Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

Give me more historicals to read!

I love reading historical romance, and I love writing them. But the reason I stopped reading them a few years ago was because errors started creeping in, then they swept in with a “this is fiction, so why should you care” attitude. So I just stopped reading them. Now I’m dipping my toe back in, and to some extent, errors are still there. Especially title errors. Not difficult to check, easy to correct.
One of the reasons I submitted to Samhain was because I enjoyed the historicals the publisher issued, and now I’ve entrusted them with Richard and Rose.

So here’s the quick guide to titles and the commonest errors in historical romances (naming no names!)

A Chance To Dream - now in print!

From Sept 30th, A Chance To Dream will be available in print!

I loved writing this book. I hope you enjoy reading it. The book is beautiful, thanks to Ann Cain’s stunning cover art, and receiving the box of author copies was like ten Christmases rolled into one.
So here’s what you can expect:

The Gay Eighteenth Century.

My historicals are mainly set in the mid-eighteenth century, when the Georgian era was at its height. The era has always fascinated me, from the great country houses to the hovels in the city, and the way the people at that time lived.
And my, did they live. They loved, lusted and laughed, all without the hypocrisy and the manipulation of guilt that the Victorians were so good at. I fell in love with this era when I was nine years old and it’s the longest love affair of my life.
I’ve read the books, and my husband says I read more eighteenth-century magazines and newspapers than I do modern ones! I get some of my plots from them, so outlandish though they might seem, most are based on real-life cases.

But in one respect, the eighteenth century was as moralistic as the Victorians. Gay love, or, as it was called then, sodomy. It was punishable by death.

However, at that time the law was a different thing to what it is today. Then, great sweeping laws were passed, but there were loopholes, so the magistrate or judge could take the particulars of each case into consideration. A woman, accused of stealing a loaf to feed her starving children escaped the penalty of hanging or transportation when she was brought to court, when the judge valued the goods she stole as much lower than their true worth – and the court had a collection to help her pay the fine!

That’s why the crime was “sodomy,” or the act of anal sex. Strictly, this was between males and females, or males and males, but in practice, only males were prosecuted, and it explains why women weren’t. It is based on Church law, but the offence was a criminal one, not a civil one, and subject to the direst penalties.
Gays were prosecuted throughout the century, from the spate of prosecutions in the 1720’s, possibly a cover for Jacobite activities, to the “Mother Clapp” prosecutions later in the century. And they were hanged for it (game is hung, men are hanged).

Although obvious gays, or rather bisexuals in Lord Hervey’s case, existed, most were tolerated. Hervey had lovers, male and female, and he was an important member of the government in the 1740’s, an immensely clever man and a friend of Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Alexander Pope (who may himself have been gay). But that wasn’t a crime – sodomy was. Lady Mary said of him, “There are three sexes – men, women and Herveys.” So gays existed and were tolerated, even exalted in this era when men wore pink but carried a sword by their side.

I’ve created two gay characters so far, one an honourable, intelligent man who has suffered for his sexual orientation, and one a coward, who made another person suffer. This last character was the first husband of Isobel, the heroine of “Seductive Secrets.” Isobel hasn’t been told the facts of life, she discovered them for herself. Her mother never encouraged her to talk, when it became obvious her marriage was going wrong, and she never told Isobel anything about sex when she went into marriage. So Isobel associates sex with pain and misery. Harry’s sin isn’t that he’s gay, it’s that he hasn’t the courage to face up to his responsibilities, and when he can’t ‘perform’ with Isobel, he blames her for the failure, not himself. In short, Harry is a coward.

I didn’t see why gay characters should be caricatures – either saints or the tooth-gratingly irritating “gay best friend” character, someone who has natural taste in interior design and making women laugh. Yes, I’ve known several gays. We all have. Some played up to the stereotype, others didn’t. So I wanted to make all my characters real. People, not archetypes, stereotypes or ciphers. I wanted to give the gay characters in my books permission to be bad as well as good. Just as long as they didn’t slot into a preformed character slot.

One of my friends, the collector of automata, Ken Rubin, has machines that perform in a variety of ways, all from the same penny. He has a huge collection of early bubblegum machines, all of which do ‘something’ before you get your gum. You can watch your penny chase down convoluted pipes, get your fortune read or try to hit a target. But you get your gum in the end. You can (and I did) spend hours studying them and marvelling at the ingenuity of the creators. I hope my characters are as diverse and unexpected as Ken’s machines, if not a bit more.
You don’t know what you’re getting when you put in your penny, but you always get your gum in the end.

For an excerpt from “Seductive Secrets,” read on.

Pittsburgh here I come!

I’ve only been to one Romantic Times before, last year, at Houston, when the awesome Linnea Sinclair shepherded me around, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.
This year I’m on my own.

Or rather, not. This year is my first as a published Samhain author (and what a ride that’s been!) I have three books out, more to come and lots to talk about!

I love flying to the US. Or rather, I love getting there. The flights are what we Brits call bum-numbing. Houston last year was 14 hours via Heathrow. This year it’s a mere 7 or 8, via Newark. I fly from Manchester, which is one of the saner airports in the UK, although that’s not saying a huge amount. With the current chaos surrounding Terminal 5 at Heathrow, I’d sell my firstborn not to get there that way.

Actually, I have a very good firstborn if anybody’s interested. Just give her back to me once she’s out of her teens.

So I can hit the ground running, I tweak my sleep pattern over here. I’m a night owl anyway, so I go to bed at 3 am or thereabouts and sleep until around 10. Take 5 hours off that for US time, and I’m not too bad.

Although I’m not a normally sociable person, at RT it’s so much easier. Lots of people who don’t think I’m completely insane when I suddenly stop talking and stare into the distance (idea time!) or when I start talking about people who don’t actually exist – except in my head. The brainstorming sessions last year were a blast. Get a SF writer, a historical romance writer and a romantic suspense writer together, mix and serve!

I’m trying to generate a few new story ideas, so the flight should be good for that, but the change of scene and the stimulation of meeting new people does tend to kick-start whatever part of the brain is concerned with making stuff up. I’ve always been good at that.

But useless at lying. Go, as you charmingly say in the US, figure.

The Last in the series?

I’ve just started writing what will probably be the final book in the Triple Countess series. Or it might not be. But it is the last for now.
It’s always sad saying goodbye to a set of characters. I shall miss Daniel, Orlando, Perdita and Corin, and their associated spouses and families.
I write series partly because I don’t want to say good-bye. Writing one book will inevitably give me a thought about one or more of the characters. “Last Chance, My Love” was started as a single title, but there’s a scene early on with Orlando and Corin and they burst to life on the page. So then I was stuck with their stories. In Orlando’s story, his sister Perdita was meant to be an annoying invalid, but she refused to do it, so then I had to do her story, too.
So now I’m writing Corin’s story. After the wonderful reception the first three books had, I’d better make this a good one!
I love writing in that era, too. The mid-Georgian era was exciting, adventurous and less restrained than the Regency. Near enough for Regency readers to feel familiar with it, and far enough apart to provide new storylines and possibilities. Beautiful clothes, men with swords as everyday wear, lots of swashbuckling action and women with a definite agenda of their own.
I have loved writing this series, but it won’t be my last venture into Georgian England.
Or maybe it won’t be the last Triple Countess book, after all. Corin has a younger brother and sisters. Never say never!

Getting In Touch With My Muse

Most writers seem to have a muse – the creature that whispers at them, never leaving them alone until they write the story that won’t leave them alone. That’s great for unpublished writers, or people who write for the love of it – but what of the writer who is working to a deadline, the one hit by the dreaded writer’s block? The muse has gone – now what?
A writer working for a publisher is a professional, expected to deliver work on time. It doesn’t always work very well with the muse, but there must be a way to cope, or learn how to.
For this to work, you have to forget the magical side of writing. Even romance writers have to take a long, hard look at their methods of working sometimes. The trouble is, there seem to be as many ways of working as there are writers. Some writers like to write from a detailed outline, and others dive straight into the story. However, whichever way they do it, there are similarities. There has to be a backbone to the story, something holding it together, and every writer knows this. Whether you call it Goal, Motivation, Conflict, or The Hero’s Journey, there is something holding the story together, and you can’t usually tell the method used in the final result.
A writer comfortable with the method she uses may still be struck by the dreaded block. There are several reasons for this. One might be the writer’s personal life. Something has changed, and the disturbance has reached every corner of her life. The likelihood is that once the situation is resolved, the creativity will return. Another is a fault with the story. Perhaps a character’s motivation is weak, something that might not become apparent until the middle part of the story. The writer isn’t always aware of it, but there it sits, like an ambush in the jungle, waiting to put a stop to the flow. In that case, it’s time to give up, go through a series of analyses to find out what is wrong, or start something new.
It’s up to the writer to find out what the problem is. If you don’t know how and what motivates you, there are ambushes at every turn. So sometime in your career, you have to stop and think. Forget the stories beating at your ears, forget the demands made on your time – it’s time to think about yourself.
If you know how you work, you can spot what is wrong quicker, and half the problem, the worrying part, has gone.

Lynne Connolly, author of Sensual Historical Romance
visit http://www.lynneconnolly.com

A love too strong to disguise, a disgrace too deep to ignore.
A Chance To Dream from Samhain Publishing

The old accuracy debate

oes historical accuracy matter?

Yes. For me, anyway. It’s an old, old argument – do we really need historical accuracy in historical romance?

I live in England, so perhaps it’s more important to me, because I see and hear it every day. Houses built in the 16th century, great showplace houses are there for the visiting, and the very structure of society owes so much to the past.

So every time I read a wincing historical error, especially the ones that are so easy to correct, like title errors (having a peer decide who his heir is going to be, addressing a duke as “His lordship,” all that kind of thing) that author has lost a reader. Me. And others like me.