Friday Q & A

It's Friday, and time for you to ask questions. We've had a fabulous mixed bag of a week:

Darlene Gardner told us how to give characters' jobs that authentic touch;

Pam Rosenthal revealed how her research became a true-life love story;

Loucinda McGary described the joy of uncovering unexpected research gems;

and Adrienne Regard tried to stop us giving our heroes huge, bad-tempered stallions that reared while bolting.

Any odds n ends you'd like addressed?

Any completely off the wall, outside the box questions that have been bothering you?

We're here!

Labels: Friday Q and A

posted by Janet Mullany @ 9:58 AM 12 comments

The Romance Writers Guide to the Noble Horse

Our guest blogger is Adrienne Regard, who has owned and ridden eventing horses for many years, and has been an organizer for United States Pony Club. She writes contemporary romances and women's fiction.

Show of hands: How many of us live in the 18th century? And how many modern writers have in-depth exposure to horses as transportation? Some years ago I wrote a pamphlet to help the uninitiated get started, called “The Romance Writers’ Guide to the Noble Horse.” It’s available through my home chapter of RWA in San Diego.

The use of the horse in historical periods, as well as in modern horse sports, is a surprisingly vast topic and every reader thinks (rightly or wrongly) that they know something about it. The unwary author can make mistakes about the nature of the animal, its use, its tack, its correct use in the 1800s which differs from today’s use — room for error abounds! The good news is, a lot has been written. The bad news is, a lot of what you will find on the web is wrong. So, my advice is to go to printed source material, and run your eventual draft past a knowledgeable friend. By that, I mean someone deeply versed in horse study, not someone who had a backyard pony as a kid.

It’s true that horses are beautiful and they are romantic and the temptation is great, but generally speaking, I’d encourage writers not to land their story on the back of a horse unless they know quite a bit about horses. If you must use a horse, I would also advise that you don’t try to dream up the most unusual animal you can think of. An 18-hand black Arabian stallion with a white mane in Regency London will result in your book being thrown against the wall. Whereas a sturdy brown horse of undifferentiated lineage and sex will probably get your hero from point A to point B just fine, without upsetting horsey readers.

The list of what NOT to do is huge. Here’s Julia Ross's list as a starting point.

Having disposed of types of mistakes writers make that cause horse people to groan aloud, let’s talk about what you can do with the horse for the purpose of forwarding your plot. Horses, even when trained, are still animals that respond to instinct first. If you need something unexpected to happen, make it the result of an instinctive behavior.

A horse may shy or bolt at an unexpected noise, or a frightening vision. A prey animal will ALWAYS choose to run away first and ask questions later. ‘Shy’ means jumping sideways very quickly, which can easily unseat a rider. ‘Bolt’ means to run off at high speed, uncontrollably. Here's a video of a horse shying.

Bucking is intentional behavior the horse engages in to rid himself of what’s on his back. The rider, the rider’s clothing, something the rider is carrying, the tack or any irritant beneath the tack, all are fair game. A good rider can survive bucking but a beginner? Probably not.

Runaway carriages are great disasters — much more dangerous than runaway horses. 1. Carriages make a lot of scary noise. 2. At speed, they are unstable and can easily overturn. 3. A runaway carriage off the road surface will bounce around like popcorn in a pasture. 4. When it comes to fear, horses egg each other on. The left carriage horse is convinced by the galloping right carriage horse to run even faster. The right carriage horse thinks the same thing. (See this link for photos and reports.)

Falling. Even in the 1800s, gravity worked. It’s not so hard to dream up a way for your rider to fall off a horse. And since helmets were not in use until the 1900s, many falls were serious or fatal. You can have a rider fall when jumping, when a horse shies, when a carriage crashes, when a horse runs away through a wooded area or when the tack fails.

Even with care, a good writer can still get things wrong according to their readers who may themselves have imperfect understanding. The old saying goes, “Ask two horsemen about an issue and you’ll get three opinions.” But at least you will have tried!

Labels: Adrienne Regard, horses

posted by Janet Mullany @ 9:00 AM 24 comments

The obscure gems revealed by research

Today we welcome Loucinda McGary, a great fan of research as you'll see from her post below. Like the Posse members, Loucinda is a former Golden Heart finalist. Her first book, The Wild Sight, will be out from Sourcebooks this October. She recently received her fantastic cover. Let's all pause for a moment to ooh and ahh...

Okay, on to the post.

The Niall Marker
By Loucinda McGary

One of the things I love about doing research was expressed very well in the words of Forrest Gump, “You never know what you’re gonna get.”

When I was doing research for my manuscript that became my debut novel, The Wild Sight: An Irish tale of deadly deeds and forbidden love, I immersed myself in all things Irish. I read about art, history, mythology, anything related to the Emerald Isle, and that is how I happened upon something called The Niall Marker.

Geneticists have isolated a gender-specific trait that they have traced back to a 5th century High King of Ireland, Niall of the Nine Hostages. Niall became the founding father of Clan O’Neill and gained his moniker by taking high-born hostages (not quite prisoners but not houseguests either) from the five kingdoms of Ireland, Ulster, Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Meath, plus one each from Scotland, the Saxons, the Britons and the Franks. This helped keep the peace during Niall’s reign and made his descendants the most powerful rulers of Ireland for the next six centuries.

Being the history geek and lover of trivia that I am, I decided I must incorporate this fascinating bit of obscure information into my novel. And it actually became one of the turning points in my story. Only it turns out The Niall Marker might not be that obscure after all...

A few weeks ago, I watched a fascinating program on PBS about how African-Americans are tracing their roots by studying their DNA. Scientists have perfected a technique that can tell anyone what percent of their DNA is from Africa, what percent is Native American, and what percent is from Northern Europe. The narrator of the program, a professor at Harvard, was quite surprised to learn that over 30% of his DNA came from Northern Europe. But that's not all!

Turns out that he had Irish ancestors. How did the experts know? (drum roll, please) Because he had The Niall Marker. I couldn't believe it! There was my fascinating little piece of trivia that I'd put into my book on national television!

Forrest was right, you never know. And truth IS stranger than fiction!

To find out more about Loucinda and her book, visit www.loucindamcgary.com. Or you can find her hanging out daily at the Romance Bandits blog.

Labels: Loucinda McGary, Research

posted by Trish Milburn @ 12:01 AM 46 comments

Research: A Love Story

By guest blogger Pam Rosenthal.

My husband Michael has always participated in my writing. He’s done some writing and editing himself, and before I began writing historical romance, I was glad to have him as first and most astute reader of my reviews, essays, and erotica.

Michael's a bookseller. An old-school, independent, brick-and-mortar bookseller, he reads what he sells, sells what he loves, and could no sooner accept money from a publisher for front-of-the-store display space than commit grand larceny. He's the kind of bookseller who remembers what his customers have read last, and knows -- sometimes better than they do -- what they might want to read next.

So if my husband’s been my most astute reader, I've been among his most eager customers -- and even better, I get home delivery. Which made it more or less inevitable, I suppose, that when Michael suggested I might be interested in Robert Darnton's The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, I fairly grabbed the book out of his hands.

Reading this brilliant and entertaining account of how French booksellers sold smuggled works of Enlightenment philosophy and erotic entertainment to a readership hungry for social change was like discovering a hidden history, both of my husband's trade as a socially-committed bookseller and mine as an erotic writer. A world opened up, exciting me so profoundly that I found myself moved to write (of all things) a romance novel, The Bookseller's Daughter, about a bookseller (she) and an erotic writer (he).

Michael was astonished, amused, and helpful as ever. He’d never read a romance novel, but throughout the writing of Bookseller’s Daughter and Almost a Gentleman he proved a tough and honest critic – especially of my synopses (you can read his wry, sly observations about synopsis writing here).

It was only when I began The Slightest Provocation, and tried setting a book in the British countryside during the dark, tumultuous, famine-ridden years after Waterloo, I realized that I needed help with more than my synopses.

Because the political situation in Post-Waterloo Britain is a tough nut to crack, especially if you take on domestic espionage as I did. My first try at a spy hero wasn't working; I needed to figure out why. And I needed to figure out a few more things as well, like:

Who were the spies, anyway, that the Home Office was sending out to infiltrate the reform societies that were springing up over the countryside and to foment rebellion?

What did the reform societies want?

And, for that matter, what exactly was the Home Office hoping to accomplish by suspending the venerable principle of habeas corpus and thereby giving themselves leave to imprison British citizens without charges?

I needed to embark upon a systematic study of a confused historical period and the confusing policies of the fierce, frightened faction that held government power at the time. Gulp.

"Michael?" I called softly.

"Help!" I bellowed.

And so, ungracefully, we became a research-and-writing partnership.

And although you can probably guess which of us made more thorough use of the library catalogs, together we collected an impressive set of borrowing privileges. We got our other best-beloved involved in the project as well. England's Last Revolution: Pentrich 1817, by John Stevens seems only to exist in two libraries in the Western hemisphere. But with his sharp bookseller's eye, Michael knew that this was the book we most needed. He located one of those copies, and our graduate student son Jesse was able to borrow it for us.

All of this research into the political situation helped me rethink my hero. Kit Stansell was no longer a spy, but a veteran of the Napoleonic wars who hopes to work in the Home Office, just when the Home Office was sending provocateurs to the countryside. Witnessing the real events of 1817, Kit and his estranged wife Mary begin to realize what’s going on and do what they can to stop it. (Well, they stop the made-up part of the events in my book, anyway -- since sadly, my made-up characters and I couldn't stop real historical tragedies from happening). And as my contentious hero and heroine battle their way to reconciling their marriage, I allowed them to try to make sense of some of the real correspondence cited in the Stevens book, which Michael and I read on microfiche during our trip to the British National Archives in Kew, just outside of London.

Which brings me to the best part of keeping research in the family: the research vacations... or holidays, as you'll call them if they take you to Britain. The day we spent reading the Home Office correspondence at the Archives remains a cherished memory, which you can read more about in my post at the wonderful History Hoydens blog.

And you can also read more here, about our walks through field and forest and over stiles in the part of Derbyshire where The Slightest Provocation is set. We'd planned to rent a car, but we wound up hiking and taking buses because the Derbyshire bus drivers were so chatty and helpful and it was so nice not to have to worry about driving on "that" side of the road -- plus we didn't quarrel, as we usually do when it turns out I've been reading the road map upside down.

Actually, we almost did quarrel, one sunny day when we couldn't find the walking path trail to Pentrich, when I thought Michael might have asked for more directions... as though a man ever asks for directions when he gets lost. But that was good too, because it served as the inspiration for the dark and rainy night when Kit and Mary get lost, and Kit doesn't ask directions... but you can read all about it in The Slightest Provocation.

While as for my next book, The Edge of Impropriety, forthcoming in November?

Well, this one's a romance between another of my brainy pairs of lovers, a popular novelist of the late 1820s and a scholar/adventurer/collector of classical antiquities. Which demanded I learn quite a bit about the Elgin Marbles, the British Museum, and the themes of eros, esthetics, and empire... a process that began in earnest (but by now you see how this goes), the evening Michael brought home a wonderful, provocative book called Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Edge it when it comes out in November. Isn't the cover lovely?

And thanks for having me, Noodlers, and for allowing me to share my gratitude to my lifetime partner in creating love stories.

Labels: Pam Rosenthal, Research

posted by Janet Mullany @ 1:05 AM 17 comments

Characters Must Have Jobs by Darlene Gardner

Welcome to guest blogger and Superromance author, Darlene Gardner. In the 22 romances she's penned, Darlene's characters have had an astonishing assortment of professions. Here's how she learned about such things as being a cameraman, a restaurant owner, an architect, an FBI agent, a marketing assistant, a lobbyist--the list goes on and on.

Labels: Darlene Gardner, Superromance

posted by Diane Gaston @ 12:01 AM 14 comments

This Week on the Wet Noodle Posse Blog

Labels: Adrienne Regard, Darlene Gardner, historical research, horses, Loucinda McGary, Pam Rosenthal

posted by Mo H @ 9:19 PM 1 comments

Friday Q and A

You ask, and someone will attempt to answer. Our topics this week covered using Google maps, writing what you don't know, travel for research, and researching clothes.

So if you've a question relating to these topics, or to an earlier post, ask away. We're standing by ready to chat!

Labels: Friday Q and A

posted by Janet Mullany @ 8:28 AM 24 comments

'Bound to Love Her' Book Giveaway

May 19-20 - (Monday & Tuesday)

Hi, it's Esri Rose! I'll be answering questions about myself on Jennifer’s Random Musings. Hear what I dream about (disturbing!) and for the first time ever, read my totally made-up “call story.” (That’s the circumstances under which an author hears that she sold her first book.) Your lovely hostess, Jennifer, is going to ask you trivia questions based on my website, and two participants will get copies of Bound to Love Her.

posted by Esri Rose @ 8:15 AM 0 comments