The Dragon and the Pearl and an interview with Jeannie Lin

Joanna here, with Jeannie Lin, author of Butterfly Swords, (Harlequin Historical, 0373296142, buy it here,) winner of RWA's 2009 Gold Heart Award.  Lin was also a break-out favorite in my personal 'exciting heroines I wish I could write,' category.  

Now she's back with her newest book, The Dragon and the Pearl, (Harlequin Historical, 0373296622, you can buy it here.)

I like me some strong heroine and I like me exotic locales and strong, protective heroes.  That was Butterfly Swords.  I'm expecting the same three-for-three in The Dragon and the Pearl. 

On to the promised interview . . .

Me:  What sort of books influenced you when you were a growing up? 

Jeannie: I was highly influenced by adventure stories: King Arthur's tales, Greek myths, fantasy adventures (former D&D geek here), and martial arts movies. I always had a thing for larger than life heroes and heroines and ultra-dramatic scenarios (we might even say melodrama). 

 

Me: I also love me some ultra dramatic.  Nobody's going to be surprised to hear that.  What draws you to this period in history?  With me and the Napoleonic era, it's the clothes.  *g*  You?

Jeannie: Oh, I do have to admit the clothes were a part. 

I used to watch these gorgeous Tang Dynasty costume dramas (think Curse of the Golden Flower with Chow Yun Fat for a more recent reference). They featured Empress Wu and her irrepressible daughter Princess Taiping. It was an elegant, glorious, treacherous and bloody time and these little clever women emerged as the biggest badasses of them all in a court full of powerful men. I loved it.

Me:   What do you consider the Historical Romance canon?

Jeannie: Actually I feel super unqualified to answer this as I'm not well read in the canon and feel I must catch up! The historical romance police will take away my card when they learn I've only read Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm and Judith Ivory's Beast this year. Woodiwiss' The Flame and the Flower is on my TBR. Similarly The Rake by Mary Jo Putney is also TBR'ed. 

Every time I read one of these "canon" books I'm blown away and think people who look down on historical romance "back then" weren't reading the right books. Can I lump Gone with the Wind in there? (I have read that one!) My foundation was Johanna Lindsey, Amanda Quick, Julia Quinn and Lisa Kleypas.

I'd really love recommendations on this front.

Me:  I like your choices of canon, and agree with them.  My own favs, in fact.  Let's talk about The Dragon and the Pearl.  How is your new heroine, Ling Suyin, alike, and different from, Ai Li, the heroine of Butterfly Swords?

Jeannie:  Both of the women are empowered, but I think of Ling Suyin as experienced in wielding her power whereas Ai Li was learning and earning her independence. Because of this, Ai Li was more willing to take risks and make mistakes whereas Suyin is more strategic and cautious. 

Ai Li was so darn nice! I know everyone thought she was all kickass and such, but at her heart she was a really good girl and always trying to do the right thing. The swords fooled everyone--even as a swordswoman she practiced all the time. Ling Suyin is not as honorable. She's a survivor. 

Me:  Random questions here.  What was the hardest scene to cut from Dragon?   

Jeannie:  This is a thought-provoking question.  Almost two-thirds of the book remained completely intact through all edits whereas the ending was tweaked quite a bit. There was an assassination attempt on Suyin's life where she was saved by a secondary character, the cripple named Jun. In the end, it wasn't needed for the central story, but I so loved the nod to so many martial arts elements in the scene (remember Jeannie, you're writing a romance...not a kung-fu flick). 

Me: I admire your strength.  I hate to cut good scenes.  I just hope you'll post it on your blog as an out take some day.  More random question.  Did your characters have any surprises for you while you were writing?  Anything you didn't foresee?

Jeannie: Oh...how do I do this without spoilers?

I knew Li Tao and Suyin before the story started because they had been featured in the previous book. Ling Suyin remains as the only character that appears in all three of my first books as they were originally written (Book #1 precedes Butterfly Swords and its fate is still in the air). 

What I didn't know is their past and I felt it was so important to who they were now. I see my scenes unfold like a movie and so though I sense the characters' secrets when I imagine the present scenes--because movies always do that, you know? Mysterious looks, close-ups, hidden innuendos--I had to learn who they were to know what it all meant. 

This is my only book that uses flashbacks which I normally don't favor, but I couldn't see Li Tao sitting down and ever revealing his past to anyone in a conversation, not even to the woman he loves. The same thing for Suyin. It seems like the trend in romance today is that when you love someone, you reveal all your dirty laundry to them. I don't think that's true-to-life and it wasn't true to the culture of background of these characters. 

There were also a few turns at the end with Suyin's character that I hadn't anticipated and that I had no personal experience with...darn spoilers.

Me:  Flashbacks are the very devil, aren't they?  *g*  What are you working on right now?

Jeannie:  Right now I'm going back to the series with a star-crossed love story about Shen Tai Yang (Ai Li's 3rd brother) and a daughter of the Gao family (Gao is the enemy warlord in The Dragon and the Pearl). 

It's a Romeo and Juliet tale if Romeo and Juliet had to consider fighting to the death. I've finished several projects that are now in the Harlequin queue that didn't have swords and warlords and focused more on the high culture of the Tang Dynasty, so that's why I'm going back to the melodrama.

Me: Thank you so much for stopping by, Jeannie.

So.  Here's a recommended read.  And if you haven't latched onto Butterfly Swords, I recommend it as well.(See the wiki here for a discussion of butterfly swords, which is interesting in its own right.)

I love both of her covers too.  Just saying.

Grappling with Hoops of Steel

Which refers to Polonius' speech, in case you were wondering . . .

Joanna here, talkin g about the history of hoop chasing and the many misconceptions we nourish about this.
 
Right off, let me explain how chasing or bowling or driving or rolling or trundling a hoop came about.

Bright young lad's father

About seven minutes after the invention of the wheel, some bright young lad standing in the back of the cave noticed you could roll the thing and chase after it.  It probably took a half hour's experimentation to discover you could roll it even better by knocking at it with a short stick.  You could make it go fast or slow, turn, even spin backwards.  A new human activity — part sport, part contest, part art, part meditation — was born. 
It proved amazingly popular.  There's something in the human race that wants to chase a rolling object.  We're like golden labs. 

I want to claim Classical sources for my subject.  And, indeed, the Classical Greeks were great hoop trundlers.  

The rest of the post is at Word Wenches Here.

I'll be giving away an early copy of Black Hawk.  I'm hoping I get my copies before they start selling them in the store.  But, in any case, It's free.

Keeping It Clean -- Georgian and Regency Bathing Customs

Talking about Georgian and Regency bathtubs, here, and the joys of getting clean. 

 
There is a general view that historical people were rather dirty, there being a dearth of historical folks getting up at six and grabbing a bar of soap and popping in to warble un bel dì vedremo in the shower.  I'm afraid we all feel rather smug about our acres of colored tile with the running hot and cold.

How clean were they?  The townsfolks as they merrily hung aristos from the lamposts, Ninon de l'Enclos, Voltaire, (Did you know Ninon left money in her will for the 9-year-old Voltaire to buy books?) Napoleon, Jane Austen, the kitchenmaid grinding coffee in the morning? How clean were they?

For more, follow the post over to Word Wenches, here.

The Wine Glass Over the Water

The Wine Glass over the Water

God bless the King
I mean our faith’s defender.
God bless — no harm in blessing — the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King —
God bless us all — That’s quite another thing.
          John Byrom

Joanna, here, talking about an interesting sort of drinking glass our hero and heroine might have encountered in their travels through Georgian or Regency England.
The Jacobite Drinking Glass.
These are wine glasses that form a body of distinctive Eighteenth Century artwork.

We have these through a confluence of lucky chances.

First off, by 1700, English glassmaking was particularly advanced. 
A century before, the champion glassmakers were Venetian. The best glass in England was made by imported Italian glass artists, working by Italian methods.

This changed when the English developed flint glass.  'Flint glass' contains a high proportion of lead oxide, an ingredient that makes for tough, workable, clear-as-water product.  Excellent stuff, in short.  And it was an English specialty.


Continues here, at Word Wenches

Historical Trivia

Just as butchers doubtless have interesting bits left over from cutting up the good meat and bakers have the odd candied fruit or eggwhites they can't use in the day's batch of pastries, Historical Romance writers pick up lovely bits of trivia they can never use in the books.

Today at Word Wenches --

The Bizarre Byways of Research
 

A goodly while ago, Pat Punt asked the Wenches to 
 
. . . share some of the strangest trivia they have come across in their research.  Having done my share of surfing the 'net, I have encountered many a fact stranger than fiction.   Their experience must be even more bizarre.

Bizarre does seem an appropriate description for what we come across.

  From Pat Rice:

The only trivia I remember is from my childhood. I play a mean game of 60's Trivial Pursuit.

But I just recently wrote about the poisonous green paint that might have killed Napoleon (Kill Your Hero with Regency Wallpaper)  and given a whole lot of other people pneumonia, asthma, and the winter blues.

But the one bit of history that sticks clearly in my mind—probably because it affected the area where I lived for twenty years—is the Mississippi flowing backward during the 1811 New Madrid earthquake. Can you imagine how powerful an earthquake would have to be to send the mighty Mississippi backward? And weirder yet, Shawnee tribe leader Tecumseh and his brother predicted the earthquake before it arrived. For some other weird stories about the period: see here.


From Mary Jo Putney:

Lord Uxbridge’s Leg

For the rest . . . head here

The Regency Cat

Talking about the cats of Regency England.  

What kind of cats can our characters expect to encounter as they go about their adventures?
Lots of cats, for one thing.
While Englishmen may love their dogs, the English householder hated his mice and depended on cats to get rid of them.  Defoe talks of forty thousand cats in London in the mid-1600s.  "Few Houses being without a Cat, and some having several, and sometimes five or six in a House."

 These London cats were working cats --
rangy, businesslike mousers and ratters.  I see them dozing the day away in the kitchen, then rising in the night, roaming the house to do battle with vermin, meeting the enemy behind the plush curtains of the drawing room and down behind the sofas in the parlor.  All the while, the gentlefolk snored in their beds. 

But there were pampered, plump cats as well.  We find them in paintings, batting at a soap bubble, peering into a fishbowl. 

For the rest of the article -- including the breeds of cats you'd see in Regency London, see here

How far the Candle

I'm over at Word Wenches today, talking about light, and how folks avoided being the thing that went bump in the night and banged its shins in 1800 or so.

"How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world."  William Shakespeare

For the most part, people took the low tech approach.  Daily life followed the sun.  Country folk got up with the chickens, not just because the chickens were making an almighty determined racket, but because there was a day of work to get to.  Every hour the family stayed awake past sunset cost money.

They made good use of the daylight while they had it.  The well-to-do had tall  windows in their houses, the better to invite the sunlight inside.  Even the stables had windows. If you want to shell peas or sew some fine embroidery, you took it to the window seat or went out to sit on the doorstep of the cottage.  The hero is apt to find the heroine reading a letter on the garden bench because that's where there light was good.

"When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent. "
George Carlin

 The rest at WordWenches here.

Art and Image Resources

Here's a list of places to find high quality, public domain images of historical costume, settings and objects.  I'm mostly interested in 1750 to 1830, so these will be best represented  

[ETA  -- now has both links and the URL printed out.]

Big Sites


Victoria and Albert Museum (allows use of museum images for noncommercial personal use.)
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/


Web Gallery of Art (These are all public domain.)
http://www.wga.hu/index1.html

Art Renewal (All public domain)
http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/AngelSpeech/angelspeech.php


The Artchive (These are all public domain, I think.  Browse by artist and title.  Get largest image by clicking to select, click on the blue line that says 'To order".  Then click on the painting.  Image has watermark.)
http://www.artchive.com/web_gallery/


The Louvre -- Virtual Visit (Groups images by time, place, and artistic school)
http://cartelen.louvre.fr/cartelen/visite?srv=col_frame

The Louvre -- Search the Collection (Type a word into the search box)
http://cartelen.louvre.fr/cartelen/visite?srv=crt_frm_rs&langue=en&initCritere=true

Base Joconde (Searches all the museums of France.  This is in French, so use babelfish for the search term.  Type search term into the box on the lower right and tick avec image.) 
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/joconde/fr/pres.htm


New York Public Library Digital Image Collection
(You can limit this by date.  See the lower part of the search parameters.) 
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgadvsearch.cfm

Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met approves scholarly, noncommercial use with attribution and link to Met.)
http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/

Flickr  (On the bottom of the form, click to search creative commons photos only.  These CC images must be attributed.)
http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/?

(You can copy creative commons icons here.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_icons)

Hermitage Museum (Does not expressly allow scholarly posting, but many are public domain.  Images said to be invisibly watermarked.)
http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/fcgi-bin/db2www/advanced.mac/step1?selLang=English

The British Museum (Approves noncommercial scholarly uses.  Mark images copyright British Museum)
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx


Boston Museum of Fine Arts
http://www.mfa.org/search/collections

National Portrait Gallery  (Can be searched by date to find public domain.)
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/advanced-search.php

Brighton Museum 
http://searchcollections.brighton-hove-rpml.org.uk/

Yale  (250,000 images on line, all expressly free for use.)
http://discover.odai.yale.edu/ydc/Search/Results?lookfor=&type=allfields&filter%255B%255D=resource_facet%253A%2522Resource%20available%20online%2522

Yale Center for British Art
http://britishart.yale.edu/collections/search
With its cool search engine and many public domain images.c

Wikipedia  (All the images on Wikipedia are either Public Domain or have been placed in all-use, non-attribution Creative Commons or equivalent.  When you search a topic, check the bottom of the page for a notice saying 'Wikimedia Commons has media related to . . . '.   To specifically search Wikimedia, the entry page is here.  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pictures_and_images )

British Paintings Online
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/
There are over 200,000 of them.  Just wonderful. 


Web Gallery of Art  (Again, these images are public domain)
I had just a terrible time finding the 'search' feature.  Go to Gallery and the search tab is at the bottom of the page.  Not a bad search engine once you find it.
http://allart.biz/


Art.com  This is a commercial site, beautifully searchable by subject.  Many are Public Domain, but a good many are copyright, so you have to use common sense. If possible, search here to find the works, then find the image at a site with better resolution. 
http://www.art.com/


Smaller Sites

The Noel Collection (Allows use of images with acknowledgement of source and a link back) http://jamessmithnoelcollection.org 
The page is here. 

Brooklyn Museum (Non-commercial use of images permitted, with attribution, as Creative Commons.  Yeah Brooklyn!)
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/search/?advanced

The Tate   (No explicit permission for image use for scholarly purposes, but many images are public domain.  Images tend to be poor quality.)
http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/

The National Trust Museum of the U.K.  (The museum forbids use without licensing.  Images tend to be small and poor quality.  They have some public domain images.)
http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/

Olga's Gallery (Russian oriented)
http://www.abcgallery.com/

Crocker Art Gallery (Only about 500 items.  Strong on California.)
http://www.digitalcrocker.org/DCG/main.php

Tufts Bolles Print Collection (Not indexed or searchable that I can see.  Try it out to see if it matches your interests.)
http://dl.tufts.edu/view_collection.jsp?pid=tufts:UA069.006.DO.MS004&page=1&cmodel=info:fedora/cm:Image.4DS:::info:fedora/cm:Image.3DS&sel=image

LACMA, (wide range of European and American artworks.  Searchable.) the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has a goodly number of searchable images.   The search engine includes a parameter for selecting date.  Many public domain images.
http://collections.lacma.org/
 
Greypony  (Mainly C18 and C19.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12946229@N05/



Scholar's Resource  (Small images only, but it says where the site got them so most can be tracked down in larger format.)
http://www.scholarsresource.com/browse/classification/1?page=1

Romantic Query Letter (Not indexed.  Cool pictures.)
http://theromanticqueryletter.blogspot.com/

Getty Images  (On the advanced search page, click 'Creative stock images' and 'All royalty-free collections'.  Each image has release information below the image.  Read the license agreement.)
http://www.gettyimages.com/Search/AdvancedSearch.aspx
Similar to Getty is Diomedia here.   There are other stock image collections as well.

Old Paint Now here. (Searchable for keyword in box at upper left.  Searchable by date on left sidebar.  Some are not public domain.)
http://oldpainting.blogspot.com/
http://oldpainting.tumblr.com/

The Blue Lantern (Searchable for keyword in box at upper left.)
http://thebluelantern.blogspot.com/

Japonisme (Searchable for keyword in box at upper left.  Original photos are copyright to site.  Prints are copyright as per date of creation.  Many are public domain.)
http://lotusgreenfotos.blogspot.com/

Res Obscura (Another small blog of interesting Public Domain images.)
http://resobscura.blogspot.com/

Pre Raphaelite Art   (Searchable for keyword in box far at lower left.  These are old enough to be public domain.)
http://preraphaelitepaintings.blogspot.com/

Art Experts (A wide and interesting collection, searchable only by artist's name.  But LOTS of minor artists.)
http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists.php

100 Years of Illustration (Vintage magazine covers and Adverts.  I'm assuming these are all pub dom on the site.)
http://giam.typepad.com/100_years_of_illustration/

National Education Network (These images are for educational use.  Interpreted broadly, this should include blogging on historical topics.)
http://gallery.e2bn.org/search.php

National Gallery of Australia  (search by keywords.  Set for list+image.  No express permission for scholarly use, but many are public dom.)
http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/

National Gallery of Ireland (Search by artist or date of artwork.)
http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/search/advanced/Objects;jsessionid=07866704D872FEF8832F34044A5D0F14?t:state:flow=696c0767-314f-4274-86ce-85f48b6e642a

Museum of the City of New York  (Lovely powerful search engine.  See the 'rights&reproductions tab at the top. Though they attempt to restrict use of public domain work, they have no right to do so.)
http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MNY_HomePage#

Powerhouse Museum Collection  (Many creative commons images, but you have to check each image.)
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/

Kunst Historisches Museum (This is German, so use babelfish to translate your search term.  No express permission for scholarly use, but many are public dom.)
http://bilddatenbank.khm.at/

Henry Luce Center for the Study of American Culture
(New York Historical Society's eMuseum.  No express permission for scholarly use, but many images are public dom.)
http://emuseum.nyhistory.org/code/emuseum.asp?style=Browse&currentrecord=1&newprofile=objects&newpage=search_basic&newvalues=1

Canadian Museum of Civilization    (No express permission for scholarly use, but many are public dom.)
http://collections.civilization.ca/public/pages/cmccpublic/emupublic/AdvQuery.php?lang=0

Musee McCord  or here on Flickr.  (Images may be used for educational purposes under the terms of use.)
http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/keys/collections/
or
http://www.flickr.com/photos/MuseeMcCordMuseum/

The Winterthur Collection  (No express permission for scholarly use. A few are public domain.)
http://museumcollection.winterthur.org/

Royal Ontario Museum  (No express permission for scholarly use, but many are public dom.)
http://images.rom.on.ca/public/index.php?function=home&sid=&ccid=

Anne Brown Military Collection  (Collection of military images, many pub dom.) 
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/catalog/catalog.php?verb=search&task=setup&colid=13&type=basic

The Athanaeum (Should be public domain.  Searchable.)
http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/

Dobedobedo (Random but interesting.)
http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/dobedobedo/all/

Madame Guillotine  (Women's C18 clothing.  All pub dom.)
http://madameguillotine.org.uk/

Victorian and Edwardian Paintings (Public Domain paintings and photos. )
http://goldenagepaintings.blogspot.com/

Creative Spaces (Searches several British museum data bases at once.  The individual sites have more thorough search engines.)
http://vna.nmolp.org/creativespaces/?page=home

Geograph Britain and Ireland These photos of British Isles places -- and many of them are just lovely -- are Creative Commons.
http://www.geograph.org.uk/

BibliOdyssey (Great images from old books and prints, almost all public domain.)
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/ 

Do you know other collections of historically interesting images?
Please share.

Sipping Tea -- Georgian Style

Is there no Latin word for Tea?  Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.
        Hilaire Belloc

No Latin for tea because tea didn't travel the silk roads all the way to the west.  In Roman times, tea was an entirely Chinese secret.  Tea only made it to Europe about 1600, the Dutch and the Portuguese carrying it home along with the other spoils of oriental trade.
 
It was the Age of Enlightenment. 
The Age of Exploration.  
The Age of Discovery. 
Europeans needed more than ale to fortify them for these earthshaking events.  They took to tea, coffee and chocolate like ducks to watercress.  
More at Word Wenches, here.

What a pity it isn't illegal . . . Regency Ice Cream

Ice cream is exquisite. 
What a pity it isn't illegal. 
~Voltaire

 
There's a certain perversity to Mother Nature.
Take  strawberry ice cream. 
Here we have an obvious Good Thing.  Combine fresh strawberries, something sweet, and milk.  Cradle the mixture in ice and harden it. 
Voilà -- you're going to end up with something tasty.



But it's not so straightforward.

Here, at Word Wenches

All that glistens is not . . . goldfish

You've probably asked yourself, from time to time, if there are any Shakespeare  quotes about goldfish.

Did Shakespeare say, "That which we call a goldfish, by any other name would be as bright"? 
Or insult some catiff with a, "Thou wimpled, reeling-ripe goldfish-licker!"

He did not. 
Goldfish didn't make it to England till nearly a century after Shakespeare's death.  We got Shakespearean dogs and cats, camels, carp, marmosets, mackerel, and whales . . . but no goldfish.

Basically, the goldfish is the carp who made good.

Read the rest of 'Everything you wanted to know about Regency Goldfish but didn't realize it'
over at Word Wenches . . . here.

Why the English?

Jennie at Dear Author, reviewing Caroline Linden's book, You Only Live Once, says,

". . . reflections on the French Revolution made me question (not for the first time) the anti-French, anti-revolution bias in historical romance.  (my bolding)

It’s a bias that has interested me for a while, mostly because I’m not sure what is at the root of it.
Is it a general disdain of the French common to…most everyone but the French?
Is it based on the weirdly pro-British slant in historical romance (I say weird because it’s usually American authors writing these books)?

Is it based on actual disdain for the bloodthirstiness of the revolution?"

I've thought about this subject some.



Bit of Backgound here for anyone who lives on Mars and is tuning in through subether radio:

Historical Romance has a dozen few favorite settings.  The most tenacious of these may well be 'The Regency'.  Regency Romances are set, roughly, from 1800 to 1817. 



Engaging in fussy historical quibbledry here: 

The French Revolutionary Period ran from 1789 to 1799.  From the Bastille to Napoleon's coup d'etat. 

The Napoleonic Era was 1799 to 1815.  From the coup d'etat to Waterloo.

Anyone still able to unglaze their eyes at this point will see that Regency Romances are set during the Napoleonic Era. 


Or,
to put it another way . . .

To me, this kinda sums up the Old Regine.

To a character in a Regency Romance, the French Revolution, (Aristos fleeing the mob, heads rolling like ten pins,)
is ten or twenty years ago.  It happened when they were at school.  Some of the protagonists weren't even born when the Bastille fell.

The French Revolution was, (as my kids would put it,) "so last week."

Regency characters are fighting the Napoleonic Wars.
Different animal.


The Napoleonic Wars, unlike the French Revolution,
can be presented, simplistically, as a straightforward conflict of right and wrong.   (Which may be why Regencies are set there.)

France is an invader and conqueror.  England is defending itself and other nations in Europe.
"Them bad French invaded Spain.  We go rescue Spain."

The Regency spy surveils, and the Regency soldier comes home from, 'a just war'. 

My character Annique, in The Spymaster's Lady, has been loyal to France through the Revolution.

I propose that she may plausibly change her loyalty when Napoleon begins a series of wars of conquest.

Her moral dilemma is exactly about the difference between the philosophical basis of the French Revolution and philosophical basis of the Napoleonic Era in France.

My character Maggie, in The Forbidden Rose, makes a choice typical of the French Revolution.

She's not choosing between nations or philosophical systems, but rather is forced to one side of an internecine class war.



Annique responds to a moral conflict that didn't exist in the Revolution.  Maggie, to a conflict that was resolved by the Napoleonic Era. 

Eight years apart, it's an entirely different war.

As to why books get set in England, instead of,  say, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Croatia, or France . . .

I figger it's the same reason kids go out to play soccer or football instead of making up a new game each time.  You arrive on the field and you got yer lines already painted, the goal posts are up, and everybody knows the rules.

We write books set in Regency England because the readers are familiar with the Regency and folks are familiar with Regency England because so many books are set there.
It's one of those feedback loops.  A viscous cycle.  Sticky.

Readers come to a Regency Romance armed with all sorts of background.  They know Almacks, Bond Street, Vauxhall Gardens, and Gunter's.

Just about nobody knows the Chinese Baths, the Palais Royale, the Tivoli Gardens of Paris, or the Cafe Foy.

The Chinese Baths of Paris in the 1790s

A writer who sets a novel someplace . . . novel,
faces a massive origination fee.  She has to describe the Chinese Baths.  Explain what the Cafe Foy is.
While that author is describing, explaining, and making real the setting, she's not telling the story.

And the writer doesn't necessarily know all this stuff.  It's long, irritating, and difficult work to do research outside the English-speaking world, because, (you guessed it,) the references are not in English.

Finally, when we're writing Romance, we do not generally look at the French Revolution because you'd have to be barking mad to set escapist literature in the middle of folks getting their heads chopped off.  I mean . . .  really.

Shooting your way out . . . with a flintlock

Hello folks,

A treat for you today.  I've invited an expert in antique firearms to talk about a subject near-and-dear to my heart -- pistol packing spies.

Random armed person of the Eighteenth Century

The problem with carrying dueling pistols and military ordinance in 1789 or in 1811 is that the general run of turn-of-the-Eighteenth-Century weaponry was big.
And heavy.



Not the sort of thing you could comfortably cart around in a purpose-sewn pocket in your jacket or cloak.

Not this small

Recognizing this sad fact, gunsmiths of the time made smaller weapons, intended for sneakier people.

It is those guns that I want to look at today.  So let me introduce my guest, 'Arizona'. 

Jo:  Welcome, Arizona.  We're glad to have you and your expertise with us.  Tell me about sneaky little guns in the era of the French Revolution and Regency.  These would have been ladies' guns?

Arizona:  Yes, they were.  Ladies had some firearms built specifically for them in the 1700's to early 1800's.  They were called "Muff Pistols".  These were small handguns which were easily hidden in a lady's muff, or handwarmer.  They were also small enough to hide within the voluminous clothing women wore in those days.


Jo: Did men carry them?

Arizona:  Though they were called ladies', or muff, pistols, many men carried them as they were considered to be what our small .380's and such are today.

Jo:  I notice men called them 'pocket pistols' when they carried them.  *g*  They weren't like modern guns, right?

Arizona:  These were flintlock pistols.  Percussion caps were designed in 1805, so it would be unlikely an actual percussion firearm would have been immediately available.

You will note, as you consider the various designs below, that firearms don't seem to have changed much since the early 1700's through the early 1800's.  That is true, though the "lines" of the firearms became more elegant and less "blocky". 



A little aside here, what we, today, would consider too large for one's pocket was indeed a "pocket pistol" during the period we are talking about.  Men wore greatcoats which had rather large pockets.  Thus, a pistol we would consider far too large for a pocket today would indeed fit into a man's greatcoat pocket.

Jo:  Can you show us some examples of these small Regency-era pistols?

Arizona: Here's a VERY good description of muff pistols, and the pocket type in particular.

Lady's muff pistol

 
From the 18th century small concealable pistols for self protection, were manufactured in Europe in large numbers. The picture shows a flintlock example manufactured in 1820 from Birmingham England.

While there were several notable firearms manufacturers, there were far more "cottage industry" gunsmiths who would make pretty much anything you requested.  Almost every medium to large city had several such gunsmiths.  The only comparable situation today is Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, where everything from matchlock firearms to AK-47's are made in home workshops.  Ammunition is made in the same way.

Measuring just over 4 inches (11.8cm) these lightweight guns were intended mainly for women. As they could easily be concealed in a Ladies hand warmer, they gained the name of Muff pistols.

Like many of this type of weapon it is fitted with a sliding safety catch to prevent accidental discharge.


Jo:  Ok.  How does my heroine load her pistol?

Arizona:  The shooter loads the firearm with black powder followed by a round lead ball.

This is usually done from the muzzle end, though, with some muff pistols, you unscrewed the barrel, seated the powder and ball, then screwed the barrel back on.
The ball was normally wrapped with a cloth patch, (though a piece of paper could be used in a pinch).

Once the powder was measured and poured down the barrel and the patched ball placed on the crown of the muzzle, a ramrod was used to force the ball down to the chamber where it was tamped against the powder, creating the charge. 

On larger pistols the ramrod was in it's familiar place under the barrel, for those who have seen "Kentucky Rifles" and other muzzle loaders.  In the case of smaller pistols, such as muff pistols, they generally came in a case, with a small powder flask, some balls, and a ramrod, which was generally kept in the case.

Remember, these were not thought to be used in a battle.  Rather, they were a last ditch self protection instrument, to be used when all else had failed.  You generally wouldn't have time to reload them, thus there was no need to keep the ramrod with the pistol.


Jo:  This took a while, this business of loading a pistol?

A three-barrel flintlock pistol

Arizona: Muzzle loading firearms were extremely slow to reload. Even experts were reported to need 15 seconds to reload a smooth-bore musket, with a much longer reload time for any rifled firearm. 

So some flintlock pistols were produced with anywhere from two, three, or four to as many as 24 barrels.  (The larger capacity firearms were of later manufacturer.) 


This photo and some of the information are from the Flintlock wiki, here.

Jo:  Wow.  Not something to carry around with you like a handkerchief, those bigger guns.

Arizona:  No, they were generally pretty heavy and rather large and bulky.

Most of the flintlock pepperboxes and multi-barrel pistols were of six or fewer barrels.  This was more due to the method of ignition (powder in the pan, which could be easily ignited by sparks from another barrel) than inability to design and build such a handgun. These designs tended to be costly to make and were often unreliable and dangerous.

While weapons like double barreled shotguns were reasonably safe, weapons like the pepperbox revolver would sometimes fire all barrels simultaneously, or would sometimes just explode in the user's hand.

It was therefore often less expensive, safer, and more reliable to carry several single-shot weapons instead.

Jo:  Right.  Carry a couple guns.  This sounds like such excellent advice I will have to have Doyle give it to somebody one of these days.
You have some audio-visuals for us?

Arizona:  The first You-Tube video shows how the flintlock works. Here.

This video shows the loading and firing sequence of a flintlock pistol.  Here.
   
And this one is an excellent example of loading and firing a flintlock musket through the use of paper cartridges.  Here.



Here to the side is the firing sequence for a flintlock.


Jo:  Let me add some more excitement --
See and hear the action of a frizzen, here. 
See and hear the action of the hammer here.
See and hear the gun fire here.

And some more interesting firing of period weapons here.

Now, Arizona, you have some pictures of the actual period pistols.

Arizona:  Here is a link to a small(er) double barreled French Flintlock Coat Pistol, ca 1750.  Another link to a French "Greatcoat Pistol" here.  And another small pistol.  Here.  This one shows some of the markings a royal arms dealer would have placed on their wares.  Here.

Jo:  That's beautiful workmanship on those.  And we see how the double barrels work.

I know there are number of folks who want details on the anatomy of a flintlock and the exact firing sequence.  I've put this below the cut . . .

Delve down below the cut and you will learn the origin of phrases like, 'flash in the pan,' and, 'to go off half-cocked'.  When we talk about 'lock, stock, and barrel', the 'lock' is the flintlock.
Cool, huh?

You will also become acquainted with the word 'frizzen' -  which is not the past perfect of an unfortunate day at the hairdressers.

Regency Bling

Regency Bling

The Regency gentleman's code might be summed up as, "no perfumes, exquisitely fine linen and plenty of it, country washing . . ."
and bling. 

I went in search of Regency bling, hoping for a gold ring in the ear of at least some Regency fops. 
Alas, not so much. 

The robust and adventurous Tudors wore earrings.  The courtier Buckingham sported major rubies.  That man of action, Sir Walter Raleigh, a gold hoop.  (This picture here shows him with a remarkably fine pearl earring.)


A half century later, Charles I wore a great pearl in his ear when he mounted the block to face the axe. 
By the Eighteenth Century, however, earrings had become the province of buccaneers, exotic foreigners, and the most foppish of macaronis.

See the rest at Word Wenches  here.

Walking Sticks and Canes

I'm talking about Sticks and Canes over at Word Wenches.

I am now a Word Wench.
*jo hugs herself madly*

This is so wonderful.

I am so delighted.

Word Wenches is THE cool blogplace to be.

And I am there.  From now on.

Yes!!






*cough*

Settling down now to talk about canes and walking sticks in a historical Regency sorta way . . .

I'm here to talk of walking sticks and canes carried by the haut ton of England and France.

English gentlemen, long before Teddy Roosevelt showed up to advise this, walked softly and carried a big stick.  Every other portrait shows some nattily dressed fellow  with a walking stick pegged jauntily into the ground or a slim baton negligently tucked under the elbow.  The dress cane was the quintessential mark of the dandy for three centuries, part fashion accessory, part aid to communication, part weapon.


And I suppose you could always just to lean on it.


More here

And back to some questions

attribution glassandmirror

In the continuing, I-will-answer-stuff mode, let me pull up a few more questions and, like, answer them.

These questions are about the Spymaster fictive universe.

The next lot of questions will be about Forbidden Rose, but I want to wait a while until some folks have read it.

17) Do you have a formal background in history?

Knitting the Revolution

It's a great pity to do lots of research and find stuff out and then realize you will never be able to use most of it. 

Over the last year, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about  who knit what, when and how in France in 1790. 

None of this will fit into a story. 

"Ah," says I to myself.  "I'll put it on the blog."

So if you don't care about knitting in 1794 in France,
(and who could blame you,)
you can wander off again and I will doubtless write something more interesting someday.

I don't know a great deal about knitting as a craft, I'm afraid.
When I decided Maggie needed to do some knitting in The Forbidden Rose I went out and bought some yarn and five, two-ended needles to see how it felt to knit.

I kept losing yarn off the end of the needles.
Apparently the French of 1790 didn't need the endy bits that keep the yarn from escaping.  Or perhaps using endy bits was considered unsporting.

If I'd been knitting wool, I expect it would have itched.
And if I did this all day long, I'd have really strong fingers.