We have snow

It is not universally popular.

No.  Not at all popular.

Some more questions

More questions --
And more, well, answers.


8)  How did she .  . . .  put such nuances into her dialogue?

For me, dialog is something I hear. 
A 'voice' comes from listening to people speak.  The written language is helpful, but the heart of it is the sound.

If it's French accents, I have to go sit and listen to French people talk.  I was lucky enough to live in France.  There are movies with authentic French accents I think . . . (she says vaguely.) 

East Enders is a good start for Cockney.  I watched a lot of BBC.

Yorkshire dialect was Herriot and the movie Babe and the bits and pieces they have recorded on dialect sites.

I'd say you build a voice by spending days and weeks listening to the accent you want to reproduce. You keep at it till you 'hear' the voices in your head.
Trying to hear voices is not universally excellent advice, but it's good advice for writers.

9) Does she place hooks purposefully every half chapter?

I do?

I mean . . . yeah.  Right.  I do.

Ok.  I don't know about planting hooks purposefully in any particular places, but I do want the reader to have questions about what's going to happen next.  This is the narrative drive thingum. 

10) Does she plan out her POV characters?

Oh dear. 
Sorta.

In Spymaster's Lady I didn't do this very well, as a matter of fact.

What it is . . .
In a Romance genre book. you have two POV characters, the hero and heroine.  This is right and traditional and works very well and it's what I fully intended to do.  The two POVs go switching back and forth at frequent intervals so you see motivation from both sides.
I knew I'd be using more heroine POV than hero, because this is really 'her' story.


I ended up with three other POVs.
Sorta by accident.

I did the in-cuts with the villain in Omniscient Narrator. They're not in any character's POV. An example is the scene where the villain goes to the little hut on the beach and questions the fisherman about Annique leaving the Normandy coast.  This is all written as if some undefined person was watching the scene.
Omniscient POV.

I had two other scenes that were supposed to be Omniscient Narrator. 
Adrian is wading out to the smuggler's boat.
Galba is playing chess.

The scenes ended up in Adrian POV and Galba POV.  I didn't plan this at the beginning, but when I came to writing the scenes, I just couldn't keep out of character POV.

It's bad technique to go wandering into random heads all the time, but then I went and did it because I thought it told the story better.  
I'm weak.


11) What's been the reception - from the pub world and readers to Spy series?

People have said such wonderful things about the book.
For instance, the ALA listed it as the 2008 Romance genre book to recommend to Library readers. I am so surprised and pleased.

The funny thing is, I seem to get folks who like the book and people who hate the book with a burning passion. 
Not so much in between.
Odd, that.

Technical Topics -- Historical Words for Explicit Content

In the interest of providing useful bibliographies . . . here's a list of references for  words in use in the Regency Period for explicit behavior.

You'll note a good many of these works are fifty or sixty years after the Regency. If you find a promising word or phrase in some later reference, you'll need to go back and check it.

Educated folks would have also read French and Latin erotic classics. The Satryicon was available in German in the Regency era, for instance.

The Slang Dictionary. Hotten. 1859. Here.

Grose's Classical Ditionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Pierce Egan. 1823. here.

A Physical View of Man and Woman in a State of Marriage. de Lignac. 1798. Here.

Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant. Barrere and Leland. 1889 Here.

The Works of Francis Rabelais. Here .

Slang. Badcock. 1823. Here.

A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant. Leland. 1890. Here.

Philosophy in the Bedroom and 120 Days of Sodom. De Sade Here.

The Lustful Turk. John Benjamin Brookes. 1828. Here.

A Night in a Moorish Harem. Anon. 1896. Here.

Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs. John Davenport. 1869. here.

Autobiography of a Flea. Anon. 1901. Here.

My Secret Life. Anon. 1888. Here.

The Kama Sutra of Vatsayayana. Richard Burton. Here.

Liber Amoris or the New Pygmalian. William Hazlitt. 1823.here.

The London Bawd. Anon. 1705. here.

Memoirs of a Young Rakehell. Guillaume Appollinaire. 1907.Here.

The New Ladies Tickler. Anon. 1866. Here.

The Romance of Lust Anon. 1873. Here.

The Three Chums. Ridley. 1882. Here.

The Way of a Man with a Maid. Anon.
I don't know where this is free online, but it can be downloaded for a small fee several places.

ETA:

I'd recommend picking up C18 and C19 erotic wordage from the period literature rather than period dictionaries.

The couple few C18 slang 'dictionaries' are irreplaceable for confirmation of earliest date.
They're less reliable for showing usage.

What it is -- these early dictionaries were intended for entertainment rather than scholarly reference. They conflate clever one-offs, (a good many created by the author, I suspect,) with true slang.

So it's cute to call a coachman a 'Knight of the Whip'? as per Grosse, but it sounds like literary affectation, not what one character could say to another. And calling a whore an 'Athanasian wench'??
Not so much.

The slang, 'blowen' -- meaning a woman -- gets 630 hits on googlebooks for the 1700-1830 time period. 'Athanasian wench' appears only in Grosse.

So I'd pull erotic usage out of the literature and then check the dctionaries for confirmation.  Or googlebook search.
I am just in love with googlebook search.

More questions

Y'know, the whole blog thing is just a morass and murky swamp of talking about yerself.  This is not -- despite abundant evidence to the contrary -- my favorite activity. I feel like Dickinson's dreary public frog.

So. More Questions and more Answers.


5) Any advice for unpublished writers?

 Don't give up. Do work you're proud of. Have faith in yourself.

Sit down and write. Do it hour after hour, even when you think you're not producing good stuff.

And what is going to sound like contradicting those comments above --
Take joy in what you do.



6) What's next in this series?

Forbidden Rose will be out June 1. That's Maggie and Doyle's story. They meet during the French Revolution, at the height of the Terror.


7) Does she plot out the whole series first?

When I see this, I think, immediately, of Dorothy Dunnett. You look at the first scene of the first book of her House of Niccolo series and it is perfectly obvious Dunnett knew what was going to happen in the last scene of Book Eight.

I am not doing that,
on so many levels.

But, then, I'm not writing a series of books that tells a single story, so I don't have to plan out a whole story.
Instead, I'm basing distinct and separate stories in the same fictive universe. My characters intersect, not because one story leads to another, but because the 'world' I'm writing about is very small.

Technical Topics -- POV

I've done a few exercises on POV over at Books and Writer's Community. 

I gathered these together for somebody the other day, and it was all so neat and nifty I thought I'd just put the reference down here.  Hope it is of use to somebody.

ETA: And here's the link again. Or, if it doesn't work, here it is written out:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4556266&postcount=19

The links to old exercises are down at the bottom of the post.

More Questions

Couple more questions.


3) How long did it take you to write THE SPYMASTER'S LADY? Was it your first
manuscript?

It's not my first manuscript. I wrote a sweet Regency Romance for Avon back in the early dawn of the modern era. Then I went to work overseas and raised a couple kids and got busy writing lots of impenetrable technical non-fiction.

For years, I wrote fiction in little corners of time. I wasn't satisfied with any of it. I wanted to expand the scope of the story and I couldn't seem to do it. I have maybe four or five completed manuscripts trunked away.

Maybe I was learning my craft.
I dunnoh.

Somewhere in there I started playing with scenes that would eventually end up in the Spymaster's Lady manuscript. Worked on them a bit and didn't get far. I'd get all complicated and tangled up in plot. Put it away. Worked on some other projects.

Then in February of 2003 I got evacked out of Saudi Arabia to the US and found myself with time on my hands. I picked up the notes and bits of scenes I had in a folder for Spymaster's Lady. I liked my characters. I liked the scenes. The plot was garbage. But I could write another plot.

"Let's run with this one," I said to myself.

Eighteen months later the Spymaster's Lady manuscript was finished.
 

4) What was your journey to publication?  

As I say, I finished Spymaster's Lady in mid 2005.  It was on the shelves in July 2008.  Three years.

First came the strange and horrible process of writing a query letter and a synopsis. And I started the next manuscript, because that's what you do when you are writing your query letters.

It was time to go agent hunting. I looked up the RWA list of agents who represented Historical Romance. I subscribed to Publisher's Marketplace. I bought Jeff Herman's Guide and the Writer's Guide to Literary Agents. I searched the web for the agents who represent my favorite authors.
I made spreadsheets. I googled agents.

I came up with a list of the five top agents I could possibly want. The dream agents. The A list.
I mailed out queries.  I guess it was August.

By the end of the month, I had three requests for the full manuscript. A month after that, I got 'the call' and signed immediately.
This was all Good, Excellent, and Scary.

The agent began sending the manuscript out to publishers.

And I started collecting rejections from major publishers. I got six or seven of them. Some found the plot unlikely; some already had a full list of Regency Historicals; several liked the book but didn't think they could sell a French-set historical. One editor pointed out that I seemed to have problems with grammar and usage. Was English my native language?

The agent said not to be discouraged. Finish the next manuscript, she said. Spymaster's Lady would sell, but it might not sell as the first book.

Then, in December, an editor moved to a most desirable publisher. The agent sent Spymaster's Lady to her.  On January 18 I sold the manuscript of Spymaster's Lady, (then called ANNEKA,) and a second, to-be-written manuscript, (that was JESSAMYN which became Lord and Spymaster,) in a two-book deal.

Spymaster's Lady hit the stands 18 months later.

photocredit.  The bathtub is supposed to be a gift from Napoleon to somebody in Louisian, so it's a period bathtub

Some questions

I received a few questions lately from a couple places.  Thought I'd share the answers here. This is the first two questions.

1) What's your process? Are you a plotter or does the story unfold as you write?

Both, I think.

Way back at the start, first thing, I dream up my characters. I get a sense of the story I want to tell about them.
Then I write a 'plot outline' that says what happens.
Then I sit down to do the long, discursive, inefficient, stiff, stupid, misspelled, repetitive rough draft.

So the first thing that gets written down is a stark little outline of the action. This is plot. This is What Has to Happen.
This 'plotting' is sketchy. Think of those three-line blurbs you get from the TV guide.

What the plot outline looks like:

Scene: The Bad Guys fire through the windows in Meeks Street and run away. Nobody gets hurt.
or
Scene: Annique and Grey go walking along the Dover Road. Something exciting happens.
or
Couple of scenes: Annique gets away from Grey and goes to England.


So first I have the Story in my head. 'Annique grows up. Annique must make a choice.'

Then I come up with a plot. The plot is the set of actions I use to tell that Story. The plot is how I pace the action and set it in logical sequences. The plot gives me a structure where problems get presented one-by-one and then solved one-by-one or stored up to get solved at the end.

Then, when I have a plot, I sit down and tell the Story inside the plot structure.

So I would 'plot' a set of scenes of Annique and Grey walking the Dover Road. I know this has to be an 'on stage' journey because the action is there to give me space to do Relationship Stuff. Also, I need to give the reader a sense of time and space passing.
I plot that, 'something exciting happens,' because the hero and heroine can't go all that distance all smooth and easy like a couple of UPS packages.

But I don't know that somebody takes a shot at Annique till I sit down to write the rough draft.

I don't go into the rough draft cold. Even while I'm writing along, I'll be using my leisure time when I'm washing the dishes and chopping onions to think about the scenes that lie ahead. I remind myself of the practical stuff I have to accomplish and the pacing needs. I shuffle possible places and characters back and forth in my head.

By the time I sit down to write the first rough draft of the scene, I have pictures and dialog. I can drop into the scene. I can go in there and throw words down.
But the rough draft continually tosses up stuff I didn't plan. I never saw it coming. Stuff that surprises the heck out of me.


2) Did the idea for THE SPYMASTER'S LADY arise from your love of the time period or did you research as you wrote?

I was familiar with the time and place.  Writing gave me an excuse to learn even more.

I knew I wanted to write genre Romance in the Napoleonic time period.
(Such sexy clothes.)
What I love about this era . . .
This two or three decades when the Eighteenth Century turned into the Nineteenth is the great watershed in how people in the Western World think about human rights and freedoms, about the importance of the individual.

There is a tremendous philosophical battle going on in this period. When the Declaration of Independence says -- "We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal." -- this is a New and Exciting Idea.

image attribution Blastmilk.

Progress on JUSTINE

I'm going to have to get used to calling this manuscript JUSTINE, instead of ADRIAN.

I'm 16,600 words into the first rough draft. 

Maybe this sounds like lots of words.  But not so much.   These are wild, whirling, mostly useless words that are me seeing the story in a blurry way and reporting on it very fast as the film runs by.

Most of the words will never make it into the final manuscript.  What the First Rough Draft mostly does is show the shape of the scenes.

First Rough Draft Progress:

Now I'm also about 4000 words into the 120,000 words that will make up the second draft.

Why I'm setting toe into the second draft . . .

Normally I'd finish Draft One all the way through before I started Draft Two,
but I needed chapters to send in with the book proposal, so I took the first four chapters of the rough draft and polished them up a bit.

Second Draft Progress:


The sun came in through the window this morning, so I thought I'd share with anyone who's clouded over today.

Technical Topics -- Using somebody else's words

Sometimes you want to use somebody else's words. 
Can you?  How do you?  And how do you tell everybody you've done this?


Couple or three thoughts here.

1) Copyright.

Public Domain: If you're quoting something that's in the public domain you don't have to get anyone's permission. Stuff before 1923 is almost always in the public domain.

Here's the skinny on copyright and fair use.
If you write, you should know this stuff.
Here's a chart on what's in the public domain.

Copyright Protected: If something is inside copyright protection, a couple dozen words from a book or movie can be used without permission. That is Fair Use. Poems and songs, on the other hand, just about cannot be quoted. The titles of poems and songs can be.

Phrases in common usage do not need permission, even if they were also lyrics of a song.

He pulled his fur hood up over his head. "You sure as hell don't need to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Phrases now in common usage that originated as the lyrics of songs do not need permission.

I came out of CrossStictches, clutching two huge sacks of fabric remnants. 
"That seems thorough."  But he opened the car door for me.
"Let's just say I am a material girl."


2) Plagiarism.

You're not going to do this on purpose, but you also want to avoid looking like you're stealing words.

-- If a character is obviously quoting something, you don't have to attribute it to avoid the appearance of plagiarism. There is a presumption that a character in the process of quoting is using language that is not the author's.

"Our revels now are ended." Blood seeped from the side of his mouth. "And out little life . . . " he coughed, trying to get breath into him, "is rounded by a . . . a sleep."

-- If the words are well known, you do not need to attribute them.

Professor Marvin was the burning bright tyger of the Physics faculty and his fearful symmetry tried the patience of many a grad student.

She picked up her drink and looked me straight in the eyes. "What you have to ask yourself, punk," she smiled, "is, 'Do you feel lucky?'"


In deciding whether this is well-known language, you may assume an educated audience.

3)  What to attribute

If your words are not a character quoting, not a borrowing made obvious from context, and not words recognizable to an educated reader,
then you should attribute.

You do this whether the words are in copyright or not.  If you got permission to quote copyright material, you mention this
If you have been influenced by someone else's ideas, it is graceful to acknowledge this.


4) How to attribute.

-- You can insert the information that this is a borrowed language into the story itself.

"My luv is like a red, red rose." He grinned. "Sweetly sprung."
"Don't drag Bobbie Burns into this. What did you do with the guard?"

-- If you have just lots and lots of this attribution to do and many many choice factoids to add and historical wonders to expound upon, you can put do this in notes at the end.
I would advise against trying out footnotes until you are multipubbed and have acquired a reputation for eccentricity.

-- If you have just a few attributions to make, put them in the acknowledgements.

-- You use language like:

Every reader will recognize Captain Nemo's Nautilus in my 'Deep Challenger'.

The words, "Debts must be paid. The books must balance." come from the incomparable storyteller Robert A Heinlein.

My robots, like many before them, follow the Three Rules of Robotics laid down by Isaac Asimov.

The paragraph beginning, "The American Revolution was one cocked-up mess of a dogfight . . ." is taken from Marc Sigusmund's 'A Manifesto for Trumpet and Pennywhistle.'

-- End notes are submitted along with the manuscript.
The acknowledgements page, like the dedication, can be sent in with the manuscript, or you can add them at the time of the copyedits. You will be prompted to do so by the wise and canny editorial assistant.

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.

Creativity

In the comment trail of the post below, the one on 'The odds of getting published,' I was nattering on about the creative process.  I have a certain stake in this, being in one of those particularly creative professions, like knitting or cooking or being a confidence trickster. 

So I pondered about process a bit.

Whether a writer comes up with cool-and-wonderful creative or three-day-old-mackerel creative, I think it's the same process.  That is, good writers, mediocre writers and downright poor writers probably all go about it in pretty much the same ways.  There's not one supergood process and fifty bad ones.

Being organizational here,
(I do love to sort and categorize,)
you got . . . hmmm . . . three paths to creation,
says I.

The Bricklayer Process. 

'I sketch the plan and get out my measuring tape and blue chalk line.  I keep laying bricks down till I have a barbecue.'

The Boys in the Basement Process. 

'My subconscious does the work.  I toss a hook down into my mind and pull up pictures and ideas.'

And the,

I Haz Got Muse Process. 

'There's a force that comes from outside.  If it comes to me, I write furiously.  When it doesn't, I can't write.'

Most writerly folk combine these methods, doing a bit of one and a bit of the other. 
It's not about being good writers or bad writers, skilled writers, hack writers, wildly unusual writers, commonplace and predictable writers, LitFic writers, Romance writers in upstate Maine, S.F. writers, or Steampunk writers with purple hair.  I think everybody uses roughly the same methods.

Though it occurs to me Mystery writers, being plot heavy, might tend to go more with the brick-and-mortar approach.
And LitFic writers may be more 'muse oriented', them being above the crass commercial need to create a comprehensible plot or deliver on deadline,
(Is this so?  I darkly suspect LitFic writers claim an innate superiority for the muse method by virtue of its being associated with The Gigantic Importantness of Teh Literary Fic.  Hah, says I.)

But I digress.

Anyhow,
if a person's creative process leans toward the bricklayer -- or they can learn to be creative in that way -- they've got a commercial writing process. 

When a writer leans towards having a muse -- they may be less commercial.  Writing to deadline gets iffy when you have to wait till Godot  the muse shows up.

I'd call myself 40% bricklayer and 60% Boys in the Basement.

I don't have any sense of an outside force at all.  The work is all me.

The whole 'muse thingum strikes me as slightly creepy, in fact. 

The creative part of writing feels like . . .
(I'd be happy to hear what anyone else's creative process feels like.)

I have a sense of myself as an island of awareness floating on a vast dark sea of unawareness.  Creation happens down there in the madness and dreams.

Up on the island I do the story organizing and the plot bricklaying and the chinking and tapping of individual words into place.

But the 'making up' of the story' . . . not so much.

The creative process is me settling down and trying to go to that, 'near sleep state.'  I build up a mental nugget of what I need.  I say to that ocean in my mind -- "I need to hear and see the scene where Hawker and Justine meet at the foot of the guillotine."

I let go.  I jump overboard and sink into this sea of translucent, formless crazy.  The process is dreaming. 
The process is watching
shimmerystrangecreatures swim by.  I grab some of them and yank on the rope to get pulled back up.

Then, at the top, safe on the dock again, I lay my catch out on the boards and turn over what I got.  I have to write this down before the flopping bright critters turn into clear water and leak out between the cracks.  Even when I pick 'em up for a good look, they're already running away through my fingers.

The good scenes, the ones that 'ring' right, come to me this way.

cat and mice cc attrib TanyaT, dog and cat image attrib GNU Wolf Howard

New Words

Reading here, The Lake Superior State University 2010 List of Banished Words.
They dislike; tweet, app, friend as a verb, shovel-ready, toxic assets, stimulus as in stimulus package, teachable moment, transparency in terms of public access, czar, bromance, sextexting, chillaxin', In these economic times, too big to fail, and Obama-prefix-suffix.

It's odd that I should be more flexible than a bunch of college kids . . .  but I actively like about half of these.

Tweet, app, and 'friend as a verb' are all cases where new technology has created new behavior. We need words to describe a new world.
These delight me.
I am especially pleased that the old, old word 'friend' is not weakened by this new use.

I'm also a fan of technical jargon.

Now, I may not be fond of 'deplane' or 'preboarding', which are about as ugly as words can be, but most technical jargon -- 'boot', 'baby-catcher', 'WIP', 'malware', 'just-in-time', 'shrinkage' -- is wonderful. Working people create useful, thumping, earthy, in-the-field, kinda words.

While I haven't come across it myself, shovel-ready strikes me as one of these useful terms. It's colorful and clear. I can think of several phrases that mean the same thing, but not a better single word.

Toxic assets -- technical jargon -- comes from those hands-on economists-in-the-field. Toxic asset has a limited and specific meaning. Why spend ten words describing this concept when two will do? I can't understand the objection.

Stimulus, when reffing the Stimulus Package components, is also technical jargon, and useful in that narrow technical sense. It's confusing when anyone applies it beyond that immediate and specific usage. I wish they had come up with a more distinct jargon word for the bill.

Teachable moment, OTOH, is pseudo-jargon. It's 'invented' jargon introduced by folks whose job is not to do work, but to write about doing work and invent jargon for it. Bad phrase. Bad Bad.  Nauseating language.

Transparency is not a new word, of course, but a hazy and poorly defined usage of a lovely old one. That haziness is deliberate. Transparent is the word we use to speak of public access when we do not want to use words like honesty or openness.
Not an admirable word in this guise, but a useful one that has no exact replacement.

Moving to those words and phrases I agree we could do quite well without ...

Czar, to mean 'maven' or 'head honcho' or 'high muckety-muck', was apt in its early use, wearisome now that it has become diluted and routine. We will eventually have Parks and Recreation Czars in every small town. Refreshment Committee Czars at the church social.

I wish this usage would just disappear. I have many wishes about words. If wishes were horses, I would  be trampled to death every time I opened a book.

Sextexting will, I believe, disappear as a redundancy. Sexxing, however, is here to stay. Bromance will be, thank God, temporary. Metrosexual will probably last. Chillaxin' became dork-speak immediately after coinage. This will not be recognized by the people who use it.

Catch phases like, in these economic times, too big to fail, and Obama-prefix-suffix merely remind us that folks who write about politics are not very original. This flock of honking geese will fly overhead and be replaced by the next lot.

Technical Topic -- The Odds of Getting Published

I was looking at the question  --
What are the odds of getting published?

And the answer, of course, is that if you write a super manuscript that makes folks laugh and cry and forget to feed the hamster,
the odds are very good indeed.

Which is an answer not so much brimming with The Useful, is it?
. . . Since it's hard to figure out how to write such a manuscript and if you know the secret would you please share it with me.

But when folks ask, 'What are the odds?'
They are really asking --
"Do I have a chance of getting published?
Is this is a wild, impossible dream
or hard but doable?

Is getting published like the odds of getting struck by lighning, or more like the odds of playing professional football, or is it an abducted-by-aliens thing, or what?

Answering in a simple, literal manner ... I'd point to  here where a reader for a literary agent looks at 'hundreds and hundreds' of slushpile submissions to find two writers who can be signed. 
Not so good odds, overall.

Trying to be helpful, I could go on to talk about football tryouts and being 6'6", 280 lbs and spending 40 hours a week thumping heads.
Or about standing on high ridges in thunderstorms holding a long metal pole.
I don't feel so competent addressing the whole abducted-by-aliens scenario.

But let's say I riff on the unspoken question.
Which is -- 'What are MY chances?'

It is very hard to get published. There's a lot of competition.

--You have to be persistent. (This is in your control.)

--You have to work your butt off. (This is in your control.)

--You have to learn your craft. (This is in your control.)

--You are more likely to succeed if you consciously produce something in a marketable field. (This is in your control.)

--You have to write better than what is on the shelves. (This is only partially in your control.)

-- You need an innate ability to write. (This is not in your control.)

--You have to be lucky. (This is not in your control.)


Maybe, 'What are the odds?' is not a useful question.
 'How can I improve the odds?' is.

We begin

My mind goes to a strange place when I begin imagining a new story.

I embark upon JUSTINE.

I push away from the shore and see where the winds take me.

I have a map on board somewhere here. And a compass.

I'll consult them eventually.

I use the minutes when I'm falling asleep to see the story. This is a rich time for imagining, of course, but I don't remember it all.
Good stuff, lost.
Maybe it shows up someday in the writing. I hope so anyway.

In my dreams, I'm keeping a blog. I see the words on the screen. I edit. I write. And there's a story I'm working on in my dream.
So weird.

In something approaching IRL . . .

I'm making the jump from my beloved old computer to a new one. These are two identical machines, so it's like some schizophrenic alter ego that looks the same but doesn't have the defaults set right.

I have a newer version of Internet Explorer.
It annoys me.

Next on the agenda is to move everything from the old machine over to the new machine.
It is as if I were Robinson Crusoe unloading the wreck of the ship before it is finally washed away, salvaging one more barrel of nails. Rescuing one shovel, one coil of rope.

I put this dreadful day off till I was finished with Forbidden.

The old machine -- four or five years old now -- became more and more unreliable. I'd be typing away and some keys would stop working. Sometimes the A and the Z would become inert. Sometimes the shift key. Sometimes the M. One never knew.

So exciting.

And the whole shebang turned off at random intervals, taking all my work down with it.

Like the copyedits I was dealing with
under deadline.

These things are sent to try us.

So now I must get the new machine up to speed
and do the galleys.
And the kitchen floor . . . . . . must eventually be washed.

And I'm starting on JUSTINE.

Copy edits done on MAGGIE (Forbidden Rose)

We're finished.

I say goodbye to Justine and Guillaume LeBreton, (who is William Doyle) and Maggie and Hawker.

Though I'll get back to them in a week or so when I start plotting the JUSTINE manuscript . . . which used to be the ADRIAN manuscript in my head but is now Justine's story.

As to Forbidden Rose and all I wanted to accomplish . . .

it's either in there, or it's not.

This post-copyedit period is when I walk around muttering, "I could have made it really good if I had another month."

I'm probably fooling myself.

Technical Topic -- Of Historical Hyphens

Let me say right off that this is a posting only for the linguistic and philological of heart.

Discerning reader Annie posted this question:

. . .What most interested me about your post, though, is what you say about 1790s usage.

In previous posts, you've touched on when and why using a slightly anachronistic term makes more sense than rigidly adhering to contemporary vocabulary. Given your attention to detail, I'm not surprised you pay the same attention to punctuation. But I am wondering how you decide when, for example, leaving a space between counter and revolutionary helps to keep the reader in the world of the novel and when it might be distracting.

I acknowledge that folks whose pasts do not include several years deciding when to hyphenate are probably delightfully oblivious to the author’s choices in this regard, but I'm still curious.


To which I reply …

The most important thing about all this word choice is -- I’m not writing 1790s language. I couldn't, any more than I could write authentic Shakespeare-era language. My readers, (they may number in the four digits by now,) do not expect me to reproduce real 1790s-speak.
If they want the authentic they can go to Walpole and Richardson.

I 'hum a few bars and I'll fake it' my way along. You could say I’m gelding modern English by cutting off all the Victorian constructions. Then, happily mixing metaphors, I slap on a light coat of 1790s slang.

But when the reader goes, 'Boing! 20th Century American phrase!' I've failed her.
(When Lazarus says, "That's a sweet idea," that was written before it became American slang. Not my fault. Not my fault.)

I write Standard English. I avoid hitting the reader over the head with big clunky modernisms, but I don't try to reproduce the 'voice' or the word choice of an Eighteenth Century writer.
I make a plentitude of mistakes.
Though I don't indulge in outright erroneous language when I happen to see myself doing it.
Except sometimes when I cheat.

ETA:  The rest of some tiresome commentary on the use of historical language in a 2010 book  is below the cut, where it is doubtless happy to stay.

Copyedits of Forbidden

Coming down to the wire on this.

Have I ever indicated by some slight subtle bitty hint how much I hate and despise and abominate the Chicago Manual of Style? Loathe and abhor it? It is a subject that does not leave me gravelled for lack of synonyms.

Ok. Why do we use double quotes for emphasis?

As in --
After the court martial, she was "out of commission" for about a year.

Has nobody noticed that double quote marks are being used in great numbers by dialog?

Single quote marks, on the other hand, hang around at the pool all day drinking Sex on the Beach.

Has anybody noticed how confusing double quotes are when we want to emphasize stuff in the narration surrounding dialog.
So why don't we use single quote marks for this? Huh? Huh?

And colors. I am just steamed purple by the stupid no-hyphen-in-colors bloody rule. A blue and white set of dishes. A yellow green field of wheat.

Are we richer, linguistically, because we don't use the hyphen? Are we, like, saving the hyphens for something important?

Right now my annoyance centers on certain French usages, which is not really CMOS's fault, but I will be mad at them anyway.

Sans-cullotes and counter revolutionary are the 1790s terminology.

Sansculottes and counterrevolutionary are NOT.
They're mostly MODERN. But they're in Websters and thus the pure quill as far as CMOS is concerned, (See, I got a swipe in at CMOS.) Webster's being, if not God, at least a theoretical construct of Infinite Wisdom.

So I've been stetting counterrevolutionary like mad all through the text.
Bet you didn't know counter revolutionary was a 1790s word.

In Japanese

I am in Japanese.

This is so wonderful.

I do hope this is a good translation. It's not just that I want Spymaster's Lady to be available to readers in Japan.
It's ...
(Ok. I'll admit it.)
I want somebody to read it
and say -- Manga!!
Yes. I want Annique to be a manga.
I have many unrealized dreams.
This is a particularly intelligent cover. Look at those wonderfully symbolic white cliffs of Dover. The scene where Annique comes ashore at Dover is not just a random point in the book. It's the division between dark and light. The turning of the action.
And the cliffs give a sense of the 'fortress' England presented to any invasion from France.

As to Annique . . .
This is not the face I picture for her,
but it's somebody I like the looks of.
It is here, at Amazon Japan, ready for all your Japanese Christmas shopping needs.
And see Spymaster's Lady visiting the Mejiro Gardens in Tokyo. Here.
Sherry Thomas tells me the title translates as The White Cliffs of Dover on the Other Side.
This, I like. Oh yes.

Off to California

Off to California to visit family,
and friends,
and more family.
Yes!!!

Technical Topics -- Page One

I was thinking about the first page.

The first page is a semaphore where the author sends the reader messages. It's a place of signals, flags run up the mast, secret handshakes.

What are we saying, as writers, on page one?