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So many plots, so little time

My latest set of short stories has hit the New Release Bestseller lists on Amazon UK and Amazon US, and my newsletter short story was opened by more than 200 people. I enjoy the short story format. Two main characters, one tight plot arc, and a gallop to a happy ever after you can enjoy over a lunch break, with a cup of coffee in one hand and the ebook reader of your choice in the other.

Could some of those stories be novels, as some readers have suggested? Yes, of course. Mostly, I manage to keep the word count tight by hinting at backstory, any part of which could be shown on the page.

But… if I write the books that occur to me as I go along, what will happen to the 45 or so plots I created before I wrote my first historical fiction novel?

I need to buckle down and write novels. At the moment, I’m still working in my day job 72 hours a fortnight, and writing in my spare time. I’m managing just under two novels a year. In due course (sooner if I suddenly start to sell lots more books), I’ll leave the day job, and make fiction writing my full-time work. Then, I reckon, I should be able to write at least four novels a year. Maybe five.

Here are the ones I have in the pipeline. Novels only. Short stories and novellas arrive like manna from heaven and get squeezed into the gaps. (The numbers are the order I’ve published.)

Standalone: not part of a series

2. A Baron for Becky (published)

A Monstrous Masquerade The tentative working name for the book about what Jonathan Grenford was up to between the end of Concealed in Shadow and the last quarter of The Bluestocking and the Barbarian (you may recall he was fetched from overseas during his mother’s house party.

The Golden Redepennings

1. Farewell to Kindness (published)

4. A Raging Madness (published)

5. The Realm of Silence (in progress)

Unkept Promises

The Flavour of Their Deeds

An Unpitied Sacrifice

Children of Wrath

The Children of the Mountain King

6. The Bluestocking and the Barbarian (being rewritten into a novel)

The Healer and the Hermit

The Rake and the Reformer (or The Saint and the Sinner)

The Diamond and the Doctor

The Lamb and the Lion

The Maid and the Mercenary

Danwood’s Daughters

Lord Danwood’s Dilemma

Lady Henry’s Choice

Charity Begins at Home

Smuggler’s Coast

Deborah and Destiny

And three others that don’t have titles yet

Lion’s Pride

(seven novel plots, no titles yet) — returned soldiers, all linked because they worked in a loosely connected group as Exploring Officers for Wellington

Series about three sisters

And also about the villain from the first three books — no series title yet

Lady Charlie Charms the Marquess

Lady Freddie Fascinates the Reverend

Lady Ernie Engages the Soldier

Miss Henwood Dices with Death

A Game of Mist and Shadows

(historical suspense with spies and thief takers)

3. Revealed in Mist (published)

7. Concealed in Shadow (work in progress)

Veiled in Darkness

The Wages of Virtue

3. (Revealed in Mist — Prue’s story belongs in both series)

Practising Charity

Finding Faith

Delivering Hope

And more…

Then there are the other three series that are no more than ideas on a piece of paper.

  • A half-formed idea about a series of eight novels under a series title The Curse of the Three: three linked families whose enmity dates from generations back and who each have a clue to a treasure.
  • Four West-Indies related stories in a series, one linked to Farewell to Kindness.
  • Four reverse fairy-story ideas.

Right. Better get on with it then.

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Fool Me Twice

Last week, we talked about get-rich-quick schemes. In some ways, the next category of fraud is much worse. Persuasion tricks use a person’s deepest desires to draw them in and fleece them of their money.

The Victorian era is infamous for persuasion tricks that involved seances or other promises to contact the dead. But frauds of this type have been known throughout history, and are as common today as they ever were.

The scheme is simple, in essence. The con artist claims psychic powers, a special ability to see those who have ‘passed over to the other side’. Someone who has suffered a bereavement is told that their dearly departed is anxious to communicate.And communication is lubricated by money.

Fortune-telling powers are a broader category of the same type.

Fortune-tellers and mediums use a technique called ‘cold reading’ to gain the trust of their victims. A practiced cold-reader uses anything they can observe about the victim’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, and so on to come up with some guesses that are highly likely to be true.

“He is asking me about ‘John’. Does anyone know John?” Does anyone not know someone called John?

The cold-reader quickly picks up on signals about whether the guesses are moving in the right direction, moving on from failed guesses and reinforcing those that the victims acknowledges.

Fraudsters also use hot reading (that is, they research their victim beforehand) and warm reading (which employs statements that apply to most people, called Barnum statements after the famous showman who began the Barnum circus shows.

“I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don’t know very well.”

“You have a box of old unsorted photographs in your house.”

“You had an accident when you were a child involving water.”

“You’re having problems with a friend or relative.”

“Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen.”

“You are wearing a piece of jewellery that you associate with someone important to you who has died.” (Almost always true of a widow. Wedding ring, anyone?)

In one case in the Old Bailey records, the defrauded woman was missing her mother when she was introduced to one Mr Fletcher, who introduced himself as a magnetic doctor. In Mrs Hart-Davies’ evidence, she describes each meeting, and we see her being sucked further and further into faith in this man.

he found me with tears coming down my face, with joy at having, as I supposed, met my mother again… I paid him for his visit; I paid after his four visits… it was about five guineas.

She goes on to explain that, at many of the meetings that followed, she and the Fletchers talked about her jewellery, which she showed to them during one of their visits, and sure enough, in due course of time, the deceased mother sent a message through Mr Fletcher to explain that the jewellery interfered with ‘the magnetism’, a problem she could correct by presenting the jewels to the Fletchers.

I collected my jewels together in a bag, thinking I should be disobedient to my mother if I did not hand them over…my mother, through him, handled the jewellery in Fletcher’s hands, saying, “Oh what happy memories these bring me!”

In vain, the Fletchers pleaded that their psychic gifts were real, and they were merely carrying out the instructions of the spirit world. They were found guilty.

Romantic scams are a persuasion trick much beloved by historical romance writers. The lovely young woman or the handsome young man pursues the innocent peer’s offspring, manages to elicit an agreement to marry, and then accepts money from the guardian to go away.

This edges into blackmail, such as the case of Florence Vining and the Marquis of Worcester. Lord Worcester, some thirty-one years before the case in question, had an acknowledged fling with Miss Vining.

I made the acquaintance of the prisoner … at a place of entertainment… I visited her from time to time… In the year 1869, I agreed to pay her 250 pound if she ceased to annoy me.

But she didn’t. He last saw her in 1874, but over many years he continued to receive begging letters, until they took a turn for the nasty during Lady Worcestor’s confinement.

I will, when you least expect me, tear the gown from your wife’s back, and will curse your child. God knows you have given me much provocation… You shall bitterly repent it. I ask you for 20 pound to leave London. Send it.”

He gave her money to go to Scotland, but the letters continued to come and the marquis had had enough. He began court proceedings.

The prisoner was found guilty and sentenced to six months’ hard labour, which seems quite light for 1898. Did the court note, as I did, that she was a mere sixteen years of age at the beginning of what Worcester acknowledged to be a seven year relationship? Certainly, the proceedings acknowledged that she seemed to genuinely believe she had been hard done by.

More to come. We’ve barely touched on extortion, and we haven’t talked about gold-brick scams at all.

 

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Family occasions on WIP Wednesday

I like stories where you get the sense you’ve moved into the middle of an existing life. All the ordinary things might be carrying on, or some big crisis might have shifted our hero and heroine out of their usual preoccupations, but somewhere in the background is normal.

Part of normal life are the things we do regularly with our friends and family. Sunday dinner. Tuesday chess night. Thanksgiving. We do something once, enjoy it, do it again, and before we quite mean it, it has become a habit, or even a tradition.

And such interactions enrich fiction. Four old school friends always meet in London on the first day of March. Mama kisses her children, and later her grandchildren, and always says ‘Love you forever’.  Two cousins, separated by years and distance, go to their old fishing hole to become reacquainted. The echoes through time add depth.

In this week’s WIP Wednesday, pick any type of repeated interaction you like: a joke, an activity, an event, a ceremony, a habit. Post it in the comments, as usual, and I’ll post mine below.

It’s from my new contemporary novella for Author’s on Main Street, A Family for Christmas. My heroine hasn’t seen her husband since their wedding day, eight and a half months ago.  She has been out with her in-laws, cutting and bringing home a Christmas tree from the farm’s hilltop.

After a cup of tea back at the house, they wrestled the Christmas tree into a bucket of damp sand, sitting ready in the corner of the big sitting room. Cheryl shifted the bucket a half circle and then back a quarter until Lee and Old Trev agreed that the young pine looked even on all sides. It was full and bushy, with branches arching upwards and one grand leader almost scraping the plaster ceiling ten foot above the floor.

“You young ones finish it off,” Old Trev commanded. “I’m going to take a bit of a sit down.”

He wandered off to the screened end of the verandah, where a comfortable recliner chair waited. Not to sleep, he would have told them, but to check out the back of his eyelids, as he did every afternoon.

Cheryl fetched a short wooden stepladder, and Lee carried over the first of the boxes of decorations. They all had stories, Cheryl told her, and each member of the family added at least one new one a year. Old Trev whittled his. He carved one a year, delicate wooden snowflakes all in different woods, oiled and waxed till they shone.

Lee and Cheryl had purchased one each in Palmy at Lee’s most recent antenatal scan. Cheryl’s was a Santa on water skis, and Lee found a medallion of a Madonna and Child. She had bought the matching St Joseph to put up for Trevor, so he’d have a part of the tradition even if he wasn’t home in time, then hidden it for fear Cheryl would think Lee was putting herself, Trevor, and the baby into the centre of the Christmas story.

They were certainly no Holy Family, though Lee had been roped into the pageant planned for the Christmas Fair. Just a small part; being led across the stage on a donkey. With Cheryl’s acceptance, the whole community had embraced her as one of their own. Not like when she first arrived.

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Tea with Mrs Markinson

Villages could be cruel places for an outsider, and the new solicitor’s wife was certainly an outsider.  Mr Markinson himself had been quickly accepted by the men, and their wives and sisters were rapidly won over by  his grave courtesy and the military bearing left by years in the British Marines. Indeed, had he been less personable, they may have more quickly forgiven the foreignness of his lady.

Rank and foreigness were the two problems in a nutshell, and today the duchess intended to solve them both. The rumours had it she was an army-lightskirt, or one of the wild girls who followed the Spanish guerrillas and slit the throats of wounded Frenchmen. The rumours lied. Mrs Markinson was some sort of Spanish nobility, and the Spanish nobility was even more complicated and heirarchical than the English. The women of the sizeable village that nestled around the feet of Haverford Castle were unable to assign her a place, and so counted her very obvious quality as an affectation and a lie.

At the rectory, most of the committee for the Spring fete had already arrived, but not Mrs Markinson. Excellent. If the woman following instructions, Eleanor had precisely fifteen minutes before introducing her as the newest committee member. Plenty of time for the ridiculous courtesies the village ladies thought suitable for the mistress of the castle.

Eleanor swept into the room, this month’s companion-secretary in her wake, and sure enough, within ten minutes, had the committee seated and ready for her next move. “I have asked the new solicitor’s wife to join us, my dears, and I expect her shortly. Before she arrives, may I solicit your kindness for Mrs Markinson?” She paused, her brows delicately raised, looking around at the startled faces of these leaders of local society. The mayor’s wife was trying to smooth out a frown, and the squire’s wife was near biting her tongue lest she say something to offend the duchess.

The village haberdasher, who was the biggest gossip in all of Eastern Kent,  opened her mouth, and the rector’s wife (God bless her) was swift to ask her, sotto-voiced,  if she needed more tea.

“I trust I may expect you to keep my confidence,” the duchess continued, silencing any further attemp at interruption. “I believe it may help us to make Mrs Markinson welcome if you know a little of her history, and of her connections with my family. She grew up in England. Her father was the younger son of an English gentleman, and her mother the daughter and widow of Spanish lords, equivalent perhaps, to what we would call a baronet.”

The ladies were nodding. The daughter of a baronet and a country gentleman. Mrs Markinson was assuming a shape they could understand. “After first her father and then her mother died, she returned to Spain to keep house for her half-brother, child of her mother’s first marriage.”

“The baronet,” the squire’s wife said, nodding to show she was following the story.

Eleanor inclined her head in agreement. “Don Imanol Mendina de la Vega, who by chance was at Eton with my son Aldridge.”

That fetched a buzz. Mention of Aldridge always provoked comment. “When the war came to Spain, Don de la Vega led a force into the mountains to support the English and oppose the French, and his sister continued to manage his household, but also to keep a village school. She also learned simples from her mother and her English grandmother, so naturally she used her knowledge to treat the wounded. And one day, a badly injured English marine was carried up the mountain to her village for her care.”

“Mr Markinson,” the ladies chorused, their soft smiles displaying their enjoyment of the romantic tale.

“You have guessed it. And the rest must be quickly told, for I see Mrs Markinson at the garden gate. It was, of course, Don de la Vega, who recommended his sister’s new husband to my son, and for love of her husband, she has followed him to Kent, leaving behind both her Spanish people and her childhood town far to the north in Lancashire.”

Eleanor stood as Mrs Markinson entered the room, and crossed to take her hand, as the rest of the village ladies rustled to their feet around her. “Mrs Markinson, I am so pleased you were able to join us. You see before you the committee for the Spring fete. I always say the best way for someone to feel at home in a new community is to be given a job to do, and you have come to the right place.”

Seated again a few minutes later, Eleanor watched with delight as the village ladies tumbled verbally over one another in their anxiety to please the duchess’s new protegee, and Mrs Markinson gave agreeable replies in her softly-accented English.  The duchess had given the barest outlines of the story, of course. Nothing of the decade of separation that split the Markinson’s wedding from their marriage. But the rest was Teri Markinson’s to tell.

The Lost Wife is a story in Lost in the Tale, to be published this week.

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Spotlight on Sunday: Caroline Warfield’s 2017 Christmas novella

This beautiful cover for Caroline Warfield’s 2017 Christmas Novella comes with the announcement that the book is available for pre-order from various retailers.

Love is the best medicine and the sweetest things in life are worth the wait, especially at Christmastime in Venice for a stranded English Lady and a dedicated doctor.

About the Book

Lady Charlotte Tyree clings to one dream—to see the splendor of Rome before settling for life as the spinster sister of an earl. But now her feckless brother forces her to wait again, stranded in Venice when he falls ill, halfway to the place of her dreams. She finds the city damp, moldy, and riddled with disease.

As a physician, Salvatore Caresini well knows the danger of putrid fever. He lost his young wife to it, leaving him alone to care for their rambunctious children. He isn’t about to let the lovely English lady risk her life nursing her brother.

But Christmas is coming, that season of miracles, and with it, perhaps, lessons for two lonely people: that love heals the deepest wounds and sometimes the deepest dreams aren’t what we expect.

Pre-order it on Amazon here. ♦ Pre-order it on Smashwords here.

About the Author

Traveler, poet, librarian, technology manager—award winning and Amazon best-selling author Caroline Warfield has been many things (even a nun), but above all she is a romantic. Having retired to the urban wilds of eastern Pennsylvania, she reckons she is on at least her third act, happily working in an office surrounded by windows where she lets her characters lead her to adventures while she nudges them to explore the riskiest territory of all, the human heart. She is enamored of history, owls, and gardens (but not the actual act of gardening). She is also a regular contributor to History Imagined, a blog at the intersection of history and fiction, and (on a much lighter note) The Teatime Tattler, a blog in the shape of a fictional nineteenth century gossip rag.

Her current series, Children of Empire, set in the late Georgian/early Victorian period, focuses on three cousins, driven apart by lies and deceit, who must find their way back from the distant reaches of the empire.

Click here to find out more here.

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Fool Me Once: Fraud in history

The South Sea Company was founded to raise money to fund the national debt, and granted a monopoly to trade with South America, at that time in the hands of Spain. Trade was never likely to take place, but that didn’t prevent stock from rising greatly in value. A few people made fortunes from insider trading, using their knowledge to purchase debt in advance. A considerable number were ruined.

Fraud was not invented with the Internet. Right through history, people have come up with scams and schemes to extract money from unsuspecting people in return for pipe dreams that evaporated when the confidence trickster slipped away into the night. Or overreached and was caught, since throughout history the first to be meshed in a con artists rhetoric is often the fraudster himself.

We chance to have evidence of fraud from ancient Mesopotamia: a doctored cruciform monument from four thousand years ago, that attempted to convince the king that the temple revenues were higher than they were. Undoubtedly, the scribe was not the first of human kind to apply what has been kindly called ‘creative accounting’. Fraud is as old as civilization.

I’ve been reading about historic cases of fraud as background to a couple of stories.

The secret Buried Treasure scam

Don’t tell anyone, but I can let you in on a pirate treasure.

Some of the biggest schemes in history have whole books written about them. The Spanish Prisoner letters of the late eighteenth century preceded Nigerian scams by two hundred years, but used the same basic psychology.

In essence, the story told was some version of the following. A wealthy person of high estate (possibly related to the ‘mark’, the person being targeted as victim) is falsely imprisoned in Spain, under another identity. He knows the whereabouts of buried treasure, which he can use to ransom himself free, but trusts no one but the mark to retrieve the treasure. If the mark comes to Spain with sufficient money for travel, the prisoner will hand over the information needed to find the treasure, and will share the proceeds fifty/fifty.

If it looks too good, it almost certainly is

The buried treasure idea is a flexible variant of the get-rich-quick scheme category of fraud, but the past is also littered with countless investment propositions that looked too good to be true, and were. Some fraudsters offered incredible profits from non-existent or failing development schemes, diamond mines, or ship cargoes. Others, more cautious, promised profits just above the market rate, funding returns to early investors with money from later investors.

Some schemes, such as the eighteenth century’s South Sea Bubble, reaped millions, and changed governments and economies. Others affected only a few people, but ruined lives, all the same.

And if you like my canal, I have a bridge I can sell you

In one case in Old Bailey online, the scheme may have begun honestly enough. The solicitor at the heart of it was investigating whether to reopen a canal. As came out at the trial, he very quickly had a report from an engineer to say that the cost would outweigh the return. That didn’t prevent him from convincing his client, a local widowed bootmaker, into investing her life savings: two thousand pounds (around two hundred thousand in today’s dollars) for a promised return of up to ten thousand. The woman didn’t have all the money, so gave a quarter up front and the rest in small amounts, given to the fraudster.

The fraud came to light when the widow was presented with a claim for five thousand pounds from someone who held a paper purportedly signed by her.

Fool’s gold

One hundred and fifty years on, the site of the Great Diamond Hoax of Wyoming doesn’t look like much.

Another variant is ‘salting the mine’. Want to get rid of an old defunct tin mine in Cornwall? Place some rich tin ore in an appropriate place and let your mark discover it. It been working since at least Roman times.

These were all versions of the get-rich-quick scam. Read on over the next few weeks for Persuasion tricks,  Extortion, and Gold-brick scams.

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First impressions on WIP Wednesday

I’m just finishing the short story to go out with my next newsletter, so I thought I’d choose something from that for my WIP Wednesday.

Give me an excerpt that tells me what one of your characters thought about another the first time they met.

My story is called A Gentleman Honours His Debts, and starts when the Earl of Bridgethorne takes passage on the ship where his bride has been hiding since she ran away a week after their marriage. This excerpt is a bit of backstory.

Leticia Fanshaw was one of three wallflowers Dickon danced with that first evening at the Bellowes house party. He’d almost passed her by; her discomfort when they were introduced rousing his pity but dousing any potential interest. This year, unlike the previous five, he had a stronger motive than the pleasures of the dance for his exercises on the dance floor. This year, he was in the market for a bride.

Not that he intended for any of Society’s matchmakers to know that, and fortunately his reputation helped keep his new motives secret. All the haut ton knew the Earl of Bridgethorne enjoyed dancing, and his skill made even the most awkward of partners look graceful. And he was kind, dancing with at least three of four of the least popular maidens at every event, as well as matrons, widows, and the more popular debutantes. Never more than one dance with each partner at any one event, a restriction that limited speculation about his marital intentions, and made courtship slightly harder now those intentions had changed.

Still, five years of conversation while standing out in line dances had given Dickon some definite views about the kind of bride he wanted. Not too proud, or too absorbed in her own beauty, which disqualified most of those to whom his fellows were drawn. Not foolish or inane or passionately fixated on an interest he did not share. He would have to converse with his wife, at least occasionally. Indeed, he hoped that, if he chose well, they might become friends. And, while he did not require physical perfection, he would, of course, have to be sufficiently attracted to the lady to do his duty by his title and estate, since an heir was the whole purpose of the exercise.

Five years of conversation had convinced him that the gem he sought was probably hidden among the wallflowers. Not an antidote, or a shy nervous creature afraid of men. But a woman whose intelligence and character had frightened off the fools who fell in love with the transitory sparkle of Society’s annual stars.

So when Miss Fanshaw blushed, stammered, and dropped her fan, he almost made his bow and his excuses, touching his hostess on her arm in the prearranged signal to present him to the next group. But was that fear in the look the young lady shot sideways to the aunt and uncle who were sponsoring her? And surely he imagined the menace in her uncle’s responding glare?

“If you would excuse us, Lord Bridgethorne and I…”

Dickon ruthlessly interrupted Lady Bellowes. How she would roast him later! “May I have the honour of a dance, Miss Fanshaw.”

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Tea in the schoolroom

Eleanor paused in the doorway of the schoolroom, where her three foster daughters were drawing under the supervision of their governess. The subject was a collection of objects: a flower in a rounded glazed bowl, a trinket box open to display a set of coral beads that trailed over the edge onto the polished surface of the table, a delicate statuette of a gun dog, with proudly pointing muzzle.

A difficult composition for such young girls, though little Frances was talented, and the older two girls competent enough. At thirteen, Frances had inhabited the Haverford nursery floor for eleven years, and by the time of her debut, in three or four years, the scandal of her existence was likely to be minimal. Especially since she, least of the three, resembled their shared father.

Matilda would face the ton first. At sixteen, she was as much a beauty as her mother had been, with the dark hair and stunning figure that had made her mother a reigning beauty of the ton, despite a less than stellar birth and lack of fashion. The combination was lethal, for the girl had died in childbirth, and the grieving furious grandmother brought the baby to Haverford House, to the man the dying mother named as father. An identification the grandmother had no hesitation is spreading.

It was just chance that Haverford was away on , and that Eleanor had just been arriving home. Or an intercession of the divine. Haverford would have turned his full ducal rage on a scion of the local gentry, and denied everything. But Eleanor took the baby in her arms and fell in love.

She smiled as she watched the three heads bent in concentration. It had taken His Grace nine months to realise that his nurseries were once again occupied, and by then Jessica, some six months younger and the daughter of an opera dancer, had joined her half-sister. No-one could doubt her parentage. She and Lord Jonathan, Eleanor’s second son, were as alike as male and female could be.

Haverford, of course, denied that he’d sired them, and ignored them completely. His solution to the unfortunate results of his careless whoring was to blame the female, a bag of coins (carefully measured to their social position) the only assistance they could expect.

Thank goodness she had been strong enough to hold out for the right to keep the children. As long as he never saw them, was not expected to acknowledge them in any way, and provided nothing extra for their support, he chose to treat her fostering as an eccentric hobby.

Eleanor loved the three girls with all her heart, loved them as fiercely as she loved the two sons she had borne her husband. And she could not regret bringing them into her home, selfish of her though it was. She had learned better, especially after the disastrous end to David Wakefield’s time under the Haverford roofs. For years now, she had been quietly settling her husband’s by-blows in less scrutinised households, carefully supervised to ensure they had the love and care she wanted for those who shared blood with her sons.

As for the three sisters, their origins and the prominence of the family meant they would face many barriers in a quest for a fulfilling life. If only they did not so strongly bear the Grenford stamp! Still, with her support and that of her sons, all would be well. She hoped. She prayed.

Time to announce her presence. “Miss Waterson, is this a good time for an interruption? I have come to take tea with the young ladies.”

This is a little bit of backstory to my historical world. The sisters are first mentioned in Revealed in Mist, and will appear in later novels. In Never Kiss a Toad, the early Victorian novel that I’m writing with Mariana Gabrielle (being published episode by episode on Wattpad) I’ve just been working on a chapter that mentions Frances’s wedding, and another that touches on the tragedy of Jessica’s death. I don’t know Matilda’s story, yet.

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Ruminations on world-building, after an orgy of reading

As I may have mentioned, I’ve been a bit slowed recently by a shoulder injury and a repeating winter cold. The shoulder is finally responding to treatment, but being limited in the number of hours I can type has been a real nuisance. The demands of the day job have to take priority so the bills get paid, with the novellas for anthologies coming next. So I’m way behind on The Realm of Silence, and will need to really buckle down if release is not to be postponed until next year.

I’ve been reading instead of writing

On the other hand, being laid up has allowed me to voraciously reread entire series of novels by the authors who sucked me into the historical romance genre. Georgette Heyer, of course. Elizabeth Hoyt. Eloisa James. Grace Burrowes. Mary Jo Putney. Carla Kelly. Stephanie Laurens. Mary Balogh. Anne Gracie. Anna Campbell. (Others, too. That’s just off the top of my head.)

I’ve been rereading an entire series at a gulp, then another by quite a different author, just as I did five years ago when my eldest daughter loaned me the book Simply Perfect and I fell in love with the genre. (Though some of the series I’ve read in the past three months weren’t written at that time.)

This time, though, was different. This time, I was reading from the perspective of my own years of world and character building in historical romance writing.

And I know what I love!

All the authors I love provide the same things, to a greater or lesser extent. Engaging plots where I care about what happens. Well-rounded characters who seem like real people for the times, and who have something about them that makes me wish them success. Realistic and detailed background features that are true (as far as I can tell) to the history of the time and place.

Reading them the way I have, a whole series in sequence, is leading me to reexamine my own writing to see how well I’m performing in those areas.

I like my plots to surprise me

Plots? I can get a bit carried away, I think. I love a detailed and complex plot with lots of Byzantine twists and turns, with copious clues that are easy to miss and only obvious as the story draws to a close and all the bits are tied together with a bow. Expect me to keep doing this. Even in my short stories, where plots are simple, I try not to do the obvious.

I reckon good people come in lots of flavours

Characters? What I try to do is make each hero and each heroine into different people. It works the other way. Stephanie Laurens writes a brilliant Norman aristocrat: tall, stern, protective, outwardly impervious but inwardly vulnerable to the one woman on whom he sets his autocratic heart. We meet him in story after story, and have all the fun of watching her bold, unconventional, challenging heroine bring him to his knees.

Mary Jo Putney, on the other hand, peoples her books with individuals of many different stamps. Decent men and women, but formed by different influences (both nature and nurture). In the Fallen Angel series, she has one of these heroes describe himself and his friends.

“What are your friends like?” He smiled a little. “Imagine a great long wall blocking the path as far as one can see in both directions. If Nicholas came to it, he would shrug and decide he didn’t really need to go that way. Rafe would locate whoever was in charge of the wall and talk his way past it, and Lucien would find some stealthy way to go under or around without being seen.” “What about you?” His smile turned rueful. “Like a mad spring ram, I would bash my head into the wall until it fell down.”

Exactly. Four very different men, and she gave each of them a heroine alike in loyalty and love, and unlike in everything else.

So for me, that means more of the same. Each hero, each heroine, each villain, as unique as I can make them. I also want to watch that my secondary characters don’t fall into the Dickens mould. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘enter, one cheerful landlady’ or ‘manservant for comic relief’, but I’ve got into the habit of knowing a little bit about everyone who crowds into my books, and even if surface characteristics are all I have time for on the page, something of their personality and history needs to sit beneath it.

And I need to like them in order to fully enjoy the book

And even if my readers don’t always like them and their behaviour, I need to. Many people find Aldridge unsympathetic, particularly in A Baron for Becky. And so they should. He behaved badly there and again, mostly, in Revealed in Mist (though not nearly as badly as Richport will in coming novels). Still, I know what motivates them and I hope you will forgive them by the time they reach their happily ever after.

I also have a couple of thoroughly unlikeable females to redeem. So watch this space.

Research is my catnip

Then there’s background: that weird amalgam of language usage and facts judiciously chosen to create a realistic environment for a story that could have happened only there, only then. I have read and enjoyed stories set against cardboard cutouts of historical backgrounds, when I’ve been in the mood. But they don’t sustain me. I’ve read stories with modern-thinking people in historical novels, and they irritate me exceedingly, unless they are time travel books and the people really are modern, or unless the writer gives a reason why this character is so out of step with their entire cultural milieu.

So research continues to be essential, and I agonise over detail. That doesn’t mean it is always correct—I make mistakes, usually something that seems so obviously true that I don’t check it. I’m always grateful for corrections. Indeed, reading to know what not to write is almost more important than reading for details that appear in the story. Not all research appears in the book, which is why I’ve got into the habit of posting research posts, so I can fool myself I did all that extraneous reading for a purpose.

Now your turn

So that’s what I’m trying to do. How well I emulate the writers I admire, and how much my own unique voice provides you with a different product, is for you to decide.

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A bit of horse sense

In today’s Footnotes on Friday, I’m recycling a post I wrote for Regina Jeffers. If you didn’t catch it first time round, please enjoy.

My qualifications for writing about horses are ten years as a Riding for the Disabled mum, five as a Pony Club mum, and seven as the reluctant care-taker of one or more obstreporous ponies.

Yet I write Regencies, and in Regency times, gentlemen were as obsessed with their horses as today’s men are with their cars or motorbikes. In fact, in two of my books, including the latest release, the hero breeds horses for sale.

Which meant I had a lot to learn. I knew the smell of wet pony, and the tricks it can get up to when it doesn’t want the bridle and saddle. That was a start. Many blog posts, library books, video clips, websites, and questions to friends later, I still think that one end bites and the other kicks. But I’m slightly more confident about sending my horse-mad heroes out into the wide world.

In The Bluestocking and the Barbarian, Lord Sutton breeds Turkmen horses he and his family have brought from their home in the Kopet Dag mountains. Lord Sutton’s Turkmens, a predecessor of today’s Ahkal Teke, arrived in England well after the heyday of what they then called the orientals, or hot bloods. Finer boned, thinner skinned, faster, and more spirited than the European horses (known as cold bloods), the imports from Turkey, Persia, and middle Asia fascinated the English of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries.

From the two lines came the warm bloods, direct ancestors of today’s thoroughbreds. Indeed, the thoroughbred stud book was founded in the late eighteenth century (for horses intended for racing) and records all English Thoroughbred breeding even today. A thoroughbred was a horse whose birth and lineage was recorded in the book. Other horses with the same breeding not intended for racing were known simply as ‘bloods’.

If you wanted to sell, or to buy, a horse, you might go to a local horse fair. Or, if you lived in London, you’d drop down to Tattersall’s on Hyde Park Corner. It had been founded in 1766 by a former groom of the Duke of Kingston, and held auctions every Monday and on Thursdays during the Season. Tatersall’s charged a small commission on each sale, but also charged both buyers and sellers for stabling.

Tattersalls was an auction ground, a meeting place for gentlemen, the home of the Jockey club, and the place gentlemen recorded bets on racing and other bets

You could buy horses, carriages, hounds, harnesses — whatever a gentleman (or his lady, but ladies did NOT go to Tattersall’s) needed. And in Regency times, gentlemen visited on other days to place a bet on an upcoming race, or just to meet and chat. The Jockey Club met there, and moved with it to a later London location and then to Newmarket. Tattersall’s is still a leading bloodstock auctioneer, and still in Newmarket.

My hero in A Raging Madness had been a cavalry officer. Britain had no formal studs for breeding war horses. Instead, they bought their horses from civilian breeders. This meant the British cavalry rode horses bred to be hunters, race horses, and carriage horses—usually thoroughbreds or thoroughbred crosses. Each colonel bought the horses for his own regiment. In 1795, the regulations established a budget of thirty pounds for a light mount and forty for a heavy mount. This budget didn’t change for the rest of the war with France, despite wartime shortages.

Here Alex is telling his brother his plan:

“Father says you are planning to breed horses. For the army, Alex? Racing? What’s your plan?”

“Carriage and riding horses, we thought. I know more about training war horses, of course, but to breed them to be torn apart for the sins of men? I don’t have the heart for it. And there’s always a market for a good horse.”

Alex buys his first stallion from another cavalry office, Gil Rutledge, who is hero of The Realm of Silence, my current novel-in-progress (the third novel in

series.

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More about horses

Geri Walton tells us about work horses, especially the heavy breeds. https://www.geriwalton.com/work-horses-in-the-regency-era/

Regency Redingote explains the origins of the term ‘blood horse’, and the pedigree of the General Stud Book. https://regencyredingote.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/the-english-blood-horse/

Regency Writing has a useful article on housing horses, and the work of a stable. http://regencywriter-hking.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century-horse.html

Shannon Donnelly’s Fresh Ink explains the many different uses of the horse in Regency England. https://shannondonnelly.com/2011/07/28/the-regency-horse-world/ This article also describes common carriage types, side saddles and riding habits.