One RITA , Two Carries, and Many Good Friends

Absurdly brief, after all the elaborate preparation. But it was as long as I could stand. And, well — I won, that’s all. I mean, sometimes life is like that, you know: no complications, no reversals. Later for the intricacies...

That's Carrie, the intrepid girl heroine of my Molly Weatherfield erotic novels, speaking from the midst of a deeply compromised situation at the far reaches of my sexual imagination.

But what she has to say will serve quite well for how I felt two weeks ago in Washington DC, when (if you don't already know) my most recent romance novel, The Edge of Impropriety, was awarded Romance Writers of America's RITA® Award for Best Historical Romance, at our annual National Conference.

Joyous, amazed, and exhausted. And (like my overeducated, motormouth heroine) willing, just this once, to let complexity and unlikelihood pass without brow-knitting analysis.

And perhaps also little bit like Stephen King's Carrie before the bucket of blood descends -- which might seem an outré comparison unless you remember the movie really well. I searched YouTube for clips, but everybody only wants to show you the carnage.

What I remember best, however, is the moment of happy triumph, done in silent slow motion, as she makes her way up through a sea of smiling faces and applauding hands to the microphone to be crowned prom queen.

Swear to God, that's what it felt like.

Some hints for future RITA® hopefuls:

It's best if your book has a long title: I was so dim-witted and slow on the uptake that I might have missed my name being announced if the awards presenter hadn't had to make her way through the thicket of syllables in Impropriety.

You'll feel less like an idiot afterwards (take it from me) if you haven't repeatedly assured every last one of your wonderful, long-suffering friends (see below for pix) that you have absolutely no chance of winning.

There's bound to be someone you forget to thank -- my mea culpa is author/blogger Lisa Dale (check her out at Book Anatomy 101 or at her smart, wonderful, inquisitive interview of me). Online thanks aren't as good, but they'll have to do -- Lisa, thanks again.

And that's all, folks, at least for now. No complexities or reversals. I've got my ass back in the chair (which is what you want, as a writer, qua Nora Roberts in that delightful New Yorker feature story in the June 22 issue) and am happily back to work on the new book. Because the real -- the maddening, exhilarating, scary -- fun has got to be in the everyday work of writing. But I'd be lying bigtime if I said that all the smiles, hugs, applause and congratulations weren't a huge encouragement.

As are the friendships. So here are the pix I promised.

Hoydens at lunch in DC:

That's Janet Mullany and me seated, and (left to right), Lauren Willig, Mary Blayney, Diane Whiteside, and Kathrynn Dennis standing.



And hoydens over drinks in San Francisco:

(left to right) Me and Tracy Grant in back, and Amanda Elyot, Kalen Hughes, and Doreen DeSalvo in front.

No Lynna Banning, I'm afraid. We're going to have to do something about that. How about some more celebrating? I know there's lots of good news from the just- and soon-to-be-published among you.

Do tell.

And hey, thanks everybody. Again.

The Marriage of Two Minds

I seem to have a knack for missing RWA conferences where my friends win Rita Awards. I wasn't at either of the conferences where my friend Penelope Williamson won twice in the 90s. In those pre-internet days, I didn't know she'd won until she got back from the conference and telephoned me. Last Saturday, thanks to Twitter, I knew Pam had won the Rita for Best Historical Romance for her wonderful The Edge of Impropriety at almost the same moment it was announced from the stage.

One of the things I love about Pam’s writing is that her characters have, in Regency terms, “a keen understanding”–they’re brainy people who enjoy talking about ideas (The Edge of Impropriety’s hero and heroine are a classical scholar and a Silver Fork novelist respectively). This past week, while a lot of my writer friends were at RWA, a post by Jean on the All About Romance blog on “The Beautiful Minds of Heroes” got me thinking more about brainy characters.

The first brilliant hero Jean mentions falling in love with is Sherlock Holmes. I confess I discovered Sherlock Holmes first through dramatizations (notably the fabulous Jeremy Brett series). I didn’t actually read the Arthur Conan Doyle stories until I discovered Laurie King’s Russell & Holmes books. Because much as I love brainy characters on their own, I particularly love intellectual and romantic partnerships between two exceptionally brilliant people. There’s the fun of watching two fine minds click over solving a problem. I love the scenes of Russell and Holmes talking through a case. The same is true of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane--I’m particularly fond of a scene in Have His Carcase where they break a code together. Mulder and Scully’s debates about science and paranormal phenomenon were one of the delights of The X-Files.

There's the delight of clever wordplay, such as Lymond and Philippa's improvised "Languish Lock'd in L" play in The Ringed Castle. And the tension of emotion simmering beneath a coolly intellectual façade, which comes out so beautifully in the scene following the play in The Ringed Castle where Lymond realizes he's in love. Or, as Russell's friend Veronica says in A Monstrous Regiment of Women (speaking, indirectly, about Holmes, or rather someone she's comparing to Holmes) "A challenge, I suppose, to break through that ascetic shell and set loose the passion beneath. Because one could feel the passion. My God, you couldn't miss it, in his eyes and his mouth, but it was under control."

There’s also the inevitable clash of two people who love to think. As Miss de Vine says to Harriet in Gaudy Night, “A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity. You can hurt one another so dreadfully.” That’s certainly true of Peter and Harriet and also of Holmes and Russell and Mulder and Scully. In all three cases, a determination to battle a problem through intellectually and a refusal to open up emotionally can leave the other partner feeling shut out. Peter in Busman’s Honeymoon, Holmes in The Language of Bees, Scully battling her cancer, Mulder coping with family revelations.

I love writing about brainy characters. The intellectual debates, the fun with words, the angst of clashing minds. In theory, at least, Mélanie, Charles, and Raoul in my books are all brilliant. Of course, that means the author has to keep up with them, which is sometimes a challenge . It took me a long time (and a consultation with a friend who was a math major) to devise the code Charles and Mel break in Secrets of a Lady (much simpler than the one Have His Carcase).

Do you like reading about brainy characters? Do you like them paired with a partner of equal brilliance? Any interesting examples to suggest? Writers, do you like writing about brainy characters? What are the challenges?

Why Mr. Knightley Only Has One Tenant (and another brief announcement)

Once more, my perennial apologia: Although I love the material specifics of history, I don't have much of a gift for it. Too many primary sources and I'm gobsmacked by the messiness, ditzed and dizzied by real life's overabundance of detail.

And though old documents are thrilling, there's all that handwriting to get through.

So I get most of my history from novelists, who have to employ some principles of selection. From good novelists -- when I can, from the great ones, the women of the nineteenth century, who so fully and so movingly comprehended a world of property -- landed and intellectual both -- in which they weren't full citizens.

Like Jane Austen's "acquisitive, high bourgeois society... interlocking with an agrarian capitalism... mediated by inherited titles and the making of family names." The literary historian Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City, continues that Austen's "eye for a house, for timber, for the details of improvement, is quick, accurate, monetary."

I love seeing through that quick, accurate eye.

And I trust it, even when I find myself a little surprised by what it sees.

As in Emma, a book it feels that I've been reading front to back and front to back again for at least the past three years -- ever since I realized that I needed to understand the material relationships between an English country village and the big estate adjoining it, in The Slightest Provocation. I used a lot of Highbury for Grefford, and some of Donwell Abbey for the Rowan estate (though -- now it can be told! -- I... shall we say... paid homage to Austen by naming the family estate in The Edge of Impropriety Wheldon Priory).

But one thing that always rather befuddled me was the fact that Mr. Knightley only has one tenant farmer, Robert Martin.

I mean, don't you think of "tenants" in the plural? As when Elizabeth Bennet tours Pemberley and Darcy's housekeeper tells her that, "there is not one of his tenants or servants but will give him a good name." Or think of Middlemarch's earnest Dorothea Brooke cherishing her plans for improving the tenant cottages on Sir James Chettam's estate.

Only one tenant at Donwell? And that tenant hardly lives in a cottage. In Harriet Smith's breathless reporting, Mr. Martin and his mother and sisters have "two parlours, two very good parlours... and an upper maid," not to speak of "a very handsome summer-house in their garden, where some day next year they were all to drink tea: -- a very handsome summer-house, large enough to hold a dozen people."

It's a pity to cut and paste Jane Austen, even (or especially) to dip in and out of the always consequential chatter of the "minor" characters in Emma -- which, though it's the only of Austen's novels to be named for its heroine, is (imo and the critic Lionel Trilling's as well) a book first and foremost about a community, and one that is delineated in exquisite precise detail.

But I hope you can see from what I kept that Austen is hardly slipshod or lacking in her delineation of Mr. Knightley's tenant farmer. And try as I might to uncover another tenant, I could not. Which leaves the question, as to why, if Donwell Abbey (in Emma's view and Austen's as well) is "just what it ought to be," a source of "honest pride and complacency," an ideal and very English estate -- why, when it comes to tenants, is Mr. Knightley different from all other knightly landowners (or at least noteworthy among them)?

(Because although in real life any instance of a general condition may be atypical, but in a novel, where every instance counts, there's got to be a reason for an atypical or noteworthy situation.)

And so there is a reason for Mr. Knightley's single tenant -- as I finally learned from a superb book of social/literary history, Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770-1860 by Beth Fowkes Tobin.

The reason Mr. Knightley only has one tenant is because -- although his unpretentious, "rambling and irregular" estate was never "improved" by a Repton or a Capability Brown, never landscaped into artsy, inviting, artificially-engineered views or prospects -- Donwell Abbey, with its "abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up" is indeed atypical, in that it's a highly advanced instance of the most modernizing agricultural practices available during its time: enclosure and engrossment.

I already knew about the Enclosure Acts:

A series of laws passed in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries [...which...] led to the enclosure or fencing-off of farms. Where land had previously been shared in a community or divided into small lots, farms were now redistributed and enclosed. Those who had many land holdings could combine them into large farms, where the new production methods could be profitably implemented. These were more efficient and were also safe from scavenging, a previously accepted practice wherein the peasants had the right to take food left behind on landlords' fields.

(So that's why Mr. Knightley is so unfailingly fascinated by fences and drains. While for enclosures, click here for more detail)

But I hadn't thought about the other side of the process: engrossment, whereby fewer tenants, farming more efficiently, would be a better deal for the landlord as well.

We might call it downsizing. And we might, if we paid too much attention, not like every aspect of it any more than we do corporate downsizing in our day.

And why I'm grateful to have this safe space of hoydendom to consider the complexities of history and historical writing, the pleasures and perils of remembering that our escapist past was somebody's dynamic, challenging, vexing and inescapable present...

Once again, how do you readers and writers deal with this? Does it improve your understanding of a novel written in past times to see it in this sort of context? Is it possible (or even advisable) to create this level of context in a historical romance novel?

While as for the the brief announcement: because I'm not so selflessly engaged in these weighty considerations not to share that my most recent historical romance novel, The Edge of Impropriety, is a finalist for Romance Writers of America's RITA award in the Historical Romance Category.

Check out the killer list of finalists I'm part of. And bid me good luck in my own efforts at enclosure of the spread of my upper arms and engrossment, particularly of my triceps.
Come say hi if you're at the awards ceremony or the party afterwards -- I'll be the smallish lady of a certain age, wearing something shiny and sleeveless.