Author: judeknight

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Sunday Spotlight on Brainstorm Your Book

I was a beta reader for this practical workbook, and it’s impressive. I expected no less from Mari, who for sure knows what she’s doing as a writer, as a writing coach, and as an editor. I’ll be using the worksheets and other ideas in my future planning sessions for my own books, and I recommend it to those who want a robust way to improve and shorten their planning process (before, during, and after that crucial first draft).

Brainstorm Your Book: Planning the Parts of Your Next Novel

Brainstorm Your Book: Planning the Parts of Your Next Novel is a hands-on, pen-to-paper, rubber-to-road workbook to help you generate ideas for all the elements of your next fiction book—character, setting, plot, and theme—to produce a more robust first draft more easily, and improve on your later versions. Whether you are writing your first book or your fifty-first, no matter your genre or personal process, Brainstorm Your Book will spark creativity, increase productivity, and make writing your novel a whole lot more fun.

In a series of questions, prompts, and exercises, Brainstorm Your Book probes your imagination, pulling small and large details from your creative mind and the world around you. The workbook will introduce you to your characters and help build solid friendships with them, show you both a bird’s-eye and closeup view of your settings, generate action to drive the plot forward, and enhance the underlying messages in your manuscript. It will walk you, step-by-step, through choices you might never have considered, act as a catalyst driving progress through the whole first draft, and increase your chances of ending with a high-quality finished novel.

Coming soon: Brainstorm Your Book Workbooks for Memoir and Nonfiction!

Buy link: https://mariannechristie.com/brainstorm-your-book/

Contest:

Win a Kindle Fire 7 and free extra brainstorming worksheets for life!

For the entire month of August on Mari’s blog, you will find daily brainstorming prompts from the book. If you follow the prompts and comment with some of the writing that results, you will be entered to win.

Follow Mari on the web:

Author Website www.MariAnneChristie.com

Facebook www.facebook.com/MariChristieAuthor

Twitter www.twitter.com/MChristieAuthor

Pinterest www.pinterest.com/MariChristie

Goodreads www.goodreads.com/author/show/5055425.Mari_Christie

 

And, for more tools to improve your writing and your novel, find Mari on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/MariAnneChristie

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The French Disease

(This is a rerun of a blog post I wrote for Jessica Cale’s Dirty Sexy History.)

In 1494, France was at war with Naples when the French camp was struck by a terrible disease.

It began with genital sores, spread to a general rash, then caused abscesses and scabs all over the body. Boils as big as acorns, they said, that burst leaving rotting flesh and a disgusting odour. Sufferers also had fever, headaches, sore throats, and painful joints and bones. The disease was disabling, ugly, and terrifying. And people noticed almost from the first that it (usually) started on the genitals, and appeared to be spread by sexual congress.

The Italian kingdoms joined forces and threw out the French, who took the disease home with them, and from there it spread to plague the world until this day.

Where did it come from?

Syphilis. The French Disease. The Pox. The Great Imitator (because it looks like many other illnesses and is hard to diagnose). The French call it the Neopolitan Disease. It is caused by a bacterium that is closely related to the tropical diseases yaws and bejel.

Scientist theorise that somewhere in the late 15th Century, perhaps right there in the French camp outside of Naples, a few slightly daring yaws bacteria found the conditions just right to change their method of transmission. No longer merely skin-to-skin contact, but a very specific type of contact: from sores to mucus membranes in the genitals, anus, or mouth.

They’ve found a couple of possible sources.

One was the pre-Columban New World, where yaws was widespread. Did one of Columbus’s sailors carry it back? It would have had to have been the first or second voyage to be outside of Naples in 1494.

The other is zoonotic. Six out of every ten human infectious diseases started in animals. Was syphilis one of them. Monkeys in Africa suffer from closely related diseases, at least one of which is sexually transmitted.

Mild is a relative term

At first, syphilis killed sufferers within a few months. But killing the host immediately is a bad strategy when you’re a bacterium. Especially when you’re a frail little bacterium that can’t live outside of warm moist mucus membranes.

So syphilis adapted. Soon, few people died immediately. The first sore (or chancre) appeared between 10 days to three months after contact. About ten weeks after it healed, the rash appears, and the other symptoms mentioned above. These symptoms last for several weeks and tend to disappear without treatment, but reoccur several times over the next two years.

For more than half of sufferers, that’s it. The disease has run its course. But it is a sneaky little thing. It is still lurking, and a third or more of those who contract the disease will develop late complications up to 30 years after the original chancre. These are the ones to fear. During the latent phase, the disease is cheerfully eating away at the heart, eyes, brain, nervous system, bones, joints, or almost any other part of the body.

And the sufferer can look forward years, even decades, of mental illness, blindness, other neurological problems, or heart disease. And eventually the blessed relief of death.

How was it treated?

Until the invention of antibiotics, the treatment was as bad the cure. Physicians and apothecaries prescribed mercury in ointments, steam baths, pills, and other forms. Mercury is a poison, and can cause hair loss, ulcers, nerve damage, madness, and death.

Syphilis was the impetus for the adoption of condoms, their birth control effect noticed later and little regarded (since conception was a woman’s problem). The first clear description is of linen sheaths soaked in a chemical solution and allowed to dry before use. Animal intestines and bladder, and fine leather condoms also appear in the literature.

They were sold in pubs, apothecaries, open-air markets, and at the theatre, and undoubtedly every wise prostitute kept a stock.

Not having sex—or at least not having sex with multiple partners—would have been a more effective solution, but it appears few of society’s finest took notice of that!

Syphilis in romantic fiction

Those of us who write rakes would do well to remember how easy it was to catch the pox. Indeed, in some circles it was a rite of passage!

“I’ve got the pox!” crowed the novelist de Maupassant in his 20s. “At last! The real thing!” He did his part as a carrier by having sex with six prostitutes in quick succession while friends watched on.

The mind boggles.

We can, I am sure, have fun with the symptoms and the treatment, though we’d do well to remember that it was not an immediate death sentence, and suicide might be considered an overreaction to the first active stage, when most people got better and were never troubled again.

Scattered across a few of the books I’m writing, I have my own syphilitic character in the final stage, suffering from slow deterioration of his mental facilities and occasional bouts of madness, though his condition is a secret from all but his wife, his doctor, and his heir.

Watch this space!

References

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27983483-history-sex-and-syphilis

http://www.infoplease.com/cig/dangerous-diseases-epidemics/syphilis-sexual-scourge-long-history.html

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/syphilis.html

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38985/title/Syphilis–Then-and-Now/

When Syphilis Was Trés Chic

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Consequences on WIP Wednesday

In Greek tragedy, the terrible events that unfold have their source in some wrongful action of the protagonist. The sense that ‘if only I had taken this action or avoided that one’ haunts literature still, perhaps because it haunts our lives.

Today, I’m thinking about consequences in romance. To me, the suffering is even more tragic if they in some way could have avoided it by being more careful or more kind. Do you have such a moment in your stories? A thoughtless, impulsive, or even cruel action that results in some learning experience for your hero or heroine? Share either the mistake or the consequences in the comments.

Mine is from Unkept Promises. Captain Julius Redepenning has been a careless man, and is about to meet an ex-lover in the presence of his wife and his children by his mistress. The meeting is both a consequence of previous actions and a trigger for further consequences.

Jules and Dan retreated to one corner of the room to stand over their packages, sending Fortune back to the house for the buggy.

It was there Gerta van Klief found Jules, mincing over using her parasol as a walking stick, and standing far too close. When had he discovered a preference for small slender ladies, who kept their charms discreetly covered, thus letting his imagination supply what his senses could not provide? He had been celibate for far too long, but Gerta did not set his pulse pounding the way it did at one glance from his wife.

“Why, Captain,” Gerta hummed, the musical tones that had once intrigued him now sounding forced and artificial. “I did not expect to see you here. Are you planning presents, perhaps?”

She tipped her head coyly to one side and smiled sweetly, an expression at odds with her calculating eyes. What had he ever seen in her?

“Mrs van Klief. I was not aware you intended to travel to Cape Town.”

She laughed, another practiced and false sound. “That doesn’t sound at all welcoming, dear Captain.” She walked her fingers up his chest and dropped her voice half an octave. “Let us find somewhere more private to… chat, Captain.” Her whole demeanour changed as she half turned to address a glowering Dan. “Boy! Watch your master’s packages. And be sure not to lose anything.” She dropped her voice to a purr again. “You must count your packages before we leave, dear Captain, so the boy here doesn’t sell some of them.”

Jules’s distaste turned to active dislike. They’d had an off again—on again affair for three years, and the woman still didn’t know the first thing about him. Mia’s disgust at his fornicating was well deserved.

“Good day, Mrs Van Klief. I am not free for a… chat. My son and I are attending our ladies.”

Before she could voice the spite he could see forming in her eyes, they were interrupted by his daughters, converging to take a hand each. Hannah and Mia then passed the widow, one on each side, turning to flank the girls.

“ But Jules, darling, you are here with your family,” Gerta crowed with every evidence of delight. “Aren’t they charming?” She narrowed her eyes at Mia, elegant in London fashions that made every other lady in the room appear poorly dressed. “But you didn’t tell me you had an English daughter, Jules. Do introduce us.”

Mia’s smile managed to be both gracious and feral. “Yes. Do present your acquaintance, dear Captain.” In the last two words, she reproduced Gerta’s tone and accent precisely, showing she had heard more of the conversation than was comfortable.

“The woman is of no account, Mrs Redepenning,” Jules replied. “Have you finished your shopping?”

Gerta flushed scarlet at the rude dismissal.

After one swift look of compassion, Mia answered Jules. “Not quite, Captain. Our daughters need your arbitration. They both want the same ribbons, and they insist only you can make the decision.”

“Please, Papa,” Ada begged, and on the other side, Marsha echoed the plea.

“How dare you?” Gerta’s loud voice silenced the room, as people craned to see what was going on. “After all we have been to one another? How can you treat me like this, Jules. I have given you…”

Mia interrupted before Jules could blister the infernal woman. “A word of advice, Mrs van Klief. In British society — and the Cape colony has become British — a woman of breeding does not confront her lover in public, and certainly not in front of his wife and children.” Her own voice was pitched to reach the avid onlookers. At some level beyond his anger and his embarrassment, he admired her strategy.

“It is a matter of self-protection,” she explained, kindly. “However unfair it might be, going public with revelations about irregular relationships always leads to more censure for the woman than for the man.” She dropped her voice, but not enough to prevent the audience from hearing every crisp word. “Believe me, I understand why you feel bereaved, but you must have known your lover was a married man, Mrs van Klief. Your arrangement was never going to last.”

Was Gerta bereaved? Jules looked at her sharply. It had just been about the physical encounter, had it not? For both of them? And, for Gerta, the value of his gifts, of course. Her husband had left her with little, and the presents of her lovers made up the shortfall between gentile poverty and comfortable living.

But the widow met his eyes, her own bleak.

“Goodbye, Mrs van Klief,” he said firmly, unwilling to give her any reason to think he might soften.

She looked from him to Mia and back again, and seemed to wilt. Without another word, she turned and walked away, beckoning as she left to a coloured maid who had been standing by the door and who hurried to followed.

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Tea with a stern moralist hiding a shady past

Today’s guest had presumed on old acquaintance to ask for an interview. The Duchess of Haverford was surprised and intrigued. They had barely known one another when Her Grace was a girl, just out in Society. Marabella Clouston had been the cousin and companion of one of her friends, but was already garnering the reputation that soon saw her exiled. Or, rather, run off to the Continent with one of her lovers.

Since her reappearance in England six years ago as the stalwart moralist Mrs Whitehead, she and the duchess had not met. Mrs Whitehead, a teacher of manners to the offspring of newly rich merchants, did not mix in the same circles as the Duchess of Haverford.

So what did she want today? Perhaps she had heard that Her Grace, who believed in second chances, had squelched the resurrections of the old rumours. Mrs Whitehead should be allowed to earn an honest living without being contaminated by decades’ old stories of a foolish youth.

The lady was announced. Time had not been kind to Marabella, who looked old enough to be the duchess’s mother if not older. The black garments, relieved here and there by touches of white, gave the impression of deep mourning, though if Mr Whitehead had died, if there ever was a Mr Whitehead, it had surely been at least six years ago.

Mrs Whitehead curtseyed, a low reverence belied by the sneer she did not quite hide as she looked around Eleanor’s comfortable sitting room.

“Please be seated, Mrs Whitehead. May I offer you tea?”

They spoke about Mrs Whitehead’s preferences for her beverage while the lady took the indicated seat and settled her skirts around her. The duchess moved the conversation smoothly on to the weather, and the activities currently curtailed by the persistent rain. Mrs Whitehead complained about the inconvenience of her dwelling, too far from Hyde Park to walk without risk of being splattered along the way by coaches, carriages and carts “driven far too fast for the conditions, and without considering those who are obliged to walk.”

Eleanor passed Mrs Whitehead a cup of tea (strong with a slice of lemon) and began to make another for her companion, who sat quietly in the background. “Indeed,” she replied, vaguely.

Mrs Whitehead made an abrupt turn in the conversation. “You will be wondering why I asked to see you, Your Grace. After all, it has been a long time since we were girls together.”

Hardly that. Marabella must have been in her late twenties when Eleanor was seventeen. Eleanor inclined her head. “I assumed you had reason, Mrs Whitehead.”

Mrs Whitehead put her cup and saucer down and leant forward, her eyes glittering. “Nothing less important than the moral wellbeing of Society, Your Grace, which is under such threat you cannot imagine.”

Her Grace was far too well trained to cast her eyes up to the ceiling, and her straight back allowed for no more stiffening in preparation for yet another diatribe from someone who wanted her to rein in her husband, or her sons, or the current fashion for low necklines, or some other outrage. What Mrs Whitehead said next, she did not expect.

“I understand you to be in some sort a sponsor of a group of dreadful women. Authors, they call themselves, as if any lady would publish a work of literature. Not that it can be called literature. Gossip and scandal, I call it. They say it is fiction. Hah! We all know they must be drawing from life, and what lives they must have led! Why, they write about… But I get ahead of my theme.”

She drew a breath before continuing her diatribe, and the duchess took the opportunity to say, “I take it you speak of the Bluestocking Belles?”

“I do. You cannot possibly be pleased with the book they published about your house party, and the way they portrayed your sons. And the next book strongly promoted the idea of second chances in love, love itself being a pernicious doctrine that undermines the very fabric of society. But this next one! Your Grace, I have come to know it goes even further beyond good taste and morality. Even the cover! Your Grace, you must help me to prevent the publication of the cover!”

Eleanor was born and raised to be a lady of high estate, and had been a duchess for more than thirty years. She froze the silly woman with a raised eyebrow and a pointed look.

“You are much mistaken, Mrs Whitehead, if you think I will join you in such an enterprise. I am sure the Belles will produce another volume of stories that celebrate the healing power of love, and I look forward to reading it. Please allow me to express my deepest regrets that you have not known such love in your own life, for if you had, you would not be so disdainful of the concept.”

Mrs Whitehead surged to her feet. “Then I will take no more of your time. You were a silly fribbet as a girl, even if you did manage to trap a duke, and you are clearly an even sillier woman now you are old. Good day, Your Grace.”

Eleanor watched the woman leave, then turned to her companion. “Fenella, we have an invitation to the Bluestocking Belle’s cover release party, do we not? Send an acceptance, please, and be sure to order the new book as soon as orders are being accepted.

Watch The Teatime Tattler for more about Mrs Whitehead’s campaign closer to the date of the cover reveal party.

And come to the party! It’s on Facebook in September. Check out the details.

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In praise of editors

I got the edits on House of Thorns back from Scarsdale Publishing a couple of days ago. This is the first time I’ve worked with a publisher, and so far I’m enjoying the experience. My draft looks, as one of my friends said about hers, as if Casey cut open a vein and bled all over it, but it’s going to be a much better book for her input.

It’s not the first time I’ve worked with an editor, of course. For a start, I am an editor. In my day job editing commercial and government documents into plain language I work with a whole team of editors. Nothing goes out of our office without being peer reviewed, so I’m edited all the time. From that experience, I came to fiction writing knowing the value of an educated eye. We get too close to our own work to be able to see its flaws — or, for that matter, its strengths. So I’ve employed editors since I started indie publishing, either paying for them or swapping manuscripts.

Good books are a collaborative process.

The author tells the story, perhaps entirely alone but more likely hashing out difficult plot points with a trusted friend, ringing or emailing specialists for a bit of expert knowledge, checking facts through research using information collected by other people. For my books set in places I’ve never been, I watch YouTube videos, read books (guide books, historians’ studies of the place and time, contemporary letters and diaries), study maps, go through local newspapers from the time period, and in many other ways draw on the work of others.

In my process, I then give it an edit and send it to beta readers; a group of early readers who will look at the half-cooked story and give me their reactions.

Another edit from me and it’s ready for the developmental editor to cut open a vein and bleed red ink everywhere.

My turn again. Time to make it better. I’ll often at this stage trial rewritten sections with the editor, or anyone else who will sit still long enough, until I’m sure I’ve got them right.

Next is a copy edit, and finally a proofread.

I say finally, but of course lots more has to happen. While the book has been off being rebuilt, tuned, and polished, we’ve been making the cover. And the production process involves adding the hair I tear out to the editor’s blood. Producing the stories you read is a very messy business. I’m looking forward to leaving that side of it to Scarsdale.

But that’s in the future for House of Thorns. Just for now I’m going to be grateful for editors.

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The fault of the poor

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Some of the rhetoric of economists who support the current financial system sounds suspiciously familiar to my history-geek’s ear, and one prime example is the British government’s reaction to the crisis in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Great Hunger, as it was known in Ireland, seemed to the British government of the day a fairly minor affair; something the poor had undoubtedly brought on themselves by their improvident dependence on a single crop.

Never mind that it was about all they had time to grow as they laboured for the wealthy, who owned all the land and decided what should be grown there. Wheat crops were harvested and exported, using Irish labour. Those labourers couldn’t afford to buy what they’d grown for their masters, but instead planted potatoes in the small patch of land around their cottages. In 1845, half the potato crop failed in Ireland, but nobody died as a result, partly as a result of government relief efforts. The views of Sir Randolph Routh, the man running the relief programme, make chilly reading when we consider what followed.

The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, lead the people to indolence and all kinds of vice, which habitual labour and a higher order of food would prevent. I think it very probable that we may derive much advantage from this present calamity.

Blame the victim, much?

In 1846, almost the entire crop failed followed by one of the coldest winters on record. The new minority government reduced its relief efforts, and made relief largely dependent on participating in useless public works: roads that went nowhere, walls that surrounded nothing.

From the beginning of 1847, the Tory government came under attack from Disraeli’s Whigs. In response, they introduced soup kitchens, the only really effective response of the entire miserable affair, watery soup being better than nothing. But summer brought the third successive year of crop failures,. The government brought in a Poor Law Act mandating workhouses, but failed to stop the export of corn.

The debates of parliament make chilling reading, as one person after another reflected on the ill effects of helping the undeserving poor, and the need for the Irish to simply make more effort. I get a strong sense of deja vu when I read these remarks in the light of more modern public debates about food, refugee, and other crises where the rich are being asked to share their resources.

That year, Oscar Wilde’s mother had this poem published:

Weary men, what reap ye?
Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?
Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?
Would to God that we were dead
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread … We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure
bask ye in the world’s caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

Despite urgent pleas from English officials and others, the government did nothing, many politicians continuing to blame the Irish poor for their own demise. In 1849, as the harvests began to recover in some parts of Ireland, in others the deaths continued. One official enquiry concluded:

Whether as regards the plain principles of humanity, or the literal text and admitted principle of the Poor Law of 1847, a neglect of public duty has occurred and has occasioned a state of things disgraceful to a civilized age and country, for which some authority ought to be held responsible, and would long since have been held responsible had these things occurred in any union in England.

The population of Ireland dropped by half in the fifty years following the start of the famine. Ireland took over a century to recover, and the descendants of those who failed to help when help was needed suffered the retribution of those scarred by the sufferings of their own ancestors. It would be nice to think that today’s politicians could learn from this and other similar tragedies, but I’m not holding my breath.

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Suspense on WIP Wednesday

Sweets to the Sweet by Edmund Blair Leighton  

I am currently working on a romantic suspense. It’s a contemporary, and a novella, for the Authors of Main Street Christmas Wishes volume, due out in November.

Abbie’s Wish has a woman who has retreated to a country town to keep her daughter safe, and three men who’d like to change her mind about letting a man into her life. The tag line says: Abbie’s Christmas wish draws three men to her mother. One is a monster.

How do you create suspense in your story? Give us an example in the comments.

Here’s the second scene from Abbie’s Wish. (The first has Abbie at the fair, making her wish.)

He followed the seller into the garage, which was as filthy, cluttered and disorganised as he’d feared. But the man owned a matching piece to the genuine part he had come to see, and the pair together were worth four times the asking price. Not that he’d let on. Far from it. He had every intention of beating the price down, if only because he was inside this disgusting hole risking septicaemia or worse.

He cast a disgusted look at the sink bench, where car parts, tools, greasy rags, and other bits and pieces lay scattered among plates with congealed food scraps, dirty cups half-filled with cold liquid substances, and a tottering stack of fast-food boxes. He curled his lip at the pinups above the bench — little girls, none of them over ten, the pictures home printed and ornamented with hearts and comments.

Where was the man? He craned to see over a pile of boxes of parts, some labelled, most anonymous but as he did, something about the disturbing montage registered in his mind, and in two short strides he was next to the bench, peering at the little girl with the dark curly hair and the delighted smile.

The same girl was on the next clipping, which had been pinned up first, and half covered so he could see there was someone else in the picture, but not who it was. He checked again to make sure the owner couldn’t see him, then unpinned the top photo. He would have to scrub his hands, but it was worth it. “So that’s where you are,” he murmured to the woman, quickly scanning the paragraph or two of text that went with the image.  He slipped both clippings into his pocket and was back by the doorway by the time the seller had emerged from his search, triumphantly waving the part.

He returned the smile with one of his own. Genuine, indeed. Just what he needed to complete the restoration of his classic motor cycle. A couple of weeks of evenings, and he’d be ready for a road trip. And — he patted the pocket that held the stolen pictures — he now knew just where he wanted to go.

 

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Tea with Sophia and others

An excerpt post from The Bluestocking and the Barbarian. Her Grace is having a celebratory lunch with guests when she is interrupted by a new arrival. I’m in the early stages of considering the extra scenes and plot threads to turn this novella into a novel.

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After dinner, Sophia joined several of the other women in Esther’s room, to help her decide what to wear the following day when she and her Mr. Halévy gave their formal consent to marry.

“Your betrothal,” Felicity said, prompting a whole discussion about how a consent to marry differed from a betrothal, and the differences and similarities between betrothals and weddings in the Church of England, and those in Jewish tradition. Sophia found herself wondering how the Assyrian Christians managed such things.

The consent to marry ceremony the following morning was held in the gold drawing room, with everyone in attendance.

The duchess had offered her own lap desk and quill for the signing and watched all with a benign smile.

Sophia envied Esther and her Adam, who lit the room with their smiles, eyes only for one another, and wished devoutly that she had gone with James.

Before they could sit down to the celebratory lunch that the duchess had ordered and Cedrica had organized, another commotion in the hall disturbed the assembly.

“See who is making such a fuss, Jonathan, please,” the duchess said. “Poor Saunders sounds out of his depth.”

A moment later, the shouting in the hall rose still louder, and Gren was shouting back, though both the visitor and Gren were speaking a language Sophia did not understand. Lord Aldridge hurried out without waiting for his mother’s signal, and his own voice sounded sharply. Silence fell. The guests exchanged glances, and the duchess hurried to fill the void.

“There. Aldridge is handling the matter, whatever it is. Now, Miss Baumann, explain to me what you and the chef have managed to produce for us.”

Esther began awkwardly and then with increasing enthusiasm to describe the dishes on offer, and one by one, the guests began to serve themselves. Sophia, though, caught the duchess sneaking glances towards the door until eventually Aldridge reentered the room and hurried to his mother’s side.

The duchess excused herself and left, to return after a few moments. “A messenger has come to fetch my son Jonathan. If you will excuse me, my friends, I will go and help him prepare for his trip. Please. Continue the celebrations. I will join you again as soon as I can.”

Sophia followed her into the hall in time to hear Aldridge say, “If you must go, use my yacht. It stands off Margate, but we can be there in two days, and she is faster than anything you’ll pick up in London. You will not have to wait for the Thames tide, either.”

“What you propose is not safe, my darling boy. The Grand Army is in your way. You could be shot as a spy,” the duchess said. “Why, this friend of yours cannot even give you assurance that the grand duchess will not behead you on sight. It is possible that…”

“Mama, all things are possible.” Gren was lit from within, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if his joy were too big to contain. “All things but one. I have tried living without the woman I love, Mama, and that, that is impossible. Anything else, I can do. Wait and see.”

“I have sent a message to the stables,” Aldridge said, “and another to my valet telling him to pack for us both. Mama, we shall rest overnight in London then leave at first light for Margate. If you have any messages, write them now.”

“Take me.” Sophia did not know she was going to speak until the words were from her mouth.

“Lady Sophia?” Lord Aldridge was frowning.

“You are right,” Sophia told Gren. “Only one thing is impossible, and that is living without the man I love. I should have said yes. I will say yes. Take me to London, Gren, and to James.”

Gren looked at his brother and then back at Sophia. “We shall be travelling fast,” he warned.

“All the better.”

“What shall Hythe say?” the duchess asked.

“I hope he shall wish me well, but I am going, Aunt Eleanor. If Lord Aldridge will not take me, then I shall catch a mail coach.” The decision made, she would not let anything stand in her way.

Lord Aldridge spread his hands in surrender. “Say your farewells, then, Lady Sophia. We leave in thirty minutes.”

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Story lengths and tropes on Sunday

Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter will know that I put a short story in each issue: one I write specifically for my newsletter.

I say ‘short’, but I’ve never yet managed to get under 4,500 words, and I average around 7,000.

What keeps a story short is limiting it to one plot line and a tight focus on the main characters. No haring off in a dozen different directions as I so love to do in novels, and no time for deep examinations of the character’s motivations and past history. Beyond that, a short romance — one just long enough to read over a cup of coffee — should still give that ‘aaah’ moment.

A novelette — 10,000 to 15,000 words — allows more characterisation and a plot line that takes longer to wind to a conclusion, but not more than one. In a novella — 15,000 to 45,000 words, let’s say — the writer can stretch a bit more, with interesting secondary characters and maybe one subplot.

And so we go. I’ve also written short novels (45,000 to 80,000 words) and long novels (anything over 80,000 words). What I haven’t done — yet — is a short short. Very short stories are an entirely different animal. They comprise The best take the shape setup, complications, twist, with the twist coming in the last paragraph. I love to read well written short shorts. I really really want to write one.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning to write my short story for the September newsletter. It is called The Ruby Cuff links, and stars a man who is marrying an ugly duckling heiress in order to save his impoverished estate. Until he hears that the ruby cuff links he once loaned to a friend might once again be within his reach. Want to hear more? Subscribe to my newsletter.

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Hydrotherapy and fashion

Buxton Crescent — built for the spa trade

I’ve been doing some research for the novella I’m writing, The Beast Next Door. It is set in the spa town of Bath, and in a nearby village, so I’ve been looking at spa towns.

Bath is possibly the best known in Regency romance writing, but it is by no means the only one.

Cheltenham was very popular in the day, especially after George III took the waters there in 1788. Royal Leamington in Warwickshire was also popular with the Georgian wealthy. In Derbyshire, Buxton was popular, its Crescent offering accommodation, shops, restaurants and assembly rooms for dancing and gossip. Tunbridge Wells in Kent was another place for the Regency belle and beau to see or be seen. (It was, purportedly, discovered in 1606 when a young nobleman with a raging hangover tasted the water and felt miraculously recovered.)

Harrowgate in North Yorkshire was famous throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and visitors often included European royalty.

Some spas didn’t really take off until the Victorian era. Charles Darwin was a fan of Great Malvern in Worcestershire. In Powys, Wales, more than 30 springs made Llandrindod Wells a popular resort, especially after the coming of the railway. In the Highlands, Strathpeffer came into its own in the 1870s.

And those are just a drop in the bucket!