Since starting this blog I have tried to post something everyday (except when I have been away from home), even if it was only Regency slang term of the day.

The deadline for the RNA New Writers' Scheme is looming, however, and my top priority must be to get Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth into the best shape that I can before I send it off for a frank and honest assessment of its many merits. This may mean missing the odd day, but I still hope to say something vaguely interesting, if not always sneering and incisive, as frequently as possible.

Heyeroines in need of a slap

1. Venetia Lanyon (Venetia)

OK, so I haven't exactly gone for a controversial choice here for the first of this series. Those of you poised to defend Harriet Presteigne, Sarah Thane or Sophia Stanton-Lacy will have to wait a while.

So, why pick on poor Miss Lanyon? Well, to put it in the modern idiom, what's not to be picked on? While the best of Heyer's heroines, like the three mentioed above, take a while to build up one's irritation, Venetia achieves this in the very first paragraph when she comes in wittering over-dramatically about a fox in among the chickens, and then answers herself in a silly voice. (Apologies for the slip into italics there, by the way. I blame Miss Lanyon. She's always doing it.)

Quite a few of the italics spring from her habit of throwing around quotes instead of having a sensible conversation. Pope, Byron, Shakespeare, Campion - rather than say what she means she just pulls out a snippet of poetry. That sort of thing can get on one's nerves fast.

Then there's the whole "house in Hans Town" business. She's a matchless beauty and knows as much. She has never been to London before. Yet when her future happiness is put at risk what does she do? She proposes to set up house in London with her younger brother, rather than doing what any spirited young woman ought to do, which would be to go back to Yorkshire and irritate her useless elder brother by constantly quoting at him, his insipid wife and his odious mother-in-law.

Luckily Lord Damerel is around to sort out this unholy mess, but even when he proposes to her she manages to muff it in various ways. One botched proposal might be misfortune, but three? She is probably too busy searching for the right quotation, or trying to work out just which word of her acceptance she should italicise.

I rather suspect that Damerel would tire of Venetia very quickly, but they plan to honeymoon in Rome. I just hope that Venetia can find appropriate quotations whn she gets there. I have in mind the bit of Coriolanus, Act III scene 1 about throwing someone off the Tarpeian Rock.


Technorati Tags: heyeroines

They may seem an unlikely bunch of quiz boffins but Stephen Bowden and colleagues from the Romantic Novelists' Association have proved they've got what it takes.

The Gloucestershire Echo have put their interview with me onto page 3 under the headline Love conquers Uni Challenge. The online version lacks a not-particularly-flattering photo of me standing in front of a bookshelf full of Mrs Wenlock's mediaeval history books, and a copy of the official team photograph.

Regency slang term of the day:

Heel tap - A peg in the heel of a shoe, taken out when the shoe is finished. A person leaving any liquor in his glass is frequently called upon to "take off his heel tap"

Overindulgence of the day:

Drop in the eye

Did I mention that the Romantic Novelists' Association team will be competing in the second semi-final of University Challenge - The Professionals next Monday? I had a photographer round this morning from the Gloucestershire Echo to take pictures of me at work in my book-lined garret to go with a short piece that they are doing on the back of a press release from the RNA. Our aim of generating favourable publicity for the Association seems to be making progress.


Having competed in the programme as an undergraduate at Cambridge I was lucky enough to make the University Challenge team for the University of York while doing an MA in Mediaeval (Anglo-Saxon) Studies in 1984. We weren't quite as successful as the Girton team had been. We won our first match, against a team from the LSE, but went on to lose to Trinity College, Dublin. They went on to reach the final, I think, before losing to the Open University. I say I think, because my memory is not what it should be. I have to confess to not even remembering the names of two of my team-mates. Our Captain was Andrew Corbett-Nolan, who won us crucial points towards the end of a tight match against LSE by recognising the names of some breeds of strawberry, but I cannot remember the first names of Ms Glyn and Mr Nash.

Regency slang term of the day:

Purple dromedary - a bungler in the art and mystery of theiving

Overindulgence of the day:

Disguised

Every time I visit my local bookshop it seems that there is a whole new series of novels set amidst the 18th and early 19th Century Navy.

Obviously C S Forester's Hornblower novels and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books have been there for a while. The recent BBC adaptation has brought William Golding's Sea Trilogy back onto the shelves, but there is more.

I must have missed Richard Woodman's Nathaniel Drinkwater books when they first appeared in the 1980s, but they are now back, in omnibus form - five volumes containing fourteen novels and two short stories. Hot off the press comes Julian Stockwin's Thomas Kydd series, which is currently at six books. Another writer who has appeared on the shelves recently is James Nelson, who has written five novels set aboard the fledgling US Navy, and others with a naval setting earlier in the 18th Century. Jonathan Lunn has also written a series of five novels featuring the adventures of Lieutenant Killigrew in the early Victorian Navy. And finally I came across the first two Martin Jerrold books by Edwin Thomas, described as "the nautical Flashman."

I was considering some naval activity for Lady Cardington's Folly; or, the Limehouse Leviathan, which is the planned sequel to my current work in progress, but with the field so full already I think that I will keep the action firmly in harbour.

A long, long time ago I wrote a piece about Jo-Jo Moyes that took her to task for denying that she wrote Romantic Fiction while picking up the healthy cheque that went with winning the Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2004.

I have learned that Ms Moyes has recently joined the Romantic Novelists' Association, which is great news. It looks like she has realised that there's nothing actually wrong with writing Romance, nor even with being proud of the fact.

It may be a lonely life tucked away in Wenlock's garret, but things could be a great deal worse.

What amazes me is that Fox are slave-driving all these writers in order to produce reality TV. You mean that all that stuff is not spontaneous? I am shocked. Shocked.

Regency slang term of the day:

Cadator - a beggar in the character of a decayed gentleman

Overindulgence of the day:

How came you so

Regency slang term of the day:

Mystery bag - a sausage

Overindulgence of the day:

Nazy

Coming soon...

I am an enormous fan of the work of Georgette Heyer, but occasionally, just occasionally, I find myself thinking that one or two of her heroines are in need of a bit of a reality check. For this reason, starting sometime next week, and probably running on a weekly basis, I will post a short piece on just why a particular Heyeroine deserves a slap.

(Short disclaimer here - "deserves a slap" is a turn of phrase and nothing more. It does not signify any belief that violence solves anything, and should not be taken as approval of any slapping of any individual, real or fictional.)

Regency slang term of the day:

Oil of Angels - a gift or bribe

Overindulgence of the day:

Wrapped up in warm flannel

My first two attempts at writing a novel both ground to a halt after about 25,000 words. I had the plot fully worked out, and I was happily moving my characters around like chess pieces, but I discovered that they were not coming to life. I was bored with them because they were so predictable. My careful plotting (which was hugely constrained by the fact that these were real historical figures) had drained the excitement out of the writing process, and if I was bored with my characters I could hardly expect any readers to enjoy them.

So when I started writing Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth I launched straight into it without any plotting at all. I knew that I was writing a Regency, and I had the opening scene - the heroine waking up in a coaching inn without the faintest idea how she had arrived there - and the fact that there would be an espionage plot in there somewhere, but that was it. I just kept writing for about 30,000 words and whenever I needed a hook to end a scene or a chapter I just stuck in the first thing that came into my head.

There comes a point where this approach stops working; having created a tangle of characters, plots and subplots I needed to resolve them in a satisfactory way. So I started writing the end of the book, so that I would know where all my characters would need to get to, and what they would need to know (and what they must not know) at that point.

Now I am writing the bit in between. I haven't written down an actual scene structure or plot summary, but I know roughly what has to happen as I start each scene. I had been dreading this point - would the constraints of the plot drain the life from the characters as they had done before? On the basis of this morning's writing the answer is "no." Lord Alexander behaved impeccably, and Charlotte neatly moved from showing off her enormous knowledge of elephants (based solely on regular reading of Dr Johnson's Dictionary) to almost giving away her real identity, to telling a story about her pretended childhood that is sufficiently close to a real incident that somewhere down the line her uncle will find out what is going on.

I have to get this all finished by the deadline for the RNA New Writers' Scheme, but as long as it keeps working as well as this, all should be well.

Regency slang term of the day:

To have an M under your girdle - to have a courteous address (ie to merit a title such as Mr, Mrs, Miss)

Overindulgence of the day:

Pogy

Oh! she was perfect past all parallel --
Of any modern female saint's comparison;
So far above the cunning powers of hell,
Her guardian angel had given up his garrison;
Even her minutest motions went as well
As those of the best time-piece made by Harrison:
In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her,
Save thine "incomparable oil," Macassar!

Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto the first, xvii

So what has Don Juan's mother, Donna Inez, got to do with anything?

It is not Donna Inez herself that interests me, but Byron's reference to Macassar. This was the first substance I came across when wondering about Regency hair care. Now in woodworking circles "Macassar" is a type of Ebony, and is a very dark-grained wood. I had therefore always believed that Macassar oil must have had the effect of darkening hair colour (and the existence of antimacassars tended to confirm this in my mind).

A bit of actual research (well, sometimes guessing just doesn't do it) revealed however that Macassar oil is in fact colourless, and has nothing to do with Ebony except that both were imported from the same place, Macassar, a district in Sulawesi.

So Macassar oil is not the answer to my quandary. The search goes on.

Regency slang term of the day:

Cucumber - a tailor, because they are said to subsist, during the summer, chiefly on cucumbers.

Overindulgence of the day:

Flawd

Once again I must return to the sidewhiskers issue. As I may have previously mentioned, Wenlock has passed the summer months growing a set of sidewhiskers to more closely resemble a true Regency gentleman. The results are in some ways quite good, although you may not quite be confident in confirming this from the recent photo on Kate Allan's blog.

As I say, in some ways quite good. But not in all ways. The problem is not in the shape or luxuriance of the side whiskers, but in their colour. The hair on top of my head is basically a dark brown. The whiskers are however coming out somewhere on the Anne-of-Green-Gables side of auburn. The combination is not really working as well as I would like. It isn't that big an issue while I sit at home working on Lord Alexander's Cipher or the Bridekirk Behemoth, but if I am to take part in the Grand Georgian Costumed Promenade, or the Grand Regency Ball at the Jane Austen Festival will I be reduced to tinting my whiskers? And if so, with what?

Clearly I will need to research Regency trichology.

Regency slang term of the day:

To travel the road - to take to highway robbery

Overindulgence of the day:

Hicksius Doxius

If you have been following the current series of University Challenge - The Professionals you will have learned that the team from the Romantic Novelists' Association made it through to the semifinals with the highest first round score. We will be appearing in the second semifinal, which, last time I heard, was due to be broadcast on 5 September.

This series of University Challenge - The Professionals is not Wenlock's first appearance on this particular programme. I first made an appearance in 1981 for Girton College, Cambridge. The rest of the team were Sue Gill, who answered most of the questions, Shelley Eyre, our long-suffering captain, and Anna O'Connor, who shocked the more upright of Girton's alumnae by not being as ladylike as they would have wished (quite what they thought of me, I'm not sure.) In those halcyon black and white Bamber Gascoigne days teams had to win three games in a row to make it through to the knockout stages. This we did, defeating Leicester, Royal Holloway and somebody else, before going down in the quarterfinals to a team from Queen's University, Belfast, who went on to win the series.



I don't know what has become of Sue, Shelley or Anna, but if anybody sees them, tell them "hi" from me (they may not look exactly as they do in the photo, of course).