Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes

My blog tour continues today! I'm talking about my deep-seated ambivalence about Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen, and trying to be taken seriously over at the Book Smugglers. (Note: I DO mean "ambivalence." I love Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen a LOT.) There are also hilarious pictures of My Family's Poor Fashion Choices Through Time. Go over and read it! (And check out the Smugglers' awesome blog!) I'm giving away a signed book in the comments.

Smuggler Ana also posted my very first review! And she was very kind to me. Is it tacky to link to reviews? It just seems weird not to when I'm linking to my guest post.

In other news, my friend Alice just linked me to this article about a new Alexandre Dumas biopic. They've cast Gerard Depardieu to play Dumas and are darkening his skin and putting him in a curly wig for the role. Because if you didn't know, Alexandre Dumas was part black. Here's a picture of him:



And here is a racist caricature from his own lifetime, entitled "The Quadroon Chef: Dumas concocting his bouillabaisse of romance":



I still remember how shocked and angry I was the first time I saw this image, when my mom and I went on a tour of the Château de Monte-Cristo, Dumas's amazing estate near Paris. I remember how sad I was when I read his novel Georges about a mixed-race hero who tries to start a slave revolt and fails, and I saw all the racism he'd written into it, the internalized beliefs about black inferiority, and how awful that must have been for him to live with every day. (The book does have a lot of great stuff in it, by the way. It just also has a lot of messed-up stuff in it.)

Just. I am a HUGE Dumas fan. HUGE. The Three Musketeers in particular was one of the defining books of my youth and it still means a lot to me. The man was a brilliant writer and a really nice guy and I love him. And apart from anything else, apart from what it says about the racism and marginalizing in European and American film industries, apart from how that affects all of us and perpetuates racism in our cultures, apart from how angry I would be if I were a French mixed-race actor who could have tried for this role if it hadn't already been handed to a white guy, apart from ALL OF THAT, this is a huge insult to HIM. Didn't Dumas face enough racism when he was alive? Haven't we come far enough that we can show him some respect? Is it so hard to cast a mixed-race actor in your movie? Is it really?

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hurrah for love! Here are two poems by Emily Dickinson about love. I know from experience that Valentine's Day can be a bummer if you're not with someone, so the first one is about break-ups:

341.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--


And here's a more cheerful one, small and simple and surprisingly sexy.

55.

By Chivalries as tiny,
A Blossom, or a Book,
The seeds of smiles are planted--
Which blossom in the dark.


And now for something completely different: apparently In for a Penny is shipping from Amazon already! Several people e-mailed or called me yesterday to tell me their copies had arrived!

EEEE!

And now a comic: Kate Beaton's Susan B. Anthony for kids.

What's a poem that you think really captures something (happy or painful or anything else) about the experience of being in love?

Breaking news!

I know two posts in one day is a bit much (my eventual goal is one a week) but something important has happened! My wonderful editor Leah Hultenschmidt sent me a copy of my book so I could see it while waiting for my author copies!!!!!

Yes, I really did have to use that many exclamation points. And now, pictures! In my excitement I am vaguely reminiscent of a lemur, but hey, I like lemurs.





Book! (Note my awesome lobster sheets.)





The copyright page!



About the Author! That's me!



Life is good.

I don't do anything so mean, I don't even sell apples!

My blog tour starts today! You can read my post about classism in Regency England over at History Hoydens. Here's the opening:

When I started writing In for a Penny, about a rich brewer's daughter who marries an impoverished earl, I realized I was going to have to do some research to figure out how people in the Regency thought about class. I had general ideas, obviously, but if I was going to write about my heroine from the point of view of my antagonist, the snobby poacher-hating Tory Sir Jasper, or write about my heroine meeting the hero's newly-middle-class tenant farmers, I needed to understand more.

I quickly discovered that there were endless gradations, just as there are today:

1. A biography of Hannah More tells this story: the Duchess of Gloucester "desired one of her ladies to stop an orange-woman and ask her if she ever sold ballads. 'No indeed,' said the woman, 'I don't do anything so mean, I don't even sell apples!'"

And I'm giving away a signed copy of my book in the comments, too. Check it out!

Contest and other news!

Hi all! In honor of my first book (which will hit shelves in just over three weeks!) I'm running a contest at my site! I'll be giving away five signed copies of In for a Penny, and one lucky winner will get my Regency Starter Pack--10 of my favorite books! This is an awesome prize, if I do say so myself, so get over there and enter!

I've also got a preliminary schedule for my blog tour and signings up on my site index--more dates coming soon! But mark your calendars, my first signing will be at Third Place Books (in Lake Forest Park, WA) on April 2nd at 6:30PM! It's going to be awesome and you should all come.

And so this post doesn't consist entirely of shameless self-promotion, here's a really interesting post about female sexuality in romance from Dear Author (which is a couple weeks old now, so maybe you've all read it already, but if you haven't, do it now):

So going back to the question of whether these views mirror some biological or psychological or historical imperative, even if all that were true, I don’t think it’s the critical issue. For me, the critical issue is that as a society we continue to value a woman’s sexual status and we give value to women (or take it away) based on this status.

Also, my critique partner Susan Wilbanks is doing a really cool series on how to use British titles and courtesy titles, using examples from the Peter Wimsey books and the Duke of Wellington's family: "Of Wimseys and Wellesleys"! Since title errors pull me out of a story faster than a speeding bullet, I'm pretty excited about this. Especially since I use the Wimsey family to remember lots of the rules myself (Gaudy Night is one of my top romances EVER).

EVERYTHING'S COMING UP ROSES!

"Rose Lerner's LILY AMONG THORNS, in which a young woman innkeeper who has worked hard to bury her past finds herself facing the man who long ago helped her escape her life as a prostitute and is now turning to her for her help; she believes the biggest threat to her independence are the sparks that fly between them until disaster threatens and she finds they must work together to fight for their freedom and their lives, to Leah Hultenschmidt at Dorchester, for publication in January 2011, by Kevan Lyon at Marsal Lyon Literary Agency (World)."

This was in Publisher's Marketplace yesterday! Yes! I sold another book!

Pretty much all the details I have so far are in that announcement--I just got the call from Kevan on Tuesday and I think I might have burst her eardrum screaming into the phone--but I'll keep you posted!

::chair-dances::

Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light?

I recently learned a new word: mondegreens. A "mondegreen" is, as defined by Wikipedia, "the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony, in a way that yields a new meaning to the phrase."

The term was coined by Sylvia Wright, who said, "When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen."

The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green". As Wright explained the need for a new term, "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original."

So the thing you have to understand about me is that I am absolutely terrible at understanding song lyrics. I have a LOT of trouble picking out words, even though words are often the most important part of a song to me because I'm a writer and not very musical. I frequently have to look up lyrics of a song I love, or it irks me EVERY TIME I hear the song. "STOP MUMBLING!" I shout at the radio. So I frequently have the experience of discovering that I was totally, 100% wrong about what a singer was saying.

I don't know why it is that what I make up for myself is so often more satisfying to me that the real lyric. Is it just because I'm used to it, having listened to the song that way so many times? Or is it because, making it up myself, I naturally made it up in a way I liked, a way that resonated with me?

The most recent example is from Bob Dylan's love song, "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands." I love that song. I love it a lot. I love it so much that I love a whole OTHER Bob Dylan love song, "Sarah," just because it has the line, "Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writing 'Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you." (This despite having no romantic feelings about Bob Dylan AT ALL, as he seems like kind of a jerk.) But I have always, always, ever since I first heard the song when I was 16, thought that the second line was, "And your eyes like smoke and your breasts like rhymes."

Turns out it's actually prayers like rhymes. Which, there's nothing wrong with that as a line. It's a nice line, even. But I loved my own interpretation. I thought it was the most romantic, sexy simile ever. (For a writer, I guess words are the most erotic thing someone can compare you to.)

And now I've heard it the right way and I'll never be able to unhear it. And I'm kind of disproportionately saddened by that.

When's the last time you've been disappointed by finding out the actual lyrics to a song?