning!

What I've read so far in 2012

2012-01-10T21:09:00.001-08:00

LibraryThing has a 75 Books in 2012 Challenge. Before I went back to work full time when my daughter was 18 months old, I used to read 125-150 books a year. Since then, I haven't counted, because I've been afraid the number would depress me with its smallness. But this year I decided to shoot for 75. Surely that's doable.

Anyway, here's what I've read so far in 2012, shamelessly copied from my LibraryThing thread. Lest you think, "Of course you'll make 75. You're on pace for around 200," I was home sick with a bad cold for a good chunk of last week and had more reading time than normal.

1) Chain Reaction, by Simone Elkeles. It's the third book in a YA trilogy. Unusually gritty, sexy, and violent for its genre, but in a good way--at least to read. When I reflect that my daughter will be the age of the main characters in just 10 years, I hope that her life, like mine, will be tame, peaceful, and boring by comparison!

2) The Hundred Days, by Edith Saunders. This is only one of several Waterloo books I plan to read in the next couple months, since my current novel-in-process is partially set there. Saunders takes more of a big picture view than a lot of the Waterloo books on my shelves, so you don't get a play-by-play of the battle, but she includes more of the behind-the-scenes political machinations in France before and after the battle, which gives you a better sense of the context. And during the battle sections, she does a good job of showing what was happening with the Prussians, the French under Marshal Grouchy, etc. throughout the day, so you see their impact on the final outcome. She's no great lover of Napoleon, but neither am I, so that didn't bother me.

3) How Few Remain, by Harry Turtledove. An alternate history of a world where the South won the Civil War that held my interest, though somehow the characters (all real historical figures re-imagined) never quite hooked me. I don't know if there were too many point-of-view characters and plot threads or what, but instead of looking for the next book in the series, I was satisfied to find plot synopses online to see how Turtledove's version of the world plays out.

4) Heat Rises, by "Richard Castle." Castle is my current favorite TV series (mm, Nathan Fillion), and I've enjoyed the three "Nikki Heat" tie-in novels for all the meta references to the show. Obviously not the deepest book I've ever read, but in my view there's nothing wrong with reading purely for entertainment (I won't call it a guilty pleasure, even, because AFAIC there's nothing to be guilty about), and this was a perfect read for a day spent curled up in bed between doses of DayQuil.

5) Eat that Frog, by Brian Tracy. As a writer not yet in a position to quit my full-time day job, I tend to collect time management books. This one, picked up on the cheap a few days ago as a Kindle Daily Deal, is nothing I haven't heard before, but it was a quick read with some useful tips. Its focus is on identifying your most critical tasks and doing them first, since you really DON'T have time to finish everything.

6) Waterloo 1815 - Captain Mercer's Journal, by Cavalie Mercer, edited by WH Fichett, introduction by Bob Carruthers. Almost every nonfiction work on Waterloo I've read contains quotes from Cavalie Mercer, a British artillery captain with a gift for vivid, descriptive writing who took part in the battle. I didn't realize when I bought this book that it's an abridged version of his journal, and I'll probably keep digging around until I find the whole thing. For research purposes I was hoping for more details of day-to-day life in the weeks and days leading up to the battle than the abridgment provided.

A Public Service Announcement

2012-01-08T20:35:00.000-08:00

Dear Fellow Writers,

"Y'all" is the second person PLURAL pronoun in Southern US English. Plural. Not singular. Which is only logical, when you consider that it's a contraction of "you all."

You may think you've heard a Southerner use "y'all" in the singular, but this born-and-bred Alabamian believes you are mistaken. If a Southerner asks her friend, "Are y'all going to the game Saturday?" she doesn't mean, Are YOU, the one person I'm talking to right now, going to the game? she means, Are you, Bobby, and the kids all going?

I've met a few people who think "y'all" is singular and "all y'all" is plural. No. "All y'all" either refers to a large group or is sort of a stand-in for "everybody" when you're trying to get a group's attention. As in, "If all y'all will gather over here, the photographer is ready to take the picture," or, "All y'all should come downstairs now--the ribs are ready."

Note too that it's spelled "y'all," not "ya'll." And please don't write "ya" instead of "you" when your Southern character is using second person singular. To my ears, Southerners are no more likely to clip the "ooh" sound off "you" than any other speakers of American English. If anything, since some Southerners really do talk a bit slower than their Yankee brethren, they're more likely to fully sound out "you."

Yes, I'm in Her Grace, the Duchess of Pedantry mode here. But badly written Southern dialect is nails on a chalkboard to me. Actually, it's one of the reasons I don't write dialect--or, at least, I don't use misspelled words to indicate accents--for any of my British characters. I try to avoid anachronisms or Americanisms for all my characters, and I use diction and word choice to show differences in class, education, and personality. But having read so many non-Southerners botch my native accent, I don't trust myself to write Cockney or Scottish or whatever in a way that won't turn native speakers against me.

2011 - my year in reading

2012-01-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

I guess I'm a little late to the party for my Best of 2011 list, but that only fits, since over half my list is books I read in 2011 with earlier copyright dates. I've never been very good about reading books the instant they come out, unless it's an ongoing series whose last book ended on a cliffhanger or one of my handful of A+++ most beloved authors.

It was a good reading year for me. Here's hoping 2012 will bring some awesome new discoveries, since it looks like something of a drought for cliffhanger/best-beloved books. Diana Gabaldon's Written in My Own Heart's Blood probably won't appear till sometime in 2013, likewise for Julia Spencer-Fleming's next Russ/Clare book. No Sharpe or Starbuck in Bernard Cornwell's pipeline that I'm aware of. I haven't heard anything about a release date for the Ivan book Lois McMaster Bujold is supposedly working on, and I'm in serious Barrayar withdrawal! Jacqueline Carey is at least on a break from and possibly done with Terre D'Ange, and I think the same may be the case for Lindsey Davis and Marcus Didius Falco (though Master & God looks interesting). And let's just say I hope George RR Martin gets his next out before the TV series catches up with it. Before my daughter starts high school is probably more realistic (she's in 2nd grade).

Don't get me wrong, none of these authors need to write faster or write what I want instead of what their muse gives them. I just don't have anything preordered months in advance right now, and I kinda miss it.

Anyway, back to 2011.

Favorite Debut Book

No Proper Lady, by Isabel Cooper. Fantasy romance that gets the balance between the two genres just right, IMO.

Favorite 2011 fiction

A Lily Among Thorns, by Rose Lerner. Solomon is one of my favorite romance heroes ever--the genre could use more brainy betas like him.

Unveiled, by Courtney Milan. Beautiful, character-driven romance.

One Was a Soldier, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. Another stunning entry in the series that won me over to contemporary-set mysteries.

Captive Bride, by Bonnie Dee. A gem of a historical romance that makes its unusual setting (1870's San Francisco) and interracial love story work.

Favorite fiction published before 2011 I just now got around to reading

The Mischief of the Mistletoe, by Lauren Willig (2010). Just a delightful, frothy Regency romp.

Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge (1964). Children's fantasy set in early 20th century England. I think it would appeal to readers of anything from Narnia to Harry Potter to A Wrinkle in Time to Anne of Green Gables.

Lady Elizabeth's Comet, by Sheila Simonson (1986). Traditional Regency that feels especially grounded in the voice and values of the time.

Can't Stand the Heat, by Louisa Edwards (2009). Contemporary romance after my foodie city-girl heart.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson (2010). A refreshing, subtle love story with older protagonists.

A Clash of Kings, by George RR Martin (1998). After getting hooked on Game of Thrones on HBO, I glommed the entire series, but I think this second book is the strongest.

Memory (1996), Komarr (1998), and A Civil Campaign (1999), by Lois McMaster Bujold. The brightest jewels in the sparkling crown that is the Vorkosigan Saga. I can't say enough about how much I love this whole series, but these are the ones I'd take with me to the proverbial desert island.

Resolved

2012-01-01T10:09:00.000-08:00

Ah, another new year (and for me, another birthday). I can never resist the impulse to make resolutions, even knowing that the combination of diehard old habits and my busy life will make it difficult to really do all that organizing and exercising and so on.

So I've done the same this year. My 2012 goals list is long, and I probably won't meet all of them. However, the most important ones boil down to:

1) Have a productive year as a writer.

2) Live a more healthy life.

I'm not going to share the rest of my goals, or even the exact steps I've delineated for productive writing and healthy living (though I may blog about them if/when I succeed).

BUT, I decided to give myself two challenges that ought to be easily achievable within 6-7 months, talk about them publicly, AND set up consequences for failing to meet them:

Challenge the First: After I turn in the manuscript for my WIP, due April 1, I want to work on a short novella. Key word here is short: I'm shooting for around 15,000 words. Once I've done a bit of research and settled on the plot, I should be able to complete the first draft in less than a month. So I'd like to finish the draft no later than 5/15 or so, and have it submission-ready by mid-June. But life happens, and my editor will most likely send me developmental edits for the WIP sometime within that window...so I'm giving myself till July 23, the day I plan to fly down to Anaheim for RWA National, to finish that first draft. And if I don't? I will wear a shirt like this on the plane:

Challenge the Second: By that same date, July 23, I want to lose 20 lbs. and/or enough to drop at least a size in my favorite jeans. (Which ought to be one and the same, but I'm giving myself an out in case by some freak chance the weight decides to come off everywhere BUT my waistline.) If I do not do so, I will wear this hat on the plane:

For me, those are some dire consequences for falling short of my goals. You see, in my real sports fan life, I'd wear this hat with this shirt:

Anyone want to pick their own sports gear nightmare and join me? I got the idea for this after hearing a pair of coworkers, one a UW grad and the other WSU, challenge each other to quit smoking with the threat of having to wear a Cougars tee for the former and a Husky one for the latter.

The fine print: the bet is off if some dire medical, natural, financial, or similar disaster interferes. F'rex, if this is the year the Seattle Fault or the Cascadia Subduction Zone is destined to slip, I'm not going to inflict Bama and Yankees gear upon myself on top of everything else.

Buried Treasures

2011-12-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

Just in time for the last-minute holiday shopper (or anyone looking for a good airplane read), I thought I'd do a post recommending some of my favorite buried treasures. This isn't a Best Reads of 2011 list--I'm saving that for January, since I typically get a lot of reading in over the last two weeks of December between long plane rides and being away from work. These are just books I think deserve more buzz and a wider audience.

I didn't give myself any hard and fast rules for what constitutes a buried treasure. Most of them are little-known books by little-known authors, but I threw in a few lesser-known works by popular or classic authors, especially when my favorite isn't the book or series that gets all the buzz.

However, since this is meant to be a shopping guide of sorts, I limited myself to books readily available new in either print or electronic form, priced no higher than $12 or so. Which meant saying no to Clyde Edgerton's Raney, though I love his Southern voice and reading it is like stepping back into my 70's and 80's Alabama childhood. It also ruled out Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat, though I swear everything else LM Montgomery wrote is readily available.

In no particular order:

Assiniboin Girl, by Kathi Wallace
Buy for Kindle

This book was originally published by the now-defunct Drollerie Press, but it looks like Wallace has re-released it as a self-published Kindle book. It's a YA coming-of-age story about a Native American girl who's grown up in New York knowing little about her heritage, but, after being orphaned and sent to live with an aunt and then her extended family on the reservation, develops a deeper connection to her past. With a certain amount of what I guess could be described as magic realism. It's a difficult book to describe or categorize, and it's not the most polished work I've ever read, but I couldn't put it down.

No Quarter, by Broos Campbell
Buy for Kindle
Buy for Nook
Buy the paperback from Powell's (though the price is above my target range)

Age of Sail (1799, to be specific), but in the American navy. First in a series following Matty Graves, a young midshipman just setting out on his career. Campbell has a wonderful American historical voice and a way for bringing little-known corners of history to light. I'd love to see the three books that are out so far become big hits so he can keep writing and follow Graves all the way through the War of 1812. If you like Patrick O'Brian or Bernard Cornwell (very different voices, I know, but Campbell's voice is different from both), do give this series a try.

And, doesn't the second book in the series, The War of Knives, have a gorgeous cover, in a badass war story way?

In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden. (not available in ebook)
Buy from Amazon
Buy from Barnes & Noble
Buy from Powell's

If you looked at the rest of my bookshelf (or even just the rest of this list), you'd never guess that one of my favorite books of all time is this quiet, rambling story of Benedictine nuns in mid-20th century England. But it is. Almost all my favorite books share a strong sense of place and communities of characters who seem so real to me I feel like I could step into the story and know how to fit into its world. Brede Abbey and Dame Philippa, Sister Cecily, Sister Hilary, Dame Catherine, and the rest are one of those communities to me, just like Narnia, Barrayar, Terre d'Ange, Peter Wimsey's London, or Marcus Didius Falco's Rome.

Captive Bride, by Bonnie Dee
Buy for Kindle
Buy for Nook
Buy from Carina Press

(Speaking of covers, isn't this one a beauty?)

I will always at least try a historical romance with an unusual setting, and this interracial romance set in 1870 San Francisco worked for me. Dee made me completely believe her hero and heroine found true love and deep knowledge of each other despite lacking a common language at first, and also that they would find a way to make their cross-cultural relationship work despite all the challenges they would face in their place and time. Also, I would love to see more historical romances set on the West Coast, as opposed to the conventional Westerns with deserts and cowboys. Give me more of the early days of places like Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, please!

Eight Cousins/Rose in Bloom, by Louisa May Alcott
Both free for Kindle.
Or $0.99 for both for Nook
Or you can pay a little more for the paperbacks

Not that obscure a pair of books, obviously, but I think fewer people have read them than Little Women or An Old-Fashioned Girl. They're actually my favorite Alcott books, I think because they're the only ones in which the heroine marries the same man I would've chosen myself.

The Golden Key, by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott (not available for Kindle)
Buy from Amazon
Buy for the Nook
Buy from Tattered Cover

This book blew my mind when I first read it over a decade ago. You mean fantasy isn't just swords and sorcery? Fantasy cultures are allowed to evolve and change technologically and politically just like real ones? You mean magic could take a form other than potions or wands and spells? (In this case, paints.) Now that I've also discovered Guy Gavriel Kay, Jacqueline Carey, George RR Martin, and Lois McMaster Bujold, to name just a few, it no longer seems so unique and revolutionary, but it's still an excellent book.

The Winter King, by Bernard Cornwell (print only)
Buy from Amazon
Buy from Barnes & Noble
Buy from the Tattered Cover

Don't get me wrong, I love Sharpe and wish Cornwell would get back to the Starbuck series. But I think his Arthurian trilogy, which begins with this book, is the best thing he's ever written.

Lady Elizabeth's Comet, by Sheila Simonson
Buy for Kindle
Buy for Nook

One of the many traditional Regency romances that's gained a new lease on life as an e-book, and the most delightful and freshly written one I've found.

The Old Buzzard Had it Coming, by Donis Casey
Buy for Kindle
Buy for Nook
Buy the paperback from Powell's

First in one of my all-time favorite historical mystery series. The heroine, Alafair Tucker, a farmer's wife in early 20th century Oklahoma, is a surprisingly effective amateur sleuth, and the books have what I always love in my historical fiction, a vivid sense of place and time. The first book is only $0.99 for Kindle and Nook, so if you enjoy mystery at all, give this one a try.

52 Cookbooks - Weeks 10 & 11

2011-12-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

Another double post. Also, a friend pointed out to me that these posts would be more interesting if I included the recipes, so from now on I will. My understanding is that there's no copyright issue with quoting a recipe or two from a cookbook, but please do correct me if I'm wrong.

Last week I drew the Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook (from 1998, so not all that new anymore). It's not a bad cookbook, but it's not particularly exciting, either. I chose Southern Oven "Fried" Chicken because I had the ingredients readily to hand:

1/2 c. fat free buttermilk
2-3 drops hot red pepper sauce
1/2 c. cornflakes, crushed
3 T all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp freshly ground pepper
2 lbs. chicken parts, skinned
4 tsp canola oil

1) Preheat the oven to 400F. Spray a large baking sheet with nonstick cooking spray.
2) In a large, shallow bowl, combine buttermilk and pepper sauce. On a sheet of waxed paper, combine cornflake crumbs, flour, salt, and pepper. Dip chicken in buttermilk, then dredge in cornflake mixture, coating completely. Place on baking sheet, drizzle with oil. Bake 30 min., turn over, and bake 15-20 min longer until cooked through.

My modifications: I used boneless, skinless chicken breasts because it turned out I didn't have thighs and drumsticks left in the freezer after all. I soaked the chicken for several hours in the buttermilk because I know that works from previous recipes. I used at least a teaspoon of hot sauce and didn't bother measuring salt and pepper. And it took me more like two cups of cornflake crumbs to get the chicken coated. Oh, and I cooked it at 350 instead of 400, because that seemed a little hot for pieces as prone to drying out as boneless breasts.

The results: Meh. Edible, something you could throw together quickly. Nothing exciting or memorable.

This week's cookbook was Life After Pizza, which I used to teach myself to cook in college and the first few years thereafter. It covers everything from basics like how to scramble an egg and soups you can make by mixing various canned condensed soups to yeast breads and souffles (neither of which I've ever mastered). I still consult it now and again for reminders of cooking times and such for basics I haven't made in awhile, and I confess to a fondness for one of those canned soup blends. Finding a recipe in it I'd never made before that sounded appealing was a challenge, but I finally settled on:

Pizza Pasta

1/4 c olive oil
1 large onion, thinly sliced
2 green peppers, sliced
8 oz. thinly sliced pepperoni
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 15 oz. can tomatoes
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp salt
cooked pasta

1) Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. Add onion, peppers, pepperoni, and garlic. Cook for 5 min, stirring constantly.
2) Mix in tomatoes, oregano, and salt. Cook, covered for 5 min. Remove cover, cook for 5 min until sauce thickens slightly.
3) Pour over pasta, serve with parmesan cheese.

Modifications: I used 3 oz. of pepperoni, because that's what the package I'd picked up at the store held. It was still too much. I added another half can of tomatoes, because it didn't look saucy enough. I doubled the oregano.

The results: Not inedible, but I'll never make it again. My younger self would've enjoyed the pizza-topping gimmickry, but my older, somewhat skilled cook of a current self can make a better homemade pasta sauce improv. And the pepperoni just doesn't work at all.

Books read, week of 12/13

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Even as I scramble my way through a hectic holiday season, I'm finding time to read. (I'm also waiting with eager anticipation to see what my LibraryThing Secret Santas got me and Miss Fraser. Neither of my Santees was much of a romance reader, but I'm hoping they'll like my fantasy choices. I got both of them some Bujold and one His Majesty's Dragon, which apparently was one of the top ten most-given books this year.)

In the meantime, I've been reading...

The Deception of the Emerald Ring, by Lauren Willig. I'm not always the biggest fan of spy Regencies, but I love this series because it never takes itself too seriously and yet is very intelligently written--not an easy combination to find.

Bold, Brave, and Born to Lead: Major General Isaac Brock and the Canadas, by Mary Beacock Fryer. As I'm sure the title reveals, I got this book as research for An Infamous Marriage. It's YA military history/biography. Not sure how wide a readership that gets, but it's just right for what I'm looking for--information to give my hero, a protege of Brock's, a backstory without getting bogged down in minutiae. (Brock, for those of you who've never heard of him--a group that would've included me until a few months ago!--was probably the most talented British commander in the War of 1812 and is regarded as a hero in Canada for blocking American attempts to invade in the summer and fall of 1812. Unfortunately for the British and their Native American allies, he died less than a year into the war.)

Raised Right, by Alisa Harris, is a memoir by a young woman raised in the Religious Right who's kept her faith but changed her politics...and that's really all I can say about it without saying more about religion and politics than I like to do on this blog. Suffice it to say that if it sounds relevant to you, you'd probably enjoy reading it.

Drive-by post

2011-12-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to say that my author website has just been updated (thanks to Frauke at Croco Designs), and there's an excerpt of An Infamous Marriage now.

Two weeks or so of books read

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

Now that I'm back in blog-land, here's what I can recall reading the last two weeks or so:

Hark! A Vagrant, by Kate Beaton. Just the best history geek and all-around geek comics going. If you don't already ready the web comic, you should, and if you do, you'll enjoy the book. (Here's one of my favorites that didn't make this collection.)

The Lady's Secret, by Joanna Chambers. I enjoyed this book (a debut historical romance from Carina Press), despite never 100% warming up to the hero, for the lovely writing and well-evoked period atmosphere. Mind you, there was nothing WRONG with the hero. He was just a bit too much the quintessential bored aristocrat for my taste, keeping in mind that my ideal of an aristocratic hero, real-life division, is Wellington, while the fictional division is a three-way tie between Peter Wimsey, Aral Vorkosigan, and Miles Vorkosigan. And obviously it's not every hero who can solve murders or help save Europe, Barrayar, or half the galaxy.

The Lady's Scandalous Night, by Jeannie Lin. A long short story/short novella set in Tang Dynasty China. The hero has been ordered to track down his best friend, now turned rebel, but the friend's sister will do whatever it takes to delay him and give her brother a chance to escape. Lin does a great job packing a lot of characterization into a story you can read in a single sitting.

To End All Wars, by Adam Hochschild. There's something uniquely appalling about World War I. Other wars have been senseless, and other wars have had appallingly high casualty rates, and I'm sure others set up the conditions for future conflicts, but I can't think of any other that combines all three factors to such a horrific degree. I find it almost too painful to read about, but Hochschild's history of those who fought the war and those who resisted it is too compelling to put down.

Expectations

2011-12-04T17:45:00.000-08:00

Generally I don't mention my religious or political views on this blog. I'm going to make a tiny exception today by talking about some thoughts on reader expectations that I had at church this morning...but I'm not going to preach at you, and if anyone uses the comments for preaching, they will be deleted.

All that being said, I recently started attending an Episcopalian church in my neighborhood, and I was happy to see that today's service was going to be Lessons and Carols. The year I lived in England, I went to two such services and loved them because they were a dream come true for someone like me who loves to sing and can never get enough of the traditional Christmas carols. Basically, someone would read a passage from the Christmas story, we'd sing two or three carols related to it, lather, rinse, repeat until we'd made it from the Annunciation to the Magi and sung at least a dozen carols.

So when I sat down with today's order of service, I was disappointed. There was maybe half as much congregational singing as in those English services, and none of it was Christmas classics like "Joy to the World," "Angels We Have Heard on High," or "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." It was, you see, an Advent service, with Advent music. (For those of you not versed in the liturgical-church calendar, Advent is the four weeks before Christmas, and Advent music is more about anticipating Jesus than celebrating the Nativity story. Probably the best-known Advent hymn is "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.") Now, I like Advent music fine, but I grew up in a non-liturgical church (translation: Baptist) that sang Christmas carols all December, and because of family travel I'm never at my church during Christmastide when they break out the shepherds abiding in the fields and the multitudes of the heavenly host. So there's this whole tradition of songs I grew up loving that I never get to sing anymore, and singing along with the radio or singing in the shower just aren't the same. (I know, I should probably find some carolers or something to join...but where would one find such a thing? I'm picturing the Craiglist ad: "Experienced alto seeking like-minded musicians for casual yet sophisticated and tuneful musical encounters...")

I think I spent the first third of the service feeling sad that, in fact, those Lessons and Carols services I attended back in 1997 weren't representative of the Anglican Communion as a whole--that just because two Church of England congregations in Bristol sang Christmas songs for one service in Advent did not make it required or even likely that an Episcopal one would do the same thing in Seattle in 2011. But then we sang a song that was both completely new to me and incredibly fun to sing, and the man sitting next to me, a fine baritone, started to harmonize, so I did the same. (To me, harmony is more interesting to sing and uses the richer, fuller part of my alto range--I can go as high as an E atop the treble clef, but I start sounding reedy and thin around B-natural. Still, I hesitate to harmonize when everyone else is singing melody, since it can feel conspicuous in the wrong way.) From then on, I appreciated the service for what it was instead of what I'd hoped it would be, and I'm glad I was there.

What does any of this have to do with reading? Well, it occurred to me that I was acting like someone who'd read one or two historical romances--say, a book or two by Jo Beverley--and then picked up a book by Courtney Milan or Loretta Chase and couldn't deal with the fact the voice and tone were different because all my expectations of historical romance were built on that initial sample.

I don't think I've ever been quite that picky a reader, but I've definitely had experiences where someone pushed a book on me, saying, "I know you love Author X, so I'm SURE you'll love Y, too." Once I try the book, I think the book pusher must be crazy, because X and Y are nothing alike, since Y's voice isn't as smooth or her characters aren't as vivid. Or I'll read bad reviews of books I love, and clearly the reviewer is disappointed not because the book is poorly written or offensive, but because it didn't match the expectations they had when they sat down to read.

I don't think it's possible to prevent expectations dissonance. But thinking about it makes me see the value of a well-chosen cover and title or a thoughtful review--really, anything that makes an accurate promise to the reader about what they'll find once they open my book.

52 Cookbooks - Week 8 & 9

2011-12-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to catch up on the last two weeks of 52 Cookbooks:

The week before last I drew The New Covent Garden Soup Company's Book of Soups, a cookbook Mr. Fraser bought the year we lived in England (we met there, started dating within a month or two, and got married a year after returning to the States and nearly two years to the day after we met). To get into the proper spirit of the thing, I made their vegetable stock despite certain oddities of ingredient. (Lettuce? Cooked? In a stock? Really?) And I'm glad I did. It gave the resulting soups a freshness and lightness you just don't get with canned stock.

I first made Cheese Soup with Crispy Bacon, which was every bit as yummy as it sounds, but nowhere near as heavy:

Since I had plenty of stock left over, I made their herbed cream of chicken soup and served it alongside a pesto bread recipe (bruschetta, basically) from my Week 9 cookbook, Starters and Closers, the Mariners' wives charity fundraiser cookbook from the 2001 season--i.e. back when we had a really good team. (Though that 116-win season is a lot less glorious in retrospect, since we weren't able to follow it up with a championship and have been wallowing in futility since 2004. But I digress.) Anyway, I decided to make one "starter"--the appetizer pesto bread--and one "closer"--Mike Cameron's contribution to the dessert section, cinnamon-dipped marshmallows baked inside crescent rolls. I thought they were kinda gross, but my husband and daughter ate them all.

Still here!

2011-11-28T21:32:00.001-08:00

I promise to resume blogging soon. I'm recovering from a sinus infection and a neck-shoulder-hand pain flareup, so I've been devoting what computer time I can manage to staying on pace with my manuscript.

Trading with the enemy

2011-11-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

One of the more surprising things I've learned in my recent study of the War of 1812 was that, before the war, America was a major supplier of grain to Wellington's army in Portugal and Spain...and that this commerce continued DURING the war, with the approval of both governments. The British kept buying because their Peninsular army needed to eat, and a series of bad harvests in Europe around that time made America the most reliable supplier available. And the Americans kept selling because the government didn't want to turn its farmers against the war by depriving them of a valuable market for their crops. Also, just because they were at war with Britain didn't make them allied with France, and they were perfectly happy to help keep the bulk of Britain's army and its best commander in the field in Europe, fighting someone else. Makes sense, once you understand their reasoning.

However, in reading Adam Hochschild's book on World War I, To End All Wars, I discovered a far more baffling case of trading with the enemy. The British, you see, found themselves short of binoculars for their officers and NCOs, and lacking the capacity to manufacture them quickly, since it wasn't an industry they specialized in. At the same time, the British naval blockade cut the Germans off from their sources of rubber, also an important military commodity by that time. Germany, however, was well set up to make binoculars. So they set up a top-secret trade. Um...Whiskey? Tango? Foxtrot? Actively trading military technology with your direct enemy in a war brutal beyond example?

(Though I can't confirm the truth of the WWI story. Hochschild's research seems thorough to me, but googling turns up nothing but debates over whether it really happened. I hope it didn't, because WWI really doesn't need another level of senselessness. Sure, the War of 1812 was as pointless a conflict as was ever fought, but at least it was relatively small-scale, and the combatant nations have been at peace ever since. As for World War I...well, the British had more casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme than they had regular soldiers in the War of 1812. And we all know how well the Treaty of Versailles worked out...)

52 Cookbooks - Week 7, Everyday Food

2011-11-17T07:00:00.000-08:00

This week for the first time I drew a cookbook I already use fairly frequently, Everyday Food: Great Food Fast. It's a 2007 collection by the editors of Everyday Food magazine, so it's full of recipes suited to current tastes and food trends, without being too labor-intensive or beyond the skills of the average home cook. In other words, everyday.

For the sake of my challenge, I chose a recipe I'd never made before, Chili-Rubbed Skirt Steak. Simple stuff--just steak coated with a chili-heavy spice rub and broiled. I also made the suggested side, romaine salad with a homemade creamy chili dressing. It looked like this:

Tasted pretty good, too. I also made a dessert from the book, Grilled Chocolate Sandwiches. Chocolate-stuffed french toast, basically. The flavor was fine, but it was messy to make, since chocolate melts softer than cheese and kept wanting to ooze out rather than adhere to the bread. I think you could get the same or better flavor with easier clean-up from pouring a good chocolate sauce over ordinary french toast.

Books read, week of 11/15

2011-11-15T07:00:00.000-08:00

After last week's somewhat gloomy reads, I decided I was due for some lighter fare.

First, I blazed through The Ionia Sanction, Gary Corby's second historical mystery featuring Nicolaos, a fictional older brother to Socrates (who makes occasional appearances as the last 12-year-old brother any 21-year-old man would want around, because he's such a logical little know-it-all). Nico is ambitious and is trying to rise in Athens' new democracy under the reluctant patronage of Pericles, which in this adventure leads to a journey to Persian-controlled Asia Minor in search of traitors and murderers. Corby does a great job balancing history and story, making Nico and his fellow Athenians relatable while still highlighting just how far removed their attitudes and worldview are from our own.

Sheila Simonson's Love and Folly is billed as a traditional Regency romance (one of the many old trads given a fresh lease on life as ebooks), though it's really more a few months in the lives of two families caught up in political tumult in 1820. There is a love story, but it's more a subplot than the focus of the book. In any case, I love both of Simonson's books that I've read so far because they feel so specific and particular. Neither the characters nor the settings are remotely generic, and her world feels three-dimensional.

Finally, I re-read Dorothy Sayers' Clouds of Witness, the second Peter Wimsey novel, now out in a Kindle edition. I'd read it years ago, but unlike Murder Must Advertise or the Harriet Vane sequence, I don't feel driven to revisit it every year or two, so I'd forgotten most of the details of the mystery. I enjoyed it, and it's important to the overall sequence in introducing Lord Peter's family (including his mother the Dowager Duchess, who is made of awesome) but it's just not the same level of masterpiece as, say, Murder Must Advertise or Gaudy Night.

More on the War of 1812

2011-11-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Still researching the War of 1812, and still looking back at James Madison et al. and asking them, "What the HELL were you thinking picking that fight? Do you have any IDEA how lucky you were to get away with a draw?"

Though, to give my countrymen of 200 years ago credit, a lot of that is my 20-20 hindsight talking. They went into it with the not-at-all-illogical assumption that Napoleon was going to continue as master of Europe, and that he'd either gradually wear the British down or that the European wars would keep going and going and going. Fighting to get some trade and territorial concessions out of an apparently weakened and certainly distracted Britain made all kinds of sense. It's easy to see now that Napoleon was already past his peak as a commander, and that the cracks were starting to show in his empire. While it was actually happening, from the other side of the Atlantic? Probably not so much.

American declared war on 18 June 1812. Three years to the day before Waterloo. And less than a week before Napoleon crossed the Niemen River into Russia--and if there's a single event that sealed his doom, it's that invasion. It's kinda hard to come back from a campaign where you lose over 80% of the army you went in with.

So, yeah, my fellow Americans guessed wrong on that one. Oops.

52 Cookbooks - Week 6, Ratio

2011-11-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

This week random.org picked out Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman, somewhat to my dismay, since it's mostly about baking, making your own stocks, or making your own sausages. None of those are my comfort zone, and with Mr. Fraser out of town at a conference, leaving me solely responsible for all house and kid care, I kinda wanted to stick to what's simple.

What does baking have in common with stocks and sausages, you may ask? (I know I did.) All are amenable to ratios--once you learn a certain balance of liquid, fat, starch, etc. you can use those ratios to create an almost infinite array of flavors. Since I was keeping things simple for the week, I made cookies. Very basic cookies:

They're 1 part sugar to 2 parts butter to 3 parts flour, plus whatever flavorings you add. And that's all. No eggs. I don't think I've ever made cookies without eggs before. I made one batch with a little salt, vanilla, cinnamon, and cloves, and another where I replaced the regular sugar with dark brown sugar but still added salt and vanilla.

They turned out well--dry, crisp, buttery, and more sophisticated somehow than most sweeter, cakier cookies. Will make again, and may use to introduce Miss Fraser to baking, since the dough molds like modeling clay and I wouldn't have to worry about raw egg issues. (I'll cheerfully lick the bowl clean myself, since I know the odds of the one or two eggs I used happening to carry salmonella are very low, but I'd feel like a Bad Mommy to encourage my daughter to do likewise.)

Books read, week of 11/8

2011-11-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

I finished two books in the last week, both of them on the depressing/tragic side.

Tecumseh: A Life, by John Sugden, is a biography of the Shawnee leader who tried to create a confederation of Native Americans from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, and who died in the War of 1812 fighting in alliance with the British. I read it as research for the WIP, and found it slow going because Sugden was so determined to stick to facts over speculation that much of the first 2/3 of the book was necessarily vague. The War of 1812 section, being better documented, was more compelling.

History is full of what-ifs for me, but what makes Tecumseh's story such a tragedy is that I can't find any way for it to have ended differently. The man was brilliant--charismatic, politically savvy, far-seeing, courageous. He was probably the equal in ability to just about any man of his generation (and he was born in the late 1760's, like Napoleon, Wellington, and Andrew Jackson, to name just three of his most famous peers). But there was just no way it could've been enough. The odds were far too stacked against his confederacy. They didn't have the numbers, the divisions between and within tribes were too strong, America was insatiably land-hungry, and Tecumseh's cause was never going to be that high of a priority for his British allies. There is no What Might Have Been. But I still admire what he was and what he tried to bring into being.

An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison, is a memoir of the author's life as a professor of psychiatry who has bipolar disorder. I read it as part of my grieving process for a friend...and it was as harrowing and difficult as I expected it to be, though I'm glad I got through it.

Welcome, Joanna Chambers!

2011-11-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to welcome Joanna Chambers here to talk about her new book, The Lady's Secret, a Regency romance which releases today from Carina Press! Take it away, Joanna:

--------

My heroine, Georgy Knight, is a failed-actress-turned-stagehand. She embarks on a quest to prove that she and her twin brother Harry are legitimate and that Harry is the true Earl of Dunsmore. To enable her to search Dunsmore Manor for evidence, she dresses as a man and obtains a post as the valet of the hero who is due to spend Christmas there.

The set up of the book enabled me to play around with some fun stuff: master-servant relationships, cross-dressing and gender, what masks hide and what they reveal. And tying a lot of this stuff together is clothing. Male clothing in particular.

Georgy obviously has to disguise herself in male clothing, but in a way, Nathan does too, using his clothing as an elegant sort of armour to enable him to present an invincible appearance to the world. Nathan's clothes are the epitome of style, and Georgy sees the appeal of all this gorgeous paraphenalia:

From the wardrobe she drew a green velvet riding coat and ran a brush over it to make the nap lie correctly. Buckskin breeches. Clean linen—drawers, a shirt, a cravat. All of it pristine white, and the cravat starched to perfect straightness. Silk hose. A tall, black curly-brimmed hat that she turned over and over in her hands, enjoying its craftsmanship, the pleasing lines of it, its dense, velvety blackness. She brought out his riding boots, cleaned just yesterday, even the soles. They were so polished they looked as though they’d never been worn. Even so, she fished out a soft cloth and gave them one final burnish. As she worked, the tinkle of cutlery, the rattle of china and the rustle of paper reminded her that Harland was breakfasting a few yards away.
- The Lady's Secret

I had particular fun writing the dressing, undressing and bathing scenes. At one level, there was the satisfaction of showing that Nathan and Georgy's physical attraction to one another, but on another level, the stripping away of clothes and revealing of skin became a metaphor for the stripping away of other kinds of masks and layers. You can read one of my favourite scenes, the shaving scene, here.

Do you like Regency fashions? Or those of any other historical period? And can you think of other dressing/undressing/bathing scenes you've loved in fiction?

-------

More about The Lady's Secret:

London, 1810
Former actress Georgiana Knight always believed she and her brother were illegitimate—until they learn their parents were married, making them heirs to a great estate. To prove their claim, Georgy needs to find evidence of their union by infiltrating a ton house party as valet to Lord Nathaniel Harland. Though masquerading as a boy is a challenge, it pales in comparison to sharing such intimate quarters with the handsome, beguiling nobleman.

Nathan is also unsettled by Georgy's presence. First intrigued by his unusual valet, he's even more captivated when he discovers Georgy's charade. The desire the marriage-shy earl feels for his enigmatic employee has him hoping for much more than a master-servant relationship...

But will Nathan still want Georgy when he learns who she truly is? Or will their future be destroyed by someone who would do anything to prevent Georgy from uncovering the truth?

-------

Joanna blogs here, and she can be found on Facebook and on Twitter as @ChambersJoanna

At Romancing the Past

2011-11-06T16:11:00.000-08:00

No new post here today because it's my day to post at Romancing the Past. I'm talking about how just about every topic becomes interesting to me once I have to research it, and how I expect that even sheep will be no exception.

52 Cookbooks, Week Five - The Route 66 Cookbook

2011-11-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

This week's cookbook is also nostalgia, albeit of a different kind than my recent culinary visit to Alabama. My random draw gave me The Route 66 Cookbook, by Marian Clark. It's an homage to the diners of yesteryear, giving a chapter per state's worth of stories and recipes from restaurants lining the route.

Lots of chili, barbecue, and pie...so I made pasta from the California chapter. My excuse is that I was at ECWC all last weekend, so I had to do my cooking blog recipe on a weeknight. I needed something I could do quickly, and nothing is more in my culinary wheelhouse than pasta with a homemade sauce. So last night I whipped up Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel Penne Pasta in Spicy Sausage Paprika Sauce:

Tasty stuff, spicy from the sausage and paprika and bright from the fresh tomatoes, green onions, basil, and oregano, but SO rich. It has a cup of heavy cream, plus an entire 6 oz. carton of fresh Parmesan cheese. I might make it again someday, but given that our doctor has given both me and Mr Fraser recent Talks on how people with our familial cardiac risk factors ought to be eating, I don't think it's going to become a staple.

Books read, week of 11-1

2011-11-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

This week, despite my hectic schedule getting ready for ECWC, I managed to finish one book and re-read another.

Lady Elizabeth's Comet, by Sheila Simonson, is one of a horde of traditional Regencies from many years ago that are now coming on the market again as ebooks. But it deserves to stand out from the crowd for its delightful, wry first-person narration (heroine's point-of-view), its astronomer heroine, and a hero who manages to make the whole "barely genteel army vet comes into a title and fortune from a distant relative" trope seem fresh. I'll definitely be seeking out Simonson's others Regencies.

Being still in a Jane Austen mood from last week, I re-read Northanger Abbey. While it doesn't have the heft of her other works, and I'll never love it quite like I do Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion, it's an altogether charming book. And if I'm picking a husband from Austen's heroes, the rest of y'all can fight it out for Mr. Darcy. I'll take Henry Tilney and his sense of humor and fun.

Back from ECWC...and introducing An Infamous Marriage

2011-10-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

I'm now home from the Emerald City Writers Conference. This year's edition was one of the best-run conferences I've ever attended. Even the food wasn't the usual dry conference chicken!

I think my workshop went pretty well, too. The room was close to full, and people laughed at my jokes, which is always something. I was so nervous right before I started. My stomach hurt, and all I could think was what if I went beyond stomachache to actual sickness? And would that ruin my career, if I was always That Lady Who Had to Run Out of Her Own Workshop?

But then once I got the mike in my hand and started talking, I was perfectly calm, and my stomachache disappeared. Strange how that works. The reality is never as scary as the anticipation. OK, there are a few exceptions. Childbirth. Second-degree burns. Getting stung by a bee. But it's a good general rule for most phobias. Now I want to speak again! Maybe send this one in for RWA in Anaheim next summer. And I have this other idea for a talk about how much you can learn about how to behave, and how not to behave, as a writer by watching cooking contest shows.

I'm also dealing with the usual post-conference combination of exhaustion and inspiration. For the next 24 hours, I just want to get through Halloween and get the house half-straightened up for when the maid service comes on Tuesday. I don't usually do the thing where you clean so the maid can clean, but Mr. Fraser and I have had back-to-back conferences since the last cleaning, and the house always goes to seed when there's only one of us home.

But come November 1, I'm digging in. I need to update my website a bit, come up with my writing plan for 2012, and revise my 5-year plan. And then there's the obvious task--finishing An Infamous Marriage. Because my 2012 release finally has a title! I love it. I think it's a great fit for the story, and somehow it's easier to write An Infamous Marriage than to write "My 2012 book," or "The Book to Be Named Later."

52 Cookbooks - Week 4, Calling All Cooks 3

2011-10-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up in rural central Alabama, everyone had the Calling All Cooks cookbook series. They were put out by an organization called the Telephone Pioneers (which Google tells me is a service organization made up of telecommunications workers and retirees), and they're typical fundraiser cookbooks. You know, the ones where all the recipes are contributed by the membership.

I'm not sure why these cookbooks reigned supreme over all the others of their kind. My mom's favorite pound cake recipe is somewhere in the first volume, and one of the pecan* pies has Good written in the margins in her careful, schoolroom-perfect penmanship, even though it's my copy, given to me as a bridal shower present. But for all that, they're just giant collections of the recipes your mother or your mamaw made if you're a Southerner of my generation. Lots of casseroles. Half the pages are devoted to cookies, cakes, and pies. The fruit salads tend to be full of marshmallows, jello, and coconut.

As you might guess, I wouldn't part with my Calling All Cooks set for the world, even though they're not how I usually cook. And when I drew Volume 3 for my Cookbook of the Week, I decided to go full-on Southerner and make me some casseroles, just like I'd do if my church was having a fellowship supper or one of my neighbors had somebody born or die in their family.

First up was tater tot casserole. Simple recipe, just ground beef, an onion, cream of chicken soup, and tater tots. I added salt and pepper even though they weren't listed because that's the minimum you do when you're browning ground beef.

I expected something awesome, total guilty pleasure comfort food. What I got was ultimate blandness. I believe I could get the flavor I was expecting if only I replaced the ground beef with spicy bulk breakfast sausage and sprinkled some cheddar cheese over the top for the last ten minutes of baking, though. Maybe I'll try it that way, because everyone needs guilty pleasure comfort food in their lives.

Though I was afraid my taste buds had lost their affinity for the casserole, I made chicken spaghetti anyway. It was a slightly more complicated recipe, with multiple ingredients in the sauce and actual fresh vegetables mixed in.

Not pretty at all, but so much tastier than the tater tot thing. I've been eating the leftovers for lunch all week.

Last but not least, I stumbled across the recipe for magic cookie bars, one of my mom's favorite quick sweet treats. I had to try it. Just a stick of melted butter poured in a 9x13 pan, topped by layers of graham cracker crumb, sweetened condensed milk, nuts (I used half walnuts and half pecans, since that's what I had in the pantry), chocolate chips, and coconuts. So very rich and sweet. When I was a kid, the chips were my favorite part. Now, I'd happily eat the graham cracker-butter crust all by itself.

*Incidentally, that's a "pick-AHN" pie. Not a "peekin" one, and most emphatically not a "pee-can" one. Also, barbecue MUST be pork, and is best served with a thin, vinegary, tangy red sauce. College football is more exciting and dramatic than the NFL game, the SEC is the best conference, and Alabama-Auburn is the best rivalry in all sports. War Eagle! (You can take the girl out of Alabama, but you can't entirely take the Alabama out of the girl.)

Books (re-)read, week of 10-25-11

2011-10-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

I normally read three books per week, but lately it's been a stretch to reach two. Partly that's because I've been getting halfway through books but not finishing them--I'll decide around p. 200 that I know exactly where this is going, and neither the writing nor the characters engage me sufficiently that I want to follow their all-too-predictable journey. Contrariwise, I've been doing a lot of re-reading old favorites. You know, where I really know exactly where this is going, but I love the characters and/or the writing so much that I'm happy to read it again and again, and since I already know how it turns out, I can just skip around and read my favorite parts.

So, last week I did a skim-for-favorite bits re-read of Judith Merkle Riley's Margaret of Ashbury trilogy (A Vision of Light, In Pursuit of the Green Lion, and The Water Devil). They're historical fiction set in 14th century England and France, leavened with a heavy dose of supernatural/fantasy elements, and Margaret's relationship with Gregory/Gilbert is one of my favorite love stories.

I'm also re-reading Persuasion, since there's no such thing as too much Jane Austen.

So what did I finish that was actually new to me? Just A Jane Austen Education, in which William Deresiewicz details how Jane Austen's works changed his life as a graduate student in English literature. It's a well-written and engaging memoir, though my favorite man-discovers-Jane-Austen tale remains Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog posts about Jane Awesome.

My first conference presentation

2011-10-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

Around this time next week I'll be making my debut as a conference presenter, speaking on How to Write Like a Full-Time Author When You Can't Quit Your Day Job at the Emerald City Writers Conference. I may not write what I know, but I figured I'd better present what I know. (And due to my pinched nerve saga, I'm adding some tips about overcoming adversity and restarting after your body and/or mind derails you that weren't there when I sent in the proposal.)

My husband happens to be an experienced and popular conference speaker within his field (web development), so I asked him for tips--they boiled down to "make a detailed outline, maybe even write the whole script out, and practice with a timer. Pad or cut as needed." But I'm certainly open to advice from others. Also, for my fellow writers with full-time day jobs: any tips you wouldn't mind my sharing with the group? I'd give you credit, of course. Or any areas you struggle with that you think such a workshop should address?

52 Cookbooks - Week 3, In Good Time

2011-10-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Over 10 years ago, my alma mater, the Penn Quakers, played the Florida Gators in the 1st round of the NCAA basketball tournament. Although Florida and Pennsylvania are about as easterly as states can be, for some reason they were assigned to the West region. The opening round was played in Seattle, so I got to watch the game.

During the warm-ups, we and the Florida fans taunted each other. We shouted, “Tastes like chicken.” (Gee, I'm sure they never heard that one before.) After a moment, they responded with, “Tastes like oatmeal.” Knowing a good line when we heard one, we laughed and applauded.

What does any of this have to do with cooking? Well, this week I made oatmeal in a crockpot. Which I'd always been told improved it immensely. However, as far as I'm concerned, it still tastes like oatmeal. I'm not even bothering with a picture this week, because it also looks like oatmeal.

Last week's cookbook draw gave me In Good Time, a Weight Watchers cookbook composed entirely of slow cooker recipes. I've never had good luck with my crockpot. I got it as a wedding present, as I suppose many do, and I loved the idea of it. Who wouldn't want to throw a few ingredients into the pot in the morning, set it to low, and come home to dinner ready to eat that night? I certainly would...if I could just get something to come out tasting other than mushy and/or sawdusty. I swear meats cooked in the crockpot manage to be soupy and dry at the same time.

I think the problem is most crockpot recipes call for 6-8 hours of cooking time, while I'm usually out of the house for around 11 hours on a weekday. In my current job, I leave the house at 7:10 to catch the 7:21 bus to work. I work 8-5 (the job has beautifully regular hours), catch the 5:12 bus back to the park-and-ride, and from there pick up my daughter from afterschool care. We walk in the door around 6:15, and Mr. Fraser gets home about 7:00. So if dinner has been in the crockpot since I left in the morning, it's overcooked.

So I groaned when that cookbook came up, and I made the maple-apple-hazelnut oatmeal recipe over Saturday night to get around the overcooking problem. It tasted all right, but not that much better than instant oatmeal. And as it happens, we noticed the next day that the underside of the crockpot is starting to sort of buckle. I don't trust the insulation to hold, so no more slow cooker for me, and I won't miss it.

Weekly book post, 10/18/11

2011-10-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this blog using dear old Dragon Dictate because I'm having the worst pinched nerve/carpal tunnel flareup I've had in months. Something about the ergonomic arrangements at the new job. I wish I could figure out what. We've swapped my chair, so now I think it's either the keyboard tray, the keyboard itself, or the fact that I'm at a fairly small L-shaped desk that I think may be kind of jamming my left elbow. Here's hoping I figure it out before they either get tired of me as an employee or I end up in full-on, pain-all-the-time, can't-write-or-cook-at-all misery.

(The writing is the highest priority, by the way. With a novel under contract, I'm going to finish the thing if I have to do every word in Dragon Dictate or write longhand and hire someone to type it in for me. But I like my new job, except for the hand pain thing, and it pays very well, so something's gotta give.)

In any case, I finished two books in the last week.

Faerie Blood, by Angela Korra'ti, is an urban fantasy set in my home city of Seattle. I enjoyed seeing familiar places magically transformed. The heroine is appealing, the magical peril alternately hilarious and terrifying, and I cared about what happened to the characters even though the writing is a little more lush than I'm used to in a contemporary setting. As best as I can tell, the book isn't available for purchase now because the author asked for her rights back due to some problems at her publisher, and I wish her all the best in finding a new home for her work, because I want to find out what happens to Kendis and Christopher next.

Marriage and Other Acts of Charity, by Kate Braestrup, is the second memoir/book of spiritual wisdom by this Unitarian minister who serves as chaplain to the Maine Warden Service. (In other words, she provides spiritual support when the wardens are involved in search-and-rescue missions, much like a hospital chaplain but with more varied scenery.) Here she talks about love and marriage, and the risk of love in a world where all marriages end–it's just that the successful ones end with one of the parties dead. Which sounds morbid, but it isn't really–at least not much.

Her Grace, the Duchess of Pedantry

2011-10-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

One summer evening at a Mariners game, I pointed out an error on the scoreboard display. I think it was a misplaced apostrophe or something. Mr. Fraser said something like, "Well spotted, Lady Pedantic." I replied, "That's Her Grace, the Duchess of Pedantry to you."

I know I can be a bit over-pedantic as a reader. I have no patience whatsoever for major historical errors--e.g. Europeans eating New World food in stories set well before they stumbled across the Americas. And don't get me started on the time I tried to read a baseball-themed book where the author evidently didn't understand how a starting rotation works.

I can be picky about much smaller things, too. I never name names, because I figure it's bad karma. Nobody is a perfect researcher. I'm sure I make my share of inadvertent mistakes, so I'm not going to sit around smugly pointing out those of others all over Twitter or Amazon reviews. But I've set aside many a book after 2 or 3 subtle errors in the first few pages because I've lost trust in the author and her story's world.

I'm not consistent, however. Recently I read two books that made horse errors. The first one was fairly subtle, but the equestrian world was a major part of the setting. The other was HUGE, but the horses' presence was incidental.

With the first book, I paused for a few seconds and thought, "Aw, man, she should've caught that." But the writing was strong overall, I liked the heroine, and I was so caught up in the plot there was no way I was going to stop reading just because she'd missed a small, breed-specific detail.

With the second, I was already annoyed with the hero for being melodramatic and self-absorbed and wondering how the author was going to stretch what to my eyes was a simplistic conflict out for another 40,000 words or so. So the horse error was the last straw, and I was glad to have a good excuse to stop reading.

Shorter Duchess of Pedantry: If you want me to finish your book, don't make errors of fact in the first few pages, before I'm properly hooked. Once you make me care what happens to your characters, I'll forgive you anything short of potatoes in ancient Rome or machine guns at Waterloo.

52 Cookbooks - Week 2, The Bread Bible

2011-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

I admit I gulped when I saw what the random draw had selected for this week's cookbook: The Bread Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum. Mr. Fraser selected it, not I, and I had too much going on this week to want to make a first attempt at yeast breads. And frankly, learning to bake my own bread is nowhere on my bucket list. (What is? Well, among other things, I want to see Paris and Rome, read War and Peace, ride well enough to at least go on a trail ride or two, and fence well enough to enter whatever low-level competitions there are for people my age. All I need is world enough and time.)

Anyway, fortunately for me the book had a whole chapter on quick breads, and I tried two recipes. The first, corn muffins, was an obvious choice, since I had stone-ground cornmeal on hand from the attempt at fritters last week. They're made with a little sugar and a lot of sour cream, and they turned out pretty tasty.

However, I don't think they'll supplant good ol' Jiffy corn muffins among my go-to side dishes. They're better, but not quite enough so to justify the extra effort to make them. Plus, Miss Fraser will eat the Jiffy muffins, but she turned up her nose at the gritty texture these got from the stone-ground cornmeal.

For dessert we had chocolate bread, which was a huge success. The recipe suggested including chocolate chips, but I left them out. As much as I like chocolate, I tend to find double- and triple-chocolate desserts kinda overkill. When I make this again--as I surely will, probably for holiday care packages--I think I'll try white chocolate or butterscotch chips. Or, even better, PECANS. Nom nom nom...

Not a photogenic dessert, at least not in my amateur-with-an-iPhone hands, but rich and buttery and altogether delicious.

Weekly book post, 10-11-11

2011-10-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

This week I've been plugging away at a biography of Tecumseh as part of my research, but I also found time to finish two Regency romances. I'd describe both as traditional, but with big twists.

Pembroke Park, by Michelle Martin, is a lesbian Regency. One of the heroines, Diana, is fully aware of her orientation and as out as one could safely be in Regency England (i.e. not very, but she's cheerfully unconventional, and has enough money and rank that she can get by with it), while the other, Joanna, whose life is more hemmed in by traditional social restrictions, only knows she's never felt passion for any of her male suitors, including her deceased husband, whom she was fond of. It's a sweet and often poignant story, and I was willing to cut Martin a certain amount of slack on errors WRT forms of address and points of law, because she wrote it back in 1986, before such details were just a Google search away.

Mr. Bishop and the Actress, by Janet Mullany, is a romance between an estate steward (i.e. an upper servant) and an actress/courtesan who, at thirty, is trying to go respectable. Told in alternating first person POV, it's a fun romp.

Snoopy and my writing dreams

2011-10-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

Lately Miss Fraser and I have been reading Peanuts together as her bedtime story, thereby revisiting one of my own childhood favorites, and I realized this was my first glimpse of the writer's life.

In a weird way, a cartoon beagle with a typewriter made me understand as a very little kid that somewhere there was a person behind every single book I read, and that someday I might be an author myself--if I was willing to tough it out and deal with rejection along the way.

52 Cookbooks - Week One, Inn at the Crossroads

2011-10-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

Last week I was staring at our cookbook shelf, wishing I had more time to cook. Our combined cookbook collection takes up almost as much shelf space as the Napoleonic Wars section of my research library (which I wish I had more time to read. Idly I wondered just how many there were, and counted 51. "That's one cookbook shy of being a blog series," thought I. When I remembered that the bloggers behind Inn at the Crossroads had just gotten a book deal, for a cookbook I'll inevitably buy once it's out, I realized I had one per week after all.

I decided to make a numbered list of cookbooks. Every week as I work on the grocery list, I choose a random cookbook and make at least one recipe from it. I have to cook from whatever book random.org spits out, with two exceptions: I won't grill when it's cold or rainy, and I won't bake in my no-AC kitchen when it's hot. It should be fun just because it's such a crazy mix--I've got aspirational ones like the Les Halles and French Laundry cookbooks, local collections from various places my family and I have lived, older books I inherited from my mother, including a 1951 Joy of Cooking, and everything in between.

The first cookbook randomly chosen happened to be the one that's still a blog--Inn at the Crossroads, where Sariann and Chelsea strive to bring to life the food of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire with a mix of medieval and modern recipes.

I was insufficiently ambitious to attempt Honey Spiced Locusts or Wintercake (though the latter looks yummy), but in a burst of energy I decided to make a whole meal from the blog, not one but three recipes.

For my main course I chose White Beans and Bacon, the medieval version, because Amazon Fresh wasn't carrying the curly endive for the modern recipe last week. It was ridiculously simple and wholly rich and delicious. IMHO it only works if you use a good, thick-cut bacon. I used the Organic Prairie brand, which I like even though I roll my eyes forever at the name, and it would've been even more awesome if I'd had any Skagit River Ranch bacon from my local farmers market.

On the side I served Corn Fritters. Not sure what went wrong, but these were as much a failure as the beans and bacon were a success. All doughy and gritty. Maybe I made them too thick and large? At least the bean recipe is a keeper, and simple enough for a weeknight meal (though I probably shouldn't let myself have that much bacon VERY often).

For dessert, and to represent the fruit and vegetable group in the night's meal, I made the medieval version of Poached Pears from Highgarden. Also a failure, but one I'm much more likely to attempt again, because I know exactly what I did wrong. In my zeal not to overcook the pears, I undercooked them by a MILE, so the result was not so much poached pears as hard, warmed pears in a tasty wine sauce. So I'd like to try again, maybe around Thanksgiving or Christmas. Because did I mention the tasty wine sauce?

Here's what it looked like. You'll note mine is nowhere near as pretty as Sariann and Chelsea's:

Weekly book post

2011-10-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm settling in to my new day job, I've decided to shoot for three blog posts per week, on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. The Sunday post will be whatever is on my mind, usually writing or research-related, or a guest post. Thursdays will be food and cooking, as I try to work my way through at least one new recipe from every cookbook I own. And Tuesdays will be my reading updates.

So, here's what I've read since the last time I blogged my reading. It's a bit heavy on the nonfiction and research books, partly because I'm working out my hero's backstory of service in and around Upper Canada during the War of 1812 and partly because my library holds list suddenly spat out a pile of nonfiction all at once.

1) The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, by Donald Hickey

A fairly in-depth history. It focuses on the American point-of-view but was still useful for giving me an overview of how the war played out. At the risk of letting my contemporary political views show a bit, the War of 1812 comes across as depressingly reminiscent of the Iraq War in some ways--the party in power pulled the country into it for rather dubious reasons and damned anyone who disagreed as traitors, for example.

2) Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815, by Colin Calloway

As the title says, a book all about relations between the British and Native Americans from the end of the American Revolution through the War of 1812. Fascinating, at least for me, because it's an aspect of Native American history I'd never run across before.

3) Love Story, by Jennifer Echols

A YA romance where the hero and heroine work out their feelings for each other and complex history together over the course of a writing seminar as college freshmen. I enjoyed it, as I always do Echols' books, though I have to admit I would've liked to see a longer last chapter or an epilogue or something just to sort of enjoy the couple together after all they went through to get there.

4) This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust

I was lucky enough to take Drew Faust's class on the American South 1607-1861 lo these many years ago as a Penn undergrad, so when I saw this book mentioned on a blog (more than likely Ta-Nehisi Coates' place), I sought it out. It's a depressing read--naturally, since it's a book about death--but I couldn't put it down all the same. It's about how the massive carnage of the Civil War changed how Americans related to war deaths in particular and mortality in general. One of the many things that struck me was that in the 19th century, a dead soldier's family wouldn't have found any consolation in hearing that their son/husband/brother died so suddenly that he didn't have time to suffer. Instead, they valued the "Good Death," wherein the dying person knows what's happening, accepts it with a show of faith and resignation (so consoling to the family as reassurance they'll see him again in heaven), and passes on loving messages and words of wisdom for those left behind. So when soldiers did die instantly, their friends would write their families these reassuring messages about how Joe saw this coming, he had a premonition and was perfectly resigned to the possibility and had been living a good and prayerful life, and so on.

Welcome, Rose Lerner!

2011-10-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

Rose Lerner and I met in 2004, long before either of us were published, at the Emerald City Writers Conference. Over the years we've become critique partners and good friends, and I'm delighted to welcome her here today to talk about her new release, A Lily Among Thorns. I first read this book years ago for critique, and it's one of my favorite historical romances EVER. Solomon and Serena are such wonderful, well-developed characters, and I love how they play against the usual romance stereotypes. Today Rose is answering my questions about her books, not to mention Avatar: the Last Airbender (one of our current favorite shows), and giving away a copy of A Lily Among Thorns to one reader who comments by midnight on Monday.

I know you do extensive research for each of your books. What was your favorite part of your research for A Lily Among Thorns?

Probably the research on London. During the Regency, the divide between London and the rest of England was really marked, kind of like the way we conceptualize New York City versus small-town America. It's not just based on the reality of those places, it's symbolic. (Anyone else tune in for the first episode of Hart of Dixie?)

Most aristocrats of the time had a foot in both places, because they spent the Season in London and the rest of the year at their country estates. But Solomon and Serena, my hero and heroine, both work for businesses that are based in London. They're Londoners year-round. That means something important about their self-images and about how others see them. Plus, Serena has strong ties to the seedier side of London life. So I wanted the feel to be right.

The Regency Underworld by Donald A. Low, Black London by Gretchen Gerzina, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb, and Immigration, ethnicity, and racism in Britain 1815-1945 were all great resources for me.

What was the hardest part?

A forged marriage certificate is an important plot point in the book. My protagonists can't find a reliable way to prove it's forged, so they decide an annulment is the simplest way to go. But annulments were hard to get! Society valued the security of marriage very, very highly and made it very difficult to invalidate.

I've read over and over that you could get an annulment if a marriage wasn't consummated, but it's just not true. The truth is that you could get an annulment if the husband was permanently impotent--and there was a hard-to-fake test to prove it. Using a false name was not, in and of itself, grounds for annulment, and neither was being underage. Mistaken identity (twinswap, anyone?) was a pretty safe bet but irrelevant to my book. Coercion and fraud were grounds for annulment but what exactly constituted coercion and fraud were interpreted differently by different judges, and in all cases interpreted fairly narrowly. I tore my hair out over this stuff!

I love that LAT has such a unique title. Why did you choose it?

I like using quotes for my titles. They carry a lot of associations and meanings with them, and that really appeals to me. My first book was called In for a Penny from the saying, "In for a penny, in for a pound," which worked a few different ways with the story, and my WIP is tentatively titled Sweet Disorder, from a poem by Herrick.

"As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters" is a quote from the Song of Solomon. (And I'd like to thank Alyssa Everett for convincing me to keep the title in that form. I was originally planning a play on words that would have been a big mistake.)

What I like about the title is that it speaks to how Serena misreads situations because of her own fears. She sees Solomon's faith as a threat to their relationship, because a respectable Christian could never accept someone with her past and reputation. But to him, his religion also means the love expressed by the Song of Songs. It's about doing the right thing, but it's also about reconciliation and forgiveness.

She also sees herself as a cold, prickly person who can't help hurting the people around her--a thorn among lilies. But Solomon helps her see the truth: she's a lily among thorns, a vulnerable young woman who's managed to survive and even do well, despite danger and challenges on all sides.

Your heroes tend to be "betas." Did you set out to write betas on purpose, since they're so rare in the genre, or is that just the kind of hero your muse delivers to you? Can you see yourself writing an alpha hero someday? (Not an alpHOLE, of course ;-) )

Hmm, it's tricky. In the case of Solomon, I definitely did it on purpose. There was a very particular type of alpha hero that was popular in Regencies when I started writing Lily. He was beautiful and fashionable and snarky and he showed absolutely no emotion. He had two tells: going a shade whiter under his tan, and a muscle working in his jaw. That was it. His mother could die in front of him and maybe he'd go all out and do both.

The heroine in these books was usually very innocent and very emotionally open. She won the hero over by giving him the unconditional, almost unshockable acceptance he'd never gotten from anyone else in his life. And I wanted to see what that dynamic, specifically, would look like if you switched the genders.

In general, it's a little more complicated. I think in romance, sometimes "alpha" is equated with "strong." But when you get right down to it, it's just a personality type. To me, alpha means natural leader, someone who in any given situation will be calling the shots. Beta means someone who can stand back and give someone else their full support. Both of those are great things! They take different kinds of strength, that's all, and are conducive to different kinds of weakness. And I wish there was more of both available. I have a lot of love to give!

My very favorite type of hero is a combination, really. To me, Nev (the hero of In for a Penny) is a...well, I guess the kinky term would be "switch." I don't know if there's a romance term. He's the leader of his group of friends. People on his estate naturally like him and look up to him. When he needs to take control of a room, he can. But he's willing to step back and let Penelope be in charge when he thinks it makes sense.

My favorite flavor of alpha is so alpha he hasn't got anything to prove. Half the time he doesn't have to make you do what he says, because he can make you want to do what he says. He can even let you run things for a while and still know he's in charge, really. SEE: Captain Kirk. He can turn command over to Spock without thinking much of it--but that's his ship, Mister, and it always will be.

And my favorite flavor of beta will shut you down in a heartbeat if he doesn't trust you or like how you're doing things. I think what people miss, with the idea of betas, is that a beta chooses who to give his loyalty to. He doesn't just roll over for anyone that walks in off the street! And he can take all that energy that he would have put into maintaining his personal control over situations, and put it somewhere else.

SEE: Mr. Spock. He's got no interest in running the Enterprise. He loves being a Science Officer, and he's perfectly content to let Kirk have the responsibility, the credit, and the glory. That doesn't mean he can't 1) beat Kirk in a fight or 2) beat Kirk in an argument, if he thinks it's necessary. But most of the time, he doesn't.

Two different personality types in a mutually beneficial and emotionally satisfying relationship based on affection and trust. Beautiful!

Again, this doesn't mean I don't love lots of types of heroes, including the stiff-upper-lip alpha with a jaw square enough to draw a blueprint off of. Can I see myself writing an alpha? Definitely. In fact, I've got a plot bunny for a high-performing, alpha revenue officer right now! I don't know when I'll get around to his story, but hopefully soon.

What are you working on now?

I'm almost done with a draft of a book about the 1812 Parliamentary general election. By the local rules of her town, the middle-class heroine's husband would be eligible for a vote...if she were married. (Yes, this is historically plausible!) The younger-son-of-an-earl hero is sent to the town to find the heroine a husband, but as we all can see coming a mile off, he falls in love with her himself!

It's not sold yet so I don't actually know yet if it will be my next book out, but believe me, when I know, I'll tell everyone who will listen!

(Had to throw in an Avatar question!) I know Azula is your favorite, but what about the Gaang? Aang, Katara, Sokka, Toph, or Zuko?

Speaking of things we could all see coming a mile off, definitely Zuko. I love how cranky and angry he is. I love how he's staked his identity on living up to his father's standards even though those standards have never done anything but humiliate him and devalue who he really is. I love how he's not very good at things and compensates by trying way too hard and taking everything way too seriously. I love how dramatic he is about everything. I love that it seems perfectly reasonable to him that after his uncle refuses to blast him with lightning, he should go stand on a mountaintop in a storm screaming at Nature to do it instead. I just want to give him a hug and a towel and say, "You're getting all wet, sweetie, maybe you should take a nap instead."

But really, I could go on for that long about every single person in the Gaang. Avatar is one of the very best shows I've seen for just really consistent, sharply drawn, endearing characterization.

Thanks for stopping by, Rose! By the way, the Kindle edition of her 2010 release, In For a Penny, is on sale for $3.79 through 10/3.

A mind full of new things

2011-09-25T19:37:00.000-07:00

I survived my first week at my new job. It's going pretty well so far, but the nature of the work is such that I'll have little weekday daytime internet access. So I won't be spending as much time in the Twitterverse and blogosphere as I've been used to doing.

I'm also in deep research mode for my 2012 novel. For reasons that would take too long to go into here, my editor asked me to change my hero's background from service in India and then in the Peninsular War to the War of 1812. Which is fine, except for the tiny obstacle that until the last ten days or so ago I knew next to nothing about the conflict in question. Seriously, if you'd asked me what I knew about it, I would've said something along the lines of, "I think it was mostly about impressment of American citizens into the British navy. Oh, and Francis Scott Key wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner' while watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry, the British burned the White House, and Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought after the peace treaty was signed, only of course no one could've known because there hadn't been enough time for the news to cross the Atlantic." In other words, not nearly enough to give my hero a proper backstory.

Why, you may ask, do I know so much about the Napoleonic Wars and next to nothing about a war my own country actually fought in? Well, my dirty little secret is I started researching the military side of the era because I had a crush on this guy:

And the more I researched, the more I became an admirer of this genteman:

...neither of whom were at all involved in the War of 1812. Though the government did ask Wellington if he'd go in late 1814. He said, basically, that he had no objections to going, but he'd like to wait till spring in hopes of finishing business at the Congress of Vienna, and, besides, unless the British could reestablish naval superiority in the Great Lakes, another general and more soldiers wouldn't help all that much. There's probably a counterfactual or two to be had there--what if Wellington had been in command of the British forces at New Orleans? No WAY would he have attacked such a well-chosen and well-defended position. Half of Wellington's considerable battlefield genius was choosing his ground well, whether on offense or defense, and only giving battle when his forces were in a position to prevail. If Andrew Jackson never got the prestige he garnered at New Orleans, it's doubtful he would've been elected president, and American history would be much different. And if Wellington hadn't been at Waterloo, I still don't think Napoleon would've gotten to keep his throne--Europe was too united against him--but he probably would've lasted longer, and the different manner of his defeat would've reshaped European history.

So, yeah. You can probably already tell that, ten days of researching in, I've become fascinated by the War of 1812 in spite of myself. It really ought to be taught more thoroughly in schools--that bit I'd learned about American sailors getting impressed into the Royal Navy is a GROSS oversimplification of the causes of the war. It's really appalling how the then-ruling Democratic-Republican Party maneuvered the US into the war despite being ill-prepared for it, suppressed dissent, and somehow came out even MORE powerful and claiming victory despite the fact we were lucky to escape with a draw. I'm still no admirer of Andrew Jackson.

Mr. Fraser and therefore Miss Fraser are members of the Cherokee Nation, so Jackson was no friend of my family's ancestors. Of course, I'm definitely a Scots-Irish Southerner and almost certainly part Creek myself...so history is complicated. But when I think Jackson, I think Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears first.

I was quickly reminded that Tecumseh was also involved in the War of 1812, though, and I think my hero is going to meet him. Because Tecumseh was AWESOME.

I'm such a research geek. But it's so FUN.

Busy busy busy!

2011-09-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

I've been quieter than usual both on this blog and online in general for the past week because I'm changing day jobs. My new job starts Monday. And I have a completely illogical superstition that if I ever have a wholly clean desk other than on my first or last day at a job, that job will disappear. Totally illogical--but so far I and my sloppy desks have avoided layoffs and downsizing, so why fix what ain't broke, you know? It couldn't be a combination of luck and skill; it's all down to the piles of paper and the inbox nowhere near zero! But as a result my last few days in a job are always a mad scramble to tie off loose ends and get paperwork properly filed. Lots of working late and coming home tired, very little blogging and tweeting. So I'll be back once I'm settled into my new job.

What I've been reading lately

2011-09-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

My library's summer reading challenge is over, but of course that doesn't mean I'll stop reading (though I probably won't try as hard as I did during the challenge to never read two books from the same genre in the same week, because sometimes I get in a mood where I only want nonfiction, or where nothing hits the spot like reading six trad Regencies in a row).

Anyway, here's my reading from the last week or so:

1) Rules of Attraction, by Simone Elkeles
Genre: YA romance

A sequel to 2010's Perfect Chemistry, also featuring a Mexican hero with gang ties he'd like to break and a privileged white girl heroine. A quick, page-turning read, and I liked how the hero and heroine sort of unpacked each other's protective layers to find the real person underneath.

2) You Are What You Speak, by Robert Lane Greene
Genre: Nonfiction (linguistics/history/current events)

I'll always pick up a book on linguistics, and I found this book especially interesting in discussing how language interacts with political identity, social class, and the like.

3) In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson
Genre: Nonfiction (history)

Larson looks at Nazi Germany before WWII through the eyes of the American ambassador at the time (a history professor with no previous diplomatic experience) and his family. Reading it, I was for the first time able to do something with 1930's Germany I've been able to do fairly easily for other places and times--put myself in the place of people living through it who had no idea how it would turn out.

4) The Olympic Games: The First Thousand Years, by MI Finley & HW Pleket
Genre: Nonfiction (ancient history)

I've been renewing my interest in classical Greek history of late, hence this book. I liked it, but it'd be a bit dry for someone just starting to explore the period. If that's you, I'd suggest The Naked Olympics if you're interested in the early Games, or Persian Fire for the Greco-Persian Wars, or Lords of the Sea for the rise and fall of Athens.

Happy New Year!

2011-09-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

What's that you say? It's not New Year's Day on any calendar that you know of? Sure it is! It's Miss Fraser's first day of school (she's in second grade now, and I have no idea who took my adorable baby girl and replaced her with this tall, skinny, leggy, but still adorable kid). And as long as I have a kid in school and work at a university for my day job, early September is going to feel at least as much like the start of a new year as the official version in January.

I'm even doing some small, informal resolutions. We just replaced my computer that was stolen in the break-in, and now that I have a new computer and a new contract from Carina, along with a greatly improved pinched nerve, it's time to step up my writing pace accordingly. And I figure if I start back on Weight Watchers today, that gives me almost two months until the Emerald City Writers Conference, where I'll see people who last saw me at RWA in New York. Maybe that's time enough for them to say, "Wow, Susanna, have you lost weight?" And I'm not due for my annual physical till January. Surely four months of Weight Watchers, even with mini-breaks for Thanksgiving and Christmas, is time enough to move the scale a bit and make my doctor happy.

What about you? Is September a new year for you, formally or otherwise? Any fall resolutions?

Labor Day Weekend Cooking

2011-09-05T09:44:00.001-07:00

My mother-in-law flew out from Oklahoma to visit us and see our new house for the first time, so I've been off from the day job since Thursday and don't go back till Wednesday. It's been wonderful having her here, and such a relaxing week. Usually when I use vacation time, it's to go somewhere. That won't change--I love to travel for its own sake, and I've got family to visit and conferences to go to on top of that. But I have to say, it's nice to have six full days to wake up and neither be in a hotel or spare room nor have to scramble to get myself out the door for work.

I haven't been doing much cooking, either. We've gone out--last night Mr. Fraser and I celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary at Cafe Juanita, and Miss Fraser insisted we take Grandma to Blue C Sushi, where the food comes on conveyor belts. Also, my mother-in-law made chicken fried steak, as she always does when she visits (SO delicious), and Mr. F grilled steaks one evening.

But yesterday for lunch I decided it was my turn. We had leftover mashed potatoes from the chicken fried steak dinner, so I made them into patties, dipped them in panko, and fried them over very low heat in butter. The potatoes were a little soupier than ideal for such a preparation, so they tended to break apart, but they tasted great, especially with sour cream on top (and bacon and fresh pineapple alongside). Next time I think I'll add some flour for thickening, or maybe just use less butter and milk in the mashers to begin with. I like to make them with roasted garlic, which gives them plenty of flavor even without gobs of dairy.

Then for dessert I made the S'mores Stuffed Brownies that Angela James tweeted about on Saturday. They turned out scrumptious and rich, though I think next time I'll leave out the Hershey Bar--there's plenty of chocolate from the brownie batter without it, and the Hershey Bar re-solidifies as it cools and doesn't add to the flavor and texture the way the graham cracker and marshmallows do.

I'm a cover quote!

2011-08-31T10:34:00.000-07:00

Last year Isabel Cooper asked me to read her upcoming debut romance with a view to providing a cover quote. I was happy to do so, and even happier to discover that No Proper Lady is well worth recommending.

The image I was able to download isn't big enough for you to see it, but I'm right there on the bottom of the cover, telling you this book contains "high-stakes magical adventure with wonderful characters and a sexy romance."

It's a time travel story where a woman from a post-apocalyptic future goes back to the Victorian era to try to prevent the events that set the apocalypse in motion, and what I especially appreciated about it is that the fantasy elements were just as strong and well-developed as the romance ones. But if you don't want to take my word for it, Publishers Weekly agrees, and RT Book Reviews gave it 4.5 stars.

No Proper Lady officially releases tomorrow, but it looks like the print version is already shipping.

My next book!

2011-08-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to report that Carina is acquiring my next book. Title and release date remain TBD, but it's a historical romance with a (fictional) British general for a hero. The hero and heroine, Jack and Elizabeth, marry in 1804 to fulfill a deathbed promise and are soon separated by the demands of his military career. By the time they're reunited in early 1815, they've accumulated a long list of grievances against each other and wish they'd never married. Just as they're beginning to make their own peace, Jack is called back to war when Napoleon returns to power--only this time Elizabeth has no intention of remaining quietly behind in England.

In other words, I'm writing a Waterloo story. I think every Regency writer, at least those of us with even the tiniest degree of interest in the military side of the era, has one in her, and this is mine. Or possibly just my first.

The book will probably come out in late 2012. I wish I wasn't looking at such a long gap between releases, but my pinched nerve slowed me down a lot for six months or so. Now, well, to use the cliche, it is what it is. Assuming the date holds, at least I won't have a calendar year without a release in it.

Weekend cooking, GrillFail edition

2011-08-29T03:10:00.000-07:00

This week's Saturday cooking day happened on Sunday, since we had Mariners tickets Saturday evening. And it was far from a culinary triumph. Let's just say I haven't mastered the art of the grill yet.

(No pictures until I replace my stolen Mac and can easily synch them from my phone again.)

I decided it was time I tried something other than steaks or boneless chicken and settled on turkey burgers. Mark Bittman had a column on grilling a couple years back, and one of his suggestions was to add flavor to turkey burgers by mixing in cooked, crumbled bacon.

That sounded tasty. While my bacon crisped, I did a google search to figure out how long to cook the burgers (burgers not being something I do often enough to have a gut feel, especially with not-beef where it's riskier to go rare). One recipe I found suggested adding various ingredients for flavor and moisture, notably mayo, mustard, and worcestershire sauce. "Why not?" I thought. "More moisture and flavor is a good thing, right?"

Well, yeah, except when they're so moist they fall into pieces, as I discovered halfway through the cooking process when I attempted to flip them. Normally I give up and order pizza at this point, but last night I decided to salvage instead. I brought the sloppy burgers inside and made...turkey-bacon sloppy joes. Which weren't half bad, really. All that flavoring and moisture that made my burgers fall apart created a reasonably tasty sandwich filling.

Undaunted, I tried grilling marshmallows for s'mores by suspending them on the same contraption we use to make kebabs. Disaster was narrowly averted when I checked them after 5 minutes and found them about to droop off the skewers. I managed to rescue them, but they were just gooey and warm, not hot enough to melt the chocolate, so they didn't taste like proper s'mores. I think to make it work you'd have to stand over the grill rotating like you do when roasting marshmallows over a campfire, and for that I'd want a far longer skewer.

What a week (with three Public Service Annoucements)

2011-08-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've EVER been quite so glad to see Friday get here.

Monday during the day I had an appointment with a neurosurgeon as part of the ongoing hand-neck-shoulder saga. (My orthopedist wanted me to see him about possibly getting a steroid injection for my pinched nerve.) I wasn't crazy about him, since he was obviously of the Me Doctor, You Patient school that gives you minimal information. He examined me, clucked thoughtfully, and referred me for an MRI on Tuesday and a follow-up visit Thursday, refusing to speculate on my likely prognosis or treatment options. But the very speed with which they got me scheduled made me a little nervous, along with the thoughtful clucking.

That night I came home from work, planning to cook dinner, do some housework in preparation for my mother-in-law coming to visit next week, and write. But then I spotted a carry-on suitcase that had been in a corner of our bedroom lying in the hall, thought, "That's weird," and went to have a look...only to discover we'd had a break-in. The thieves took almost all our electronics--my iMac, three laptops, both our Kindles, our Wii, Mr. Fraser's digital camera, and Miss Fraser's DS--along with a silver ring designed to look like an ancient Celtic torc (not worth a lot, but high sentimental value for me, and as best as I can tell no longer available), and, to add insult to injury, a handful of Canadian change, maybe $5 worth, from atop a dresser. See, our change jar was full last weekend, so we took it to one of those change counter machines you see in grocery stores, which of course returned all the Canadian money that had got mixed in from when we've gone up to BC for a weekend. I was going to start a separate jar, figuring next time one of us is up there we'd have enough CAD$ for a couple of donuts at Tim Horton's or something, but no more!

Tuesday I was scrambling to come up with as many receipts as I could for all the stolen items for our insurance report, and I had my MRI, which seemed to go smoothly. I left work with a list of plans for when I got home--only to step on a honeybee while picking Miss Fraser up from day camp. (Open-toed sandals, grassy lawn with blooming clover, OUCH.) It hurt too much for me to drive, so Mr. Fraser had to come get us both, and I spent all evening with my foot propped up on ice.

Wednesday I got a call from the neurosurgeon, very hush-voiced and mysterious, telling me there was something concerning on my MRI, and they were going to set me up to see a neurologist. They'd found one who was happy to see me the very next day, though I might need to be patient and wait at his clinic, since he was squeezing me in. He said there were 5 things it could be, and 4 of them were pretty benign, but the other one...less so. I eventually forced him to tell me that the less benign option was MS, but that I shouldn't worry or look things up on the internet and just see the neurologist tomorrow like a good girl. (He didn't SAY "like a good girl" but the tone was there.)

IMHO, that call would've made the calmest person in the world anxious. And I am NOT the calmest person in the world.

This post is getting long, so I'll just say I spent a harrowing 24 hours until I saw the neurologist, who was able to assure me I don't have MS. When I apologized for being such an anxious patient, he didn't quite criticize his colleague, but made it clear what I should've been told on Wednesday was more like, "There's nothing in your MRI that indicates a need for surgery, so we're sending you to a neurologist for follow-up instead. It just so happens Dr. So-and-So has an opening tomorrow, so you might as well take advantage of it if that works with your schedule. And, oh, there was a shadow on your MRI that's probably just an artifact of your breathing or swallowing at the wrong moment, but he may do a few additional tests for due diligence."

Oh, and based on his examination (lots of reflex checks and a nerve study) he thinks I had a pinched nerve that's now healed, and my lingering symptoms are muscle and ligament damage that should heal with time, patience, continued PT and therapeutic massage, and diligent attention to posture and ergonomics for, oh, the rest of my life. So that's good news.

Anyway, what's the use of a Week From Hell if you don't come through it with wisdom to share with your tribe? So here are my PSAs for the good of the order:

PSA the First: Save receipts and serial numbers for all your valuables in a centralized, easy-to-locate place. This will make you, your police officer, and your insurance agent happy. I think I'm going to scan everything and store it on Dropbox next time.

PSA the Second: If you get stung by a honeybee, pull the stinger out RIGHT AWAY. I would've probably suffered less pain Tuesday and would have a smaller welt on my foot even now if I hadn't waited 10-15 minutes because I didn't want to touch it.

PSA the Third: Neck MRIs are prone to weird shadows and false positive results. Don't let yourself panic over one, no matter how mysterious and hush-voiced your doctor insists on being.

Saturday cooking, 8-20-11

2011-08-21T18:15:00.001-07:00

No pictures with this week's Saturday cooking post. I took them, but my iPhone died this morning. The Apple Store replaced it, since it was still under warranty, but there was nothing I could do about restoring anything I'd done after the last time I synched the phone earlier this month.

It got up to 85 yesterday, which in Seattle passes for a heat wave, so I cooked on the grill again. I chose a recipe for grilled steak with tomatoes and scallions from an old issue of Everyday Food. Very simple--just flat-iron steaks, seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked on high for 4 minutes on each side, along with cherry tomatoes and scallions cooked at the same time in a grill basket, then seasoned with balsamic vinegar. My only change was adding a handful of chanterelle mushrooms picked up at the farmers market that morning.

It was pretty good. Neither Mr. Fraser nor I loved the grilled vegetables, though I liked the flavor of the chanterelles and scallions. For dessert we had angel food cake (bought at the store--I'm not that much of a baker and no way was I going to add heat to our AC-less kitchen to bake a cake), topped with a mix of strawberries and blackberries from the farmers market. Good stuff.

Quick notes on two weeks of summer reading

2011-08-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here's what I've been reading lately, over half of it on the plane to and from Pennsylvania this week.

1. Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge
Genre: Children's fantasy
Format/source: trade paperback, library

A lovely classic children's fantasy, lyrical and wry, that deserves to be better known. I discovered its existence through this review at Tor.com, and recommend it for anyone who hasn't let being a grown-up stop them from reading the likes of LM Montgomery and CS Lewis. Not two authors I usually compare, but this book reminded me of both.

2. Bossypants, by Tina Fey
Genre: Humor/memoir
Format/source: hardcover, library

Snarkily hilarious memoir of Tina Fey's life and career, including her stints at Second City Improv and SNL as well as her work on 30 Rock and the whole Sarah Palin thing.

3. The Viscount's Betrothal, by Louise Allen
Genre: Historical romance (Regency)
Format/source: mass market paperback, library

A tender Ugly Duckling romance that mostly adheres to the traditional Regency pattern, though it's a relatively recent release from the Harlequin Historical line.

4. Hillel: If Not Now, When? by Joseph Telushkin
Genre: Nonfiction (Jewish theology & practice)
Format/source: Kindle, purchased

An examination of the views and philosophy of one of the most influential rabbis in the history of Judaism. The book was written primarily for a Jewish audience, but I found it interesting to read from outside the tradition, both because I'm fascinated by religion in general and for the light it sheds on my own religious background (since Hillel was a near-contemporary of Jesus).

5. Short Straw Bride, by Dallas Schulze
Genre: Historical romance (Western)
Format/source: Kindle, purchased

A 1990's historical romance, re-released as part of Harlequin's effort to digitize its backlist. (Something I'm all for, whether it's publishers or individual authors behind the effort. More books available for the reader, and the author gets royalties for the sale, unlike if you tracked the title down through a UBS.) It's a fun Western historical, something of a riff on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I was a bit put off by the very physical fight the hero and heroine have in the middle of the book, but the fact that it's a mutual fight started by the heroine kept it from coming across as abusive--I just feared for the crockery and the spines of the books in their house whenever they happen to fight in the future!

6. Bumped, by Megan McCafferty
Genre: YA (near-future dystopia)
Format/source: library, hardcover

In this take on dystopian near-future-fic, 75% or so of the population is afflicted with a virus that renders them sterile by the time they're 18 or 20, and efforts to preserve eggs and sperm for later use also fail. So to survive, the species needs teen pregnancy, and bright, attractive girls are in high demand as surrogates. As an aside, I wonder what it says about now vs. my teen years in the 80's that there are so many dystopian YA novels? Yes, this is a stressful time to live through, but I grew up worrying about WWIII, and to the best of my knowledge the YA books that weren't straightforward romances or whatever ran to "my girlfriend is dying of cancer." (I never read those.)

Why I'd make a lousy book reviewer

2011-08-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

...aside from the whole Being An Author Myself thing, of course, which adds a certain awkwardness all its own. Give a poor ranking to someone who outsells you and it looks like sour grapes. Do the same once you're an established big name and if you're not careful you could come across as an arrogant jerk. Some authors are reviewers and manage the two hats well, of course, but I don't see myself becoming one.

You see, my internal grading system is something like A-B-Did Not Finish. But with nuance:

A+
I love this book/series so much I immediately buy the author's entire backlist, no matter the cost, no matter the effort in tracking it down. I haunt the web for details about the author's next release. I babble about the author and book(s) incessantly to anyone who'll listen. F'rex, I haven't actually accosted strangers on the street to ask them if they've made Miles Vorkosigan their personal Vor-lord and savior, but the temptation is there.

A
I fell in love with this book, but in a less intense way than with an A+. I'll seek out the author's backlist, but at a leisurely pace, maybe a book every month or two, and I'll preorder his/her future work.

A-
I like this book a lot, but it doesn't quite have that certain something that's going to make me remember it forever and go to it when I need a comfort book to re-read. I plan to read the author's backlist/future releases, but there's not the same sense of urgency for more as with an A+ or A book--I'll just remember the author as someone who gave me a good experience once and can probably be counted on to do so again.

B+
This book charmed me but didn't wow me, and I noticed a few flaws--little plot holes, occasional awkward word choices, etc. I'll probably give the author another chance. Or maybe it's an author who's delivered higher-grade books for me before, but this entry feels just a little off her game somehow.

B
I enjoyed this book while I was reading it, but a month from now I'll have nearly forgotten it.

B-
This book had noticeable flaws, but I cared enough about the characters to keep going till the end. But I probably won't read anything else by the author unless a future book gets rave reviews from a friend or reviewer I trust.

So. Those are the books I finish. Here's how I rank the ones I don't.

C (AKA Bored Now)
This book isn't terrible, and it's probably capably written and edited. But for whatever reason, a chapter or two in I don't care enough to keep reading. Maybe I've seen the plot trope driving the story a kajillion times, and nothing in the writing or characters gives it spark enough to make an old story seem new. Maybe the voice just doesn't work for me. So I set it aside because life is too short to read books I'm not excited about.

D (AKA Annoyed Now)
The writing is not just flat, but nails-on-a-chalkboard grating. Or the historical details are off enough to throw a history geek like me out of the story. (Or the sports details are off in a baseball or football story, or whatever. Basically, "I care enough about this topic to have made myself something of an expert on it. Why would I read a book about it by someone who evidently cares less than I do?") Or the characters feel like stereotypes.

F (AKA Offended Now)
Any or all of the following: Writer commits multiple and glaring grammatical errors. Historical details so off that anyone awake during high school history class would be thrown out of the story. Abusive "heroes" in romance. Characters aren't just stereotypes; they're racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted stereotypes. (I'll make occasional allowances in older works, but that's too complicated a topic for this post.) Author clearly has political, cultural, or religious views in direct opposition to my own, and they're here to preach!

Obviously my grading scale wouldn't work if I were on the review team at, say, Dear Author or All About Romance. And now that I have books out there getting reviewed, I've had to learn that not everyone (really, not even most people) uses grades/stars like I do. Four stars can be keepers for some readers. Three stars don't necessarily mean I bored that reader, nor one that I offended her.

Incidentally, I'm probably going to keep blogging what I read each week--which is not quite the same as a review. Any book that makes my blog is a book I finished--which means I'd give it an A or a B. :-)

Sad news

2011-08-12T16:54:00.000-07:00

I just found out that one of my dearest friends from college was killed in an accident early Thursday morning. We hadn't done a great job of keeping in touch since I moved to the West Coast. It had turned into one of those friendships where you occasionally talk on the phone or comment on each other's Facebook status, with regular promises to get together next time we were in the same corner of the country. But I'm still shocked and devastated. He's in most of my college memories, one way or the other, and this hurts.

I'm planning to try to fly back east for the funeral, and I doubt I'll be blogging again until the end of next week.

People, if you've got a friend you're thinking you should call or email eventually, or try to catch up with next time you're back in your old hometown, don't put if off. Life is just too damn short and uncertain.

Saturday cooking, 8-6-11

2011-08-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

This Saturday I was neck-deep in editing a proposal for my latest historical romance (a Waterloo story!) to send to my editor, so I didn't go as elaborate with the cooking as last week. I did, however, try out our brand new grill, just installed on our brand new deck. I combined a couple of suggestions from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and marinated some boneless, skinless chicken breasts in sesame oil, soy sauce, and lime juice, then threw them on the grill. They came out looking like this:

Tasted almost as good as they looked, too, served with leftover rice from Friday's Thai take-out and broccoli and green beans cooked (and, frankly, slightly burned) in a grill basket.

I could get addicted to this grill business. At least for a simple cut of meat like this, it's so quick and easy, and easier to clean up than the same recipe broiled or sauteed.

Summer reading continues

2011-08-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

I've slowed up a bit on summer reading for grown-ups, not to mention blog posting, because I've got a pair of deadlines, semi-self-imposed but important to me, this month. I'm pushing myself to write harder than I have since first developing my pinched nerve issues last November. So wish me health, and the sense to know just how much I can push myself before causing a serious setback.

But, I've still been reading. I never really stop. My latest three books:

1. The Domestic Servant Class in 18th Century England, by Jean Hecht
Genre: Nonfiction (history)
Format/source: hardcover, UW library

Purely a research rather than a leisure read, but an engaging one. (I find reading about the 18th century more useful to me as a Napoleonic/Regency writer than the 19th because most 19th century sources skew heavily Victorian. Many historians agree with me, for what it's worth, writing of a "long 18th century" spanning the period between the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and Waterloo in 1815.) It gave me a much better sense of why someone who had options might choose to go into service over what to my mind would be a much freer and therefore better way of life as an artisan or shopkeeper--namely good pay, job security that included food, clothing, and shelter, the chance to travel, and the fact that when I think ANYTHING would be better than servility, FREEEEEDOMMMM! etc., I'm projecting a bit too much of my own cultural biases onto a different place and time.

2. Lost in My Own Backyard, by Tim Cahill
Genre: Nonfiction (travel)
Format/source: Hardcover, library

This was recommended to me by the Seattle library's "your next five books" service, which gives you personalized, reader's advisory-type recommendations if you tell them a little about what you do and don't like. I mentioned Bill Bryson as a nonfiction favorite, so the librarian thought I might like Cahill's travel writing. He's not as funny and doesn't have as strong a voice as Bryson, but I enjoyed this book. It reminded me of a childhood trip to Yellowstone and made me want to go back.

3. The Masque of the Black Tulip, by Lauren Willig
Genre: Historical romance/chick lit/spy fiction
Format/source: hardcover, library

I read The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, first book in this series, ages ago, but the reader's advisory librarian reminded me of the series. (The rest of her romance recommendations didn't really work--I'd either already read the author and liked them but hadn't loved them enough to include on my list of favorites, or they were VERY old school. Like, rapist hero old school, you really thought a fan of Loretta Chase, Jo Beverley, Courtney Milan, and Rose Lerner would want to read THAT old school? Seriously, I think the romance side of their reader's advisory could use some work. Maybe I'll even mention it, politely, of course.)

But anyway, Black Tulip. Fun book. I definitely need to catch up on this series. In some ways they're not my usual thing, since my tastes skew realistic and even a bit gritty, while this series is frothy, deliberately OTT, and slyly anachronistic. I think it's the "deliberately" and "slyly" parts that make it work for me. I can tell Willig knows and loves her history and enjoys playing with it. Anachronisms and inaccuracies only bug me when I feel like the author doesn't know and/or doesn't care.

Saturday cooking

2011-08-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

Some part of me still thinks I should put dinner on the table the way my mother always did. Not the same food. She was a product of her time and place, which meant she could bake like nobody's business but cooked vegetables until they were dead and--I still don't get this one--not only was she willing to eat instant mashed potatoes, she actually thought they tasted BETTER than the real thing.

But she cooked every night. And aside from that baffling fondness for instant mashed potatoes and the like, she didn't use a lot of convenience foods to get dinner on the table. She roasted beef, fried pork chops, stewed chicken and dumplings. She always had two or three vegetable side dishes, and at least once a week she made a homemade dessert.

She had time for this because she was a stay-at-home mom. I am not. I have a full-time job, plus all the hours I spend trying to build my writing career. Yet still I feel guilty for prepping spaghetti & (frozen) meatballs and (jarred) sauce with a bagged salad on the side, whipping up grilled cheese and opening a can of tomato soup, or just ordering a pizza.

Gradually I've realized that's silly. I'm busy. Those quick weeknight meals may not be nutritionally ideal, but most of them aren't all that bad. But I do love to cook, and I wish I got more use out of my cookbook shelf. I think I've got as many cookbooks as I do books on Wellington, Napoleon, and both their armies...which given my research book addiction is saying something. So I decided to make Saturdays my Real Cooking Days, the one day I'll spend hours in the kitchen and regularly try new recipes.

Here are this weekend's results:

I went to the University District Farmers Market Saturday morning. I resisted my usual urge to stock up for the whole week, which inevitably leads to beautiful produce going bad in my fridge when it turns out I actually don't feel like doing something with those collard greens on Wednesday evening. Instead I stuck to what I could use that day, including the bread, tomatoes, and basil...

...that formed the basis for this bruschetta (assisted by garlic, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar):

Then I finally made a recipe from Pig: King of the Southern Table, one of the cookbooks I got for Christmas this year. I chose a recipe for braised pork chops with port gravy since it looked pretty straightforward and was entirely a stovetop dish. I didn't want to run the oven much, since it was a warmish day and our kitchen has no AC. (This is Seattle. Most houses don't have AC--we're ahead of the game with a tiny window unit in the bedroom--and "warmish day" = 80F or so.) Here's how it looked, with a side of couscous:

It was, unfortunately, a bit bland, and the pork chops were dry despite my following the recipe pretty exactly and testing for doneness at the earliest suggested time. But the gravy was good, so I might try again, with thinner chops, triple the rosemary in the breading, and a far shorter cooking time.

Last but not least, I improvised a dessert out of french toast made from chocolate bread from the farmers market topped with sweetened blackberries and blueberries (they're the early end of the crop & were too tart to eat without sugar), and whipped cream. (Yes, whipped cream from a can, which is probably just as appalling as my mom's instant mashed potatoes, but we all have our shortcuts. Now you know one of mine.)

This was much the best of the meal to me. A little too breakfasty for dessert, but delicious all the same, and so simple to make.

Need a new way to kill time on the internet?

2011-07-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

Are you fascinated by words and language? If so, you might want to check out the Economist's Johnson blog (named for the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson), where you can find everything from the Harry Potter stars trying to speak with American accents (Rupert Grint overdoes the R's, and to my ears Emma Watson is the most convincing of the lot) to annoying airline lingo to the many, many ways you can talk about a lion in Arabic.

One thing I discovered via the blog that I'm embarrassed to admit I never realized on my own is that Eeyore got his name because that's how a donkey's bray is rendered in a non-rhotic (i.e. R-dropping) English accent. As in, Hee-haw. This despite the fact I did figure out long ago that Marmee in Little Women is just Mommy, because Louisa May Alcott was from the part of the world that pahks its cahs in Hahvahd Yahd. I think I got Marmee but missed Eeyore because the Bostonian accent sounds so much more aggressive in its non-rhoticity, somehow, or maybe I notice R-dropping more in an American accent because it doesn't fit the general pattern.

Summer reading dances with dragons

2011-07-23T19:14:00.001-07:00

It took me two weeks to finish three books for the Seattle library's adult summer reading program this time, because one of them was George RR Martin's A Dance With Dragons. Dance is, of course, a very long book, but that wasn't the issue, or at least not all of it. The first two books I tried to read after finishing it were by authors whose work I've enjoyed in the past, but I just couldn't connect to their stories this time round. I don't think it was the authors' fault. I just needed some space to pull my brain out of Westeros before I could commit to a different book's world. So I finished the nonfiction book I'd been reading on the side, re-read some Bujold, and then found I could connect to a new book with no problems.

1. A Dance With Dragons, by George RR Martin
Genre: Fantasy
Format/source: Kindle, bought

I was completely absorbed by this latest entry in A Song of Ice and Fire as I read it, but now, over a week later, I find myself wishing more had been resolved. I don't want to give spoilers...but surely those two characters everyone thought were going to meet in this book COULD'VE met instead of merely being within yards of each other that one time. And that other character, the one who's probably not dead, at least not permanently, but might be--was that cliffhanger absolutely necessary? To name just the two most obvious cases. Still, whenever Book 6 comes out, I'm going to be pre-ordering and clearing space on my schedule to read it, I guarantee you.

2. The Naked Olympics, by Tony Perrottet
Genre: Nonfiction (history)
Format/source: Kindle, bought

A fun, readable history of the ancient Olympics and the inventive, competitive, exhibitionist Greek culture that invented them.

3. Can't Stand the Heat, by Louisa Edwards
Genre: Contemporary romance
Format/source: Kindle, bought

I've found so many good contemporary romances lately that I think I'm going to have to stop calling it a subgenre I don't read. As a foodie, or at least a foodie wannabe, I enjoyed this romance between a chef and a food critic and plan to seek out the rest of Edwards' work. And maybe try the Pork Belly With Candied Walnuts and Apples recipe she included at the end.

Hand update: a definitive diagnosis at last?

2011-07-21T21:17:00.000-07:00

So, you know how week before last I thought, based on my visit to an orthopedist specializing in the hand and shoulder, that I had carpal tunnel syndrome rather than a pinched nerve in my neck after all? Well, today I visited a neurologist, who poked and prodded everything from my wrist to my upper back with electrodes (OUCH!).

Turns out there's no indication of impairment whatsoever where you'd expect to find it with CTS or its elbow joint cousins. If anything, I have remarkably healthy and fast-firing nerves. However, everywhere you'd expect someone with a C6 pinched nerve to have pain, numbness, or impairment, I've got them.

All I can say is thank God I didn't let that first doctor operate on my wrist when she was ready to schedule the surgery, since it wouldn't have helped a bit and would've at least temporarily weakened and limited the use of my arm to no purpose.

The neurologist said that happens a lot, unfortunately--C6 pinched nerves imitate CTS so well that they're frequently misdiagnosed, especially in people like me whom you'd EXPECT to have CTS, and good for me for paying attention to my shoulder symptoms and refusing any invasive treatments until I had a fuller picture of what was going on.

There is, of course, surgery for pinched nerves, but the neurologist doesn't think I'm at anywhere near that point yet. He recommends anti-inflammatories, PT, and continued careful attention to posture and ergonomics. Apparently from a medical perspective, my case isn't that bad--I just feel like it is because it's keeping me from writing as fast as I want to or tackling assorted household projects that would make our house look a bit less the fixer-upper work-in-progress. But I've got good strength and range of motion with little to no muscle atrophy, which I gather means surgery at this point would be overkill.

So. I figure nerves don't lie, so pinched nerve with no CTS it is. Which means exercises, naproxen/ibuprofen, and...patience. Sigh.

More changes I wish I could make in the Rita/GH

2011-07-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

I judge several unpublished romance contests a year. Contest judges helped me immensely in my early days as an aspiring writer. I remember one judge in particular, reading the first version of what would eventually become A Marriage of Inconvenience, who encouraged me by raving about how BEAUTIFUL my writing was...before telling me firmly, in no uncertain terms, that I must NOT indulge myself by putting my heroine's entire backstory, however fascinating, in Chapter One, and that I must further refrain from allowing my heroine to go to sleep at the end of said chapter, unless I wanted my readers to feel justified in putting the book down and turning out the lights themselves.

Thank you, ma'am. Lesson learned.

So I like to give back, and generally do my part to support the writer community. Five years ago, whenever I signed up to judge a contest an overstuffed priority mail envelope would soon arrive filled with entries and scoresheets. Some judges, myself among them, suggested it'd save postage, trees, and trouble to move to electronic entries, and after some experimentation, that's exactly what happened. All the unpublished contests I've judged in the past two years have arrived as Word or RTF files in my inbox...with one exception. The Golden Heart.

I don't see any good reason why this should be so anymore. Even as late as 2005 or 2006, paper entries made sense. Half or more of the editors and agents I was submitting to back then even wanted paper instead of email. But that's changed. Even if the ultimate outcome is still a printed book, we've become an electronic industry. Writers have become much more savvy about converting their manuscripts to formats like RTF that are readily readable across a variety of word processing programs. So IMHO it's past time for RWA to save us all some postage and spare a few trees by switching to electronic entries.

The Rita also accepts only printed books. Electronic books like mine are eligible, but only if the publisher is willing to provide professionally bound printed copies for the contest. Carina was generous enough to do so for those of us who wished to enter this year's contest, but I think they're the exception rather than the rule among e-first publishers. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

I doubt it will surprise you to learn I think this rule should change, too. Let's level the playing field for the e-pubs by permitting electronic entries. I'd even go so far as to say let's make it ALL-electronic, because we've reached the point where any print publisher is simultaneously releasing electronic editions of all their books, at least for popular fiction. I might be getting ahead of myself on the all-electronic part, but I know I'd rather receive a bunch of PDFs that I could download to my Kindle than a stack of paperbacks to add to the mountains of clutter in my office. Sure, not everyone has an e-reader yet, but their market share is growing every day. And everyone in the judging pool, or as near to it as makes no nevermind, DOES have a computer they can read PDFs on in a pinch.

What do you think? Are you with me, or do I go too far?

Requiem for a bookstore

2011-07-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

I had my second post on changes I'd like to make to the Golden Heart and Ritas all ready to go, but then I heard that Borders is closing.

I've seen this coming for awhile. Borders never seemed to get the hang of how to survive in a world where physical stores and merchandise were less and less important for book and music buyers. I haven't been a regular Borders shopper in years. Amazon is my go-to book source, and if I'm craving a trip to a brick-and-mortar bookstore, I've got a Barnes & Noble five minutes from my house. In fact, if my mother-in-law didn't have a habit of including Borders gift cards among our stocking stuffers, I doubt I would've darkened the doors of one of their stores in the past decade.

But the news still saddened me. You see, I remember the first time I stepped inside a Borders, the one near Rittenhouse Square in Center City Philadelphia, back in 1994 or so. I thought I'd died and gone to bookworm heaven. Back then--and I feel like an old-timer talking about what it was like when she traveled everywhere by horse and buggy--I found new books to read by walking through libraries and bookstores, picking them up, and looking at their back covers and first few pages. Amazon was just a gleam in Jeff Bezos' eyes. While there were a few places to talk books and discover new authors on Usenet (oh yes, I was on Usenet back then), there wasn't the plethora of reader blogs I search for recommendations nowadays. There was no Goodreads, no LibraryThing. If it wasn't in the tiny selection at my local branch library or my mall's Waldenbooks or B. Dalton, I had almost no way of knowing it existed.

So Borders was a revelation. That bookstore was easily ten times the size of a mall store. It must've had as much shelf space for each individual genre as those mall stores had for romance, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, and so on combined. I found more books in the world waiting for me to read than I ever would've dreamed possible. There was nothing I loved more to do on a Saturday than bike into Center City from where I lived in West Philly and spend hours upon hours there.

So ave atque vale, Borders. Thanks for giving me so many wonderful hours and introducing me to so many favorite books in the 90's. And to those 11,000 employees who'll be laid off, my hopes and prayers that you'll land on your feet and find work where you can thrive.

How I'd change the Ritas and the Golden Heart

2011-07-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Even as I was watching this year's Rita/Golden Heart awards ceremony, I was reflecting that the competition's categories and formats don't mesh with the current reality of the romance genre. Going by Twitter comments, I was far from the only one.

For anyone reading this not already familiar with them, the Rita and Golden Heart are Romance Writers of America's annual contests designed to reward the best in published and unpublished romantic fiction, respectively. The changes I'd like to see concern the category descriptions and the entry format requirements.

Currently there are no categories for same-sex or erotic romance, which in the past decade or so have become a HUGE part of the genre. Of course, there's nothing in the rules that would prevent an author from entering, say, her m/m pirate adventure in the Historical category or her erotic space harem story in Paranormal, but I don't think such a book would have a fair chance of finaling. All you need is two judges out of your five who aren't comfortable with homosexuality or multiple super-explicit sex scenes but ARE comfortable expressing their value judgments through their anonymous scores, and you're sunk.

And looked at from the judge's perspective, I can understand wanting to limit the odds of being asked to judge a book you'd never choose to read of your own free will even if it was a perfectly written example of its subgenre. I almost never read inspirational OR erotica, for example (just to use both ends of the spectrum), and I wouldn't want to have to judge either category. For one, I don't feel qualified. I usually volunteer to judge historical, Regency, or YA because I've read enough of all three to trust my judgment of what's a perfectly executed example of a classic trope vs. a tired cliche, or what's a daring and inventive new experiment vs. a story gone off the rails. I don't have that same mental framework in place for subgenres I don't read. Also, hand me a stack of inspys or eroticas, and I'm thinking, "Really? I have to read these? All five from beginning to end? I can't skim?" Which is certainly not the attitude I want MY judge to have when she's handed my book, and while I may be too mainline a Protestant to be an ideal inspirational judge, I can certainly get behind "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

So. Two new categories. I'd treat them like Inspirational and Young Adult and make them a catch-all for any setting or tone and open them to anything meeting the broad romance/strong romantic elements definition of "romance is the main plot or major subplot, with a happily ever after or happily for now ending."

And these are lower priority, but while I was at it I'd tweak the existing categories a bit. I'd either make novellas eligible for Best First Book or make the first full-length novels of authors who've already published novellas eligible. It just doesn't seem fair that authors who happen to sell a novella first are never eligible, especially as novellas continue to gain market share. I'd add a novella category to the Golden Heart. And I'd probably merge the Regency Historical and Historical categories. Sure, that would leave only one Historical winner, but I don't think Regency vs. Not is the best way to split the categories anymore. Really, lately it seems like I'm running across more Victorians than Regencies, but five years from now the pendulum could swing back to Regencies, or even to Westerns or medievals or some setting that's rare to nonexistent now. So it seems simpler to just have a Historical category than to keep tacking to the trends as they inevitably change every few years.

This post has gone longer than I planned, so I'll save my thoughts on entry format (tl;dr version="why paper only STILL?") for later this week. Anyone else have thoughts on the categories? Want to tell me why my changes wouldn't work, and what you'd do instead? And yes, I know I should send my opinion to the Board. I will, I promise. I'm just thinking about it aloud in front of the whole internet first.

Hand update, mid-July edition

2011-07-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

So, last week I saw an orthopedic surgeon for a second opinion on my shoulder and wrist/hand issues. She had my neck and shoulder x-rayed and put me through an array of strength and range of motion tests. (Which, incidentally, had the effect of making my symptoms in both areas the worst they've been since March or so. THANKS, Doc!)

I was at least 90% certain that the neck x-ray would show a pinched nerve as the root of all my problems. However, my neck looks...normal. Same for my shoulder. And it turns out the first doctor was right after all. I do have carpal tunnel syndrome, and a bit of ulnar tunnel syndrome as well. Sigh.

That said, this doctor was a lot more willing to believe me that my shoulder is an issue as well, and one somehow connected to what's going on further down the arm, even if there isn't an obvious reason. My left trapezius muscle is extremely tight, hence my ongoing pain, and the PT I've done with a focus on my shoulder and neck HAS seemed to help my wrist/hand symptoms.

So the next step is for me to visit a neurologist next week, who will do nerve studies focusing on the entire affected area. After that, back to the orthopedist to settle on a treatment plan.

We'll see what happens, but my latest theory is that I have two separate injuries, both sustained within a week of each other in November, neither of which will heal fully because they're part of a linked neuro-musculo-skeletal system and tend to trigger each other. I think the two tunnel syndromes come from pushing myself to do NaNoWriMo on a desk with poor ergonomics. And I think I strained my trapezius muscle pretty badly while carrying my sleeping daughter (age 6 at the time, and almost 50 lbs), who lolled off my shoulder, forcing me to jerk to not drop her.

But I could be wrong. I thought the x-rays were going to show an obvious pinched nerve in my neck, after all. On the one hand I'm frustrated, because I was hoping for a clear, straightforward problem with an equally clear solution. However, I'm glad to at last have a doctor who's paying attention to my whole range of symptoms.

And between longhand and Dragon Dictate, I've figured out how to move forward with my writing in the meantime. It's slower than just pounding out a draft at the keyboard would be, but I'm still not without hope that by the end of 2011 I'll have a release or two scheduled for 2012.

Summer reading: pre Dance With Dragons edition

2011-07-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

A Dance With Dragons hit my Kindle at midnight, so there's a good chance that I'm somewhere with Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, or Daenerys Targaryen right now. Which I guess is a spoiler that all three survived the first four books, for those of you who've only seen the show...or maybe it isn't. They could be undead. Stranger things have happened. You'll just have to find out for yourselves.

Anyway, I continue to plug away at the Seattle Public Library Adult Summer Reading Program. I want to win that Nook, dang it. Not that there's anything wrong with my Kindle, but as an e-published author I need to be familiar with multiple formats, don't I? Or maybe I'm just competitive.

Last week's books:

1) A Reluctant Queen, by Joan Wolf
Genre: Inspirational historical romance
Format/source: trade paperback, library

A biblical novelization, but one that isn't particularly preachy or literalistic in its approach to the source text. Really, it's almost an alternative history, in that Ahasuerus is Xerxes' brother instead of another name for the same man. The action takes place between Marathon (490 BCE) and Thermopylae/Salamis (480), and as a bit of a Greek history geek I couldn't help wondering what's going to happen to, oh, world history in general and western civilization in particular if Xerxes isn't the Great King and the 480 invasion of Greece either doesn't happen or is better led. And the text invites those questions, since one of the topics the characters argue over is what to do about those troublesome Greeks. Still, I enjoyed the book. Sweetly romantic, I liked how Haman and Mordecai were humanized, and the details of Persian court life felt well-researched.

2. Ladies of Waterloo, by Charlotte Eaton, Magdalen de Lancey, and Juana Smith
Genre: Nonfiction (history)
Format/source: trade paperback, bought

Three women's experiences living through Waterloo, not at the battle itself but as friends and wives of men who were involved. Research for the WIP.

3. A Cook's Tour, by Anthony Bourdain
Genre: Nonfiction (food/travel)
Format/source: Kindle, bought

Companion volume to Bourdain's old Food Network series. Made me long to go to Vietnam, France, Morocco, and the French Laundry (where I have promised to take my husband if I ever make the NYT bestseller list). Cambodia, not so much.

Hair - do you care?

2011-07-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

It's not that I don't find plenty of blond men handsome. I mean, what's not to like about this?

And who wouldn't love a sexy blond guy in Napoleonic-era uniform holding a baby?

Adding in bottle blonds in leather yields yet more opportunities for admiring the lighter-haired side of life:

And how can I forget the geeks, culinary and otherwise?

But when I go shopping for a hero for one of my books, my mind goes places like this:

Or here, though I'm still trying to figure out how to make Ichiro work in a Regency/Napoleonic setting:

Really, this is about as light-haired as my heroes get:

My heroines, too, are a pretty dark-haired bunch. Anna in The Sergeant's Lady has black curls, while Lucy's in A Marriage of Inconvenience are a rich dark brown. The heroine of my current WIP has ash brown hair, and my unfinished manuscripts and ideas that may become books eventually are full of hair ranging from light brown to black. I don't do this on purpose. They just come into my head with varying shades of dark hair. It is perhaps not a coincidence that I'm a brunette married to a man with black hair and the mother of a brown-haired daughter. I suppose it's just my default.

My question for you as readers is whether or not this matters. Would you even notice from book to book if an author always wrote dark-haired heroes and heroines, if all her heroines were short or tall, flat-chested or buxom, etc? Would you care if you did?

Two weeks of summer reading

2011-07-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm continuing my endeavor to read three books per week as part of the Seattle Public Library's adult summer reading program. Here's the last two weeks' worth. On the one hand, I didn't have a lot of reading time at RWA. But SEA-NYC is a long flight, so I got some serious airplane reading in.

Week of 7/19:

1. Crying Blood, by Donis Casey
Genre: Historical mystery
Format/Source: hardcover, library

This is the latest entry in one of my favorite mystery series that no one knows about. They're set in early 20th century Oklahoma, with Alafair Tucker, housewife and mother of ten, as amateur sleuth with an occasional assist from her husband and older children. They're rich with local color and historical detail, and the first book in the series, The Old Buzzard Had it Coming, is available for the Kindle at IMO a reasonable price.

2. The Wilder Life, by Wendy McClure
Genre: Memoir
Format/Source: hardcover, library

McClure, who is my age or maybe a few years younger, like me spent a part of her childhood obsessed with the Little House series--the books, not the TV show. Her memoir explores what the series meant to her, reflects on Laura Ingalls Wilder's real life vs. its fictionalized depiction, and takes us with her as she visits Ingalls and Wilder home sites.

3. A Prudent Match, by Laura Matthews
Genre: Traditional Regency Romance
Format/Source: Kindle book, purchased

Originally published as a Signet Regency in 2000, this book is now available electronically through Belgrave House. May I just say one of the best things about the e-book revolution is being able not only to buy older, out-of-paper-print books easily and at a reasonable price, but to do so in such a way that the author receives royalties for it? This is a straightforward, sweet, but not entirely chaste Regency about the early days of a marriage of convenience.

Week of 7/26:

1. Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns, by Cheryl L. Reed
Genre: Nonfiction (religion & spirituality/women's issues)
Format/Source: Kindle book, purchased

A mostly sympathetic portrayal of an assortment of contemporary American nuns. (Ever since I read In This House of Brede, I've been more interested in nuns than your average married Protestant romance novelist.)

2. Unveiled, by Courtney Milan
Genre: Historical romance
Format/Source: Kindle book, purchased

(Yes, I read those two back-to-back because it amused me to read two such different Unveileds in a row. I am easily amused, sometimes.)

Best historical romance I've read this year, poignant and character-driven. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about it, in my opinion, is that once the hero and heroine start trusting each other, they don't stop, despite many opportunities where a lesser writer could've used a Big Misunderstanding to drive them apart.

3. Naamah's Blessing, by Jacqueline Carey
Genre: Fantasy
Format/Source: Kindle book, purchased

I've been hooked on the Kushiel's Legacy series since it began with Kushiel's Dart, and this book provided a fitting close to Moirin's trilogy (though not a good place to start if you're new to the series--you should begin at the beginning). I'm fond of alternative histories, and I enjoyed Carey's take on the Aztec and Incan cultures and their early encounters with Europeans. Though I also noticed George RR Martin's books have changed my expectations of fantasy. I kept expecting these two characters who turned out to be perfectly loyal friends and companions to Moirin and Bao to betray them and their mission at any moment.

I hope Carey returns to Terre d'Ange and its world someday, but I can understand her needing a break after nine epic novels. I'd love to see her take the stories yet further forward in time, though with the, um, technological constraints she had Moirin impose upon her version of the world I suppose she couldn't exactly have a d'Angeline Napoleon, though I with my historical biases think it would be AWESOME.

Doesn't Carey get the best covers? I included hers in this post just so I could look at the pretty some more.

Back from RWA

2011-07-03T18:28:00.001-07:00

I got back from RWA yesterday evening. It was a good conference, though I was getting over a cold and fighting off some vague stomach bug or case of food poisoning all week that kept me from properly enjoying the social side of RWA or the many culinary delectations the area surrounding the hotel offered. By midweek I'd resigned myself to skipping late-night activities, ordering the blandest items I could find on menus, and eating all the yogurt I could lay hands on. Yesterday was the first day I felt 100% healthy in over a week, just in time to catch my flight home! Oh well. NYC isn't going anywhere, there will be other conferences with other parties, and it's not like Seattle lacks either variety or quality in its restaurant scene. (Next time I have something important to celebrate I'm going here, for example.)

So I shepherded my energies and focused on finding helpful and informative workshops. Michael Hauge's two-hour Uniting Plot Structure and Character Arc lecture alone was worth the price of admission for me. It caught me at just the right time, with a mostly formed plot for my historical romance WIP that could use some refining. I'm always looking for new time management tips like the ones Cindy Kirk brought up in her workshop on writing when you have a full-time day job. And I'll be going back to Laura Joh Rowland's 20 questions on revision next time I'm polishing a manuscript.

Most importantly, I came home with a new sense of purpose and confidence for my writing. Compared to when I first started writing with intent to publish, almost ten years ago, the publishing world has become a far more confusing place. In a way it was easier--or certainly simpler, which is almost the same thing, but not quite--when there was only one game in town, and you were either in or out based on the acceptance of a handful of print publishers.

Now, I'm confident I've made the right decisions about my books so far. Working with Carina has been a wonderful experience, and one I hope I'll get the chance to continue into the future. But with so many options out there, each one with advocates ready to swear it the One True Way, it's easy to worry about screwing it all up--not being able to find MY One True Path that will allow my writing dreams to come true.

I can't point to any one incident last week that changed my focus, but somehow I came away seeing opportunity rather than stress. If I have a One True Path, it's in honing my craft to the best of my abilities and in continuing to write stories I'm passionate about. I'll never be able to guarantee how the publishing market or readers will respond to those stories, but the beauty of all the changes we've seen in the past few years is that there are that many more opportunities out there for the stories I love to find their way to readers who'll love them too. So I'm going to get busy. Or, well, busier. I've got a story I love that needs finishing.

RWA and a hand update

2011-06-25T15:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to announce that I won't be blogging over the next week since I'm flying out bright and early Monday morning to attend RWA in New York. Once I'm back in Seattle at the beginning of July, I'll talk about the conference, what I've been reading lately, random research notes, and my writing life in general again.

An update on my hand issues–I've been seeing a physical therapist regularly to treat the pinched nerve in my neck, and my symptoms have definitely improved. I've gone from having basically 1.25 hands in December to having 1.75 hands now, maybe as many as 1.9 on a good day. In other words, my left hand doesn't feel quite normal–there is still a vague sense of pins-and-needles or tightness even on the best days–but it's a usable hand again. I can carry a medium-weight bag of groceries in it without yelping in pain. I can type. Between my improved hands and getting used to Dragon software, I've been putting out a decent word count on my new historical romance manuscript. Life is much better than it was six months ago.

I hate the timing of this, right after my first two books came out, because the injury slowed me down enough that I wasn't able to produce a quick follow-up to A Marriage of Inconvenience and The Sergeant's Lady. But, if I can use a cliché for a moment, it is what it is. I'm happy with what I'm writing now, I'm writing as quickly as I can, and I haven't given up hope of making a 2011 sale and having a 2012 release after all. And if I can't manage that–well, it will have to be a 2013 release, and I'll just have to survive having a year without a new book out.

As for where I go from here, I'm going to get a second opinion on my hand to try to determine whether the issue is just the pinched nerve or if there is also carpal tunnel involvement, and whether I need surgery to truly fix either problem. If my current condition is the best I'm going to get, and/or if surgery carries a high risk, I can live with that. I still can't do heavy lifting with my left hand, and if one of my hobbies were gardening or carpentry it would be more of an issue, but I can write, I can do my day job, and I can cook. That's a lot more than I could do at the beginning of the year. But, on the whole, I'd rather not go through the rest of my life with a slightly numb hand, so I'm going to continue to follow up and see what can be done about this.

Summer reading for grown-ups, week two

2011-06-19T07:00:00.001-07:00

So, yesterday I turned in my second entry to my public library's Summer Reading for Adults program. (Each 3-book reading log gets me another chance to win a drawing for a Nook at the end of the summer.)

Here's what I read over the last week. I think I did a pretty good job on my goal of picking three dissimilar books this time around...

1. A Feast For Crows, by George R.R. Martin
Genre: fantasy
Format/Source: Kindle book, purchased

This is Book Four of the Song of Ice and Fire series, the source material for HBO's Game of Thrones. The series is one of the most compelling things I've read in ages, but also by far the darkest. Trust me, TV viewers, it's just going to get more harrowing. Though I couldn't put this book down, I do think it's the weakest offering in the series to date, largely because three of my favorite characters were wholly absent, one briefly appeared at the very beginning, and two were there, but their scenes were few and far between. I learned only after finishing that Book Five, A Dance With Dragons, which comes out next month, runs parallel to this book instead of being a true sequel about what happens next. If I understand correctly, we'll get to see what was happening with the three wholly absent characters and the one who was barely there...but it means I'll have to wait till Book Six to find out what happens next for the two who WERE kinda there. Who knows how many years away that will be, and one of them got left in what was literally a dark place on her cliffhanger, so...

Don't get me wrong, I love these books. I'll dive into Dance the morning it hits my Kindle. But I wouldn't want all or even most of what I read to be this dark, nor to have such a large cast of major characters in such a baroque plot.

2. Wellington at Waterloo, by Jac Weller
Genre: nonfiction (military history)
Format/Source: trade paperback, purchased

An analysis of the Battle of Waterloo almost entirely from Wellington's perspective--even the maps face south instead of north, which actually made the battle make a lot more sense to me. Somehow having the maps oriented toward the British side enabled me to fully grok why Wellington chose the Waterloo position to make his stand and why the battle fell out as it did.

That said, this shouldn't be your first book on Waterloo. For that I'd recommend Alessandro Barbero's The Battle, a page-turner of a history that gives more or less equal time to all three armies involved. Also, Weller was an unabashed Wellington apologist. I happen to agree with his bias (though I think Weller's man-crush was even bigger than my woman-crush), but if you're an ardent admirer of Napoleon, you may find Weller's work rather head-explodey.

3. Naked Heat, by "Richard Castle"
Genre: mystery
Format/Source: hardcover, library

This is the second tie-in mystery novel to Castle, the ABC series, ostensibly written by the lead character. It's a fun, twisty, frothy mystery, rather like reading an episode of the show.

I had Naked Heat with me on Thursday when I saw my physical therapist for my weekly session to treat my pinched nerve. The techs in the gym turned out to be Castle fans who were surprised and impressed that I'd gotten a book like that from the library. Yep, kids, the library is not just for literature and term paper sources!

196 years ago today

2011-06-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

The Battle of Waterloo was 196 years ago today. As a Regency romance author who prefers to write about soldiers and also something of a military history geek, I think I'm contractually obligated to post something about the battle.

Four years from now, I plan to actually be there on the field for the 200th anniversary. I've got a decent-sized chunk of money set aside in a CD where I won't be tempted to touch it before it's time to book plane tickets, and I'm hoping to take 3-4 weeks off work and make a leisurely trip of it.

My new WIP is partially set at Waterloo, so I've been re-reading some of my sources. Today I was reminded by John Keegan in The Mask of Command that from the time Wellington woke up on June 15 (the day the French army crossed into Belgium) and when he fell asleep on the floor in his headquarters after Waterloo (having given his bed up to a dying officer), he got about 9 hours of sleep. Total. In three nights. Knowing that, I'm even more amazed and impressed with how well he and his army performed. On that little sleep, I'd have trouble framing a coherent sentence, and I'd probably botch the whole battle doing whatever is the military equivalent of getting a bowl of cereal, but putting the cereal box away in the fridge and the milk carton on the pantry shelf.

Infidelity in romance

2011-06-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

Last week there was a post on Dear Author about infidelity in romance novels. I read the comments with great interest because my new historical romance WIP is about how a couple recovers from the husband's adultery and builds a relationship of love and trust.

My hero and heroine enter a marriage of convenience on short acquaintance and are then separated for years by the demands of his military career. Neither is at their best at the time of the wedding, and they go into their separation regretting that they're saddled with each other for life, but there's not a heck of a lot they can do about it given the divorce laws of early 19th century England.

So the hero does what's realistic for a man of his place and time estranged from and at a distance from his wife: he has mistresses. As for the heroine, she lives a celibate life, but is sufficiently a creature of her place and time that she wouldn't expect a man to do likewise for years on end. What gets under her skin isn't that her husband HAS affairs, but that he isn't remotely discreet about them, to the point she believes, not without justification, that everywhere she goes people are pitying her and/or laughing at her. So when he comes home expecting her to give him an heir and a spare or two like the meek, colorless, obedient wife he thought he'd married, she informs him he's got some serious apologizing to do if he wants her willing.

It's a story of its time, because neither the marriage of convenience nor the fact they can't readily divorce their way out of it would make any sense in 2011. Yet it's also about forgiveness, and trust, and putting aside mistaken assumptions--and, oh, of course, love and passion--all of which I think are timeless.

I know there are some readers who'll find my hero's behavior unforgivable and irredeemable, period. But I'm curious what you who are reading this blog now think: would the historical context and/or this couple's specific circumstances make the infidelity plot more palatable for you?

Summer reading for grown-ups!

2011-06-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

My mother never let me sign up for my hometown library's summer reading program when I was a kid. Her reasoning was that I was a fast and precocious reader, so it'd be too easy for me to win the prize for the kid who read the most books. Also, I had my nose in a book all the time anyway, so she didn't see why I needed to sign up for a program to encourage me to read more.

She had a point. Nonetheless, I'm happy to be able to finally compete/participate in the Seattle Public Library's Adult Summer Reading Program. For every three books read between June 1 and August 28 (regardless of whether or not I borrow them from the library), I get to turn in a form that will be entered in a drawing for a Nook. I already have a Kindle, so I'm not going to go out and BUY a Nook, but I'll happily compete for a chance to win one.

To make things more interesting, I've arbitrarily decided that any three books on the same form have to be in totally different genres. Here are the books from my first entry form:

1. The Girls Who Went Away, by Ann Fessler.
Genre: Nonfiction (social history)

I already blogged about this book here. It's based on personal accounts of women who surrendered babies for adoption in the 50's and 60's.

2. Gentleman Captain, by JD Davies
Genre: Historical fiction (Age of Sail/nautical)

I sought this book out after seeing it reviewed on Dear Author. Given my love for Aubrey-Maturin and Sharpe, I'll at least try just about any novel with a naval or military focus, especially if it's set in the Age of Sail/black powder era. This book is set in the 17th century, well before Jack Aubrey & Co., but I'm all for variety. While it got off to a slow start, and I felt a bit distanced from the story action whenever the narrator stepped back to reminisce on how things had changed in the 60 years since he lived through its events, it still qualified as a cracking good read.

3. Dare She Date the Dreamy Doc, by Sarah Morgan
Genre: Contemporary romance

I have to confess I never would've gotten past the title to read this one had it not garnered rave reviews on Dear Author and Smart Bitches and been named a Rita finalist. Not that I judge books by their covers and titles, exactly, but I do often look at them as signals of whether the publisher (in this case, Harlequin, of which Carina is an imprint, so it's my publisher too) considers me part of the target market or not.

Anyway, this book fully deserves the good reviews. It's a quick read--I polished it off in a single evening--but Morgan delivers fully realized characters, a strong sense of place, and a believable romance in her short page count.

A little eye candy for your Saturday...

2011-06-11T12:13:00.000-07:00

I've decided the hero of my new WIP looks a bit like Richard Madden, the actor playing Robb Stark in Game of Thrones.

He'd Regency up pretty, don't you think? He's an officer and it's a war story, so he can still be all scruffy and stubbly, just in a red coat with a greatcoat or cloak instead of leather and fur.

That actually makes a lot of sense...

2011-06-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a book called The Girls Who Went Away, about teens and young women who gave up their babies for adoption, often under parental and social coercion, in the 50's and 60's--i.e. when the culture was starting to become more permissive WRT premarital sex, but before legalized abortion or readily available birth control. No personal connection for me and nothing I'm researching for a future manuscript; it just looked interesting.

One issue the author mentioned in passing was that in the 50's and 60's part of the tremendous pressure to conform came about because so many of those stereotypical 50's middle class families were newly raised in status. According to the statistics she cites, maybe 30% of Americans were middle class in the 20's and 30's, but the postwar economic boom and the GI Bill increased that percentage to 60 or 70%. (I'm pulling the numbers from memory.) So the parents of those girls who were getting pregnant were often the first generation of their families to have a college or even a high school education, to own a home and a measure of financial security, and so on. Therefore they were very anxious about losing their status or about not acting like a proper moral, middle-class family ought to act. Hence what by current standards was a conformist, repressive culture. Which, come to think of it, would be equally true of the Victorian era in America and Britain. New prosperity is a good thing, but it carries a certain amount of baggage with it.

Interesting, huh?

What's in a necronym?

2011-06-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve read several biographies of the Duke of Wellington that begin by listing certain superficial commonalities he shared with his great adversary, Napoleon. Both were born in 1769. Both were the product of island dependencies of the nations they’re most associated with--Napoleon of course was Corsican, while Wellington was Anglo-Irish. I’ve never seen a biography that mentioned the fact both men were christened with sibling necronyms, however.

In other words, both were given the same name as a dead brother.

As a woman of the 21st century, I can’t imagine doing such a thing. If, God forbid, anything happened to Miss Fraser, it would feel like the height of cruelty to both daughters to give another baby the same name--as if my second daughter wasn’t her own unique person but a replacement for her lost sister, and as if my first child could ever be replaced.

Obviously the Earl and Countess of Mornington and Carlo and Letizia Buonaparte didn’t feel the same way when they were naming their new sons back in the summer of 1769. I don’t think that’s because the higher infant mortality of the 18th century had inured them to grief at the loss of the first Arthur and Napoleone. Parents of the era before vaccinations and antibiotics were undoubtedly less shocked to lose a child than we would be today, but letters and journals of the era show the deep sorrow of fathers and mothers at the loss of babies and young children. Instead I think 18th century parents thought of names differently than we do today.

When Mr. Fraser and I named our daughter, we thought primarily of her future and our aspirations for her to be a happy, successful individual. We picked a name we believed sounded both beautiful and dignified. We tested its dignity by plugging it into the presidential oath of office and imagining how it would sound in the sentence, “And the Nobel Prize for medicine goes to...” (Or to put it another way, to me a good girl’s name is one that would sound better on a POTUS than on the pole.) We kept the nod to tradition and family heritage in her middle name, which is a feminine form of her paternal grandfather’s name.

But in the past, names were more about family connections than expressing your dreams for your unique Special Snowflake of a baby. Wellington was named for his maternal grandfather. Knowing that, it makes much more sense that his parents reused the name. If you name your second son Arthur to show him, his grandfather, and all the world that the connection matters to you and you want the name to live on in the family, of course if that boy dies, you’ll give the name to the next son born, hoping he’ll be more fortunate and live to pass the name on to sons and grandsons of his own, keeping the great chain of connections and heritage alive.

Announcing the Emerald City Writers Conference!

2011-06-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

Spots at Greater Seattle RWA's annual conference are already filling up fast. Sign up now for great speakers, educational workshops, a chance to pitch to a great slate of editors and agents, and even yours truly giving her first ever conference workshop on how to write like a full-time author when you can't quit your day job:

Emerald City Writers’ Conference

Sponsored by the Greater Seattle Romance Writers of America

Through the many different opportunities the Emerald City Writers’ Conference provides, writers of romance and other fiction genres can improve their tool kit of knowledge, get re-energized and affirmed in their writing, and meet with industry professionals directly involved in acquisition and publishing. If you're serious about moving your writing ahead, this weekend is for you.

October 28-30, 2011 at the Westin Hotel, Bellevue, Washington

Keynote Speakers:

Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dianna Love and Sarah Wendell

Conference includes:

• Agent and Editor Appointments

• Workshops with noted educators and authors in, Writing life, Career Development, Industry, Submissions, Marketing, Genre specific technical studies, Strategies, Plotting, Dialog,

• Career Planning, and more

• Friday Master Class with Bob Mayer (Add-on)

• “Pitch Fest” Pitch Coaching

• Networking Opportunities

• ECWC Bookfair

• Goody Bags, Raffle Baskets, Door Prizes!

• Saturday Night Masquerade-Themed Costume Party, guests welcome

Editors

• Leah Hultenschmidt, Sourcebooks

• Angela James, Carina Press

• Tera Kleinfelter, Samhain Publishing

• Esi Sogah, Avon/Harper Collins

• Junessa Viloria, Ballantine Books/Random House

Agents

• Jill Marsal, Marsal Lyon Literary Agency

• Suzie Townsend, FinePrint Literary Management

• Melissa Jeglinski, The Knight Agency

For more information, click here.

Welcome, Mallory Braus, Freelance Carina editor!

2011-06-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

In celebration of our one year anniversary, I asked as many of our Harlequin team members and Carina Press freelance editors as possible to write a short blog post, talking about what the past year or so has been like for them, working on Carina Press. I deliberately didn't provide any direction other than that, because I wanted to see what people came up with, in the spirit of Carina's 1st anniversary. I was so pleased when I saw what they'd all come up with, and had to say (and some of these posts made me just a little teary)! I hope you enjoy the post, and look for your opportunity to win a Carina Press book at the bottom of this post. ~Angela James

Mallory Braus is a freelance editor for Carina Press. You can follow her on Twitter.

When I was younger, I became obsessed with Indiana Jones. I wanted to be a treasure hunter—traveling the world, discovering what no one else had, falling passionately in love with each new adventure.

Then I realized I’d have to deal with bugs. Airplanes. Rickety boats. Permits. Extreme heat (or cold). Sand. Have I mentioned airplanes? Thus, the life of Indiana Jones was not for me.

Or so I thought.

Working with Carina changed all that. I am a treasure hunter. Every day, I wake up and begin an adventure. I’ve traveled in space on a mercenary ship. Overcome grief to find redemption in the glorious Montana sunset. Faced down a killer in the days of Prohibition. Flown through the skies by way of dragon. Gone undercover to determine the innocence of a family of spies. I’ve fallen deeply, passionately in love. And that just skims the surface.

What first drew me to Carina was the company’s motto—Where no great story goes untold. And the more I followed Carina’s growth, the more Carina books I read, the more I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

I love hearing the funny stories my authors share about receiving “the call”. Now I’ll share mine. I read a tweet by Angela saying she’d be contacting the editors she’d like to bring on the next day. I spent the night tossing and turning, having multiple nightmares which involved creative and mortifying ways I might find out I’d not been chosen, and then finally gave up the fight at 7am. It was 10am on the East Coast, after all.

I opened my inbox to find the email waiting. I only made it through the first paragraph before I leapt from my bed. My dream job had become a reality. I ran down the hall, calling out “I got it! I got it!” and caught sight of my sister (and roommate) heading into the bathroom. Undeterred, I continue after her…

I would find out later that she was on a work call and at my first screech had decided to hide. And lock the door.

Yep. I ran straight into that sucker. Staggered back. Shook my head to clear the stars away. I gave a good measured knock on the door. Shouted, “I got it!” one more time and continued on my path of sharing the good news. Finally, after grabbing an ice pack, I finished reading the email, called my parents, and texted my friends.

It was the best day of my life.

Carina Press encourages us to be trend starters, rather than trend followers. We look for great stories and find them in droves. With every acquisition, I’ve been gifted with a gem—sparkles galore. With every author interaction I’ve learn something new, whether it be about the editing process or myself. Working with the other editors has been a gift. What an amazing group of women! I’ve found such support and generosity and comradery. I’ve also learned to drink my morning tea before reading through editor emails—for fear of choking from laughter mid-sip.

Every day I wake up with a smile—excited to begin the adventures of the day. Every night, I fall asleep in anticipation for what tomorrow will bring. I have to say it, working for Carina rocks and I’m so excited to be here celebrating the 1 year anniversary with all of you!

To celebrate Carina's one year anniversary of publishing books, we're giving away some prizes. Today, on each of the nineteen blogs our team members are featured on, we're giving away a download of a Carina Press book to one random winner (that's nineteen total winners!) All you need to do to be entered to win is comment on this post. You can enter to win on all nineteen posts. In addition, on the Carina Press blog, we're giving away a grand prize of a Kobo ereader and 12 Carina Press books of the winner's choice. Visit the Carina Press blog to enter to win, and to see links to all 19 of today's blog posts.

And a sincere thank you from all of us, to our readers and authors, for making Carina Press's first year a success!

On the blog this week

2011-06-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

Today I'm blogging at Romancing the Past about when I care about accuracy (historical fiction of any genre, including romance) and when I don't (my current second-favorite TV show, Castle, for one).

Tomorrow is Carina Press's first anniversary, and I'm helping host a one-day blog tour to celebrate. Stop by and comment for a chance to win a free download of a Carina Press book.

No Six Sentence Sunday today

2011-06-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

The Six Sentence Sunday blog is on hiatus this week as the site migrates to a new platform, so I took a break from posting excerpts.

And I think I'm going to take a longer break from Six Sentence Sunday, just because it was so relaxing today to not compulsively check my blog every time I had a spare moment to see how my comment count was going. Also, while I enjoy reading others' excerpts and there are several stories I plan to continue to follow, I found it was taking me hours just to go through each week's author list.

Don't get me wrong, I think SSS is a great idea. But between writing, my day job, and family, I don't have a lot of spare time, and I need to reclaim those Sunday hours for writing, researching, hanging out with my husband and daughter...or even today's activity, which was taking my Brand! New! Car! (yes, I say it like that--I only got it yesterday) out to try its paces on the open road while listening to my Mariners pull off a come-from-behind victory.

I still plan to talk about my writing and post the occasional excerpt from a work-in-progress. And maybe I'll drop in on SSS on occasion.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Entailed Property

2011-06-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've reached the end of my original Of Wimseys and Wellesleys series on titles and forms of address in the British aristocracy, but thought I'd continue to blog about related topics as they occur to me and I have time.

Today I'm going to talk about entailed property, which almost any lord or duke will have as part of his inheritance. Though it's not limited to men with titles, as fans of Pride & Prejudice well know. I haven't made a careful study of how entails work, so I'm open to correction, but here's my understanding:

Entails were designed as a way to keep a family's real property in one piece down through the generations by tying it to each generation's senior legitimate male representative. In a sense, a lord or duke doesn't own his entailed lands so much as hold them in trust for his son, grandson, and so on after him. He can't sell entailed land, and he can't bequeath it outside the line of succession.

If entailed land brings in a profit, through rents, farming, mining, or whatever, that money does belong to the current possessor (we'll call him Lord Stark, because I've got Game of Thrones on my brain). He can spend it or save it as he chooses. If he has a large family, he'd be prudent to set some of his income aside to help provide for his daughters and younger sons.

It's only entailed property that has to go to the firstborn legitimate son. Lord Stark, assuming he's of sufficient importance, probably owns a lot more than just his entailed estate with the family castle on it. He has money that he's inherited or earned from his land and investments, and he has non-entailed real estate he's inherited or bought down through the years. He can leave that property to anybody, pretty much, related or not, just as you or I can will our estates as we wish.

The system worked well enough when there was a straight line of succession and the family maintained enough wealth to provide for daughters and younger children. But, as Pride and Prejudice teaches us, that was by no means always the case. Entails could impoverish daughters and enrich distant cousins. They could make families land rich and cash poor, up to their ears in debt but unable to clear the slate by selling their land. All of which was terrible for the families...but a boon for writers in search of conflict.

Reading update

2011-05-30T14:02:00.000-07:00

My latest "appointment television" show is HBO's A Game of Thrones. I watched the first episode simply because as a fantasy fan I was glad to see a network take the genre seriously and attempt to make quality TV from it. By the second episode I was so hooked I had to read the books too, and I'm still trying to figure out how, as a fan of Jacqueline Carey, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Lois McMaster Bujold, I hadn't noticed them before.

I'm about halfway through Book Three, A Storm of Swords, now. This is fantasy at its best, for sure, epic and high-stakes but above all human. There's some magic, walking dead, dragons, and strange gods, but it's the honor and ambition, loyalty and betrayal, hope and horror, that keep me coming back for more. That said, I have a love/hate relationship with the fact that unlike a lot of fantasy novels, you can't count on the good staying good, the evil staying straightforwardly bad, and the most appealing characters staying alive. It's realistic, and it adds an unusual amount of suspense to the reading experience, but I wish I could trust that, say, Arya and Danaerys will both stay A) alive and B) appealing enough that I'll continue to WANT them alive. I don't always want to be quite this harrowed by my leisure reading. But on the other other hand, when a character does something awesome and heroic, it's all the more thrilling when you're half expecting them to chicken out or choose the dark side, as it were.

My goal is to catch up on the series in time for A Dance With Dragons' release in July, but I'm finding I need a palate cleanser or two between books. Last week I read Kathleen Eagle's In Care of Sam Beaudry. I'm not generally a fan of small-town contemporary romances, since they often seem to carry the implicit or even explicit assumption that small towns are BETTER than cities. As someone who grew up in a small town but went to college in Philadelphia and am raising a family in Seattle, I just can't relate. But Eagle's books aren't like that. Her small town, rural, and Indian reservation settings come across as not better than my world, but fascinatingly different. And I go to books for different.

In my research reading, I just finished Richard Holmes' Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. It's an overview of all aspects of life in the British army roughly 1750-1850. For me it was mostly a review of what I learned researching The Sergeant's Lady, but a most useful review on points where I'd grown rusty, since both my current manuscripts have an army setting. It's readable and well-researched, and I'd recommend it to any author looking to write a military setting or hero of its era.

Six Sentence Sunday 5-29-11

2011-05-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

This week at last we're back in my historical fantasy, Wolf & Huntress. Cass Macdonald, our heroine, is remembering an incident from when she was thirteen and in the middle of the night sneaked out of the lodgings she shared with her sister and grandfather:

Grandda had been waiting for her when she climbed back in through the window just before dawn. Before she could think of an explanation, he’d slapped her hard across the face. “Just what were you thinking you were about, foolish lass?”

“I was hunting vampires,” she said stoutly. “And I was killing three of them.”

“Hunting vampires by yourself?”

Comments and feedback always welcome, and check out other authors' excerpts at the Six Sentence Sunday blog.

Long weekends and the perfectionist

2011-05-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

In celebration of the first long weekend of the summer, I'd like to talk about how an overscheduled perfectionist like myself looks at a three-day weekend.

Somewhere around Thursday I realized it was in fact about to be Memorial Day weekend. (It's been unseasonably cold here in Seattle, you see, so it feels more like March than late May. This keeps throwing my mental calendar off, making me feel, for example, that I have a lot more time before RWA National then just a month.)

I thought, “Wow! A three-day weekend! Think of all the things I could get done!” I began making a list in my head. It looked something like this:

-I could clean the whole house and make it so immaculate that my mother would smile down from heaven and think, “At last my daughter has learned to be a good housekeeper. I knew someday she'd live up to my standards.”

-I could read every word of A Storm of Swords. That's the whole thing, beginning to end, all 1128 pages of it.

-Mr. Fraser and I could actually finish stripping the wallpaper from the entry wall, pick a paint color, and start painting the halls.

-I could bake cookies! Miss Fraser would love that.

-I could get so much writing done. I could do 3000-4000 words per day.

-I could work on blog content for the next month or so and get it all cued up and ready to post automatically over the next few weeks.

-I could go through the boxes in the garage and decide what to keep, donate, or throw out.

-I could actually try out some of the recipes from the Once-a-Month Cooking websites and cookbooks and have myself all set up with meals to reheat on busy nights.

-I could go to Nordstrom's. They're having a sale, and I really need to replace my everyday work shoes that are falling apart and get a piece or two more to round out my RWA wardrobe, seeing as how realizing it's Memorial Day meant realizing it's just a month till National.

-I could go car shopping, since our '99 Mazda is on its last legs.

All of those are worthy goals. And if I had, say, two whole weeks off instead of just three days, I could do them all. But my instinct is to try to do EVERYTHING, and then to feel like a failure when I've only managed to clean the den and one bathroom, write 4000 words total, and read maybe half of my long book of choice.

I have a funny attitude toward time. Give me a very small chunk of it, say half an hour before I need to go pick up Miss Fraser from a play date, and I feel like it's useless to do anything and fritter it away on something like iPhone Scrabble. Never mind that I could read a chapter or two of a book, load the dishwasher and take out the recycling, or catch up on email--half an hour just feels to short to be useful. This is what keeps me from being productive many weekday evenings and on days at work when I have a lot of meetings. My motivation tends to collapse in the absence of long, uninterrupted blocks of time.

But give me a whole day, or a long weekend, and the opposite is the case. I think of many things I might do over three days and feel like I should be able to do all of them. Then come Monday morning I'm all dissatisfied with how my weekend flew by and how little I got done.

I'm trying to do better this weekend. My writing goal is simply to make productive use of the windows of uninterrupted time each day when my daughter gets her two afternoon hours on the computer. (Mr. Fraser just taught her to play Minecraft, and she's wholly hooked.) I'll probably sit down tonight, make a list of my fit-for-Nationals wardrobe pieces, and plan a shopping trip for tomorrow. I may test-drive a Sonata, the current front-runner for the new car. I'll try to do a little extra housework atop the bare minimum of laundry and dishes that have to happen. And I may get to page 500 on A Storm of Swords. Really, that's plenty for three days.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: No Title for You!

2011-05-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to focus on the critical role of legitimacy in determining who can and can't inherit a title.

Legitimacy in this case cannot be conferred retroactively, and is based on one's parents' marital status at one's birth, not conception. If a duke marries his pregnant mistress as she's going into labor, the child (if a son!) can inherit as long as the vicar completes the ceremony before the birth. If they marry when the infant is a few hours old, that baby is out of luck. This is one of the most common fictional errors with respect to titles and inheritance--a peer legitimizing a bastard son or grandson. Couldn't happen. The law made no provision for it.

A case in point is Wellington's oldest brother Richard. As a young man, he took up with a French actress, with whom he had five children...and only afterward married her. The fact that he eventually married their mother did nothing whatsoever to confer legitimacy upon those children. It probably made them more socially acceptable--both of the daughters made reasonably good marriages, one to a baron, the other first to a baronet and second to the younger son of a duke. But there was no way the eldest son could inherit his father's titles. Once illegitimate, always illegitimate.

Richard Wellesley held two titles: that of Earl of Mornington, which he'd inherited from his father, and Marquess Wellesley, granted for his services as Governor-General of India at the end of the 18th century. Upon his death, the latter title became extinct, since he had no legitimate sons to pass it on to. But since the Mornington title came from his father, it did not die out but went to Richard's brother, William, second oldest of the family, and then to his son and grandson. At that point, in 1863, William's direct male line died out, and the earldom passed to the descendants of the third Wellesley brother, Wellington himself. And there it remains to this day--as mentioned a few weeks ago, the eldest son of the eldest son of the present Duke of Wellington uses Earl of Mornington as his courtesy title.

Six Sentence Sunday 5-22-11

2011-05-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

I finished the rough draft of my novella, Jane's Second Soldier, on Friday, and I'll be setting it aside for at least several weeks. I know it's not ready to submit as it stands, and I need some space before I can decide how much work it needs and whether I'm willing to commit to it.

Now I'm working on both my historical fantasy, Wolf & Huntress, and a new historical romance whose working title is The General's Mouse. Since none of the new sections from W&H made a nice SSS post, I'm posting the first six sentences of my newest manuscript. It's January 1815, and the scene is on a Royal Navy frigate returning from North America. They've just met a ship bound in the opposite direction bearing news of the treaty ending the War of 1812. My hero, a young general whose entire career has been based on his prowess at war, isn't sure what to think of peace:

-----

“To peace!”

Dutifully Jack lifted his glass. “To peace,” he echoed, along with the rest of the officers dining at Captain Tizley’s table.

How many of them truly want peace? Jack wondered as he downed his wine. He couldn’t honestly say he did. After the debacle at Plattsburgh, he had intended to plead with Horse Guards for an independent command.

-----

Comments and feedback always appreciated (keeping in mind that this is the rough draft of something I just started yesterday!). And visit the Six Sunday blog to view other authors' contributions.

Time management for perfectionists

2011-05-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

I started writing seriously in 2001, three years before my daughter's birth, but I really got into a good rhythm during the almost two years I stayed home with her after she was born. She was that rarest of infants, a good sleeper. She slept through the night from the time she was two months old, and would've done so earlier had the doctor not said we needed to wake her up for a feeding. And she took reliable naps from 1:30-3:00 every afternoon, which just happens to be the time I feel most awake and alert. (Don't envy me too much, though. I was on bedrest for the last two months of my pregnancy and had a four-day induced labor, so I paid my dues.)

So I wrote during my daughter's naptime. It was perfect. No interruptions, a long enough time slot to produce a respectable daily word count, and plenty of time when my daughter was awake but not needing 100% of my attention for other writerly activities like research reading, networking, and critiquing.

But then family finances dictated that I go back to work. I suddenly had far less time for writing...and I discovered I'd never learned to manage my time properly before because I'd never needed to. For five years now I've been struggling to find just the right balance between writing, day job, and family. I don't have all the answers yet, but I'm going to be giving a workshop on what I've figured out at the Emerald City Writers Conference in October.

All along I've been fighting against a tendency to make overly ambitious plans for what I'll accomplish on any given lunch hour, evening, or weekend. Then, when I fail to meet my rigorous schedule or get seduced into reading just one more chapter or watching just one more inning when I'm supposed to put down the book or turn off the TV, I think, "Oh, well, I've blown it today. Might as well just quit." Sometimes I'll let this insidious brand of perfectionism derail a whole week. I'll have vowed to take the bus to work or write on my lunch hour or stay on Weight Watchers EVERY DAY. Monday and Tuesday go great. But on Wednesday I oversleep and have to drive in, or something comes up at work and I have to eat at my desk, or I get desperately hungry at 3 PM and buy a bag of chips...and I've blown the whole week. Might as well not even try on Thursday and Friday.

Deep down, I know this behavior is just as stupid as it sounds. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop me from doing it, again and again.

But I think I've finally found a solution. About a month ago I sat down and made a list of everything I want to do that I could in theory procrastinate or avoid. Some of them are writing related--the two daily writing sessions I strive to achieve, research reading, blogging. Others aren't--exercise, staying on Weight Watchers, bringing my lunch to work, and cooking in the evening rather than ordering pizza or Chinese, to name a few. I assigned them all point values and set up a spreadsheet. Every time I do something on the list, I give myself the allotted points. Then, when I accumulate 100 points, I reward myself.

So far I've earned two rewards and have given myself lunch at the delicious Indian place near my office, complete with gulab jamun for dessert, and bought myself a book off my wish list, Kathleen Eagle's In Care of Sam Beaudry, which I'm going to read between George RR Martin books to give myself a break from Westeros (which is awesome but exhausting). And if I make 500 points in a calendar month (which ain't gonna to happen in May), I get myself a bigger reward. I think my first one is going to be a Duke of Wellington miniature to go with the rifleman and redcoat already standing guard over the markers on my dry erase board at work.

The beauty of this system is that it keeps me from tripping over my own perfectionism. So, I didn't ride the bus on Tuesday. That's OK, when I ride it Wednesday, that's 2 points. So I didn't write on my lunch hour on Thursday. That's no reason not to write late at night after my daughter is asleep, nor to skip reading a chapter in my current research book or working on a blog post, because I can still salvage a good score for the day.

It's elaborate and, I admit, kinda strange. But it's working for me, so I put it out there for other overscheduled perfectionists.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Dukes

2011-05-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

This week we at last reach dukes, the highest rank short of royalty in the British peerage. (I'm going to leave royal dukes out of it, because A) the Wellington and Denver dukedoms that are the subject of this series aren't royal, and B) they're not generally an issue in fiction, because most authors of, say, Regency romances aren't going to create fictional royal dukes.)

The first thing you need to know about dukes is that they're rare. Currently there are only twenty-seven extant dukedoms in the British peerage (you can find a list of them here). To become a duke, in general you either needed to be an extraordinarily influential and powerful aristocrat...or else have the good fortune to be Charles II's bastard son. (He created the Dukedoms of Monmouth, Richmond, Lennox, Southampton, Grafton, and St Albans for his offspring.) The closest thing to merit-based dukedoms that I know of are Wellington and Marlborough, and it's not like the first holders of those titles were of anything approaching humble birth.

Dukes, being a cut above the rest of the peerage, are addressed differently. They are not called "my lord," and if you encounter a reference to "Lord Wellington" in a novel set during the Waterloo campaign (i.e. after he was granted his dukedom in 1814), the author missed that detail. If you someday have the chance to, say, travel in the TARDIS to observe the Battle of Waterloo (a fantasy of mine, I admit), you should address Wellington as "Your Grace," unless you feel yourself to be on familiar, equal terms with him, in which case "Duke" or "Wellington" would be appropriate. Or "sir," but in the "Yes, sir" sense, not the knightly one.

I have items in Brenda Novak's auction!

2011-05-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

One aspect of being a published author I'd been looking forward to for years was being able to donate my work to Brenda Novak's On-line Auction for the Cure of Diabetes. One of my nephews has Type 1 diabetes, so the cause is close to my heart. This year, I've finally arrived!

All the offerings I'm involved in are listed on the Carina Press page. I'm offering a first-chapter critique of a romance novel, I'll be at a networking breakfast at RWA in NYC next month, and my books are on the loaded Kindle and Nook.

While you're there, have a look around. It's not just books and critiques. There's sports memorabilia, jewelry, decor, even Celine Dion tickets (not my thing, but as Wash on Firefly said, "Some people juggle geese").

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Heirs' Courtesy Titles

2011-05-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

This post was up for at least a few hours last week but disappeared during Blogger's issues, so I'm reposting it now.

First of all, a quick clarification from my previous post about heirs apparent vs. heirs presumptive. I stated that an heir apparent is the eldest legitimate son, or occasionally the eldest son's eldest son, of the current title holder. I should've said eldest living legitimate son. If a duke has two sons, and the elder dies without fathering a legitimate son of his own, the younger son then becomes the heir apparent. They key is that the heir apparent has to be the direct descendant of the current title holder, who will definitely inherit as long as he doesn't predecease him. If the current peer is your brother or uncle, you can only be the heir presumptive, because it's at least theoretically possible you could be displaced by your brother or uncle's son.

But...if you are the heir apparent of a duke, marquess, or earl, you probably have an heir's courtesy title derived from one of your father's subsidiary titles. High-ranking peers almost always have more than one title, generally through accumulating lower-ranking titles on their family's climb through the ranks of the peerage. So the peer's heir apparent bears the next highest of his father's titles and is addressed accordingly. And if the heir apparent has an eldest son of his own, he gets the next title on the list as his courtesy title, and so on.

It's probably simpler to give an example, and the currently living generations of the Wellington family provide an extensive and tidy one:

- The current Duke of Wellington (the 8th duke) was born in 1915 (the Wellesleys are a long-lived bunch--"the" Wellington lived to be 83, pretty impressive for his time).

- His eldest son, the current heir apparent, was born in 1945 and is styled the Marquess of Douro.

- Lord Douro's eldest son, born in 1978, is styled the Earl of Mornington. If you've been following this series and have a good head for details, you'll recall that was the title of the original Duke of Wellington's father. Wellington's oldest brother had no legitimate children, and his second brother's legitimate male line died out at some point in the 19th century (YES, I'm feeling too lazy to look up the exact date--there are limits to even my pedantry), so the title fell to the Wellington branch of the family.

- Last year Lord Mornington's wife had twins, one of whom is a boy, styled Viscount Wellesley.

Probably a good thing they have so many titles to go around, since all the men above are named Arthur Wellesley. (Of course they are. Feel free to hum "Tradition.")

Note that there is no rule that a duke's heir apparent must be a marquess, that a marquess's must be an earl, and so on. In our fictional example, Lord Peter's nephew, the heir apparent of his brother the Duke of Denver, is Viscount Saint-George. The heir's courtesy title is just the next highest ranking of his father's titles, whatever that happens to be.

Make sense?

Six Sentence Sunday - back to Jane's Second Soldier

2011-05-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

Taking a couple weeks away from Wolf & Huntress to finish my first draft of Jane's Second Soldier, which I'd been neglecting, since it's so much more fun to play with a brand new manuscript you won't have to edit for MONTHS than to write the last chapter or two of one you know is going to need serious editing before you can send it out.

Anyway, here's a scene from early in Jane's Second Soldier. Her new husband, Ben, doesn't have a lot of experience with women, but he has fine instincts:

And then she began to sob. After a moment’s hesitation Ben set his bowl down, removed hers from her unresisting hands, and pulled her into his arms—though not without a covert glance to see if they were making a spectacle for the whole camp. The twilight seemed to be hiding them, or at least everyone was polite enough to pretend, so he turned his attention to his wife. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. He had never held a crying woman before. But he rocked her, and patted her shoulders, and smoothed her hair, and murmured things about how sorry he was, and that she should cry all she wanted, and he was there and he’d take care of her.

Six Sentence Sunday is a weekly blog event where authors post brief excerpts from their work. Comments and feedback are always welcome, and do visit the home blog to see what others are posting.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Heirs Apparent and Presumptive

2011-05-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today's post is a quick side note before we take up heirs' courtesy titles and how to address dukes: the difference between an heir apparent and an heir presumptive.

An heir apparent is an heir who will definitely inherit a title as long as he doesn't predecease its current holder--which, in the British system we're focusing on, means the oldest legitimate son of the current title holder. (Or, if the oldest son predeceases his father but fathers a son of his own before he dies, that grandson would be the heir apparent.)

An heir presumptive is the person who will inherit a title as long as he isn't displaced by the birth of an heir apparent. Generally speaking, a peer who has no legitimate sons has some other relative--a brother, a nephew, or cousin--who'd inherit the title if he died. Note that this heir must be a legitimate descendant in the direct male line of the original title holder (titles that can be passed through daughters exist, but are very much the exception rather than the rule). If there aren't any left, the title becomes extinct. An heir presumptive can't become an heir apparent even if it's certain the current title holder will never father more children--say, if he's elderly, senile, and impotent. For all the law knows, he might make a miraculous recovery and marry a younger woman who'd then give birth to a son displacing the heir presumptive.

Six Sentence Sunday - Wolf & Huntress

2011-05-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

I'll keep posting from my historical fantasy WIP, Wolf & Huntress, as long as y'all are enjoying it, but I'm deliberately leaving gaps in the story, trying to play it more like a movie preview and less like a synopsis or a serialization. At least in this, I want to be a tease!

Anyway, this week Cass is breaking up with the fiance who had the nerve to save her life by pulling her out of a fight (on the instructions of another character who has the Sight and sees big things in the future for Cass):

-----
“I am not your lass!” she cried, her voice echoing off the hillside. “Just...go. Help the others. I’ll take Shonnie, and get safe away, but not so I can save Scotland. I’ll use Caitriona’s money to buy silver shot, and I’ll bide my time. I’ll find the Campbell werewolf when he’s not looking for me, and not expecting my scent, and I will avenge my sister.”

-----

Six Sentence Sunday is a weekly blog feature where writers post six sentences of their work, whether a WIP or a published book. Stop by the main blog to check out other authors' contributions.

NOTE: I won't be commenting much myself this week, as I'm having a pinched nerve flareup that's limiting my screen time.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Lords (but not Dukes)

2011-05-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today we tackle how to address all lords--i.e. all peerages below the rank of duke.

My real life example for this series, Arthur Wellesley, was granted a viscountcy in 1809 after his victory at the Battle of Talavera. I don't know why he became a viscount rather than a baron (plenty of men were granted baronages for military and naval achievements during the era), but my guess it was some combination of the fact he was born to the aristocracy rather than the gentry, his family's good political connections, and that it was becoming evident by that point that he was a damn good general. :-) (I'm pretty sure I would've wanted to strangle Wellington on a regular basis if I'd known him for his political views and elitism, but AFAIC he was second to none on a battlefield.)

At the lower ranks of the peerage, a lord's title is often the same as his last name. John Smith becomes Baron Smith, addressed as Lord Smith. E.g. the other major British hero of the Napoleonic era was ennobled as Viscount Nelson. This wasn't an option in Wellesley's case because his oldest brother was Marquess Wellesley (we'll see more of him later when I get around to who can and can't inherit and how titles become extinct). Since Wellesley himself wasn't available to be consulted, being occupied fighting the French, the College of Heralds (who keep track of such things) consulted his brother William, who pulled out the map and found a town in Somerset called "Wellington," near where their ancestors came from before going to Ireland. At that point our hero became Viscount Wellington of Talavera and Wellington, and William wrote to say, "I trust that you will not think that there is anything unpleasant or trifling in the name of Wellington." To which the new Lord Wellington replied that he thought William had chosen most fortunately. His wife was less pleased, mentioning in her diary that "Wellington I do not like for it recalls nothing."

I describe the name selection process at such length because it'd feel so odd, to me at least, to have your name changed for you, as an adult, and to just have to live with it whether you liked it or not. William could've saddled his brother the goofiest name on the map, and there wouldn't have been much Wellington (or, in this version of things, Lord Catbrain or Lord Netherwallop or or Lord Hoo) could've done about it. OK, those probably wouldn't have flown with the College of Heralds, but STILL.

Anyway. I digress. Up until 1814, Wellington kept getting regular promotions, as it were, becoming the Earl of Wellington, the Marquess of Wellington, and finally the Duke of Wellington. Until he became a duke, the proper address for him didn't change. He was Lord Wellington, addressed as "Wellington" or "sir" by those who were more or less his social equals and as "my lord" by inferiors. He signed his letters "Wellington." His wife was Lady Wellington, and she signed herself "Catherine Wellington." "Wellesley" almost disappears as far as they're concerned. (Their children are a different story, and a post for another week. It's about time I tackled heir's courtesy titles.)

Incidentally, when a peer holds a military rank in addition to his title, you call them Rank Lord Title--i.e. General Lord Wellington, Admiral Lord Nelson.

Writing and hand update

2011-05-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

Back in early April, I posted about my plans to write every day during the month. And I succeeded, making progress on both my historical romance novella and my historical fantasy. Some days I only wrote a paragraph or two, but that was enough to keep my mind in the story. Insofar as I can, I mean to keep writing every day no matter what in the future.

That being said, I didn't write a single word yesterday. My hand and shoulder pain came back with a vengeance, and I barely made it through the day at work, so when I came home all I did was rest.

As it happens, I'd just seen my hand specialist last week, and she advised me to make plans to have carpal tunnel surgery. I was all set to do so but I had this gut feeling that something wasn't right. It seemed that everyone who was advising me, but especially the hand specialist, was all but ignoring my complaints of shoulder, back, and neck pain. I could tell that my hand got worse when my shoulder got worse. I couldn't believe they were unconnected. I didn't want to sign up to have my wrist slit open if that was only going to fix part, or maybe even none, of my real problem. So I talked to my primary care provider and asked if she'd refer me to someone who could evaluate and treat a possible pinched nerve. My first physical therapy appointment is this Friday.

During yesterday's bad flareup, I looked up the symptoms of a pinched nerve in the shoulder, and I'm shocked and not a little angry that my hand doctor didn't consider the possibility. It sounds like if anything I have a classic case. The nurses I work with and the massage therapist who was able to fit me in for an appointment this afternoon agree. They also said that they don't think I've done any permanent damage yet, because my muscle tone is still good, if hellaciously tight in spots, and the massage therapist gave me good advice on what to do between now and my first meeting with the physical therapist.

Still, I'm very frustrated. If I'd been treated for a pinched nerve back in December, I might be all better now. I might have finished my novella and submitted it to Carina in, oh, February. Assuming my editor and the rest of the acquisitions team liked it, I might even have my next release date.

But I know it could be a lot worse. A pinched nerve is hardly life-threatening. I'll get through this. I'll do what I'm doing right now and use Dragon software until I'm better–something I couldn't do during most of April because of a bad cold threatening to wreck my voice. One way or another, I'll keep writing.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Name Changes

2011-05-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today's post isn't about titles of the nobility, but about how malleable surnames were in Britain 200 years ago.

I mentioned in a previous post that Wellington's last name up into his 20's wasn't Wellesley, but Wesley. And his paternal grandfather wasn't born a Wesley, but a Colley. (Or a Cowley. The further back in time you go, the less consistent people were about spelling even their own names.)

So, how did a Colley become a Wesley? It was a matter of inheritance. When Richard Colley inherited an estate from a Wesley cousin on his mother's side, he changed his name accordingly. Note that he inherited property, NOT a title. With very rare exceptions, titles can't pass through the maternal line, but as long as property isn't entailed (a subject for a different post), one could leave it to pretty much whomever one liked. There wasn't a requirement to change one's name upon inheriting from a differently-surnamed relative, but it was commonly done. You can see something similar in Jane Austen's Emma, in which Frank Weston is adopted by his wealthy maternal grandparents and becomes known as Frank Churchill.

Two generations later, how did the Wesleys become Wellesleys? Basically, Wellington's oldest brother Richard decided he liked Wellesley better, and the rest of the family followed suit. Wellesley was indeed the original form of the name, if one went up the family tree a few generations.

Name changes of this kind were perfectly legal and didn't require the formal bureaucratic process a similar change would entail now. As long as you weren't doing it with intent to defraud someone, the powers that be didn't care.

Another form of name change you see a good bit in the 18th and 19th centuries is hyphenation, upon informal adoption, inheritance, or marriage. The second of the Wellesley brothers, William, inherited estates from a cousin by the name of Pole and is known to history as William Wellesley-Pole. He had a son, also named William, who married an heiress named Catherine Tylney-Long. When a woman brought a lot of money and/or family prestige to a marriage, sometimes her husband added his name to hers...which in this case led to the exceptionally unwieldy moniker of William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley. For reals.

Next time, we'll go back to titles proper.

Six Sentence Sunday - more Wolf & Huntress

2011-05-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

Since y'all liked last week's excerpt from my historical fantasy WIP, Wolf & Huntress, so much, I figured I'd give you a little more from the first chapter. Cass Macdonald, our heroine and point-of-view character, is being forcibly restrained from going to her sister's aid in a fight. As I mentioned last week, she's just discovered she can hear werewolf telepathy, though she has no idea such a thing should be possible (it's an extremely rare ability in this world, maybe one or two people per generation) and doesn't understand why she has such a strong sense of this particular enemy's intentions:

-----

Mary’s head rolled to the side, and for a second the sisters’ eyes met. Then the light of life died, and Mary’s eyes went still and empty as glass.

The wolf raised his head, dripping with gore. Your turn.

Cass swallowed down her grief and shock, breathing hard. Revenge first, then mourning.

-----

Comments and feedback always appreciated, and be sure to check out other authors' contributions.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Knights (and Baronets)

2011-04-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

For previous entries in this series, follow the tag at the end of the post.

Say the word "knight," and it conjures an image of a man in plate armor, ready to joust for the honor of his lady fair. But there were still knights in the 18th and 19th century (and to this day). Just minus the armor.

A knighthood is an honor given to untitled men (but in the 18th and 19th centuries generally of at least genteel birth) as a reward for service to the Crown. I haven't done a detailed study, but my impression is that most reasonably successful generals and admirals of the Napoleonic era were at least made knights. Wellington's first major honor was being knighted in 1804 in recognition of his early successes as a major-general in India. So from that point until he was granted a peerage in 1809, he was addressed as Sir Arthur Wellesley. As with the younger son's courtesy titles we've discussed in the past two weeks, the "Sir" goes with the first name. He's Sir Arthur, not Sir Wellesley.

Wives of knights, however, don't follow the same pattern. In 1806, Wellesley married Catherine Pakenham, whom he'd courted as a young man before leaving for India. In the intervening time they'd grown into different people, extremely mismatched different people who had a thoroughly unhappy marriage. But that's neither here nor there. We're just here to learn what to call them. And in this case the right answer is Lady Wellesley. Not Lady Catherine, not Lady Arthur. Lady Wellesley.

Incidentally, at this point there were two Lady Wellesleys. (Ladies Wellesley?) The other, Hyacinthe, was married to the oldest Wellesley brother, Richard, who'd been granted the title of Marquess Wellesley for his service as Governor-General of India, superseding his former title of Earl of Mornington (inherited from his father). This situation wasn't as confusing as you might think, for two reasons. The first is Hyacinthe's background: she was a French actress who was Richard's mistress for years and years before he actually married her. As such, despite her status as marchioness she wasn't accepted in good society or even within the extended family the same way that the well-bred and well-behaved Catherine was. The second is common sense--just like you might have two friends named Bob Smith, and avoid any confusion by talking about Work Bob and Bob from High School, English society of 200 years ago was perfectly capable of saying "Lady Wellesley, the marchioness," or "Lady Wellesley, Kitty Pakenham that was," or whatever to make their meaning clear.

Note that knighthoods are not inherited honors. If Wellesley had been killed while he was still a knight, his firstborn son would NOT have become Sir Arthur in his turn.

A side note about baronets: While I don't have any Wimsey or Wellesley examples of them, you'll see them a good bit in 18th and 19th century fiction. In Jane Austen's work alone, Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park and Sir Walter Elliott in Persuasion are both baronets. Baronets follow the exact same form of address as knights--the key difference between them is that the eldest son of a baronet DOES inherit the honor.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Courtesy Titles, Part 2

2011-04-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

Today we look into what happens when the daughters and younger sons of last week's post get married.

I'll start with the sons of dukes and marquesses, since they're more straightforward. Obviously, their names don't change upon marriage. Lord Peter is still Lord Peter. But when he marries Harriet Vane (a commoner, daughter of a country doctor), she becomes Lady Peter. Not Lady Wimsey, because younger sons' courtesy titles attach to the first name, not the surname. And not Lady Harriet, because it's his title, not hers. Incidentally, their children don't have titles, courtesy or otherwise. They're just very well-bred and well-connected commoners.

Daughters of dukes, marquesses, and earls are more complicated. The rule, as I understand it, is that when a woman with a courtesy title marries, she takes her husband's title if it's higher in precedence than hers, but keeps her own if hers is higher. This means that if she marries a man without a title, she doesn't become Mrs. Husband's Name. Instead, she's Lady HerFirstName HisLastName. In the case of the fictional Wimsey family, Lord Peter's sister, Lady Mary, marries Charles Parker, a police detective and one of her brother's closest friends, and becomes Lady Mary Parker. (NOT Lady Parker.) Her husband's name doesn't change. Basically, a man can convey his courtesy title to his wife, but a woman can't pass hers to her husband. Is this sexist? Of course it is. If you're going to write historical fiction, you'll run into far worse instances of it.

Wellington's one sister also married commoners (untitled gentlemen might be a better term), becoming first Lady Anne FitzRoy (wife of the Hon. Henry FitzRoy, son of a baron) and then after his death Lady Anne Smith (wife of Charles Culling Smith).

If Lady Anne or Lady Mary had married a peer (a holder of an actual rather than a courtesy title), then she would've taken his title even if it were a lower rank of the peerage (baron, viscount), because substantive title always trumps courtesy title. I.e. if Lady Mary Wimsey had married Baron Stuffy, she'd be Lady Stuffy rather than Lady Mary.

It's when courtesy title holders marry each other that things get really complicated. Then, if I understand this correctly, you go by their relative precedence. Dukes' daughters trump dukes' younger sons, who in turn trump marquesses' daughters who trump their younger sons and so on. So Lady Mary Wimsey, as a duke's daughter, has precedence over any man's courtesy title. Therefore, no matter who she marries, unless he has an actual title of his own, she'll outrank him and continue to go by Lady Mary. But if Lady Anne Wellesley, an earl's daughter, had married the younger son of a duke or marquess, she would've become Lady HisFirstName HisLastName, because dukes and marquesses trump earls.

At least, I'm almost sure that's how it works. But I'm open to correction if not.

Six Sentence Sunday - Wolf & Huntress

2011-04-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it! I'll be late on reading others' posts today, because I have three services to sing the Hallelujah Chorus at. But I'll get to them, once I'm all sung out. (I'm on the West Coast, so I always set up my Six Sentence Sunday posts the day before rather than getting up before 6 AM my time to meet the East Coast deadline for getting them live.)

This week we're returning to my historical fantasy WIP, Wolf & Huntress. In this scene from the opening chapter, our heroine, Cass, gets the first hint that she has the ability to hear werewolf telepathy.
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The wolf was at least as big as the largest dog Cass had ever seen, fully waist-high on the tall Campbell who marched at his side. The beast’s fur gleamed silver in the moonlight, solid but for the black tips of his ears and tail. He bared his teeth, sharp and white, and in the near-silence Cass could hear him snarl.

And more than snarl. A voice she’d never heard before echoed in her mind. Sealgair bitches...murderers...smell their blood.

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(Sealgair is Gaelic for hunter. As for why that's what the wolf calls Cass and her sister, well, hopefully someday I'll sell the book and y'all can read it. :-) )

Feedback and comments always appreciated, and please visit the Six Sentence Sunday blog to see the wide range of contributions.

The Small Book of Regency Baby Names

2011-04-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

I've often cracked, when naming characters in my novels, that the Big Book of Regency Baby Names is actually a slender pamphlet. And now I've got actual data to back that up. I'm reading a book called The British Army against Napoleon: Facts, Lists, and Trivia 1805-1815, by Robert Burnham and Ron McGuigan. It's pretty much as dry as it sounds, though the trivia interspersed with the lists is fun, and it's full of useful info to someone like me who's currently writing a novella set in the aftermath of Salamanca and a novel spanning Bussaco through Fuentes de Onoro.

The chapter on the life of an officer includes a list of the fifteen most common first names among British officers serving in the Peninsular War. They were:

John
William
James
Thomas
George
Charles
Robert
Henry
Edward
Richard
Alexander
Francis
Samuel
Joseph
Frederick

Just shy of three quarters of all the officers serving had one of those names, and over a quarter were named John or William.

As for their last names, here are the ten most common:

Campbell
Smith
Stewart
Jones
Fraser
Gordon
Hamilton
Scott
Thompson
Cameron

Very Scottish, and I'm betting I've got some extremely distant cousins among their number. (Yes, Fraser is a pen name, but it's on my family tree--the name I pull out at Highland gatherings whenever I run into the kind of people who want to check your pedigree before selling you a tartan scarf, and, yes, I really have met a few.)

I'd love to see an equivalent first name list for the wives and sisters of those officers. I'm guessing it'd include Jane, Catherine, Anne, Charlotte, Caroline, Sarah, Frances, and Mary for sure, but I'm not sure what would round out the top 15. Eleanor? Harriet? Lucy? I know Georgiana and Cassandra were in use (obviously--see the Duchess of Devonshire and Cassandra Austen), but I don't think they were that ubiquitous.

I try for realism in character names. I wouldn't limit myself to just those top 15--though TSL has William and AMOI James--but I'm name nerd enough to check the etymology of a name to make sure it's not too modern and sensitive enough to social nuances that I'm not going to give an English character a blatantly Celtic name, and if I picked anything really unusual I'd be sure to justify in my own mind, if not on the page itself, why that character's parents ventured off the John/William/James/Jane/Catherine/Anne beaten path.