Some random questions on the stories

A kindly reader has asked a few questions.  I paraphrase the questions and answer them below, in case anyone is interested.

Lucille seems tragic, but with a touch of inhumanity. 

The long and short of it is, Lucille is not a nice person. 

Taking a toddler to France in dangerous political times is iffy at best, so we start with that. Then Lucille's loss of her husband and her imprisonment, rape, and torture made her very hard. Cold. Fanatical almost.
Annique paid the price.

Annique's eidetic memory was recognized as soon as she could talk. It's the key to why she was in France at all. If she hadn't been uniquely useful, her mother would have sent her back to England when Annique's father died.

Frankly, Lucille exploited Annique and spared her very little. Just as Lucille spared herself nothing.

Was Lucille a villain who manipulated and used her daughter and later Justine in a despicable way

or a heroine who stepped up when England's existence was at stake?

Was she a woman who sacrificed everything she cared about for England's sake?

Or a selfish ideologue?

Or, like, all of the above?
 

I don't explain and we never go into her head. I try to show her as a woman with regrets. I'm hoping the reader will find her believable as a person and wonder about her and feel sorry for her. 

She had just a touch of inhumanity

On the exculpatory side:

Lucille, as a high-level officer of the Secret Police, curbed some of the evil things going on. Justine's rescue from the child brothel and sending Justine to help the last of the Caches are two examples of Lucille's work.

Did she really keep a brothel?

 Well ... yes.

I have trouble writing about historical whoredom. It needs somebody wiser than me.

Women had few career choices in this era. Some women, for one reason or another, became whores. A rich, well-run brothel like the one Lucille ran was an island of safety in a city visited by war, revolution, riot, and the occasional bout of starvation. The woman working there were grateful to be in the place. They had different expectations than run in the world of 1867 or 2018.

So I'm trying to deal with difficult historical realities in the context in which contemporaries would have judged them. Also trying not to be too realistic.

She raised Annique to be a spy, naively committed to France, while using her for the opposite cause. She set Annique up for the heartbreak and disillusionment in TSL,

Lucille wouldn't have felt it was morally dreadful to be a French patriot. Lucille spent her whole life among French patriots and, I think, loved some of them. Arguably, France was on the right philosophical side in that war.

Lucille chose loyalty to the British. She left Annique free to choose which side she'd be on. 

Annique feels betrayed when she sees all her letters and reports have found their way to the British. A tough day to be Annique.

What happens to Grey and Annique?

I don't say what happens to Grey and Annique after the end of TSL, since I want to be free to return to the timeline and write a story there if I ever decide to which I probably won't though.

I'm sure they had a true HEA, which means they both found uses for all their talents. Maybe out in India. Or maybe they went under deep cover in the south of France and ran a safehouse. I know they did exciting things.

Why does Shandor have a Hungarian name? At least, the spelling isn't Hungarian but the sound of it is.

It's a Kaldarashi name. A Rom name.

At the end of Rogue Spy, what was Galba's final reaction to Pax's insubordination?

All along, Doyle and Grey kept Galba in the loop about what was going forward. Galba, in the manner of senior management since the dawn of time, turned a blind eye to what he couldn't prevent . . . and what was ultimately serving his purposes.

Galba would have preferred that Pax not be the one to kill his own father, (Who among us wishes to promote patricide?) but he approves of the overall outcome.

After the close of the book Galba gives Pax a legendary and wide-ranging chewing out. Then Grey, Doyle, and Galba take turns interfering with wedding preparations to brief Pax on what they expect from him when he heads back to Italy.

Who replaced Grey when he retired?

Some "guy I didn't need to name or worry about what happened to him" took over. Then another guy, likewise. Then Adrian.

When Adrian stepped into Galba's shoes as Head of Service, the position of Head of the British Section was taken by -- you guessed it --  another "guy I don't need to name or worry about."

All else being equal I'd rather not name or describe characters who aren't necessary to the action because I always have more than enough characters anyhow.

How did Justine learn about Lucille's death and how was she affected by it? I expected to see this come up in The Black Hawk when the story moved parallel of the events in Spymaster's Lady and Vauban's death was mentioned.

[SPOILER]

What we're looking at here is the section of Black Hawk that begins with Hawker coming to Justine's window carrying a letter and ends when Justine shoots Hawker.

[END SPOILER]

In this time frame Vauban had been dead about a week. Lucille, who has been in Italy for months, has been dead a few weeks. 

The action of TSL begins after the action of this section ends.

Before this Black Hawk section opens .... Lucille dies. Annique leaves immediately for Paris. Soulier's resident spy sends word of Lucille's death to Soulier in London. LeBlanc's assassin, having killed Lucille, spends a lot of time attempting to find Annique and finish the job. He then wastes more time trying to track her north. Eventually the assassin rides for Paris and reports to LeBlanc.

During the TBH section, only LeBlanc, Soulier, a couple messengers, folks in Italy, and Annique know about Lucille's death. Justine meets none of these people except LeBlanc and he's not about to reveal he knows Lucille is dead because he has no legitimate way to have this news.

After the BH section, Paris Secret Police get the info.

So Justine doesn't learn about Lucille's death "on stage," as it were, and we don't see her reaction.

Reading Order

Here's the publication order of the six books of the Spymaster Fictive Universe. It's a perfectly fine order to read them in, IMO. 

I mean, that's the order in which I learned about the characters.

 

So. Publication order is:
 

Spymaster’s Lady  

My Lord and Spymaster
Forbidden Rose
Black Hawk
Rogue Spy
Beauty Like the Night 

 

The chronological order of events is:

Forbidden Rose  (1794)
Spymaster’s Lady (1802)
Rogue Spy (1802)
My Lord and Spymaster (1811)
Black Hawk (It covers several time periods between 1794 and 1818)
Beauty Like the Night (1819)

 And that's also a good order to read them in. So you win either way.

And there are some minor works in the Spymaster's Fictive Universe:

Gideon and the Den of Thieves (novella) (1793)
Not currently available.

Intrigue and Mistletoe in the anthology Mischief and Mistletoe (1815 and a bit)

My True Love Hath My Heart in the anthology The Last Chance Christmas Christmas Ball.

Her Ladyship's Companion (30-year-old Regency) (1818)

A careful, kind and intelligent reader asked me why, in Black Hawk, I used the word 'antiseptic' long before the germ theory and why Justine dissolved her antiseptic in liquid and packed it in bottles.  Why not just send the powder along on these expeditions.

(Jo clears her throat) and says 'THANK YOU' for caring enough to wonder about this.

And I haz  reasons (excuses):

As to the word 'antiseptic'. Millennia ago, long before they understood the mechanism by which it worked, folks knew some stuff discouraged infection. By mid-C18 folks had a word for that and it's the same one we use today. Antiseptic. The OED gives us a 1751 "Myrrh in a watery menstruum was 12 times more antiseptic than salt water."

The writer's problem is that 'antiseptic' sounds very modern.

So I sat for a while pondering whether I should use it. This is classic historical writer dilemma and one of the things that drives sensitive souls to drink -- coffee if not brandy, anyway. 'Historical Word Problem' hits me three, four times a book.
But antiseptic is a couple generations prior to date-of-story, so I went ahead and laid it down.

I also considered the vexed question of which medications would be carried as mix-it-yourself powders and which would be aqueous solutions or tincture-of-this-and-that. It seemed to me the choice depended on the exactness with which the solution must be prepared and how quickly the solution would be needed when called for.

I posited that Justine's mixture takes a good long while to go into solution -- thus the boiling water -- and is likely to be needed PDQ, if needed at all. Bottled at the source, it can be used immediately. Prepared In the field, it would need hot water and a long while to dissolve.  This is the same reason a modern first aid kit intended for use in the outback would have its antiseptic in liquid, ready to use, form. 
Justine includes one bottle for immediate use and also the powder for mixing a further supply.

I have her dissolve in water rather than alcohol because this is a water-soluble powder. Oddly, I find no indication folks thought of alcohol as antiseptic in 1800. It may just be I haven't researched it enough.

Carrying liquids could feel a little 'off' to the reader for several reasons. I think it's because liquid is heavy. Some part of our mind is reluctance to see clunky bottles of liquid cumbering up a medical kit that has to be carried through the jungles of Borneo or wherever.


The medical cases of the era were heavy.

Timeline confusions (SPOILERS)

WARNING:  HERE BE SPOILERS


I've had a couple people come away from the timeline of the books a little confused.  In fact, the sound of heads banging on desks is about deafening.

So let me provide a general comment on the timeline as a Guide for the Perplexed.  And then I'll probably do it again in a week or so, but with more specificity than I can scrape together right now. And I'll only do that if I'm not buried in work of some kind or another.


We have three confusing time periods. Like ... sometimes I have two books happening at once.

1794 -- And we are in Forbidden Rose. Hawker, Pax and Justine are all young. Hawker is 12 or 13. Justine, 13. Pax, about 16.

Galba is Head of the Service. Grey has not yet joined the Service. Annique is living with the gypsies at this point. Doyle is a senior Independent Agent. Hawker is merely a raw possible recruit, on probation.

In 1794, Hawker walks onto the stage in Forbidden Rose leading a pair of tough little donkeys. About a third of the way into Forbidden Rose Hawker will meet Pax when they change duty at the watching post on Maggie's house. A bit later Justine and Hawker meet for the first time on the street outside Doyle's prison.

Black Hawk also visits 1794. This is in the first fallback section from the frame story.  We open that segment with Justine and Hawk getting together in Paris in front of the now-inactive guillotine.  This is the day after Doyle is freed from prison in Forbidden Rose.  In this segment of Black Hawk, Pax, Hawker, and Justine go to the Coach House and rescue the last Caches-in-training. 

Forbidden Rose and the 1794 section of Black Hawk then come together and end with the same scene. That's the one where Justine gives Severine into Maggie's keeping.

1802 -- This is where things gets complicated, because now we got three books involved.

In 1802 Justine and Hawker are 19 or 20. Pax is 24 or so.

Galba is Head of Service. Grey is Head of the British Section. Hawker is a young Independent Agent.

We have an 1802 segment of Black Hawk full of our three young spies saving Napoleon from an assassin. At the end of that 1802 section of Black Hawk, we see Justine shoot Hawker. This is on page 228.


The action of Spymaster's Lady opens five or six days after that shooting scene. Offstage, Grey and Hawker got picked up when Hawker was getting himself out of the Louvre. There is Hawker in prison, dying from Justine's bullet.  Annique gets thrown into the cell and they're off!!  Hawker, Grey, Annique and Doyle run headlong across France.

Rogue Spy starts when we're in the middle of the Spymaster's Lady timeline.  The two stories go forward in parallel. Action of one story happens while stuff is going on in the other.

While Pax in that tavern working up the courage to go

to Meeks Street, Grey and Annique are walking across Devon to London.

When Hawker visits Daisy's house in Rogue Spy it's been maybe three weeks since he was shot. He's only now come to terms with his final breakup with Justine. Meanwhile, across town, in Spymaster's Lady, Grey is dealing with Annique as a prisoner at Meeks Street.

Rogue Spy wraps up with the death of the Merchant but Spymaster's Lady continues. So later events like  Meeks Street headquarters getting shot up and Annique escaping to Soulier's house take place after Cami and Pax have already been married and sailed for France.

1818:  1818 is the frame story of Black Hawk. It's 16 years since Justine shot Hawker. Sixteen years since Cami and Pax, Grey and Annique married.

Hawker is Head of Service. Galba has retired. We haven't visited their timelines, but we can assume Cami and Pax, Grey and Annique have had many adventures in the intervening years, done important work, and have settled into a happy life. Maybe they have kids even.
And in 1818, Hawker and Justine marry.

So that's the way all these events spread out.
And that's just as clear as mud, isn't it?

Go ahead. Ask me something. I'll try to clarify.

Technical Topic -- Using the City

A wonderful reader wrote, asking "What sorts of resources do you use to make your cities--London and Paris, in particular--so convincing?  . . .   find your London to be almost a character in and of itself."




As to making the city part of the story . . .  I think we gotta use scenery in a dramatic sense.

When two characters are talking, we layer in lots of stuff between their dialog and internal thoughts to make 'time' pass at the correct rate.  Scenery is one of the things used as a pacing device.

When Justine is walking down the steps in the Coach House and she's really scared I put in description of what's on the walls and what the downstairs looks like so the reader can get a gut feeling of being scared along with her.  That emotional response wouldn't have time to form if I took fifty words to move her from the upstairs to outside the door where she listens to the Tuteurs. 

Likewise, when Jess and Sebastian have left Lazarus and sit looking out over the Thames, the description of the Thames spaces out realization and revelation.  Lets it  unroll slowly. 
Likewise the underground journey in Forbidden Rose is meant to make clear that the rescue attempt is a long, perilous, uncertain, process. If I just said -- "and then they spent a couple hours bumping around in the semi dark till they found ... "  -- it wouldn't let the reader absorb the emotion.

Scenery puts the characters in passing time.

 attrib esprit du sel

Scenery is also symbolic.  It has meaning.

In Forbidden Rose, that passage through the darkness is Orpheus rescuing Eurydice.  Justine going down the stairs to face a great fear is every hero picking up his sword and going forward to meet the dragon. Sebastian and Jess sit face to face and talk, while the River Thames, which is their past, (Jess' mother used to take her there; Sebastian used to scavenge the banks,) flows beside them and away, carrying their past while they reveal it to one another.

The writer needs images.  Contemporary paintings and drawings are great for this. 

But it's not just about having the images in the writer head.

I think it is a mistake to just  'travelogue' a setting.    Sure enough, we need to describe the city.  Describe it vividly.  Tell everybody what the city looks like and what the weather is and colorfuldetailslikethatthere. 

But that's not enough.  The writer has to use the setting to accomplish more than "Isn't this exotic?"  We have to make the setting tell us about the characters.  We match setting to the characters' feelings and purpose. We make setting symbolic.

We supercharge the visuals.  We make them full of feel.

One of Those 'Friends Without Benefits' Situations

A kindly reader asks:

"I was a little questioning about the interactions between Annique and Adrian. Some other reader's reviews suggested that he was a little bit in love with Annique, now obviously this was after he had met Justine so I was wondering if  you could elaborate  on this ..."


You roll your characters up in the same blanket in a ruined monastery and folks wonder if they're maybe a little bit more than 'good friends'.
But, really, I was just trying for friendship between those two, which is probably naïveté on my part.  Maybe there is a certain unlikeliness that one would cuddle up next to Hawker and feel only an innocent appreciation of the warmth.

Would they just be good friends, those two?

Well ... why friends at all?

Once Adrian and Annique meet, a sense of camaraderie between these two is almost inevitable.
They're experts in the same profession; they speak the same 'language' as it were; they depend on one another; they're running from the same enemy. 
And Adrian has always had an admirable gift of true friendship with women.

At the beginning of Spymaster's Lady, Annique feels protective toward Adrian and amused by him.  She likes him.  She respects him for the spy he is and the greater spy he will become.  But it's not romantic love.  (I maintain.)  Annique is sexually attracted to the older, harder, more powerful Grey instead of the wild, brave, brilliant boy her own age.      

But why not both?  Why not les sexy overtones between Adrian and Annique?
What are they, deficient in vitamins?

Well ... there's this.  Adrian quite deliberately marks out a platonic relationship between himself and Annique.  He teases, but makes no real sexual overtures.  Once it's clear Grey is attracted to her, Adrian doesn't let himself even think of her in a sexual way.  That's one of the virtues he brings from that criminal gang background of his youth.  A friend's woman is utterly taboo. 

And then, there's Justine. 
The influence of Justine defines the Adrian-Annique friendship.  She's only glancingly mentioned in Spymaster's Lady, and not by name, but she's at the forefront of Adrian's mind throughout the book.  We don't see this because we don't go into his thoughts, the book not being about Adrian, after all.  (We go into his POV once.  I think it's once.) 

The action of Spymaster's Lady takes up a few days after Justine shot Adrian.  (We see it happen in Black Hawk.)  When, in TSL, our feverish Hawker jokes about the wound, he's remembering that Justine led a pack of soldiers after him.  That she tried to kill him.  That's what he's not saying to Grey and Doyle when he's being lightheartedly heroic.
Justine's betrayal is the subtext of Adrian's behavior through much of Spymaster's Lady.

(I love to use the word 'subtext' and don't really care if I'm using it right.  Life improves tremendously when we learn not to care about using the word 'subtext' incorrectly.)

Anyhow, TSL opens with Adrian's betrayal and loss. That bullet hole defines Adrian's reaction to Annique.  He's been so battered by the end of his passionate, deadly, complex relationship with Justine that a new sexual attraction would only be painful.  The protective friendship with Annique is exactly the healing he needs.  Maybe the emotional tie with Annique is stronger because he thinks he's lost Justine forever. 

So anyhow -- responding to that question --  that is how I see the relationship between these two.  But every book is a partnership between the author and the reader.  If readers see the Adrian/Annique relationship differently and the books don't directly contradict . . .
Go for it.
Take the story where you want it to go.

Or, anyhow, go for it till I write something elsewise.

Me, talking about books and the writing life

I'm HERE, at WMRA radio, talking about writing books and my life and my philosophy of storytelling and probably a few other things thrown in.

At the top of this interview I give an extemporaneous reading of an excerpt from The Black Hawk just to let everybody know why I do not generally attempt to give public readings that involve characters with British and French accents.  

Class and the Spymaster Fictive Universe

I was writing to excellent reader Ann today, talking about the blog post I did on how we write about Regency-era slums and got to thinking about how I deal with 'class' in the books.

Do I consciously write about social class in these books?
Yep.  I figger we all reveal our attitudes and beliefs unconsciously as we write ... so I might as well be aware I'm doing this and use it.



Take Lazarus.
Lazarus is motivated by resentment of the class that ruined his servant-girl mother and drove her into prostitution.  This is the class to which his father belongs.  The class Lazarus would enjoy if he'd been legitimate. 

Lazarus runs an empire of violence and theft, in part, because he figures his minions are entitled to take what they want.  The rich do.  Why shouldn't the poor?  He's self-educated and brilliant.  He can't help but see the inequity in the laws of England.  He ends up with great sympathy for the French Republican cause.

In his private life, his special ire is reserved for women of the privileged class who commit crimes that would land a servant girl in jail or send her to the gallows.  Again, class motivates his actions.
 

Adrian's life journey is shaped by a desire to become 'a gentleman'.  He walks, like Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, on sharp knives every step of the way.  He finds himself, like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, unable to go back to what he was and yet unable to be comfortable with what he becomes. 

He measures his own success by his ability to pass as a member of the upper class. And yet, Adrian only passes for a gentleman; he never becomes one.  He watches, judges, and shrewdly assesses the rich and powerful . . . as an outsider.  He can never buy into their narrower view of the world.  He uses privilege, but doesn't believe in it.

Adrian originally admired the French Revolution, liking the leveling effect.  Then ... an outtake from Forbidden Rose has him watching a tumbril take a family with teenage girls to the guillotine.  We don't see the scene onstage, unfortunately, but that was a turning point of his life.  It outraged him.  He would never again be tempted by revolutionary violence.  Years later, he rejects Napoleon as an ambitious opportunist.  By that time, by 1799, Adrian is wholly committed to the British Service. 

But he never rejects France's social reforms.  Philosophically, Adrian is all for dismantling aristocratic privilege.  He doesn't act on this because social equality is never offered to him as a viable choice in the 1789 to 1818 timeframe. 
One reason Adrian gets along with Justine is they have no basic philosophical disagreement.


Doyle is more sympathetic to the idea of an aristocracy.

He plays at being a coachman or a laborer without assuming the interior life of one.  He's an aristocrat inside.  Born one.  Schooled and trained as one.

More than that, Doyle's a practical man rather than an idealist.  He believes a hierarchical society is inevitable, so he aims for a humane and workable system -- a fair, stable, well-run government with gradual change toward equality and social mobility.


The discussion Adrian and Doyle have at the beginning of Forbidden Rose is meant to show their different points of view.  (This is prior to Hawker's disillusionment with the bloody side of revolution in France.)

[Doyle and Adrian approach the orangerie at the chateau. It's savagely destroyed.]
 
    Hawker followed him, crunching glass into the gravel.  “The boys in that stinking little village waited years to do this.” 
   “Did they?”
    “They dreamed of it. They’d sit in those pig houses in the village with the shutters closed and the wind leaking in. They’d think about these fancy weeds up here, being coddled, all warm and happy behind glass. Down there,they were freezing in the dark. Up here, they were growing flowers.”
     “That’s fixed, then. No more flowers.”
     Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hawker stoop and pick up a rock, draw back and throw. Glass fell with a thin, silver discord. The heroic revolutionaries of Voisemont had missed one pane. Destruction was now complete.   

Justine is my most ideological character.  In 1818 she's going through a period of disillusion, as idealists will.  She's seen Napoleon fall.  She's seen Paris turn away from the Revolution and accept the Royalists back in power.  It'll be a few years before she gets her political fire back. 

Justine saw her degradation and loss not as a male/female issue -- not so much, 'men did this to me' --  as a class and power issue.  'The rich can get away with anything.' "In a just society these things would not happen.'  She responds to her hurt with a desire to right the wrongs of society.  She becomes a political person.

Justine's journey is one of rebuilding herself after absolute destruction.  Part of this is reclaiming her place as an aristocrat. Though she's despised aristocrats, ironically, it's a measure of her complete healing when she can say,

     “I will come to live with you in your great mansion and be a lady again. I will be a DeCabrillac, and face down the world if they make accusations. I will shake out your haughty mansion like an old rag and make it comfortable to live in.”

She becomes something she has fought against, because Adrian needs this from her.  It's her gift to him.


Justine, too, is someone who doesn't buy into the class paradigm.  She may claim her name and position, but I see her taking her aristocratic space cynically.  She's gotten subtle in the Police Secrète.   Give her a few more years and she'll be the Grande Dame of the Reform Movement, infiltrating the camp of the enemy, still fighting the good fight.

An Interview at USA Today

Not your average general

An Interview with Pamela Clare of the USA Today, Happy Ever After Blog in which I talk about writing Black Hawk, winning the RITA, and why Napoleon beat the pants off all the armies of Europe for a decade and knocked the moral, ethical, and philosophical foundation of the aristocracy into a cocked hat.

Pamela: What was it like, winning the RITA for best historical? 

Joanna: Awesome. Frightening. Surreal.

And surprising. I didn't expect to win, competing against that finalist list. Wonderful books. It's like the freestyle swim in the Olympics. What separates the winner from the second place? Two seconds maybe.

I'll admit that when I got the RITA statue home I took it out and put it on the table and just touched it a few times. I kept thinking, "They like the book. They like the book." And it made me so happy.

Here's the URL.

The RITA -- I Haz IT!

 I am so very very happy to say I have won the RWA RITA Award for Best Historical Romance of 2011. 

In my never-ending quest to reveal the nitty-gritty of publishing, I will tell you how it went.

At the Awards Dinner, I was sitting at the table marveling at the process of selecting winners, which seems to contain both the inevitability of tides and the randomness of wave formations.  I laid a fork to hold down what page of the booklet we were working through, watching the Finalists, of whom I know just a lot one way and another, and trying not to let panic come creeping with little cat feet into my mind.

I keep drinking cups of coffee and not eating the dessert because, y'know, cake and not good for you and the whole boring sugar metabolism thing and self-restraint on general principles ...

I had corner bent the page where my own particular fearsome trial lay.  I turn to that page because it is now time.  Lay the fork across it. 

They read through the Historical Fiction Finalists.  Because I am not panicking ... really truly not panicking ...  I am thinking, "If I lose, I'll allow myself to have one of those cakes.  Probably the chocolate one.  But the vanilla icing one looks pretty good.  Maybe it has lemon flavor inside.  Now, is that a third kind of cake there or is it just white cake and the light shining on it funny ..."

I'm thinking along like this while they read out the names of the Historical Finalists.  They say, "The Black Hawk" and I have not been following, so it is a doubletake moment while I work out that they've just named the winner and it's me.  "Go on!" says Pam-Hopkins-the-agent using an exclamation point.  "You won!" she says, using another.


They let you practice beforehand where you will walk and I am good at following simple, straightforward directions.  I proceed to follow directions and discover the podium is approximately where I expected to find it.  I am safe so far ...

Some nice lady hands me the RITA statue.  I will just take a moment aside to say that those puppies are heavy.

The light up there is so bright I couldn't read the note I wrote. 
What is is --  I'd written down my agent and editor names so I wouldn't forget them and stand there mouthing in small frantic gup gup gup like a goldfish.  But I got them right.  Then I said some extemporaneousity that seems to have made sense because no one later asked me why I was babbling idiocy.  Then I got down the exit ramp without tripping.

I thought it all went off rather well.

[ETA]:  The most excellent Jina Bacarr took a video of the speech wherein I seem to speak very slowly.  This is because I think kinda slowly, at the best of times, I'm afraid, and I was trying not to forget my agent's name and editor's name.  The speech is here.  One can see it in Safari and IE, but maybe not in Fireforx.  See also the acceptance speeches of Ann Aguirre here and Tessa Dare here.  [/ETA]

It is a measure of how little I expected to win the RITA that I had not previously at any point given one single tiny passing nuggle of a thought as to how I was going to get a statue home.  In the end, I used the conference bag and made it my carry-on.  The conference bag just precisely held the box they give you to carry the RITA in, which is a delightful innovation on somebody's part.


hawk attrib velosteve acceptance kristenkoster

I came across this list. It's from American Library Association at Booklist, Book Group Buzz.

I'm putting this list up -- well, it has me on it which is a non-inconsiderable part of why somebody sent me the URL -- because this is just a wonderful lineup of great 2011 Romance and Romance-related Books.   It includes a number of folks who do not compete for the RITA, so it draws from a wider pool than the RITA does.  

I do not know where I have seen a better round up of wonderful books.

Joanna Bourne The Black Hawk

Thea Harrison Dragon Bound

Loretta Chase Silk Is for Seduction

Eloisa James When Beauty Tamed the Beast

Nalini Singh Archangel’s Blade

Susan Elizabeth Phillips Call Me Irresistible

Julie Ann Long What I Did for the Duke

Pamela Clare Breaking Point

Darynda Jones First Grave on the Right

Nalini Singh Kiss of Snow

Meredith Duran A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal

J. R. Ward Lover Unleashed

J. D. Robb New York to Dallas

I'm a Finalist

I finalled in the RITA for 2011.  This is a great honor and just so generally cool I am rendered pretty much speechless.

Black Hawk is one of eight in the Historical Romance category.

To wit:


Always a Temptress by Eileen Dreyer (Grand Central Publishing Forever; Amy Pierpont, editor)

The Black Hawk by Joanna Bourne (Berkley Publishing Group; Wendy McCurdy, editor)

(That's me.  Look.  There I am.  Me.)

The Danger of Desire by Elizabeth Essex (Kensington Brava; Megan Records, editor)

Heartbreak Creek by Kaki Warner (Berkley Publishing Group Sensation; Wendy McCurdy, editor)

The Many Sins of Lord Cameron by Jennifer Ashley (Berkley Publishing Group Sensation; Kate Seaver, editor)


Scandalous Desires by Elizabeth Hoyt (Grand Central Publishing; Amy Pierpont, editor)

Silk Is for Seduction by Loretta Chase (Avon Books; May Chen, editor)

Unveiled by Courtney Milan (HQN Books; Margo Lipschultz, editor)


As you can see -- these are major players here.  I am taking my joy from the Finalist position in the gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may school of reality.