How did publisher Sourcebooks acquire the rights to many of influential novelist Georgette Heyer‘s historical romances and mysteries? With good luck and determination! Sourcebooks founder and president Dominique Raccah and editorial manager Deb Werksman told the story to Laurie Kahn, executive producer of the Popular Romance Project. What do you think of Georgette Heyer’s work? What authors or works do [...]
I don’t know about the rest of you historical writers out there, but there are times when I am riveted with jealousy for contemporary writers—mostly when I’m reading a contemporary and the hero speaks. It’s so much easier to do a man in “regular” speech than it is in “Regency-speak.” Here’s an example. I happen to adore MaryJanice Davidson’s books, [...]
Filed under Behind the Scenes · Tagged with Ascot, bartenders, characters, conversations, Eloisa James, gambling, heroes, historical romance, MaryJanice Davidson, masculinity, novellas, profanity, rake, Regency, Renaissance, Shakespeare, slang, speech patterns, Under Cover
How do authors pick the perfect scene for a reading? Something sweet? Sexy? Humorous? Sad? The tone of piece, the venue, and the audience all need to match, and there’s only a short window of time to give a tantalizing glimpse into an entire novel. Sarah MacLean shares selections from an antagonistic scene in Eleven Scandals to Start to Win [...]
This post was originally published on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and accompanied a podcast. The post appears here with the permission of Sarah Wendell and Lauren Willig: When I wrote my first (publishable) book, the book that became The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, I was pretty sure that I was writing a romance novel. The working title was [...]
Filed under Behind the Scenes · Tagged with 2000s, agents, Amanda Quick, Avon, Borders, chick lit, cover art, covers, digital publishing, fiction & literature, genre, historical fiction, historical romance, Jayne Ann Krentz, Julia Quinn, Lauren Willig, marketing, mystery, Regency, retailers, shelving, The Ashford Affair, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, titles, women's fiction
Plenty of authors and historians have talked about the fact that, contrary to what the average person assumes, Christmas in the Regency was vastly different from Christmas in the Victorian period. No one hung stockings by the fire, few people put up trees, and Santa was nonexistent. This is problematic for authors writing Christmas romances. We can’t even substitute “Father [...]
Filed under Behind the Scenes · Tagged with 'Twas the Night After Christmas, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, A Visit from St. Nicholas, Christmas, Clement Clark Moore, cultural exchange, Germany, globalization, historical romance, holidays, international contact, nationality, poetry, Regency, Sabrina Jeffries, the Netherlands, traditions, travel
The theme of my two Regency novels, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander and Pride/Prejudice, is the m/m/f ménage told as a romance, a love story with two happy endings. At the end of the novels, the hero—a conventionally masculine man—is in loving relationships with his wife and a male partner, and each partner is aware of and accepts the [...]
Filed under Talking About Romance · Tagged with 1600s, age, Ann Herendeen, arranged marriages, economic marriages, egalitarian, England, fashion, Ganymede, gender, GLBT, homophobia, identity, Kit, law, love, marriage, ménage, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830, Pakistan, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, Pride/Prejudice, prostitution, Regency, research, Rictor Norton, sexuality, social heirarchy, Stephanie Coontz
One of the topics that comes up a lot among historical writers is what research books are essential. If you ask your top 10 favorite authors, you’d probably end up with a pretty impressive research library (and I’d love to see other authors tell us about their Must Have Books in the comments). Here are mine. I think these books [...]
Filed under Behind the Scenes · Tagged with 1700s, 20000 Years of Fashion, and Marriage in England 1500-1800, archetypes, aristocracy, arranged marriage, children, clubs, courtship, divorce, domestic life, economic marriages, England, Enlightenment, family, fashion, food, François Boucher, gentlemen, Georgian, Hannah Glasse, Hardwicke Marriage Act, illegitimacy, inheritance, Isobel Carr, law, Lawrence Stone, love, Mark Bence-Jones, marriage, Middle Ages, mourning, Peerage Law in England, peerages, Randolph Trumbach, Regency, remarriage, research, Road to Divorce, Season, servants, sex, Sharon Laudermilk, Sir Francis Beaufort Palmer, social history, social mobility, statistics, Teresa Hamlin, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, The British Aristocracy, The Family, The Family Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, The Regency Companion, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England, the ton, theatres, titles, upper class, values, Victorian, wives, worldbuilding
Although I mainly write erotic historical romance set in the Regency time period, I still like to get the facts right. I graduated with honors from the University College of Wales with the equivalent of a Masters degree in History and if I learned anything from that experience, it was how to do my research efficiently. And, back in my [...]
Filed under Behind the Scenes · Tagged with Ackermann's Repository, architecture, biographies, Blood of the Rose, Charles Hamilton Smith, decorative arts, fashion, fashion plates, heroes, history, Kate Pearce, keepers, King Richard III, Kiss of the Rose, London, Mark of the Rose, Paul Laxton, Philip J. Haythornthwaite, primary sources, Regency, research, Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, soldiers, The A to Z of Regency London, The History of King Richard III, Tudor, uniforms, vampires, Waterloo, Wellington's Army: The Uniforms of the British Soldier 1812-1815
For 20-odd years I have been collecting research books. I started at some point during my teens, and have by now amassed a rather eclectic collection that covers such diverse topics as the medieval warhorse, castle-building, British teapots, doll houses, anatomic waxes, secret societies, and erotic art (complete with amusing illustrations of Roman oil lamps). While at first I simply [...]
Filed under Behind the Scenes · Tagged with 1800s, A Country House Companion, architecture, Baedeker, Behind the Scenes: Domestic Arrangements in Historic Houses, Ben Weinreb, Black Forest, Captain Gronow, Castle of the Wolf, Christina Hardyment, Christopher Hibbert, Christopher Simon Sykes, clubs, Crockford's, daily life, dining, Eustace Ude, Germany, Great Houses of England and Wales, guidebooks, Henry James, His Reminiscenes of Regency and Victorian Life 1810-60, Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, London, Lord Byron, Mark Girouard, Murray, Murray's Hand-Book for Northern Germany, National Trust, Newstead Abbey, Penrhyn Castle, primary sources, publishers, Regency, research, rural life, Sandra Schwab, settings, The London Encyclopaedia, visualization
The first rule of romance is that the heroine always wins. The heroine’s happily-ever-after is a hallmark of the genre, and no matter which time period or sub-genre of romance, our readers come to our novels in the faithful expectation of the heroine’s eventual triumph. Yet, throughout history, such an empowered outcome was sadly rarely the case—women have most often [...]
Filed under Behind the Scenes · Tagged with A Tale of Two Cities, Admiral Sir Charles Middleton, alternative histories, art, British Royal Navy, captains, Charles Dickens, craft, Elizabeth Essex, Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, French Revolution, Georgian, HEA, historical romance, Joanna Bourne, learning history, maritime history, Mary Wollstonecraft, music, Napoleon, Napoleonic Era, Naval Chronicle, Regency, Revolutionary, RITA, The Black Hawk, the everyday, Trafalgar, Vindication of the Rights of Women, women's history, worldbuilding
