Covers

Covers . . . 
just because I felt like posting covers ...

ETA:  I have moved the covers below the fold so they will not slow the loading of the blog for slow machines.

Chinese

We're coming out in Chinese.
'Chinese, Chinese, Chinese,' she sings.
Lord and Spymaster and Spymaster's Lady will be out in Chinese

in a really bitty bitty print run.

If the books were beer, the Chinese run would be a microbrewery.
Largest reading population in the world.
A handful of books.

I am continually impressed by the oddness of reality.

Little bits of Good News

I know. I know.

I promised I would be done with the manuscript on August One
and said I'd show up again bright and happy and full of blogwords after that.


Ummm .... Not quite.
I'm still stuffing the story octopus into the plot coke bottle.


So, not so much keeping up with the blog is going on, though it is only a postponement of blogkeepery and a veritable torrent of creativity will be unleashed when I finally finish the manuscript.

Maybe.


Two nuggets of news:

My Lord and Spymaster is out in Russian. Here. I had forgotten this was going to happen.
The title seems to be, 'My Sweet Spy'.
.

See the cover? Isn't that pretty?

In this case it is Sebastian who cannot keep his shirt on.
(Metaphor-taken-literally-itis sweeps Romancelandia.)
And Jess is blonde.
Yes. Yes. Yes.




The other news is that the French rights to Spymaster's Lady have been sold. Woot woot. Yes!

That one I'll be able to read.

Oh Frabjous Day.

Jo
My Indian name is AshkoHaHa.

Getting a RITA

I posted this in the comments trail, and then decided I would make it a post of its own. Because getting prizes is part of writing, and anyone who decides to be a writer should be prepared for What Happens in the Writing Life.

The RITA ceremony has about 3000 people there in a grand ballroom,
all of them sitting in rows and rows of chairs and looking down at this little stage in the far distance.

(How do they get 3000 people to come do this without giving them food? Though they give them food afterwards, of course.
But still ... would YOU come to hear thirty people get up on stage one after another to somewhat incoherently thank their editors and agents and families and stare like deer caught in the headlights?)

Since nobody can see the stage
the helpful technicians at RWA have set up huuuuuuge TV screens. Those puppies must be 40 feet high.

They show every pore on the faces of the RITA winners, (or Golden Heart winners,) when they get up to speak.
This is reality TV.

AAAARRRRGGGGHHH.

I do not say I would rather face a firing squad, because, of course, I would not.

I think.

But anyhow ... there I was and I had just found out I was NOT going to get a RITA for Spymaster's Lady, having lost out to the excellent and wonderful Pam Rosenthal whose work impresses me so much it is almost not like losing at all to lose to her ...
(though not quite,)
and I am now relieved because the ordeal is over and I am not going to have to mount the scaffold ...
ah ... podium ...
and can now relax,
and they say My Lord and Spymaster.

So I drop my glasses, without which I cannot see.
Anything.

And I drop my very short speech, which I have written in Big Letters on a piece of paper,
and which consisted of only five people to thank,
not because I am stingy but because I didn't think I was going to be able to say anything at all.

So they are gone somewhere in the darkness below my chair.
And I have to walk up on stage and make that set of acks.

I do not actually remember much that happened after this point. It was so horrible my mind has repressed it.

I do not AT ALL remember standing there and staring out at THREE THOUSAND PEOPLE and saying the right words, but I have been assured by people who wish me well that I did just that and that I did not make a fool of myself.

This is good.
This is very good.

I understand they played the theme from James Bond for the 'walkup'.
No memory of this.

So, anyhow, getting the RITA is like being beaten with long, flexible bamboo poles and at the same time being tossed in a blanket while someone plays La Traviata in your ear on a penny whistle. When you come to the other side you have this beautiful little gold statue sitting on the floor in front of your feet and you are sitting down again.

I am going to put the RITA on the shelf over my desk.

It's heavy, and the gold quill the lady holds is fragile. It would still be suitable for knocking burglars over the head with.

The RITA in the photos is not my RITA. It is the RITA of Jennifer Ashley who is here and who just wrote The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie. Go. Read it.

I WON!

I won the RITA for Best Regency Romance of 2009.

Technical Topics -- Words, Words, Words in MLAS

Here are some fine and careful points of word usage from My Lord and Spymaster, brought to you by the excellent Franzeca Drouin.

Franzeca, who knows everything about words, pretty much, and helps authors out when they're using them kinda careless like, lives at her website here.
And a very interesting website it is.

Drop by and look through her 'sources' if you're doing research anywhere in the period.



Leesee

We open on Page 2 with the perplexing matter of finicky.

The passage is: Pretty soon there'd be nobody in the street but her and that cat picking his way, finicky, across the cobbles. He had errands to run, that cat. You could tell by looking at him.

Franzeca points out that OED dates 'finicky' to 1825, with a note that it's mostly US. Googlebooks lets us find 'finicky' in print as early as 1819.

This is, unfortunately, seven years after the date of MLAS.

What folks would have said in C18 was 'finicking'. Fielding, for instance, says, "I have none of the cant of your fine finicking London chaps."

C19 saw the introduction of 'finicky' as an alternative. This robust variant eventually replaced 'fincking',
for which I am sure we are all grateful.
By the last half of C19, 'finicky' and 'finicking' are about equally common.

I looked at the two possibilities and dithered a second or two and chose finicky.

I'm accepting this word into my period vocabulary under my 'One Decade Rule'

What I figure is, slang and idiomatic usage didn't go just galloping into print in early C19. Respectable people disapproved of informal usage.
I'm allowing the lapse of a decade between idiom on the streets and appearance in print. Longer than that if the idiom is vulgar.

Americanisms aren't at all unlikely for my heroine. Jess dealt with Yankee merchants all the time.

As a sidebar --- Why 'finicky'?
'Finicking' sounds ye-olde-C18 to my modern ears. Sounds niffy-naffy. It's not the way my Jess would talk. I want the blunter 'finicky' to build her voice.

When I picked 'finicky' I knew I was dealing with a fairly new C19 word, but I admit I hadn't realized 1812 was cutting it quite so close.


Moving on to Page 6 of MLAS, we get 'caper'.

The passage is: Back when she engaging in criminal acts with some regularity she'd have called this a right pig of a caper.

'Caper', meaning a dodge or scam, dates in writing to 1839.

I comment on this here.

You saw the 'One Decade Rule' above?

I'd argue that thieves cant entered the written record long after the date it was actually used. In early C19 we have only a couple few 'dictionaries' that preserved a mere scant few hundred words of what must have been a wide and rich vocabulary. Almost certainly, any bit of the argot that made it into these dictionaries was old, old, old in the slums.
This is my 'Trash Talk Rule'.

I'm going to stake out the ground for yet another quibbling excuse. The 'Perfect Word' excuse.

Some technical jargon is just so simple and exact and irreplaceable and there is NO period equivalent so I take an aspirin and grit my teeth and use it.


Coming to page 6. Standby.

The passage is: She'd tried bribes, threats, blackmail--all the old standbys.

As Franzeca says, 'standby' depends on exact usage of standby; someone available to render assistance, 1801; a support or resource, 1861.

Ok. I was wrong. Wrong. Wrong!

Because I am using it in the 'support or resource' sense.

I suppose . . . this might be an independent early metaphoric usage.
Can I say that? Huh? Huh? Independent invention of the metaphor?


Now we come to a real zinger.
Ouch.

Page 20. 'black out'

The passage is: "Don't be stupid. Hurts everywhere." She decided to black out for a while. Her eyes slid shut and she went limp.

Franzeca dates 'black out' in the sense of 'to temporarily lose consciousness,' to 1940.

Arrrggghhh.

I should have known this. And it doesn't even sound period. It sounds C20.

I was just wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Mea culpa.



Page 40. 'unconscious'

The passage is: Damn. Was he really thinking that way about an unconscious woman?

Franzeca points out that 'unconscious' is old as meaning unaware. As a medical term indicating loss of consciousness, it dates only to 1860.


I didn't know.

Having bloopered this way, I would do this again. In fact, I probably will. My characters will continue to fall 'unconscious' right and left in future manuscripts, rather than faint or swoon or something.

I'm pulling out the 'Perfect Word' rule on this one.

This is another of those technical jargon words that are exact and clear and simple and don't have a robust period equivalent.

A really careful writer wouldn't use 'unconscious'. I'm going to be less careful and accurate. I assume the karmic burden of this.


Franzeca says ... "Page 42: and elsewhere 'Cockney' you capitalize, which seems correct to me, as a noun and adjective of ethnic origin. Mostly not capitalized in OED, and it doesn’t look right. Harrumph."

Well, I feel good about capitalizing.

Presumably a word that starts out as a proper name eventually gets tired of maintaining a capital letter and just sinks into small letters in exhaustion.

We will not encourage this slackness. One must have some standards.


Page 58: Borneo in OED, 1876; first treaty involving the island of Borneo and Britain, 1824. Because of political and administrative districts on Borneo, might not be referred to as island title, but political titles. Jess’s knowledge of shipping would make her more aware of this arcane information."

I love obscure and arcane. Certainly Jess would know the name of every island in the Pacific that exported anything and all its political nitpickery.

I figger, here, she just meant the island itself and that's what it was called.

For 'Borneo' as an exotic tropical island destination, see the map of 1683 here.


And Page 77, Do you mean 'strolled' or 'trolled'?

The passage is: If the Captain was Cinq, he probably strolled through Quentin's papers with great regularity. A man as careless as Quentin was just an incitement to treason.

My Jess is being metaphoric. Well, she'd be metaphoric in both cases, but in this case she's being metaphoric with 'strolled'.


And finally, we come to page 96.
'charcoal' as a color, "charcoal grey", 1952.

The passsage is: What does one wear to ransack a warehouse? Black, I think, and the charcoal waistcoat. Tasteful, yet understated."


Phooey. I'm going to decree that Adrian's not using 'charcoal' as a color in the sense of 'green', 'blue' or 'red'. He's being metaphoric, the way he might talk about the 'snuff' driving coat or the 'coffee-and-cream' jacket or the 'claret' waistcoat.

He's making a direct trip from the colored object to the metaphoric destination without a single brief stop in the artists' pallet.

RITA Finalist -- Twice

I am a RITA finalist for The Spymaster's Lady in the Historical Romance category. I'm a finalist for My Lord and Spymaster in the Regency Historical category.

Two Finals.

I am so happy and excited my stomach hurts. This is Exactly like the birthday party where you get the electronic game you wanted and eat six pieces of cake and then throw up, except that you have to buy a long black dress too.

An Outtake from MLAS

Martha, in the comment trail, asked about scenes that don't make it into the final book.

As a generality, there are Good Reasons why scenes quietly disappear from the ms before the Editor ever sees them.
The scene is boring.
Or it twiddles off down a line of minor plotting, instead of telling the love story.
Or it is talking heads conveying information.
Or all three.

Here below is a scene that got written
and then a draft or two later got grubbed up by the roots and tossed out.

The scene is not dreadful in and of itself. It explains why Jess, (our heroine in MLAS,) is knee deep in kimchee with the British Government.
But we do not write scenes to 'explain things'.

The stage action I kept, because I need the little jigsaw piece of scene to transition from one place to another. The action shows up, much modified, in MLAS as pages 152 to 158. But the version that hit the book is all about the love story instead of suspense plot and intrigue.

Below, you're looking at Second Draft work, not Final Draft work.
There's lots of awkwardness and bad phrasing.
And I've left in my 'notes to myself'.

*************** See the out-take here ******************
It begins ....


Adrian was propped against the wall in the stuffy closet they used as a listening post, reading from a black, bound notebook. He crooked a finger in invitation and kept reading. "Close the door."

There wasn't room for three in the cubbyhole. He slid in behind the table, the rack of pistols on the wall poking into his back. Trevor, the spy in training, sat at the table, his ear pressed to a brass ear trumpet that emerged from the wall and wrote, scribbling fast. The only light in the room came from the dark lantern at his elbow. Three sides of that were closed, the fourth open. In the bright oblong it cast, his pencil made a manic, dancing shadow across the page. Three books, like the one Adrian held, lay to his left. Another dozen were stacked and ready.

This was where the British Service watched and listened to what went on in the library. Jess was right -- the walls were full of rats.

... and it ends ....



"You and Josiah are playing games. Jess isn't."

"Then it's time she did." Adrian was still a moment. "Josiah knows what I am. Eventually, Jess will. Do you know, there are times I do not find being Head of Section at all amusing. Shut up, now. When I open this they can hear us."
****************

Couple of MLAS Q & A

Kind reader, Eva, writes with some questions about My Lord and Spymaster. I thought I'd bring 'em out and talk about them here. (She says it's ok.)

Eva writes: First- did Adrian ever have feelings for Jess? I can't tell if he views her as merely a friend or a woman that he believes is off-limits to him but has secretly lusted after.
When Adrian first knew Jess, she was only twelve. He was about twenty. Eight years is a huge barrier at that age.
In a way, Adrian never 'reset' that distance between them. Even when she's grown, he sees her as 'the child grown up.'

The original relationship between them would have been . . . smart-mouthed preteen and her very cool uncle or Olympic hopeful and the silver-medallist who's coaching her.
That is to say ... close, but never sexual.

Eva writes: Is Annique the only Frenchwoman that he claims to have loved?

We haven't met Adrian's woman yet.
I think she's going to turn up in Maggie's story.

Eva writes: By the way, I am seriously waiting on pins and needles for Adrian's story...... Hint, hint ;)
I plan to start Adrian's story as soon as I finish up the Maggie manuscript. That'll be early in 2010.
I haven't the least idea what I'm going to write.

Ah well, we wrestle only one alligator at a time.

Eva writes: what role has Eunice played before she began rescuing women? Was she a spy as well? Why is she protected by Lazarus? You drop sooo many hints about her but I'm just not sure if I'm putting the pieces together in the correct way.....
Leesee ...

Eunice is the daughter of a duke. (That's why she's 'Lady Eunice'.)
She was married at sixteen to a very unpleasant man, twice her age, who physically and emotionally brutalized her. He obliged everyone by dying when she was twenty-five.
(May we speculate that she helped him to his reward? That would be so satisfying.)

Eunice was left a widow with a miniscule income, an irreconcilable split from her family, and a burning desire to right the world's wrongs. By sheer force of will, she became a power in charitable London. Check out any well-run orphanage or home for wayward women; she's probably on the Board of Directors.

Standish is the love of her life.
(How could he be otherwise?)
She met him when she was in her late thirties and long past any thought of falling in love with anyone. He was doing a 'dig' of a Roman site in a ditch in East London. When they met, he was firmly -- if somewhat ineffectively -- protecting his pottery shards from the local disadvantaged youths who were sure he'd uncovered gold.

As to Eunice and Lazarus.
Eunice amuses Lazarus, which is reason enough for him to let her play in his part of town.

There's some practical reasons as well.
When he identifies himself with a force that brings food, clothing and medical care into his territory, Lazarus plays the good guy, and wins approval in the hood. That's the same reason he protects the Reverend.

Also, Lazarus doesn't want the daughter of a duke killed on his turf. He's tolerated by the authorities, in part, because he keeps that sort of thing to a minimum.

He finds Eunice useful as an object lesson. Having a place girls can run to is a salutary lesson to pimps who batter the merchandise.

And when he protects Eunice, Lazarus places a limit on the power of the most brutal and stupid of his gang. She becomes, symbolically, his power to do any damn thing he wants. It's a symbol that costs little to maintain since she's already well protected by her connection to the British aristocracy and, in later years, by Sebastian.

I think Lazarus is maybe a little cowed by Lady Eunice. She's intimidating when she sets her mind to it.

Now Eunice was never a spy. She's a flaming radical and has dicey intellectual ties all over France, but she's not really a political animal. She's a hands-on, practical sort.

Because of these ties, she's an excellent source of what we'd now call intelligence. She's first to hear the latest intellectual news from Paris. She's on an in-your-face framiliarity with half the criminal element of London. And she's related to everyone powerful in and out of government in England. (She's Galba's second cousin on his mother's side.)

Meeks Street uses her when they need a safe place for women who are hurt or on the run. She's willing to provide introductions to British Service agents who need to move into the fringes of the 'ton'.

Eva writes: why is there so much animosity\anger between Josiah and Lazarus? Aren't they related?
Josiah and Lazarus came to London as young men to seek their fortune. They worked together, getting rich and trusting each other and being rivals a little bit.

What drove them apart was Jess' mother. Lazarus had her. Josiah took her away.

After some serious conflict, they patched up an uneasy tolerance. For years, Lazarus envied Josiah his little family. Envied him the extraordinary child that Jess became.

Then Josiah was out of the picture. Lazarus stepped in.

In the years she was with him, Lazarus was training Jess to be a master thief and part of his gang. Someday, if she got strong enough and mean enough, he would have made her his successor. He thought of all this as 'teaching her the trade.'
He's not a nice man, but he wished her well. He loved her in his way. And because he loved her and the world is a dangerous place, he didn't cut her any slack when it came to following the apprenticeship he'd set her.

Family quarrels are the bitterest. But it's still family. Despite his words, Lazarus wouldn't have let Josiah hang. He helped Jess when she came to him. He would have intervened more directly if Josiah had actually come to trial.

Now ... as to why he scared her to death when she came to him for help ...

Jess betrayed him. She chose Josiah instead of him. He's pissed off at her, and he's hurt.

From a practical standpoint -- Lazarus is good at seeing things like this -- Jess isn't really safe walking the streets of London unless she's a true part of his 'gang' again. He can't just decree that she is. He needs to sell it to his people. Her fight with Badger is a 're-initiation' into the gang. It is the ordeal that transforms her from spoiled-aristocrat-outsider-who-deserted-us into 'one-of-us'.

And ... Ummm ... wandering into deep theoretical, pseudo-literary territory here ...
Jess' return to the padding ken is a symbolic death and rebirth. Lazarus (the name indicates rebirth from death ... ...) is the past that must be conquered and reconciled with. She makes this passage through the underworld in the company of Sebastian, (who is named after the saint who restored sight and speech and freed prisoners.)

Eva writes: And the woman who Lazarus had hostage until she was practically in labor- does he actually care for her? Why did she go back to him with the baby?
Second question first. She went back to Lazarus because women are such fools.

First question. Yes. Lazarus does love her.

We only see one moment of a long, tumultuous relationship, and we only see if from the outside.

She's going to 'reform' Lazarus in the end, I think, and he'll call her 'Fuffy' even when she's old and grey. They end up in Baltimore, become respectable, and their many descendents brag about their aristocratic roots.
If only they knew

Eva writes: I truly loved MLAS but I would have liked another intense, passionate scene between Jess and Sebastion.
I wish I'd had a little more time with MLAS. I write slowly, and there's stuff I didn't have time to get quite entirely right. I would have liked another sex scene, too.

Eva writes: firmly believe your books would make fantastic movies.
From your lips to Hollywood's ears ...

An out-take from MLAS

Here's an outtake from My Lord and Spymaster.
I refer to it in a later post. Here it is, in full, for anyone who wants to see it.

In a much modified form, this scene made it into the book.

***************

Adrian was propped against the wall in the stuffy closet they used as a listening post, reading from a black, bound notebook. He crooked a finger in invitation and kept reading. "Close the door."

There wasn't room for three in the cubbyhole. He slid in behind the table, the rack of pistols on the wall poking into his back. Trevor, the spy in training, sat at the table, his ear pressed to a brass ear trumpet that emerged from the wall and wrote, scribbling fast. The only light in the room came from the dark lantern at his elbow. Three sides of that were closed, the fourth open. In the bright oblong it cast, his pencil made a manic, dancing shadow across the page. Three books, like the one Adrian held, lay to his left. Another dozen were stacked and ready.

This was where the British Service watched and listened to what went on in the library. Jess was right -- the walls were full of rats.

He waited till Adrian looked up. "Don't question her again."

"Ah." Adrian gave him the same meditative consideration he'd been using on the book. "You're feeling protective."

"I can't deal with her when she's so scared she can barely think. You're making it worse."

"Naturally. We are, in our own small way, His Majesty's government.[which caps?] " Adrian shrugged. "We didn't haul out the bastinado, [date, sp] you know. Fletch chatted with her once, politely. Pax coaxed at her as if she were a kitten hiding under the sofa. Galba attempted reason. Reason is always a mistake, I feel."

"You've put this in my hands. Leave her to me. No more badgering."

"Our attempts to badger were, if I may say so, water off a duck's back. Do you want to see her badgered? Let's take a look at that interesting reunion next door." An angry rumble vibrated the walls, coming from the study. It had been going on for some time. "That's Josiah, disapproving of her recent exploits."

"Or he's annoyed she didn't follow his orders well enough."

"I don't think you're a fool. Do try not to disappoint me." Adrian flipped back to the beginning of the book he held. "Here are today's notes. Eight o'clock -- breakfast with Galba, discussing the market for fake antiquities." He thumbed forward. "Macleish, at ten, much incensed over problems in inventory and complaining about Pitney. He is followed by Pitney, at noon, complaining about Macleish. Pitney then enlivens everyone's day by peaching on Jess, who has been a very naughty girl. You must curb her tendency to climb four-storey buildings. [check hyphen]"

"I intend to. Let me see that." He helped himself to the book. To give him credit, Trevor wrote a clear hand and filled in later what he missed the first time through. "Damnation. Pitney knew what she was up to and didn't stop her. She took a bloody ferret with her. Can no one control that woman?"

"Good men have tried." Adrian reached across and turned forward a dozen pages. "This is what you want to see. At three o'clock, matters become interesting. Sergei Orkoff visits. What do you know about Sergei?"

"Attaché with the Russian Embassy. [check legation? Check possible titles] Smooth. Amusing. I see him at Claudia's soirees, hanging on the fringes of the Foreign Office and War Ministry crowd, listening. Very friendly to men who talk more than they should. My guess is he's in your line of work."

"Discerning of you. He is also an old friend of Josiah's.

"Orkoff is everybody's old friend."

"Too true." Adrian watched him read. "You will see they greet one another with glad cries, in French. That is to keep us on our toes. Some discussion of where to get decent pastry in London. The rain. Orkoff reminiscences of bordellos in Heidleburg."

And there was page after page of it. "Why did you let him in?"

"The Russian Embassy asks us to. And I was curious. Next -- you'll come to it -- Josiah discusses bordellos in Munich. In German. Sergei relates a filthy but inventive story involving animals and a Prussian Grand Duke [check title margravane]. Trevor finds this all very interesting. One seeks to educate the young."

"Fascinating." He turned the page. "They've switched to ... what? Russian."

Trevor stopped pretending to take notes. "That's because Orkoff's Russian. Or ... koff. Russian."

Adrian said, "Russian isn't one of your languages, is it? I'll have Trevor do a translation tonight."

The stripling looked mutinous.

"Tonight, Trev." Adrian's voice was gentle.

"He's not going to read it." Trevor [some action]. "The Captain's made up his mind. He's not here about Whitby. All he's doing is bullying Jess into bed with him."

"Then Jess will slice him stem to stern and laugh girlishly while he writhes in his own blood. Nonetheless, you will deliver the full translation to his house tonight." Adrian let that settle in. "A careful translation."

The mutter might have been, "The hell I will." Or it might not. Fortunatly, Trevor was Adrian's problem. [look for echo in earlier scene]

"Just tell me."

"Always the practical man. Let's see." Adrian took the book and turned it into the light. "We continue in the same vein. Customs officials in Athens. Cheeses. An anecdote concerning the Swedish legate [check] in Vienna."
Adrian laid the notebook on the table, held flat under his spread fingers. "And here, in passing, Orkoff mentions the transfer of a tourmaline from Josiah to a certain Levgenny Gregoritch Petroff Romanovski,[check Russian names]. For safekeeping."

He felt a dry prickle across the back of his neck. A warning of danger. "A Romanoff?"

"A minor, but perfectly genuine, Romanoff. He has vast estates overlooking the Black Sea." [check political geography] Adrian waited.

"Whitby doesn't deal in jewels." It took a minute. "The tourmaline is Jess."

"Regrettably, yes."

Trevor's hands, on the table, clenched into fists. "She won't do it. I won't let her."

"How nice for you both. Let us see what Sebastian has to say about this, shall we?" Adrian smoothed his way along Cryllic [caps?] letters with his fingertips [check frequency of fingertips]. "Reading between the lines ... the Russian Embassy [ambassador, legate, legation] offers to intervene on Josiah's behalf with his His [cap?] Majesty's Government. Josiah leaves the country. His holdings in England are forfeit to the [devolve? confiscated] crown [caps?] -- that's the sweetener for the Foreign Office [what office deals with treason?] -- and Jess marries a minor Romanoff. That's the payment to the Russians."

Jess, God help her, would marry a syphilitic dwarf if Josiah told her to. But it wasn't going to happen. Even in the first blank instant of rage, he knew that much. "Damn the Czar anyway."

"Amen."

"Whitby wouldn't live six months."

"He would meet some elegantly Byzantine end. The Russians are so good at that sort of thing."

"Whitby dead. Jess inherits half the shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean. Quite a coup for the Romanoffs."

But Jess wasn't destined for some Russian lordling. That wasn't what Adrian was warning him about. He did a quick mental tour of the labyrinth of Russian Imperial politics and didn't like what he found. "It's not ships the Russians want."

"Not ships. Not the indecent pots of money. Not warehouses. It's the [arabic word or turkish word for 'contacts'] prestige. The influence. Whitby knows everyone. He has a network of spies and commercial agents from the Crimea to Khartoum."

"It's the Whitby name they want."

"I can almost hear the Russians slavering."

That was the East. He'd sailed those waters for a decade. Every trade, every encounter, was an intrigue of boxes nested within boxes, wheels within wheels, layer after layer of subtlety. England played intricate, rough games in the ports and palaces. So did the French and the Austrians and the Russians. "It changes the balance of power. The Foreign Office can't allow it."

"They'd see the company, and both the Whitbys, destroyed first."

"Both Whitby's. They'd have to destroy both of them." Jess did collect enemies, didn't she?

He rubbed his chin, feeling the beard. He'd been up all last night searching the Whitby warehouse and he hadn't shaved. He looked like a pirate and Jess still didn't even have the sense to be scared of him. "No wonder she doesn't trust the government. Did the Foreign Office frame Whitby?"

"I think not. Probably not." Adrian closed the book. "They are not, strictly speaking, that clever. And Whitby's has heretofore presented no problem."

"They'll find out Orkoff was here."

"Certainly. They will eventually figure out why. Some bureaucratic popinjay will then panic." Adrian met his eyes. "He will fix upon one of the two obvious solutions. That is why Jess will return to your house every night, mon ami. Your footmen will stick to her like so many nautical mustard plasters [date] every day, and my own men will lurk in the shadows lending just that soupçon [check]of official support. This is the last time she gives us the slip. She must not fall into the hands of the Foreign Office."

Behind the wall, in the study, the grumble of a man's voice continued, words muffled to unintelligibility. Jess was getting yelled at.

Outside, the real storm was gathering. He could protect her against Cinq. Could he protect her from his own government? "The Foreign Office doesn't want her dead. They want her married to an Englishman."

"To their chosen Englishman. I doubt Jess' consent is considered strictly necessary. Sit down, Trevor." That was directed at the boy. "There is insufficient space for strenuous heroics."

Trevor subsided, muttering.

The boy was right about one thing. "They can't make her do it. Not Jess."

"I will back Jess against triple her fighting weight in Foreign Office lackeys. And Josiah's been diddling the diplomatic service for years. I suggest we listen intelligently to what he has to say to Jess." Adrian set his hand on the small, square panel in the wall behind him.

This wasn't what he'd come for. "I don't –"

"... You don't listen at keyholes. Have I ever told you how much I admire gentlemanly scruples? You read the transcripts. You pass a quiet hour pawing through her bedroom. But you won't eavesdrop. These distinctions escape me. Douse the lights, Trev."

Without a word, the boy closed the door of the lantern and threw them into total dark.

"Sebastian, they know I'm watching. They expect it. Think of it as a sort of game." The sound of tapping fell into the darkness. That would be Adrian's fingers, restless on the table or the edge of the chair. "I specialize in betrayals. I assure you, this hardly qualifies."

"You and Josiah are playing games. Jess isn't."

"Then it's time she did." Adrian was still a moment. "Josiah knows what I am. Eventually, Jess will. Do you know, there are times I do not find being Head of Section at all amusing. Shut up, now. When I open this they can hear us."
***************

If you want to go back to the post where I was talking about this, it's here.

Technical Topics -- Talking Heads II

In My Lord and Spymaster, I had a dozen nuggets of backstory to pass along to the reader. So I wrote a Talking Heads scene. Adrian and Sebastian search Jess' bedroom.

How do you make a Talking Heads scene slightly less horrible than it might otherwise be?


-- Best choice is you turn the action of the scene into plot action. (i.e. You make it 'not' a Talking Heads scene. )

So, instead of folks sitting around the kitchen table, talking,
which does not change the outcome of the story and is not story action or even plot action,
you change it into folks sitting around the kitchen table building a bomb or performing an emergency lobotomy or cutting letters out of the newspaper for the ransom note
all of which are at least plot action.

-- Failing important plot action, you do the next best thing.
You liven things up with 'stage business'.

Stage business doesn't advance the plot, but it's interesting. Folks bend spoons with their psyches or learn to play the fiddle or get hiccups.

What else do we do to take the edge off a Talking Heads scene?

-- You layer on sensation, of course, as you would in any scene. Give visuals. Blow whistles. Waft forth the smell of brownies in the oven.

-- You make sure there's real info to share. That is, they don't already both know what's being said. ("As you know, Bob ...")

-- Your characters interact with each other. You enrich, expose and develop the characters. You might even sneak some story in this way.

-- And, most especially, your characters react to the information that's being conveyed. They wouldn't be talking about it if it weren't important to them.

OK. Coming to one of my specific instances of Talking Heads.

In the search-Jess's-bedroom scene I want to convey the backstory factoid that Jess had an old boyfriend.
Sebastian and Adrian do not sit at a table and swap info.

You got yer stage business
and yer visuals
and yer interaction between Sebastian and Adrian
and you got yer character reaction to what's being said.

Here's the scenelette:

Adrian tapped the letters together and looped the blue ribbon around them and made a jaunty bow. "Gods. I was never that young. I'm glad Jess was, for a while."

"It wasn't tied like that."

"I'm showing her somebody's been in here." He set the letters carefully back in the box and closed the lid. "Not a sparkling correspondent, young Ned, but I don't suppose she noticed."

That was the name written in the front of the Odyssey. "Who's Ned?"

Adrian was up, wandering the room, leaning to peer in at the fireplace. He waited just long enough to be annoying. "The Honorable Edward Harrington. She was fifteen. He was bright, likable, ambitious and quite sickeningly in love with her."

"A paragon."

"It has given me considerable satisfaction, over the years, to think of Jess, out in the straw in a horse barn, bestowing her virginity on that boy." He ran his thumb along the carving of the fireplace. The mantel was black marble and the design was scrolled leaves. "He had the face of a young Apollo."

Jess's lover. The one who'd put knowledge in her eyes. "What happened?"

Adrian shifted the firescreen aside. "Genuinely bad luck. Josiah shipped him out as supercargo, to see what he was made of. Edward Harrington died heroically off the Barbary Coast, saving the lives of two of his shipmates. He was seventeen." Adrian rolled up his shirtsleeves and knelt on the bricks of the hearth. "Jess spent the next year constructing Europe's best accounting system. I don't think she slept at all for a couple months."

"I see." He wasn't sure what he saw, except that he was jealous of a boy, half his age and dead.

"He was a better man than either of us." Adrian twitched a knife from its sheath on his left forearm. "And look here. Jess has been sloppy."************

What do I do to make the Talking Heads marginally palatable?

*****************

Adrian tapped the letters together and looped the blue ribbon around them and made a jaunty bow. That's stage business and visuals. "Gods. I was never that young. I'm glad Jess was, for a while."

"It wasn't tied like that."
There's human interaction. Sebastian is annoyed at Adrian. That's what interests the reader right now, not so much what was in the letters ... though that's supposed to be intriguing too.

"I'm showing her somebody's been in here."
Which is Adrian's reaction right back.
The Talking Heads don't just talk. They snipe.

Information comes to the reader under cover of these two guys being annoyed at each other. The reader doesn't have to care about the info. She can care about the two characters on stage.


He set the letters carefully back in the box and closed the lid. Stage action. "Not a sparkling correspondent, young Ned, but I don't suppose she noticed."

See the character interaction?
Adrian lures Sebastian to ask questions. Adrian , for reasons of his own, obviously wants to convey information.

The way the info is released becomes important. The characters have a reason to talk about the info. They have an attitude toward the info.

One of the dangers with Talking Heads is we can set them to chattering about stuff they don't really need to discuss.
So in a Talking Heads scene you always ask yourself -- why this info? Why between these two people? Why now?

... Here, it's because Adrian has something he wants to say.
That was the name written in the front of the Odyssey. "Who's Ned?" 

Adrian was up, wandering the room, leaning to peer in at the fireplace. He waited just long enough to be annoying.

Adrian doesn't just lay the information out for Sebastian like he was dealing cards. There's an ebb and flow to it. Adrian teases Sebastian with what he knows. Sebastian pulls info out of Adrian.

"The Honorable Edward Harrington. Ned. She was fifteen. He was bright, likable, ambitious and quite sickeningly in love with her." 

"A paragon."

"It has given me considerable satisfaction, over the years, to think of Jess, out in the straw in a horse barn, bestowing her virginity on that boy."

This is Adrian's emotional truth. The factoids are just slathered all over with meaning.

The way Adrian says this shows Adrian's awareness of who he's speaking to. Adrian wouldn't say this, this way, to anyone else.
Info filters to us through its source. If story facts are not modified in the guts of the man who holds them, we don't have real characters. Likewise, info is shaped towards its recipient.

We don't just 'tell a fact'. We tell the fact we see and understand. We tell it to our audience.

Our characters have to do this too.

OK. OK. This is true in any dialog.But it's especially important to keep the basic dialog rules in mind when we do Talking Heads. T.H. tempt us to forget everything we've ever learned about dialog.

He ran his thumb along the carving of the fireplace. The mantel was black marble and the design was scrolled leaves. Visuals. Stage business, too, I guess. "He had the face of a young Apollo."
Adrian's emotional reaction to the factoids.

We transfer the emotional punch of these old factoids into the present. The T.H. do not merely tell the old story; they experience that story now.

This is not an exchange of info. It's a replaying of old events and old truths with the character's current reactions.

Current reactions hold the reader's interest. Sometimes, they're story.



Jess's lover. The one who'd put knowledge in her eyes. That's the internal from Sebastian. "What happened?" 

Adrian shifted the firescreen aside. "Genuinely bad luck. Josiah shipped him out as supercargo, to see what he was made of. Edward Harrington died heroically off the Barbary Coast, saving the lives of two of his shipmates. He was seventeen." Adrian rolled up his shirtsleeves and knelt on the bricks of the hearth. "Jess spent the next year constructing Europe's best accounting system. I don't think she slept at all for a couple months."
That stuff above ... here's a minor technical.I'm doing the big long run of straight backstory here. I get it out of the way, all in one lump. What I've done ... I've laid big dollops of emotion before and after, and I'm hoping like mad that the reader doesn't get bored while I real quick-like slip all these little facts past her.

"I see." He wasn't sure what he saw, except that he was jealous of a boy, half his age and dead.

And we got us some internals.
Internals go with Talking Heads like Burns with Allen.
Sebastian thinks about what he's just been told. He reacts. He feels.
This is the necessary ingredient. This is what mitigates Talking Heads and all this factoid dropping. The human reaction pulls the reader through the scene.

"He was a better man than either of us." Adrian twitched a knife from its sheath on his left forearm. "And look here. Jess has been sloppy."

At this point, Adrian grabs us and jumps onto the next bit of stage business. We leap from past to present, from interior to exterior.
We go on to do an interval of solid, visual stage business. That's our respite before the final set of factoids lands like wet dough onto the floury board of the scene.

Technical Topics -- Talking Heads I

When to use 'Talking Heads'?

I brought up a message and response down in the comments trail that deals with one specific use of Talking Heads.


I stopped by to comment on MLAS (aka Jessamyn). I just started reading it . . . and was wondering if you kept the scene about Sebastien rooting through Jess's bedroom (I recall it from a previous post . . . and although it's a little different, it's still there!)
Yah! Why did you think an editor would cut it?


A raft of Really Cool Scenes got cut out of the manuscript. I had to write other stuff to replace them.

The searching-Jess's-room scene managed to escape the slaughter.
This pleased me.

Putting the matter in a philosophical teacup --

All scenes have to justify their existence.
Scenes that do not contain the H&H interacting really have to justify their existence.

At heart, the structure of the search-Jess's-bedroom scene is Talking Heads Exchange Information. Sebastian and Adrian are -- I hope -- interesting Talking Heads, exchanging vital information and doing nifty stage business while they're at it.
But they're still Talking Heads.

This is a weak structure for a scene. An easy, self-indulgent structure.
You have to ration yourself to maybe one or two Talking Head scenes per manuscript.
This kinda scene is the first to get chopped if your pacing is slow or you need to lose words. Rightly so.

So ... why is this scene in the final book?

I think the search-bedroom scene survived the cuts because it was truly about character revelation. (i.e. it was not using 'character revelation' as an excuse for taking up space.)
The scene 'told' stuff about these three characters that would have been difficult to 'show' in any reasonable length of time . . . which is one of the justifications for Talking Heads.
The scene is short.
It found a spot where I could afford to slow the pacing.
And it made an efficient framework to reveal character.
I let Sebastian look at Jess's possessions and straightforwardly tell the reader what they 'said'.

You'll say this sort of scene isn't so much 'efficient' as 'bloody obvious' and 'heavy handed'.

Hmmm ... yes ....

My Lord and Spymaster in Russian

A fine bit of news. My Lord and Spymaster will be translated into Russian. The publication date is estimated at eighteen months from now.

I do not look a gift horse in the mouth. I am grateful to the Berkley subsidiary rights folks. Yeah, subsidiary rights!!

But why Russian?

I had never thought about this one way or the other, you understand, but is Russia full of Romance readers?

... oh
Since I've got the message open,
the status report on Maggie is:

18400 / 120000 words. 15% done on the second rough draft!

I think Maggie is going to end up at 120,000 words. I've figured out how to simplify a plot point or two late in the story. And I de-created a minor character.
Poof.

I stopped today halfway through Chapter Eight. Tomorrow I should finish refining that, and then Maggie and Doyle (and Hawker,) take to the road.

The rabbit scene still lingers within the manuscript, glaring defiance, daring me to extract it.
I have not.
This is weak of me.

Some MLAS Backstory

Anon said ...

I just started rereading MLAS, and ... I realized as I started though, that I don't know what happened to Jess's mom. Or why where Josiah went and why he didn't come back for her, when she was a kid--if I remember correctly, Jess' mom was still alive when she went to work for Lazarus.


I pulled a good bit of backstory out of My Lord and Spymaster.

It's always a hard choice. Do I go wandering down these side alleys of the distant past, or stick to the straight highway of what's happening right now.


Here's a bit of a scene about Jess' mom, pulled out of an early draft.

***********

Always liked to watch people, Sebastian did. Probably saw a lot.

He said, "What in Blue Blazes did you think you were doing?"

"It was one of those calculated risks."

"It was a calculated madness. Did you really stab him when you were eleven?"

"I tried to. He was expecting it." She frowned and began fingering along a strand of her hair. "I wanted to kill him, Sebastian. He got me locked up in Newgate when my mother was dying of fever. Bad fever, whatever it was. Both the women nursing her died of it in the end. When I got out -- "

"You were in ... For God's sake, you were in Newgate."

"I was safe enough. Nobody touches what belongs to Lazarus. But I about battered myself silly on the walls, wanting to get to my mother. I kept waiting for Lazarus to buy me free. It took me a couple of days to figure out he was the one who peached on me."

"And your mother died."

"When they let me loose, I went after him. Didn't do much more than scratch him. I think I was out of my mind for a while."

"You think you were ... Jess, is there ever a time you're properly sane?"

"I'm cautious, generally. You barging in and asking Lazarus for me -- now that was daft."

*****************

And here's something about Josiah.

***************

Loyal to the bone."

That described Jess pretty well. She certainly picked godawful men to be loyal to. "Where the hell was this father of hers all that time?"

"In Egypt, in Napoleon's army, shooting at Englishmen." Adrian rolled the pencil back and forth on the table. "That is supposed to be a deep dark secret from us."

"In Egypt."

"Whitby got picked up in Boulogne for smuggling and spent six month in Prison, passing himself off as a Frenchman. Ended up swept into the Emperor's army. It took him years to get loose and back to England. Jess and her mother were on their own."

"And Jess sold herself to Lazarus."

"I imagine Lazarus arranged it that she didn't have any choice."

*****************

A bit of Yorkshire dialect

Diane B asks ...

How is 'tha' pronounced?

This is talking about Josiah Whitby's voice.

Now Josiah is from Yorkshire. What we have here is second person familiar, (thee or thou,) of course. This is conventionally represented 'tha' in writing Yorkshire dialect.

I'm leaning on that old convention.
I want to suggest the dialect. Folks familiar with Yorkshire speech will fill in the blanks. Folks who don't know it will not be annoyed.

I'm not making any attempt to be phonetic. That is an ocean without any bottom and I don't intend to fall in.

If you wanted to hear it ... the word I've represented as 'tha' appears in this recording.
It's near the beginning. Listen to the bit that goes ...

"Well, me lad, I said ... it'll be a bit before tha' does that again, maybe."

Though the speaker uses the familiar 'tha' in that spot, he uses 'ye' or "you' elsewhere. '
Tha' was only for intimates.

You can also hear the familiar usage in this long and completely incomprehensible joke. It seems to occur in a couple places. One is about three-quarters of the way though. There, it's pronounced, rather clearly, 'thou'.

MLAS cover

Moth said ...

Definitely off topic here but I was looking at my copy of MLAS and I was wondering why the cover model has brown hair. Was this one of those things where it was out of your hands? Or too late to fix by the time you were aware of the problem? It's just such a silly mistake I'm mad on your behalf that the publishers did it.

I don't have anything to say about the covers. Not before, not during, not after.
That is marketing. Market is an art to me unknown.

Maybe they think a brown-haired cover is more appealing?

It actually isn't the cover artist's fault either. She doesn't have the manuscript to work with, only directions from marketing.

Adrian and Jess met ...

Emlyn said ...

And this may be off-topic, but could you clarify a little more (without spoilers, of course) when and how Adrian & Jess were acquainted? He's in Russia with her & her dad acting as their butler, Hurst (love this! adrian as butler! lol!) after he rescues her from Lazarus, right? Does she know him before this? How did he come to be involved in her rescue?

Leesee ... In Spymaster's Lady, Adrian gets picked up by Josiah's smuggler boat and rescued.

He returns the favor by intervening in Josiah's struggle with Lazarus over who's going to get to keep Jess.

Adrian and Doyle spirit Jess away. She's had a bad fall and she's still drugged into unconsciousness. She doesn't wake up till she's on the ship and away from England. She never saw Adrian.

All that's in the two books, someplace or other.

What's not in the books ....

Adrian is assigned as Head of Section for Russia, based in St. Petersburg. Josiah also sets up one of his offices there. He and Adrian re-establish contact and Josiah lets Adrian use his house as British Service Headquarters.

That's when Adrian and Jess finally 'meet'.

Adrian, Grey, Jessamyn . . . look like . . .

Emlyn says ...


And because you mentioned that Annique resembled a young Natasha Kinski, could you put a face on Adrian as well? And Jess as well?

I got Jess tacked down someplace or other as Robin Wright, in The Princess Bride. Further back in the posts a bit there's links to pictures for both Jess and Annique.

Adrian ...


Two artists' rendering.
painted about five years
apart.












This is Sebastian.
Here, .

[Edited to add -- I've pulled out the copyright photo and put in a link to it. Now we are all legal again. ]



And Grey.










.

creative commons Bollywood Sargam

You are a witch, btw. These characters are ALIVE to me.

.

(jo blinks.)

You mean they aren't alive?

.

.

WAAAAHHH!

My Lord and Spymaster various stuff

I was getting confused answering posts about My Lord and Spymaster that were appended to the 'Dates' post.

So I decided to bring the last one up here and just add it as a new message.


Lady Leigh writes:

First off- I LOVED My Lord and Spymaster. The one scene I keep coming back to is when Jess is lying in the grass. The whole bit about clover and horehair and Sebastian making love to her eyebrows... I've tried to pick apart what is so powerful about it, all the layers and language, what it makes me feel and how. Did it take you a while to write that scene? Did it just come out as magic?

How long does it take you to plot and write a book? When will Maggie's story be done?

Thanks for all your posts on writing instruction etc. I appreciate it! The method to the madness.

Is there an interview with you anywhere? I missed your month at Julia Quinn and Eloisa James' BB.

Have you ever thought about hosting an online workshop?

OK- enough with the questions ;-)

Leesee --

-- I am so delighted you enjoyed My Lord and Spymaster. I'm still all worried about that one, so I'm glad when anyone says nice things about it.

-- The one scene I keep coming back to is when Jess is lying in the grass

The scene you like -- Jess and Sebastian in the garden. I have no idea why that one worked. I really have no idea.

I'm very fond of it though. It more or less wrote itself just as it stands, all in one piece, and it's one of the first scenes I wrote for MLAS.

In the end, I was going to leave it out, actually. I came about theeeeese close, (jo holds up maybe three centimeters,) to chucking it. Because it is not in the direct line of action. That is, I could have removed the scene and it would make no difference to the forward progress of the story.

Also, I just knew a lot of readers were going to find it slow going.

But I really liked it. So that edged me one hair to the right and I kept the scene.

-- How long does it take you to plot and write a book?

It takes at least a year to plot and write a story. Maybe longer.

When I was writing TSL and MLAS I was redoing all the walls and floors and installing electrical wire and bookcases, (and endless so on,) in a new house. I think I would have got the manuscripts written faster if I hadn't been doing all that other stuff.

I never did finish doing the bathrooms. I really should get on with that.

No time. No time.
(jo, feeling harried)

-- When will Maggie's story be done?

Maggie's story will be late 2009.
I think.

-- online workshops ...?

I did some online writing workshops at the CompuServe Books and Writers Community. Here . It was a while back. They're under the 'Writers Exercises' section.

-- Is there an interview with you anywhere?

I have done some interviews.

I will post links to interviews on the sidebar the next time I gird my loins and go add things to the sidebar.

I have some reviews to add there also -- including one completely pinch-your-nose-it-stinks review -- and have been procrastinating about it.

What they look like . . .

For Grey -- remember, he is not particularly handsome. Maybe Javier Bardem. Photo here, here,

Or possibly Hugh Jackman here and here

For Doyle ... how about Bruce Willis? here