Technical Topic -- The Regency Post Office

This is a very small historical tidbit post here.

It's the sort of thing I'd normally put into Word Wenches,
except that I find myself without the patience to ask permission for all the images I want to use.  I do not like to add links to a Wench posting because links do not last forever or sometimes even into the next month.

Anyhow, it's 1802.  (This is the Pax manuscript.)  We're in a country village near Cambridge -- the fictional Brodemere.  My character Cami looks over some correspondence that's landed on her desk. 

She picks up a letter that's come all the way across England, from London.

NOT from 1802 for oh so many reasons

The first thing you -- as a visitor from the distant future perched comfortably in her head -- would notice, is that there's no envelope.

Let me show you what the letter would not look like.
It wouldn't look like this over here to the right:

Her letter wouldn't be an envelope, with a pretty colored stamp, cancelled across the stamp by the post office. 

Envelopes on postal service delivery are still a generation in the future.   In fact, they weren't mass produced till 1845.   The post office charged by the sheet and an envelope counted as an extra sheet.  This is yet another piece of history driven by government regulation.

No stamp.  The first gummed postage stamp -- I'm talking here about a bit of paper you apply to a letter rather than stamping ink on with a big ole inked stamp -- is the 'Penny Black'.
It dates to 1840.

That's Queen Victoria on the Penny Black, btw.


"Wait," you say, for you have been paying attention.
"No envelopes?" you say.  "That's so weird," you say.


Well, yes and no.
I think letters often did often come in envelopes.
Just not letters delivered by the post office. 

Folks sending the footman crosstown or the groom cross country to hand-deliver invitations and secret love notes and blackmail requests probably made envelopes from their fancy writing paper in an origami sorta way.  Spies sending secrets in the diplomatic pouch probably used envelopes, and rich folk who didn't count the cost, and, I suspect, noblemen and MPs who franked their mail and got it free.

Mail was not universally envelope-less, IMHO.  But if it came by post, it often was.


Anyhow, there you are sitting at Cami's desk and you've remarked there's no envelope and no pretty colored postage stamps.


Next, you will note that everything is handwritten, (with a quill).  This will not surprise you since nobody's got a printing press at home and  I need hardly point out that the typewriter is an 1860s invention.
Third class junk mail is not even a bumf on the horizon.

Crossed. No relation to cross-eyed.

You may see an indecipherable mess of writing like that to the side.  Thrifty folks 'crossed' their letter so they didn't need to pay for an extra sheet.    They wrote first one way and then the other.
I would probably strangle somebody who did this to me.

What next?

Okay.

When Cami picks up her envelopeless letter from out of town, the paper -- quite possibly a single sheet -- is folded in three and sealed with red wax.
Because that's what you do when you don''t have an envelope.

Folded letter with red seal

The wax might -- probably did -- have a seal pressed into it.  This could be a complex family crest or a simple design, like an initial.

The theory was the unbroken seal proved the letter hadn't been opened.  Let us all stop to appreciate the delightful naiveté of those who bought into that particular fiction.

What you need to seal a letter

The set up for applying seals looked somewhat like this to the left here.   Camille would have most of this stuff sitting around on her desk or in one of the drawers.

Coming to the paper itself:

"Hand made papers were made in molds, hence one could readily observe the paper marks and ribbing from the parallel wires in the mold. Often these “laid” papers also bore distinctive watermarks."
 From 'Jane Austen's World'

'Laid paper' is made by catching linen pulp onto a flat, closely wired sieve and letting it dry.  The resulting paper retains a faint cross hatch pattern.

I have saved the best for last.

When a letter travelled through the postal service, it acquired postmarks.  A letter heading from London to Cambridge and then to the fictional Brodemere would collect several.

There'd be a colored circular postmark from London, giving the date it was mailed.  The letter, in 1802, would go by mail-coach to Cambridge (I'm fairly sure) and there's be another postmark from Cambridge as the destination post office.  There might be a square stamp showing fees or postage added during the trip.  Mileage might be stamped -- but more usually handwritten -- in pencil.  The final cost might be written in pencil likewise.  Toll fees might be noted, again in pencil. 


At the excellent Bath Postal Museum we find Here, here, and here Bath to London 'straight line' letters from 1801, 1807  and 1805.  A letter to Andover in 1808 is here.

For further perusal, if you are just fascinated by postal stampage:


Here is a franked 1822 letter from Kilmarnock Scotland to Isleworth Middlesex that shows several interesting features.
.

A complex seal for some letter

This one has a crowned 'Free' handstamp of December 2, indicating the recipient in Middlesex was entitled to receive mail without paying postage.  That's the 'franked letter' we read about.  Seems to work for both sender and recipient, which I didn't know.
On this, we see a 'Kilmarnock - 427' stamp, showing the mileage.  That would have been struck upon sending.  And there's a Glasgow transit stamp with the date November 29, 1822.  


Another very relevant set of postmarks is about halfway down the page here.   Scroll down till you reach the post titled, 'Entire written 22 September 1803 from Fakenham Norfolk to Andover'.  This has a date stamp, and mileage and price written in pencil.

(I've seen some indication that mileage marks record the distances to London.  The recipient post office didn't try to calculate the byways and pathways from all points in the kingdom.  Charges were simply based on (a) how far from sender to London and then (b) how far from London to the recipient.
This doesn't sound very fair, frankly)

n.b The next letter in that discussion is sealed with black wax, because it's a condolence letter.

Moving on ...

about halfway down the page here, in the post beginning "Heck I'll pay you $3 Brummie", is an 1829 letter with two colored handstamps and two penciled notes.  A post or two further down is the same letter laid flat to show the sender's address.
I can't tell for sure, but it looks like the sender's name might be folded inside when the letter is sent ...? 

That whole six-page thread is interesting if you're dealing with Regency-era or Victorian correspondence. 

London postman 1830

Here is an 1839 cross-London letter.


Finally ...  How much did delivery of Cami's London letter cost?

Letter Rates for 1801 for a single sheet, within Great Britain

Not exceeding 15 miles				3d.
15	to	30	miles	4d.
30	to	50	"	5d.
50	to	80	"	6d.
80	to	120	"	7d.
120	to	170	"	8d.
170	to	230	"	9d.
230	to	300	"	10d.

This is from The Development of Rates of Postage, by A. D. Smith

Anyhow, that's about 8d for the London letters.  Less for the ones from Cambridge.

Technical Topic -- The Elements of Writing

Somebody asked elsewhere, "How do I write a Romance?" and "How do I write, anyway?"

I was thinking what advice I'd give someone who was just struggling with the first draft of the first manuscript.

What would I say if I wasn't going to say,
"Why don't you become a lawyer or an accountant or the manager of a sporting goods shop instead since that is going to pay a lot better and your evenings will not be filled with angst and scribbling and desperate searches for a word that is not 'suspicion' but sounds a little like it and means something close and what the devil is it ... ah skepticism!"  That kind of evening.

Anyhow, I was trying to come up with something important and basic to the tendons and muscle of writing and also useful and a good first step into the business of thinking like a writer.  (Bit of a mixed metaphor there, isn't it?)  

Since I hate to waste advice, as I give it so rarely *cough* (not)... I am dragging the advice I gave there, back here.

What I said:

The first and best advice to a beginning writer is -- Read.

Read for fun, of course.  Read widely.  Read well.  (i.e. read crap but don't just read crap books.)  Read the best of your genre.  Read outside your genre.

But also read, not as a reader, but as a writer.  

This is maybe somewhat like looking at scenes

Since you are going to write Romance genre I will send you to pick yourself up a couple of books by Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz. They should be available in your local used book store. Try for short books, something not as thick as your thumb.

Go invest in a set of highlighters -- yellow, red, green, blue etc.

After you've skimmed the book, go back and look at the first scene in Chapter Three. You're going to mark the beginning of the scene by drawing a pen line across the page.

Scenes are the building blocks of the writing and that's why we're cutting one out and looking at it.
Since you're maybe at the beginning of analyzing books, you can ask yourself -- "what makes a scene?"

Speaking very generally, a scene is in one setting; it deals with one problem or intention; and the main character of the scene is there from beginning to end.  When you go somewhere else and start doing something else or you switch to another focus character, you're in a different scene. Generally.

Writers, being wonderful altruistic folks, are apt to put a little space at the end of a scene or change the chapter altogether.

So. Go hunt down and mark the other end of the scene.
How long is this puppy? (Pages in paperback average 250 words per page.)

I have a JAK in hand, Copper Beach. Chapter Three is one scene, a talking heads scene between the protagonist and a boat captain. It's seven pages which is roughly 1750 words.  In JAK's The Family Way, Chapter Three is 22 pages, 5500 words.  J.D. Robb's ( Nora Robert's) Reunion in Death is a less straightforward scene because it starts with a technically beautiful flashback, but it's sixteen pages, 4000 words.

One reason to look at the length of a scene is that a common problem with early manuscripts is the scenes are too short. They're too short because they leave out or shortchange some elements of writing.

So we're going to mark those elements of writing and study them squirming on pins, metaphorically speaking. 

Anyhow.  Let us mark.

Red, green, blue, and the ever-popular fuschia

Mark all the dialog -- the stuff inside quote marks -- in red.
Mark all internals -- that is, when we see the character's thoughts -- in blue.
Mark anything that shows movement of the body in space -- sit, turn, walk, light a cigarette, shoot somebody -- in green.
Mark description -- color, smell, placement of objects, landscape, shape of somebody's nose -- in yellow.

Anything that's concerned with stuff happening outside of the scene can be fuschia or whatever you have left. 
Fuschia is for backstory. 
Fuschia is for fascinating factoids about the Lost Kingdom of Horowitz or how the ion-drive works.

Sometimes this outsider wordage will be a narrative intrusionary. Often this out-of-the-here-and-now comes in internals. And there's fuschia chat between the characters where they inexplicably tell each other what they both already know.
What all this fuschia boils down to, though, is the writer talking to the reader, passing along information.

So if the character says, "That's a pretty flower," it gets marked in red.

Looking at the elements of story. Putting them together

If the character goes on to think, A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her? It gets marked in blue.

If the character knocks the ash off his cigarette, it's green.

If the character then thinks, We had roses in the garden of the priory, when I was seven or I'm going back there someday to root them out of the ground or My mother was a great gardener or I could grow roses if I had to, that might be fuschia.
It's not in the here-and-now of the story.


Let's say you start out with:

"That's a pretty flower," he said, taking a joint out of his wallet. A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her?  Has she found herself another werewolf? He didn't care much for that possibility. He patted through his pockets. He had matches in here somewhere. He remembered . . . Mother had been a great gardener. She loved the flowers more than her children. We had roses everywhere in the garden of the priory, between the wolfsbane and the foxgloves, back when I was seven. A few red petals had fallen from the bouquet onto the white tablecloth. They were the color of blood.

Interpreting the elements, you might end up with something like:

"That's a pretty flower," he said, taking a joint out of his wallet. A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her?  Has she found herself another werewolf? He didn't care much for that possibility. He patted through his pockets. He had matches in here somewhere. He remembered . . . Mother had been a great gardener. She loved the flowers more than her children. We had roses everywhere in the garden of the priory, between the wolfsbane and the foxgloves, back when I was seven. A few red petals had fallen from the bouquet onto the white tablecloth. They were the color of blood.

The 'parts of writing' -- dialog, action, description, even the excursion out of the scene and to another place and time  -- work together.
NR and JAK are masters of balancing these elements.

After you've done a dozen scenes from NR and JAK, go back to some of your own work and apply those highlighters. 

The Legitimacy of Excellent Genre

I was thinking today of how we're tempted to draw a line between 'serious writing' and 'fluff', and then hand over way too much credit to 'serious writing', which is understandable in some ways, though I'm rather fond of fluff and don't like to see it dismissed so.

Where I get a little stroppy is when we identify good writing as literary, which is what we're in danger of doing when we start talking about 'serious writing' in the genres.

Now to me, Literary Fiction is writing that experiments with the forms and conventions of literature.  Telling story is not essential.  Consideration of important themes and the human condition is. 
(You ever notice how LitFic doesn't make you laugh much?  Ah.  Thought you had.)

Genre Writing -- or Popular Writing, Commercial Writing, or whatever you call it -- doesn't generally play around with the forms and conventions of writing.  In genre, story is primary.  It's central and essential.   Exploration of important themes and consideration of the human condition ... optional. 
Some of it's even funny.

There's good genre fiction and bad genre fiction, of course, just as there's good LitFic and bad LitFic.
(And I will venture to say that bad writing with pretensions is worse than ordinary, run-of-the-mill bad writing with Scottish Lairds romping half naked through the gorse bushes.)

But being well written doesn't turn genre fiction into LitFic any more than being poorly written turns LitFic into genre. 
They're different beasts. 

If somebody wants to use 'serious fiction' or 'legitimate fiction' or 'legitlit' to describe excellent writing in a few selected genres, there's no reason he shouldn't do so . . . 

. . . though I gotta say we already have a term for excellent popular fiction.  We call these books 'excellent popular fiction'.  We call them 'great genre stories'.  We use the term for books that are well and skillfully realized, but resolutely oriented toward storytelling and accessibility.  These are our best.  These are the pride of the genre.  They reflect glory on everyone who writes it. 
They're ours.  So there.  (Thumbs nose.)

I don't like critics coming in and trying to sneak our best genre books out the side door into something marked 'serious literature'.


The notion that a well-written genre book wins the prize of no longer being genre and that genre is crap because there are no well-written books in it is as circular as the Eye on London or the moon or some other big, noticeably circular thing.   


Says, I, speaking from my collection of infallible opinion that I just happen to have in this bag here.

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.

Word verification

Folks -- for years I've let the comments roll without word verification or moderator intervention. 

In the last couple months I've been deluged with spam.  Ten or twenty hits a day. The Blogger spam filter catches 90% or them, but I still have to track down the others.  It takes time and effort and it annoys me no end.


So.  Comments will now require word verification.  I apologize.  I hate to do this to you.

Those Lively Regency Streets

Regency streets would have been fairly active and interesting places, what with knife grinders, pot  menders and chimney sweeps, milkmaids and streets sellers hawking everything from cherries to hot codlins -- not to mention the miscellany of enterprising pickpockets and cut purses and those generally operating on the windy side of the law.



Exciting, those Regency streets.

'Hot Codlins' are roasted apples, in case you didn't know and were wondering.


There was a little woman, as I've been told,

Who was not very young, nor yet very old;

Now this little woman her living got

By selling codlins, hot, hot, hot!



But I digress.


Along with all those buyers and sellers, intent upon the mystery of commerce, there were artists out there hustling a living.


You had your street musicians.  Most often, they'd be playing something portable, like a violin or a hurdy gurdy.  I do not feel impelled to discuss what a violin is, but hurdy gurdy's are kinda interesting.   



Drop over to read the rest at Word Wenches.  Here.
Still to come ... Hurdy gurdys, Raree shows and Punch and Judy.

Caroling, Caroling in the Regency

This little screed on Christmas music comes about because I don't listen to commercial radio.  That is because such channels are full of people trying to sell me used cars or banking services or beer and after a while I want to go over and beat my radio to death with a stick.

But durn it, at Christmas I want to listen to Christmas music, so I ventured out into the musical world beyond PBS.  And it was painful.  After I had not beaten my radio to flinders for several days, ('Flinders' is a fine old word, popular in the Regency, and it means splinters or fragments.  It's of Dutch or Scandinavian origin and always plural.) I decided to compile a playlist and the heck with the radio.

But all that got me thinking about Christmas carols.


Go here to read the rest at Word Wenches, though there are no more pictures of cats, alas.

The Christmas Playlist

Christmas Playlist

All I Want For Christmas Is You ... Mariah Carey
Angels We Have Heard On High ... Sixpence none the Richer
Blue Christmas  ... Elvis Presley
Carol Of The Bells ... John Williams
Christmas Don't Be Late ... Alvin and the Chipmunks
Coventry Carol ... Loreena McKennitt
Deck The Rooftop ...Glee Cast
Do You Hear What I Hear ... Destiny's Child
Driving Home For Christmas ...Chris Rea
Feliz Navidad ... Jose Feliciano
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas ... Frank Sinatra
Here Comes Santa Claus ... Gene Autry
I Believe In Father Christmas ... Greg Lake
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus  ...  Jimmy Boyd
I'll Be Home For Christmas ... Bing Crosby
It Came Upon A Midnight Clear  ... Josh Groban
It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas ... Johnny Mathis
Joy To The World ... Aretha Franklin           
Last Christmas ...  George Michael
Let It Snow! ... Ella Fitzgerald
Little Saint Nick ... The Beach Boys   
Mary, Did You Know ... Clay Aiken
Merry Christmas ... Chuck Berry
O Holy Night ... Celtic Women
Rockin' Around The Cristmas Tree ... Brenda Lee
Santa Baby ... Kylie Minogue
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town ... Frank Sinatra
Silent Night ... Elvis Presley   
Silver Bells ... Olivia Newton-John
Twelve Days Of Christmas  ... Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters
We Need A Little Christmas ... Angela Lansbury
What Child Is This? ... Charlotte Church
White Christmas ...The Drifters   
Wonderful Christmastime ... Paul McCartney


(All of these are available on Iomoio except for the Anglea Lansbury song. I got that on iTunes.)

German Forbidden Rose

My German translation of Forbidden Rose will be out in May 2013. 

Isn't it lovely?

Technical topic -- The Regency East End

Someone asks --

In re the Regency East End ... Would you happen to have any book recommendations?




Indeed I do:

Berm, Chaim, London's East End, (mostly late Victorian Information.)

Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, Black London: Life before Emancipation.

Holmes, Thomas, London's Underworld.  here. 

Low, Donald, The Regency Underworld.

Victorian East London Dore

Mayhew, Henry, Mayhew's Characters.   (See also Quennell, Peter ed, London's Underworld.  This is a selection from Mayhew and available used and cheap.  Mayhew is written mid-century but info is earlier.  A lot of Mayhew's work is on the net. For instance --  here. )

Rose, Millicent, The East End of London. (I don't have this one myself, so I can't vouch for it, but I keep meaning to look it up in a library.)

Two Citizens, How to Live in London.  here.

Have a look at the maps here and here.


Here's a Victorian account:

We dismiss our cab: it would be useless in the strange, dark byeways, to which we are bound: natives of which will look upon us as the Japanese looked upon us the first European travellers in the streets of Jeddo. The missionary, the parish doctor, the rent collector (who must be a bold man indeed), the policeman, the detective, and the humble undertaker, are the human beings from without who enter this weird and horrible Bluegate Fields. 

We arrived at Whitechapel Police Station, to pick up the superintendent of savage London. He had some poor specimens - maundering drunk - in his cells already - and it was hardly nine o'clock. 

We plunge into a maze of courts and narrow streets of low houses - nearly all the doors of which are open, showing kitchen fires blazing far in the interior, and strange figures moving about. 

At dark corners, lurking men keep close to the wall; and the police smile when we wonder what would become of a lonely wanderer who should find himself in these regions unprotected. "He would be stripped to his shirt" was the candid answer - made while we threaded an extraordinary tangle of dark alleys where two men could just walk abreast, under the flickering lamps jutting from the ebon walls, to mark the corners.       Jerrold Blanchard, London: A Pilgrimage 1872

I feel like I gotta get up on one of my hobbyhorses here.

London workmen Victorian

The most important thing about the rookeries of London in 1802 -- and the Roman tenements in 79 AD and the slums of SE Washington DC in 1960 -- is that the denizens of the place were 'at home'.  They weren't dwelling in some landscape of horror. 

And they were ordinary folk.  The men and women in these stacked-up, decrepit buildings and dirty streets were ordinary, well-meaning, hard-working people, not monsters.  The violent gangs hanging out on street corners were a dangerous minority who preyed on and were hated by everyone else.  
 

Clothes sellers, late C19

When the heroine makes a wrong turn and ends up in a bad neighborhood, she hasn't fallen into a pit of vipers.  Those people passing her on the street, the ones living three flights up in every building, are no better nor worse than the well-dressed crowd she'd meet in Mayfair.  Her maidservant grew up a block to the left.  Her cook has a brother living down at the end of the alley and visits him every Sunday.  Your heroine's problem is not that the streets are populated with slavering hyenas.  It's that she's conspicuous. 

In My Lord and Spymaster I try to show the heroine as someone who comes from the mean streets, who understands them, who recognizes the dangers but doesn't see the place as some filthy hell filled with demons.

St Giles, in the Regency. See the streetlamp

The alley to the right was Dark Passage--and wasn't that a fine descriptive name?  To the left was Dead Man's Way.  Another piece of poetry.  When she was a kid she'd run this warren barefoot.  She knew these streets, knew every thin trickle of an alley that ran into Katherine Lane.  She'd been born in a grim little attic a dozen streets to the north.  Time was, she chatted friendly and easy with every beggar and pimp on the Lane.  She could have ducked into any of these taverns and been welcome to dry out by the fire.  Now she was a stranger.  Not Jess, any more.  Now she was 'Miss Whitby' and she didn't belong.  

and

From the outside, all rookeries look the same, but some are more dangerous than others. 
Ludmill Street was peaceable in its rough way.  Safe enough, if you knew what you were doing.  When a pair of Irishman approached, making monetary offers, she snapped back, sharp, in Italian.  They left her alone, thinking she belonged to the Italians.  There were lots of hot-tempered Italians in this section who didn't like even their whores approached by Irishmen.  A few hundred yards further on, she sent an Italian boy on his way with a Gaelic curse.  Lots of hot-tempered Irishmen in this quarter, too.  

When she got to the Limehouse, to Asker Street, it would be considerably more dangerous.  She'd be unwise to visit alone.   

Every illustration we have of the East End of London from the Regency period is someone from outside, making a point with his picture or his description.  Saying as much about himself as he does about what he's reporting.  Hogarth's Gin Lane is propaganda.  Propaganda from the good guys, but still, a selection of detail to make a point. Bob Dylan's 'Propaganda all is phony' sums it up.


How this relates to writing --  I'm good with 'she wandered into a bad section of town' trope as a reasonable way to put the heroine in peril.  But I regret when these scenes imply that the poor of London were a seething cauldron of evil into which she had incautiously been tipped.  I dislike the: 'they look like me and are well-dressed = good; They look different and are poor = rabid animals' equation because it strikes too close to attitudes from our own era. 

This is Bond Street.  Not as fancy as we imagine it.

If I wanted to research a scene in the East End in 1800 . . .   Yes, I'd go to books and learn the geography of the place and the physical conditions and the particular 1800-ish habits of the local criminals.   But I''d want to think about the bad sections of a modern city and the people who live there and how I'd represent the adventures of someone who walking into those streets.  When I exaggerate for high drama -- what am I saying about my character and myself?  When we're writing about the past, we're also writing about the present.

. . . much later ETA: 
I got a review on a short story of mine that said -- paraphrasing here -- "Your heroine falls on hard times and works in Whitechapel scrubbing floors.  I can't believe that.  Is 'scrubbing floors' supposed to be a euphemism?"
The implication is, all the thousands of young women in Whitechapel were whores.
The implication is, there were no respectable poor living in Whitechapel.
The implication is, poverty = depravity.

When we look at the past, we see our opinions and expectations reflected back at us.  
    

Booty Tuesday --Kristen Callihan's Firelight

Carrying home booty

This is Booty Tuesday and, as is my wont, I am giving away absolutely free with no strings attached, wonderful books.

Signed.

This week is your chance to win a SIGNED copy of Kristen Callihan's first book, Firelight.  Those of you who are particularly alert in these matters will know Firelight was just listed by Library Journal as one of the ten best Romance books of 2012.  (Click on that to see the Library Journal entry which is very interesting.)  Callihan is sharing the limelight with folks like Nora Roberts, Loretta Chase, Grace Burrowes, Cecelia Grant, Sherry Thomas and Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

Cool, huh.  Are you going to tell me you haven't read Kristen Callihan yet?

Oh dear.  But, wait -- we can remedy that.  This is Booty Tuesday.  Book-winning may be in your future.

From the book:

"Why do you wear that mask?"

"Asks the woman whose beauty might as well be a mask."

"Pardon me?"

The immobile black mask simply stared back, floating like a terrible effigy over broad shoulders.

"What is beauty or ugliness but a false front that prompts man to make assumptions rather than delving deeper.  Look at you."  His hand gestured toward her face.  "Not a flaw or distortion of line to mar that perfect beauty.  I have seen your face before, miss.  Michelangelo sculpted it from cold marble three hundred years ago, his divine hand creating what men would adore."  He took a step closer.  "Tell me, Miss Ellis, do you not use that beauty as a shield, keeping the world at bay so that no one will know uour true nature."

"Bastard."

They have this kinda adversarial relationship, these two.

To be eligible to win Firelight, write and post a poem in the comment thread of this post. 

Use one of the following words from the cover:

Kristen, Callihan, firelight, fire, light, great, price, talent, sexual, tension, jaw, drop, plots, weave, brilliant, dark, darkest, London, series, flame, ignite. woman, torment, plague, birth, strange, powerful, gift, entire, life, struggle, contend, exceptional, abilities, innocent, irreversible, mistake, family, fortune, decimate, forced, nefarious, nobleman. burn, eternity

Your poem can be a 
Limerick
Haiku    (traditional or non-traditional)
Rhymed couplet
Quatrain  
blank verse
or any other rhyme or poetry form you fancy.  I am not particular.

I'll pick one lucky commenter (US and Canada only, sorry) from the comment trail on Saturday.

You can also buy Firelight here should you not be feeling poetical.  Overseas folks can buy Kristen's latest book, Winterblaze, from Book Depository, here.   

EDITED TO ADD:

Booty Tuesday has TWO books to offer this week.
One signed copy of Firelight
And one signed ARC (That's advanced reading copy.  It's the first, first, first look at the book in print) of Kristen's new book, Winterblaze.

There will be two chances.  The first is for folks who have written a poem and it's for the best poem.
The winner gets to choose which book she wants.

The second chance -- this one a simple drawing -- is for the remaining book, whichever it is -- and both folks who write poems and those who just comment will be entered in that one.

So if you really, really really can't write a poem, you still have a chance to win a book.

And if you can write a poem, you have two chances.

I feel as though I've made that very complicated, but it's quite simple really.

Self Publishing versus the 'Big Guys' Publishing

I'm following yet another discussion of whether one should self-publish or publish with a Major Publisher.  And I'm trying not to comment in the midst of that because this here is not my field of expertise.  I'm pretty much wholly ignorant about both sides of the arugment.

So I thought I'd go back here to my blog and talk about it in graphics, since I can make a fool of myself on my own blog.

Now, this is my wholly-made-up-guesswork take on the success rate of people who query their completed fiction manuscript to the major publishers in New York.
Remember, most submitted manuscripts are just purely awful.  Nobody who reads this blog falls into the perfectly dreadful manuscript group so you do not necessarily need to worry about the success rate in general.


This attractive graphic to the right is the getting-into-publication rate for those who decide to self- publish.  You will note it has a tiny sliver of folks who attempt this and do not quite succeed.  They are too gormless to use smashwords or the like.

I will just mention that I would fall into that select group were I to try to do this.




Now we hustle onward and come to some more sheer guesswork on my part.  This is the earnings per book.  The first brightly colored graphic attempts to convince you I know what novels earn in the first couple years after they're released by one of the major publishers.

Should mention that, when I say major publishers, I'm including not just the Big New York Six (soon to be Five), but about everybody who plays the print game and gets distributed by the big brick-and-mortar retailers.  Tor.  Kensington.  Them folk. 

The pinky-white slice is books that earn less than $1000.
Moving up in remuneration, and going counter-clockwise or the ill-fated widdershins direction, the red slice is books earning more than $1000, but less than $5000. 
I've assigned green to the great majority of books and assigned a profit of between $5000 and $15,000.
The navy blue slice is books that bring in more than $15,000.  It's not a negligible proportion, really.

.   

I would not go to the barricades to defend the accuracy of this graph ...  but it 'feels' about right.   If anything, I think I'm underestimating the percentage of books that earn more than $15,000.

And, at last, we come to the profits on self-published books.

The info I'm presenting with that big sweep of beige is that most self-published books earn less than $1000. 

Books that fall into that little sliver of higher profit tend to be erotica, or published by authors with a significant platform, or books by those also print published, or work from those who understand marketing and promote diligently.  

Or, of course, all four.

So what am I saying with all this other than I like pie charts?

There are mobs of prophets and orators out there who want to sell writers something -- whether it's a product or validation for their own choices.

What do you want out of publication? 

If you need artistic freedom, if you hunger to put your work in front of readers, if you have something you must say,  if you don't need or expect much money, if you know you can't be published by the Big Guys -- for whatever reason,
then self-publishing may be for you.
You're in good company.  Generations of LitFic writers have felt exactly this way.

If you want to reach more readers and have a reasonable chance to make enough money to live on frugally, (well ... very frugally) try for traditional publication.

Booty Tuesday -- Yasmine Galenorn's Shaded Vision

Carrying home booty

This week is your chance to win a SIGNED copy of Yasmine Galenorn's Shaded Vision.

This is the second book by Galenorn I've given away, so I must have absentmindedly plucked up two at her table while she was looking the other way.  

Shaded Vision is one of her Otherworld novels which are just chock full of paranormal characters.  This one is about Delilah, one of three (somewhat) weird sisters.  She's the werecat of the trio.

I'm very fond of cats.
Anyhow, the usual suspects are out in all their otherworldly menace and all hell is breaking loose, as it is wont to do in Galenorn's novels.


From the book:

"When did Toby start working for you?" I was determined to needle him just a little about it.  After all, that was what friends did.  And Carter was our friend.

He glanced up at me, and a little smirk crossed his face.  "About two months ago.  He was working for a client of mine.  We . . . the attraction was immediate.  So he came to work for me.  The attraction won't last.  He's one of the djinn, and they don't make good long-term lovers.  But it will be fun for the duration.  And I needed the company.  And the help."

Can you trust a djinn?"  Camille frowned.   I knew that look.  It meant that she didn't trust Toby any more than she trusted a skunk in heat.

"No, but that is why he is not allowed access to private information, and why he doesn't have a key to my place.  Do not trouble yourself, young witch.  I will not compromise the integrity of my operations with a veil of sex haze.  But it has been a long time since I've found someone to my liking, and I plan to enjoy myself in the meantime.  And before you ask, I don't ask what equipment my lovers have, merely if they want to play."

Fun for the duration.  Djinn are like that, apparently.  Who knew?

To be eligible to win Shaded Vision, write and post a poem in the comment thread of this post. 

Use one of the following words from the cover:

Yasmine courting, darkness,  shaded, vision, other, world, deliciously, dark, spectacular, hot, erotic, bewitch, mix, magic, passion, frost, sister, sexy, savvy, intelligence, agency, half, human, power, Fae, any time wrong, usually,wicked, witch, husband, vampire, werecat, death, maiden.

Your poem can be a 
Limerick
Haiku    (traditional or non-traditional)
Rhymed couplet
Quatrain  
blank verse
or any other rhyme or poetry form you fancy.  I am not particular.

I'll pick one lucky commenter (US only, sorry) from the comment trail on Friday.

Fall Comes

Fall is creeping up the mountains.  I have trees yellow as lemons, yellow as saffron, yellow as candleflame at the edge of the yard. 

Booty Tuesday -- Lauren Willig's The Orchid Affair

Carrying home booty

This week is your chance to win a SIGNED copy of The Orchid Affair by Lauren Willig. (Signed with her own authorial hand.)

Laura Grey's first assignment as a British spy is to gather information on Andre Jaouen, right-hand man to Napoleon's Chief of Police.

Did I ever mention how fond I am of Regency spies?   International intrigue and Regency clothes.  Paris. Hot Frenchmen.  Oh my. 

From the book:

"Now, Andre, watch how it's done."

Something in the way he said it made Laura suspect that he was talking about more than the rules of flirtation, but when she looked at Daubier, his rumpled face was guileless as a child's.

"I am all ears," said Jaouen.

Daubier made a tsk noise before turning his attention back to Laura.  With an elaborate flourish, he lowered his considerable bulk over Laura's hand.  She could hear his corset strings creak with the effort.

"My dearest lady," he huffed, from somewhere in the vicinity of Laura's knuckles.  "I am rendered speechless by your . . . "

"Tidiness?" suggested Laura, as he paused for a noun.

To be eligible to win The Orchid Affair, write and post a poem in the comment thread of this post. 

Use one of the following words from the cover:

Lauren, orchid, affair, sparkling, continue, elevate, romance, pink, carnation, sheer, fun, sure, please, draw, reader, perilous, tale, intrigue, secret, deception, identity, hide, heart, pride, prejudice, live, history, plenty, full, veteran, governess, Laura, Grey, joins, school, spy, Andre.

Your poem can be a 
Limerick
Haiku    (traditional or non-traditional)
Rhymed couplet
Quatrain  
blank verse
or any other rhyme or poetry form you fancy.  I am not particular.

I'll pick one lucky commenter (US only, sorry) from the comment trail on Friday.