Author: judeknight

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In defence of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham by Jacqueline Reiter

Jacquie ReiterToday, I welcome Jacqueline Reiter to the blog. Jacqueline has a PhD in late 18th century political history from Cambridge University. She is very possibly the only world expert on the life of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham, and has written an unpublished novel about his relationship with his brother William Pitt the Younger. She is currently writing Chatham’s biography for Pen & Sword Books. When she finds time she blogs about her research at https://alwayswantedtobeareiter.wordpress.com and she tweets at https://twitter.com/latelordchatham.

I’ll be bold: John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham was a very interesting, and thoroughly underappreciated, gentleman.

I know that’s what you’re thinking. (Unless you’re thinking “Who is the 2nd Earl of Chatham?” in which case don’t be bashful, because you’re not alone in that.) Really? The 2nd earl of Chatham? Why bother with him?

It’s a very good question. Chatham has a terrible historical reputation. His claim to infamy is his unfortunate attempt to command a military expedition. The result was the disastrous Walcheren campaign of 1809, which went as wrong as any expedition can be expected to go. Walcheren aside, he is overshadowed by his famous father, Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham, and his equally famous brother, Pitt the Younger. “Unattractive, vain, pompous, stupid,” thundered the 1940s Pitt family chronicler Tresham Lever: “The most stupid and useless of the Pitts”.[1]

“Stupid and useless”?! I couldn’t disagree more. I stumbled on Chatham by accident while studying his famous brother, and he has never let me go since. It’s rare to find someone so universally deprecated, and, while the stories about him aren’t all unfounded, he has definitely had a bad press. Don’t believe me? To help you make up your mind, I present five facts about John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham – or, as I tend to call him, John.

  1. He wasn’t stupid

Nope, not even a bit of it. Not as clever as his brother William, perhaps, but none of the Pitt siblings was stupid. His education (at home, with a tutor) was considered “singular” by at least one contemporary, but it furnished him with a lifelong love of complex mathematics (he was discussing Euclidian geometry in his letters at 15) and natural history. Like his father and brother, he was an accomplished classicist. When he grew up he was considered a sensible sort, with a reputation in cabinet for giving unostentatious good advice.

  1. ….. But he was vain (and lazy)

John Pitt Lord ChathamMmmm. His nickname of “the late Lord Chatham” was not undeserved. Joseph Farington recalled that, when Chatham was compared with his successor as First Lord of the Admiralty, “it was admitted that Lord Chatham has greater abilities, if an unconquerable indolence, did not prevent their being exerted”.[2] I’ve rarely seen him making appointments earlier than two in the afternoon. I once read about him reviewing the militia at ten a.m. and nearly fell over in shock.

Chatham even kept the King waiting. He once turned up four hours late at a royal function.

And, yes, he was “vain”, maybe even “pompous”. His niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, said that never “did anybody ever contrive to appear as much of a prince as he does: his led horses, his carriages, his dress, his star and garter [KG! KG!], all of which he shows off in his quiet way with wonderful effect”.[3] Chatham’s brother William had a reputation for sloppy dressing, frequently described as wearing muddy boots or greasy leather breeches. Chatham would rather have died.

  1. He wasn’t lucky

“If ever any individual drew a prize in the great lottery of human life, that man was the present Earl of Chatham”, Sir Nathaniel Wraxall wrote, cuttingly.[4] Wraxall was a jealous, poisonous gossip. Chatham’s luck was superficial and I don’t envy his life one bit.

But he inherited one of Britain’s most famous titles

True: but it stopped him leading his own life. His parents forced him to resign from the army in 1776 as a protest at the war with revolutionary America. When he returned in 1778 he was obliged to accept undesirable postings to places like the West Indies to avoid being deployed against the American rebels. Later, he was forbidden from serving on the continent lest he die and propel his heir (his brother William Pitt) into the House of Lords. And though he undoubtedly benefited from being the prime minister’s brother, he was constantly compared to his more famous relatives.

OK, but he inherited pots of money, yes?

Also true, to an extent. Chatham inherited a nominal income (after 1803) of £7000 a year, a £4000 pension settled on the Earldom of Chatham and a £3000 pension acquired by his father for three lives. Whoopee, as they say. But the estates he inherited were so mired down in debt that Chatham had no choice but to sell them (his father actually raised more than £10,000 IN ONE GO on the security of his son’s inheritance, and there were other debts as well).

Chatham unfortunately didn’t learn from his father’s poor example. He spent most of his life taking out massive loans from friends and moneylenders (some respectable, others ……. less respectable) to help keep him and his wife in West End properties, carriages and expensive silverware. But, after working through a number of bonds, contracts and legal proceedings detailing the Chatham family finances, it seems he started off at a distinct disadvantage. He was still trying to fulfil the terms of his father’s will as late as 1809, nearly thirty years after the first Lord Chatham died.

Very well. But he was lucky in love.

Chatham married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Elizabeth Townshend, after an endearingly bashful courtship. (Chatham came over all tongue-tied every time he tried to propose, and kept missing opportunities to speak up. It’s all rather sweet, although I suspect Mary wanted to kick him in the shins by the end of it.)

The couple remained close throughout the thirty-eight years of their marriage. They went everywhere together (except on campaign) and I’ve never been able to substantiate the rumours that he had a mistress. (And anyway he’d never have had time: as I said, he and Mary went EVERYWHERE together.)

But Mary’s life was full of illness. She spent nearly the first year of her marriage unable to walk across the room due to some sort of rheumatic complaint. She celeberated her recovery with a miscarriage, and never did manage to carry a child to term. Worse still, between 1807 and 1809 she developed what may have been a form of schizophrenia. It nearly broke their marriage; remarkably, it did not. But Mary relapsed in 1818, and never really recovered. She died suddenly in 1821 of unidentified causes, and Chatham remained profoundly depressed for over a year.

Not so lucky, then.

  1. He wasn’t as pathetic as people think

Chatham’s public reputation rests on his less-than-stellar performance at Walcheren, and his career as First Lord of the Admiralty and Master-General of the Ordnance. Walcheren didn’t cover him with laurels, and I must say he was not the right person for that task. But his cabinet career did not suck nearly as much as people think.

Everyone who worked closely with Chatham seems to have been fond of him, in a rather protective way. He remained friendly with several members of his Admiralty Board long after he left the Admiralty, and one of his underlings at the Ordnance thought he was the best Master-General in a generation (no, really, I’m not making this up). And his military secretary at Walcheren, Thomas Carey, wrote (AFTER the failure of the campaign): “In understanding few equal him, & in Honor or Integrity He cannot be excelled”.[5]

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But one thing’s for sure: Chatham inspired loyalty.

  1. He’s worthy of your time

As great as his father or brother? Not a chance. An administrative genius, or a great military commander? Hah, don’t make me laugh. But unimportant? Uninteresting? Unworthy? Sorry, can’t agree. He spent more than twenty years at the highest levels of government, holding highly responsible wartime posts; he’s much more than the bunch of unsubstantiated rumours circling about him in the contemporary and secondary literature. (And don’t get me started on THOSE.) He’s not in the first rank of historical personages, but he mattered.

Have I convinced you yet?

References

[1] Sir Tresham Lever, The House of Pitt (London, 1947), pp. 361-2

[2] Joseph Farington, The Farington Diary I (London, 1922), 64, 170

[3] Duchess of Cleveland, The Life and Letters of Lady Hester Stanhope (London, 1914), p. 52

[4] Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, Posthumous Memoirs of my Own Time (London, 1836) III, 128

[5] Thomas Carey to William Huskisson, 3 May 1810, BL Add MSS 38739 f 26

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No such thing as a free lunch

Sharks enjoy free lunches right up until fish and chips time.

Sharks enjoy free lunches right up until fish and chips time.

One of my friends pointed out to me this morning that Farewell to Kindness and Candle’s Christmas Chair are both up on a free ebooks site.

As we explored further, we found some peculiar things.

First, every book we looked at had been downloaded 600 and something times, and had 40 something reviews.

Second, this included books that had never been published, some of which we haven’t finished writing.

Third, the text describing the books, the cover images, and the reviews (where there are reviews) are identical to those available on Goodreads.

And when we clicked on the links to go to the sites for downloading and for reading on line – both supposedly separate sites from the front-end listing site – we found identical text, complete with grammatical errors, on all three sites.

When we tried to go further and were asked for our credit card details, we stopped.

So here’s the thing. Don’t try to read free books from an internet site.

  1. Many of them are virus traps or fronts for scammers who want to steal your money, your identity or both.
  2. Even if you don’t nuke your computer or lose your life savings, you’re likely to get a substandard product, particularly if it has been scanned in a hurry by someone who needs to get the book through the OCR software before they have to get it back to the library.
  3. And let’s not even talk about the writer, who has put in months, maybe years, to write the book and who is lucky if they get $1 in the hand for each sold copy. Figures for average number of books sold vary depending who you’re talking to, but 100, 250, and 500 are the numbers I hear most often. A week, you say? A year? No, good reader, ever. In the book’s entire life. If you don’t feel bad about taking a dollar off someone who gets paid $500 for a year’s work, then drop me a line. I have a url for you, and all they’ll want in return is your credit card information.

We authors understand that budgets aren’t infinitely flexible, and that – while food and housing come before books – books are a life necessity. We understand because nearly all of us have lived on constrained budgets, most of us still do, and few of us make more from writing than the writing habit costs us.

The world is full of ways to get cheap good books: libraries, subscription schemes, legitimately free books or books for 99c. Join a few readers’ groups on Facebook or sign up for an eretailers newsletter to find out when books are on sale. Come to book parties and join in the games. If you’re a keen reader, why not write reviews? Many people who have set up a book review site have more books than they can handle given to them, because writers need honest reviews like babies need milk, and for many of the same reasons.

In the end, I can’t stop people pirating my books, and I wouldn’t if I could. At least they’re being read. And maybe the people who read them will go on to buy other books from me later. If they survive the shark-infested waters of pirate land, that is.

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Romance novels are feminist

Dangerous-Books-For-Girls-bigHere’s a book I’m putting on preorder: Dangerous Books for Girls by Maya Rodale. I did her survey last year when she was researching for the book, and I read the preview over the weekend. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s easy to see how women were stifled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: for most women owning property, financial independence, a real education, and a voice in the political process were just not on the table. And while women’s status has changed dramatically for the better in Western society, we’re still Not. Quite. There.

It has been nearly a century since the Equal Rights Amendment was proposed and it hasn’t been ratified to the U.S. Constitution. Women still do not receive equal pay for equal work. We are still debating whether women can have control over their own bodies—but insurance will gladly cover all the Viagra a man wants. Our academic institutions and respectable media predominantly study and review literature by men—and they definitely don’t cover genre fiction, like romance. That’s just America. China has one child policies resulting in an overabundance of boys. In Afghanistan, families without sons encourage their daughters to live as boys (the practice of Bacha Posh), because it’s shameful to be a girl or to have a girl. Again and again we see women considered less—unless it’s in a romance novel.

Because of this high valuation of men and low valuation of women, we’re more comfortable talking about one, lone man instead of a genre that speaks to the hopes and dreams of millions of women.

This isn’t about bashing dudes. Romance readers love men. There are even men that love romance novels. Romance novels are all about two individuals meeting and loving and living as equals. It’s not even just about men and women and heterosexual relationships. Romance novels featuring LGBT characters are written and read and becoming increasingly popular. Romance novels are about two people discovering their best, true selves and finding a loving, egalitarian relationship.

But when the subject of romance novels comes up and we talk about Fabio, we are really talking about a cultural tendency to value dude stuff more than lady stuff. We are showing our fear of love and pleasure. And we are sidestepping a conversation about possibly the most revolutionary, feminist literature ever produced.

Take a look for yourselves. Fabulous stuff.

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Alpha and omega

My hero in Farewell to Kindness is an alpha male.

My hero in Farewell to Kindness is an alpha male.

No, not the Alpha and the Omega, though it is Sunday here in New Zealand.

In a number of Facebook events, and most recently in a discussion on the Facebook group ‘I Love Historical’, we’ve been invited to comment on whether we prefer alpha or beta heroes.

I wasn’t quite sure what people had in mind by the terms, so I’ve done a bit of research, and here’s the result.

The terms come from research into dominance hierarchies in social animals. The alpha male is the leader; the one with the greatest access to food and mates. In some social species, only the alpha male can mate; in others, mates are shared by the alpha and his trusted lieutenants; in still others, the males lower down the social hierarchy will sneak access to the females, or several lower ranked individuals will gang up on the boss.

David, the hero of my current WIP Encouraging Prudence, is a beta.

David, the hero of my current WIP Encouraging Prudence, is a beta.

The beta male is the lieutenant — the alpha’s trusted offsider. He will often take over as alpha if the alpha is disabled or killed.

Next down the hierarchy is the gamma, and so on, till we get to the omega — the animal no-one wants to be, the weed who everyone picks on.

Depending on the species, females can also be alphas, betas, gammas, and omegas. A female alpha might be pack leader, as with hyenas, or half of an alpha pair, as with wolves.

Popular culture has seized on the terms alpha and beta, but has them wrong. I found a lot of articles implying beta was the opposite of alpha, and was a bad thing to be. Not so. Beta is the cushy role, the wingman spot. Beta individuals suffer less stress, but still enjoy many of the benefits of leadership as they coast along in their leader’s train.

Alpha males chartHow much any of this applies to people is questionable. We’re a hierarchical social animal, beyond a doubt, but our tendency to pair bonding and our ability to ignore our instincts both mitigate against a true alpha, beta, gamma type of social structure.

That said, the categories are more useful than I expected in romantic fiction.

Think of the alpha male as the one who must be in charge; the natural leader who finds it hard to sit back and let others take the lead (though a good alpha is happy to delegate to a trusted beta).

The beta male is the one with the same ability to lead but not the same drive to always be first; the lieutenant who can always be trusted to support his leader but who can step up to take over if he has to.

And the gamma is a follower born, happy to take and carry out orders, and only really happy when he has someone to look up to.

I’ve saved this chart in my character tools database. I found it on an organisational psychologist’s site, and I think it will be a great help in character development in novels to come.

 

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The 18th century cookie cutter

I’ve found some lovely cookie cutters while I’ve been researching for Gingerbread Bride.

Flat hard wafers seem to have first been made in 7th century Persia, and spread into Europe through the Muslim conquest of Spain. And gingerbread was a great favourite in England from medieval times.

Wooden moulds to shape the dough gave way to metal cutters in or around the 16th century. They were made on the spot to the buyer’s specification, every one different.

cookiecutter1

Historically cookie cutters were made by family members and itinerant tinsmiths who travelled the country.  Often the tinsmith would spend several days making cake tins, pans and pails. The cookie cutters for the most part were made from left-over tin scraps. Some interesting examples have turned up showing they were made from flattened baking powder tins and canisters.

As well as the dough and the cutters, I’ve been researching the story. First written down in the 1870s, the gingerbread man is part of a much older classification of folk tales: the runaway food stories. The British tradition seems to have leant towards pancakes and bunnocks, but the gingerbread story, when it first appeared in print, came with the note that a servant girl told it to the writer’s children, and that she had it from an old lady. So I feel quite justified in using the story in my novella for the Bluestocking Belles box set. Here’s the excerpt where my heroine remembers the story.

Mary smiled with satisfaction as she placed the last of the little gingerbread ladies into the box.  In the four weeks she had been at Aunt Dorothy’s, she had learned a number of recipes, and helped with all kinds of baking, but the gingerbread biscuits that the cook of the Ulysses taught her had become her special contribution to the success of the shop.

Making them took her back to the galley where Cookie ruled with a rod of iron over various helpers, but always had time for a lonely little girl. She could still hear his deep gravelly voice telling the story of the run-away gingerbread horse, or it might be a dog, or whatever cutter shape he had used at the time. She would be hovering over the tray of hot biscuits, waiting for them to cool enough to ice and eat.

“And he ran, and he ran,” Cookie would say, “with all the village behind him: the old lady, the fat squire, the pretty milkmaid, and the hungry sailor. But none of them could catch the gingerbread horse.”

The story would continue, with the gingerbread horse escaping one would-be eater after another, and mocking them all, until Cookie had iced the first biscuit, and she would then wait, patient and giggling, for the gingerbread horse to encounter the river, and the fox.

First, he’d put the horse over her back. Then, as the river water rose, on her head. And finally, she would tip her head back, and he would perch the biscuit on her nose, and say the words she had been waiting for. “And bite, crunch, swallow, that was the end of the gingerbread horse.”

Aunt Dorothy had round cutters, and star cutters, and cutters in the shape of various animals. When the miller’s daughter asked for gingerbread ladies and gentlemen for her wedding breakfast, Mary had been delighted with the conceit, and the cutters the tinker made to her pencil drawings worked very well.

The icing gave them clothes and features; a whole box of little gingerbread grooms, and a box of little gingerbread brides. The miller’s daughter would be very pleased.

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Writing to a different drummer

Stop trying to fit in when you were born to stand out.

Stop trying to fit in when you were born to stand out.


I write the type of historical romance that I like to read, with strong determined heroines, heroes that almost deserve them, and villains who are more than paper cut-outs. I like complex plots with real issues at stake, and I enjoy a sense of the rich tapestry of life, with characters galore. I especially like writers who create fictional worlds that they revisit time and again, where each book stands alone as a story, but where we meet characters we’ve known before from other books.

Quite early on while writing Farewell to Kindness, I had a few critiques from book industry people that suggested I was skirting too near to the edges of the historical romance genre. I should remove the villains’ POV chapters. I should simplify the plot. I should soften the heroine, who starts the book by threatening to shoot someone. I should remove some of the action and add in more about the romance. I should move the meeting of the hero and heroine closer to the front of the book. I should remove the two secondary romances, the heroine’s older sister, and a number of other characters.

These critiques were kindly meant. My advisers wanted me to write a book that would sell. Writers need readers. The story isn’t just the one I tell; it’s the one you hear, and until you hear it, it doesn’t live.

I didn’t ignore them. I tightened my writing a lot. I did remove some characters and ‘unnamed’ others to make them less distracting. But I didn’t completely rewrite my book, either. The book these advisers wanted me to tell could have been written by any competent writer. It wasn’t one I could throw a year of my life at.

I launched Farewell to Kindness last week, with over a hundred books presold and the reassurance that prereaders had enjoyed it. And I am finding readers, and I love that they’ve enjoyed the book, and cried in the right places, and argued over whether the hero’s cousin is an arrogant so-and-so, and written me some wonderful reviews. Maybe my audience will be small, and a different book may have reached more readers. But this is my book, and I love it.

Yesterday, a couple of things happened that prompted the following private message conversation with fellow Bluestocking Belle Mariana Gabrielle. The trigger was a series of comments from another writer about how we need someone experienced in the industry to comment on our books so that we can tailor them for the market.

Mariana: This laying down the law about writing for the market just bugs me. Silly, really, but true nonetheless.

Jude: It must be nice to know everything.

Mariana: LOL. Exactly. LOL really is one of those days!

Jude: Short weeks are always crazy. And I got a 3 star review on Amazon that pointed out the ways I don’t comply with industry norms. (Not a bad review — quite a fair one – but just a reminder of why I went indie.)

Mariana: I hate the fair ones.

Jude: This review started “This book is pretty good, but it’s not a good match for my tastes,” and went on to suggest cutting out a lot of the plot twists and spending more time on the romance. Which is fine, but this was not that book.

Mariana: ‘Not a good match’ says it all. At least that was acknowledged.

Jude: I get cross with those who pontificate about the one right way.

Mariana: Me, too; about anything, not just writing.

Jude: Yep. Makes my skin crawl. I’m fine with ‘right for me’; just not ‘my way or no way’.

Mariana: That’s why I trained myself to talk about what works for me. Much more palatable.

Jude: If I’d responded [on the post that triggered this conversation] it would have kept the point off topic. But I’m tempted to do a new post on how ‘the industry’ inevitably plays it safe by doing what has worked, and therefore is doomed to playing catch up when readers follow something new and different.

Mariana: That sounds like a good point, and I have opinions on that. Trying to be “the next XXXXX” is incredibly stupid. By the time you think it, you are too late.

Jude: If I let others shape my writing I might be mildly successful but dissatisfied.

Mariana: Many of my friends say, “You could write the next 50 Shades…” They don’t get that there is no next 50 Shades. No next Twilight or Harry Potter. Trying is a fool’s game.

Jude: If I write what I want to write, I will be satisfied, and if people like it they’ll need to come to me to get it.

Mariana: Yep. And my integrity will be intact.

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Tropes and storytelling

CarolineToday, I’m pleased to welcome Caroline Warfield to my blog, to post about tropes and storytelling, and to tell us a little about her latest release. And read to the bottom for news about her giveaway!

Jude has written eloquently about the classic tropes, archetypes, and storylines that underlie storytelling in general and romance novels in particular.  It made me pause a bit to consider which ones influence my own writing.

Both of my published books and my work in progress are have English characters and are set in the Late Georgian/Regency era. It might be easiest to begin with what I don’t write.   I avoid very young virginal heroines.  I avoid the “marriage mart.” I have little interest in the reformed rake.  I have also avoided impoverished orphans, inheritance issues and compulsive gamblers, at least so far. While some of my characters have titles, none of them could be defined in terms of power and its uses and abuses, as is often the case. Each of the books, however, uses a classic story line.

romeDangerous Works could be called a spunky bluestocking story, except Georgiana’s pain as a frustrated scholar runs deep and her dedication is fierce.  The classic story is that of the hero (or in this case heroine) who is repeatedly foiled but keeps trying. She pushes forward for years in the face of family resistance, a system that excludes her from so much as a decent library, and the academic snobbery of Cambridge. Ultimately, with the help and love of Andrew, the hero, she succeeds.

Rome - Caroline's postAnother classic storyline is the one in which actions in the past by the hero or heroine eventually catch up with them, and they must pay their debt.  In Dangerous Secrets a terrible mistake haunts the hero, Jamie from the very beginning.  He runs as long as he can. His love for Nora actually makes him run harder, but it catches up with him in the end and he has to resolve it.  This story does have some common story elements: a wastrel father, a stern vicar, a widow recovering from a bad marriage, a wise older woman friend, and an evil count.

In my work in progress, Dangerous Weakness, the hero, Glenaire, is forced to journey in search of Lily who is pregnant with his child.  It is certainly a hero in search of treasure story. However, the oh-so-perfect marquess is thrust into one alien situation after another, peeling off layers of London refinement. He has to fight his way back to normal life, and, of course, redefine what he wants that life to be.

There are no new stories in any genre. My job as an author is to create flesh and blood, imperfect characters that come to exemplify the traits of true heroes and succeed in completing the challenges presented to them by the storyline. I hope my readers find that I’ve succeeded.

About Dangerous Secrets

Dangerous secretsWhen a little brown wren of an Englishwoman bursts into Jamie Heyworth’s private hell and asks for help he mistakes her for the black crow of death.  Why not? He fled to Rome and sits in despair with nothing left to sell and no reason to get up in the morning. Behind him lie disgrace, shame, and secrets he is desperate to keep even from powerful friends in London.

Nora Haley comes to Rome at the bidding of her dying brother who has an unexpected legacy. Never in her sunniest dreams did Nora expect Robert to leave her a treasure, a tiny blue-eyed niece with curly hair and warm hugs. Nora will do anything to keep her, even hire a shabby, drunken major as an interpreter.

Jamie can’t let Nora know the secrets he has hidden from everyone, even his closest friends. Nora can’t trust any man who drinks. She had enough of that in her marriage. Either one, however, will dare anything for the little imp that keeps them together, even enter a sham marriage to protect her. Will love—and the truth—bind them both together?

Available on Amazon

US http://tinyurl.com/ph56vnb

UK http://amzn.to/1Gd9Im9

Canada http://amzn.to/1bbDxde

Euro http://amzn.to/1LrSLru

About Caroline Warfield

Caroline Warfield has at various times been an army brat, a librarian, a poet, a raiser of children, a nun, a bird watcher, a network services manager, a conference speaker, a tech writer, a genealogist, and, of course, a romantic. She is always a traveler, a would-be adventurer, and a writer of historical romance, enamored of owls, books, history, and beautiful gardens (but not the act of gardening).

Social Media Links

Web http://www.carolinewarfield.com/

FB  https://www.facebook.com/carolinewarfield7

Twitter @CaroWarfield

LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/profile/CaroWarfield

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Good Reads http://bit.ly/1C5blTm

Bluestocking Belles http://bluestockingbelles.com/who-we-are/caroline-warfield/

To enter Caroline’s prize giveaway, go to: http://www.carolinewarfield.com/dangerous-secrets-blog-tour-2015/

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The Gingerbread Bride

Here’s a sneak preview of my Christmas novella, to be published in a Bluestocking Belle box set. Usual disclaimers apply: I’m still writing the first draft, so later ideas might mean rewriting this bit, and it needs editing and proofreading. But I’m loving Mary, and Rick is another nice guy. I do enjoy writing nice guys.

renoirIt was Richard Redepenning. What on earth was he doing in a field in Surrey? It was as if her running away conjured him up! She almost smiled as she thought of the number of times he had appeared out of nowhere to rescue her when she was young, and then frowned when she remembered finding out that he had been in London for two months, and hadn’t called on her once.

Today, she was rescuing herself, thank you very much.

Good manners, however, prompted her to say, “I was sorry to hear about your wound. I trust you are recovering?”

He was dismounting, and she could see for herself that the wound had left him lame. His boot hit the ground and he lurched, catching his balance against the saddle. She almost dropped her bags and put out a hand to help him, but she could hear her father’s voice saying ‘let the man keep his pride, child’.

Instead, she put the bags down gently, and surreptitiously eased her shoulders. The bags had not felt nearly as heavy when she strode away from the others at the coach, after a short argument with the coachman about the merits of following the road versus trusting her navigation skills.

The coachman insisted that sticking to the road was a much better idea, since who knew what barriers might appear on the path she could see cutting down the hill. “I know what I’m doing, miss,” he insisted. If he thought that she was going to trust a coachman who had finally ditched them after multiple near misses, he was soon disabused of the notion.

As soon as she struck out on her own, she questioned whether it had been wise. Even the silly coachman would have been protection from the three men who had been leering at her for most of the afternoon. She was, of course, duly grateful to Lieutenant Redepenning for happening along before they caught up with her. But she had a pistol. She would have managed perfectly well had he not happened along.

“I have some rope here,” Lieutenant Redepenning was saying, as he looked through his saddle bags. “Ah. Here it is. Pass me the carpet bag, Miss Pritchard, and we’ll let the horse carry it the rest of the way to the village.”

She rather thought he needed the horse more than the carpet bag did. But arguing with Richard Redepenning had always been an exercise in futility. He was the only person she knew who could outstubborn her. Though that was at least in part because of the pointless tendre she had held for him since the first time he had rescued her.

She had argued with her nurse; the Spanish nurse, or maybe the French one. There had been three in quick succession the year she was nine. She didn’t even remember what the argument was about, but she did remember deciding there was no point in taking an appeal to Papa. Papa would not countenance insubordination within his family any more than within his crew.

Mary, convinced she was right, had taken it into her head to go looking for something. That’s right, apples. They’d fought about apples. She had passed an apple seller in the market earlier in the day, and had asked for an apple for tea. The nurse had told her the country grew no apples, so she had waited till the silly woman went to sleep, then crept out of her cabin and set off to find the market.

Which was not at all where she expected it to be. She soon became lost in a maze of little streets, and her red hair and fair skins attracted a forest of locals, looming over her and making incomprehensible sounds, while she stood at bay against a wall and prepared to fight for her life.

Then the crowd melted and Midshipman Redepenning was there, smiling at her and holding out a hand, while all the time talking to the village people in their own language. At 14, he had been a beautiful boy, tall and slender, with a crop of golden blond hair and intensely blue eyes.

He didn’t growl, or complain about nuisance girl children. He didn’t offer to suggest that her father beat her (not that Papa ever did). He escorted her home to the ship, and helped her sneak back into her cabin. He even took a detour through the market and bought her an apple.

Mary had fallen in love that day, and stayed in love as the boy grew to the handsomest, kindest man she knew. No other man had ever measured up. Not that Lieutenant Redepenning cared. As far as she could see, he still thought of her as the child he kept having to rescue.

“Miss Pritchard?” There was she lost in memories of some far off sunny shore, while Lieutenant Redepenning stood in front of her with his piece of rope at the ready.

“Thank you,” she said, and she hoisted the bag up and balanced it on the saddle while he tied it, with quick efficient sailors’ knots. The band box went up next, tied in front of the bag.

“If you would see to the gate, Miss Pritchard,” he suggested. “I can walk well enough, but I’m not as spry as usual.”

They slowly sauntered down the hill path, Mary holding the proffered arm but attempting to put no weight on it.

Mary’s anxiety made her cross. He really shouldn’t be walking. Idiot man. He should have stuck to riding, and the road. If he was sore tonight, it would be his own fault, not hers. She didn’t ask him to come after her.

They came to another gate, and on the other side a seat that looked over the village, now almost close enough to touch. They were level with the church roof and the top floor of the inn, and looking down on the cottages.

The last stretch of path, though short, was going to a problem. It was steep and narrow. How was Mary going to get the lieutenant down it without injury?

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Revised publishing schedule

InnovationI had an idea. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it is so-o-o good, I’m not aiming to publish Encouraging Prudence in September. Instead, I’m holding it over until October.

And you’ll be glad I did. (Or, at least, I hope you’ll be glad.)

To fill in the gap between the publication of Farewell to Kindness and the publication of Encouraging Prudence, I’m writing another novella, which I’ll publish sometime in July, maybe as a birthday present to myself. It’s tentatively entitled A Baron for Becky, and it isn’t the Marquis of Aldridge’s story. His happy ending is still several years away, but he does have a leading part in the novella, as Becky’s protector.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

So, by the end of next month, I plan to have finished the first draft of two novellas (Gingerbread Bride, for the Bluestocking Belles box set, to be published in November), and also of Encouraging Prudence.

And by the end of April next year, two years from the day I started writing Farewell to Kindness, I’ll have published at least three and possibly four novellas and four novels. Or, at least, that’s the plan.

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Romance with a bear is not interracial

diversity_tcm401-392214I have steam coming out of my ears, folks.

Fellow Bluestocking Belle Mari Christie, who writes as Mariana Gabrielle, is in the final stages of preparing her novel La Déesse Noire for publication in June. So she was looking at the ‘multicultural and interracial romance’ novel list in Amazon, since her heroine is the daughter of an Englishman and an Indian tawaif (great story idea, and I get to read it before you do – but more about that another time).

Mari found the list was dominated by books about werewolves, werebears, vampires, and other fantasy creatures.

I hate to break it to you, but werepeople are not real. Okay? When publishers of paranormal books tag them as ‘multicultural’, they risk trampling on the efforts of writers to bring real diversity – with people from all the world’s ethnicities and cultures’ – within the reach of readers who have a right and a need to read stories about people like them.

If you believe that people have a right and a need to read books with protagonists whose experience reflects their own, please contact Amazon and ask them to consider filtering such books into the paranormal lists, leaving the multicultural and interracial lists for books that reflect real diversity.