Apr 8, 2009
I woke up the other morning at 3 A.M. and there she was, like an even ashier Cinderella. She was tiny, scrawny, brown and dirty. Her hair was a mess, her tongue as sharp as an adder. She was my unlikely heroine for my unlikely hero Andrew, and she was still nameless. I kept thinking of the fabulous Shakespeare Re-Told Taming of the Shrew. Shirley Henderson played Kate, and while a bit over the top, kind of fit my mental profile. So here’s when Andrew first meets Miss Peartree:
He tiptoed down the hallway as quietly as he ever had eluding a suspicious wife or husband, coming at last to the kitchen. A raggedy serving girl dressed in what appeared to be stray Tartans and tablecloths was bent over an empty fireplace, a pitiful pile of sticks on the hearth. At the sound of his footstep on the bare slate floor she turned and shrieked.
Some of Andrew’s childhood Gaelic had come back to him the further north he’d come. Immersion with the village women earlier had helped a bit too. “Gabh mo leithsceal.” Excuse me.
“Does bloody anyone in this bloody place speak any bloody English?” the girl muttered.
She looked like a street urchin. Her brown hair was a nest, her pointed, unfashionably brown face was smudged and her brown skirts muddied. She was so very brown. Surely she couldn’t be—
“Miss Peartree?” Andrew asked, praying not.
The little wren’s mouth hung open like a baby bird waiting to be fed. Then she looked like she tasted the worm. “Oh, good lord. Mr. Rossiter?” She curtseyed, nearly tripping on twigs.
A little later on in the day, she became Gemma, because she is a jewel just waiting to be polished.
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night to write?
Apr 4, 2009
Some people think baths are yucky. These are the “You’re soaking in your own filth” crowd. But I’m definitely in the liquid relaxation line, beginning almost every morning with a steaming hot bath. I don’t have to worry about falling down while shaving my legs, and I’ve got one of those removable showerheads so I can wash and rinse my hair. I’ve lived in houses with tubs only and houses with showers only. If I had to make a choice, I’d take the house with the tub every time.
Now I know you’re asking yourself, “Why the hell is Maggie talking about her personal hygiene routine?” It’s simple. I finished Mistress by Marriage on Thursday. And what did I want to do to celebrate? Drink champagne? Eat a pound of chocolate? Nope, I wanted to take another bath, even though it had been only three hours since I took the last one. So I talked myself out of it, because I hadn’t done anything to get myself dirty except touch a keyboard and my skin is still kind of dry from the longest winter ever. But now you know my mad method of having fun. I am one wild woman.
What do you do when you finish a big project? Do you prefer to shower or bathe?
There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (uh, perhaps not the best bath advocate out there)
Apr 1, 2009
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve put down almost as many books as I’ve picked up. Yes, I’m picky. Perhaps part of the reason I’m so nonchalant about abandoning them is that I don’t have a vested cash interest. Ely paid for them. She and I swap books. I love getting boxes from her that have little stickies on each book with pointed comments: “Not so horrible, just so-so for me,” “The best part about this book? The dog on the cover,” “Spooge! It’s so bad have liquor nearby,” “Oy vey, the Scots are coming.”
Now, the fact that I can shut a book midway, or skim ahead to the HEA is something new. I used to be a good girl who read every word until the bitter end. Now I operate on the “Life is short so eat dessert first” principle. If something tastes bad or boring to me, that is The End, even if I’m on page 127.
Do you abandon, skim or read the last chapter first? Do you do a book swap or donate your books? (I do both.)
It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. ~Albert Einstein (who probably never read a bad romance novel, and who was definitely not an April fool.)
Mar 25, 2009
Sometimes a child can make you see things a whole different way, simply because she doesn’t want to see things a whole different way. Sadie and I were playing with Play-Doh the other day, and she had a fit if I changed the shape of the stuff. Rolled it like a hotdog? Shriek. Flattened it like a pancake? Shriek. Cut it in half? Double shriek. She wanted the purple blob just the same way it came out of the can and was crabby when she couldn’t get her way.
Most of us are like Sadie—we want the comfort of our known world. We buy our favorite authors, we watch our favorite shows, we hang out with our favorite friends, we visit our favorite blogs (and thank you if you’re reading this). We know what we like, and that’s not a bad thing. But I never want to get too comfortable. My next book will be a challenge I hope to pull off. My hero will be kind of unheroic—a morally challenged, damaged man who will be transformed by the love of a good woman (the still first nameless Miss Peartree). What have you done lately to stretch your Play-Doh?
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Mar 18, 2009
Not Corps. Don’t want you to think I don’t know how to spell. My current heroine is a writer of gothic novels, and her writing plays a central role in Mistress by Marriage. This is not the first time I’ve wound up with a writer-heroine. They do say to write what you know, and when you’re stuck in front of the computer, you forget there are other possibilities out there.
One of my very earliest novella characters was a romance writer who didn’t believe in love. She got the guy anyway, and had twins to boot. *Snort*. Then there was infamous Kelly King, who wrote several romances simultaneously, much to the dismay of her mixed-up couples.
It’s hard to find the proper ‘career’ for a historical heroine. Writing historicals is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you can get away with all sorts of Uber-Alpha-Maleness and unprotected sex that would be extremely irritating in real life. On the other hand, women were expected to play a very different role in society, and to be true to the era, you really can’t have a heroine running around claiming she wants to stay unmarried and be ‘independent.’ Are you telling me that instead of having a nice warm hero in her bed, she’d rather be at the mercy of her father, her brother or some cross-eyed cousin? I don’t think so. Getting the balance right between 21st century sensibilities and 19th century reality is tricky.
What are ‘acceptable’ activities for your historical heroines? If you write contemporaries, how big a role does employment play in your plot?
March is Women’s History Month. Go out and make some!
