Motherhood, Copy Edits, & Fashion

 photo: Raphael Coffey Photography

I've been going through the copy-edited manuscript of my next book, The Paris Affair. My last chance to tweak the prose before publication and all inevitably the time I find myself double checking a bunch of research minutia, adding in things like description of gowns, verifying word usage, etc... . It coincided this week with unexpected car trouble, the power going out, and a morning visit to a nursery school my daughter may some day attend. All of which is a round about way of explaining why instead of writing a new post, I'm recycling one I wrote for my own blog, with a few embellishments and updates.

This post is a favorite of mine because it combines two topics dear to my heart - being a mom and (at the risk of sounding frivolous) fashion. I confess I love clothes. I love putting together outfits each morning, choosing accessories – it’s like a chance to create a costume and decide who to be that day. My friends will testify that I have a tendency to dress up much more than I need to – why not wear heels and a dress for an afternoon of writing in a café? (which in fact is what I'm wearing as I write this post). Why not wear a cocktail dress to a casual dinner with friends instead of leaving it hanging in the closet? Why not wear a long gown at the smallest excuse? Last night was Mélanie's 10 month birthday. We went out to dinner with a friend at a nice restaurant where we wouldn't look out of place in jeans (after all jeans rarely look out of place anywhere). But instead I wore an LBD and Mélanie wore the her "princess" party dress (which previously belonged to two other little girls) because the pink tulle skirt always puts a smile on her face.

It’s probably a sign of shallowness, but I confess that one of the things i wasn’t looking forward to about pregnancy was finding things to wear. I was afraid getting dressed wouldn’t be fun anymore. But as it happened, I found I enjoyed the challenge. Fortunately I love empire-waisted dresses, so some things already in my closet worked through pregnancy. A black jersey dress I splurged on at a post-holiday sale a few years ago got me through everything from meetings to lunches to cocktail parties. And I found I was able to buy new clothes that weren’t maternity clothes, including a gauzy taupe dress that looks like a short version of a Regency gown which among other things was great for two baby showers and Thanksgiving dinner with a variety of cardigans. Realizing that my diaper bag was going to double as my purse, I bought a big Longchamp tote in a nice solid brown instead of something floral patterned.

I went home from the hospital in another empire-waisted dress I’ve had for years with a good neckline for nursing. And thus I went from the challenges of pregnancy dressing to the challenges of new mother dressing. A lot of my friends loved the fact that they didn’t have to dress up when they had new babies. For me it was the opposite. I wanted to curl my hair and put on makeup and wear dresses and heels. Part of it was that it was the holiday season when Mélanie was born, so there were lots of parties and special events. But part of it, I think, is that it was a way to hang on to who I was. I love being a mom, but I still wanted to be Tracy. My baby gift to myself was a new black dress with lace sleeves (which you can see me wearing in countless photos including the one above). When Mélanie was less than two weeks old, we got up at almost the crack of dawn the morning after Christmas and went Boxing Day sale shopping at Union Square in San Francisco. I was delighted to see lots of others parents with young children (everyone with strollers was using the elevator) as well as moms with teenage daughters which made think about trips with Mélanie when she’s older. The need for clothes that work for nursing provided an excellent excuse for shopping (I fear I’m all too good at find excuses for shopping). I learned that surplice mock wrap bodices are great for easy, discreet breastfeeding. I found a wonderful dress in this style at Teddy http://www.shopteddy.comin New York that goes everywhere from writing afternoons to to meetings to dinners out. I got in two colors on two different trips.

But while I’m still able to have fun with clothes, it’s not quite the same as before. There was the night I went to the symphony with my uncle and aunt in a cute cocktail dress, carrying a tiny black bag instead of my big tote/diaper bag. I came home from my sophisticated evening out to find that the cute cocktail dress had been unzipped on the side the entire evening because i breastfed before I went out (it has a slip, so I was covered up, but still…). There was the day I got Mel and me dressed in cute outfits and out the door at an early hour for a day of lunch and meetings only to realize I’d forgotten to wear earrings for probably the first time in twenty years (I went around all day with my hair combed over my ears). And there was the recent afternoon when I left Mel with a friend and went to a meeting at the Opera House and drinks next door at Jardinière wearing a cute LBD I hadn’t worn since before my pregnancy. Only to realize when I got home that the cute LBD had avocado and baby sunscreen smeared on the shoulder.

All of which is something of a metaphor for a deeper truth. While I still am the person i was before Mélanie was born, being Mélanie’s mom has changed me. Which is a good thing.

One of the things I've been doing in my copy edits is layering some additional clothing descriptions where they can accentuate character details. Particularly fun with my heroine Suzanne who frequently is in disguise in the book. Do you find clothes help define who you are in different parts of your life? Do clothes in books do the same for characters?

Capturing a Moment in Time

I just returned from a lovely few days at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with my daughter Mélanie (there we are at the Member Lounge, though Mel is still a little young to actually go the plays). Along with some wonderful Shakespeare my friends and I saw a great new play OSF commissioned, All the Way, by Robert Shenkkan, about Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act. Very much in the style of a Shakespeare history play, it's set on a broad canvas, with a wide cast of characters - politicians from both parties, Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, J. Edgar Hoover.

I came home to Lauren's wonderful blog about Regencyland and the difficulties of "winkling out those elusive distinctions" of a specific year within a larger time period. As Lauren said, "Letters and diaries are even more revealing, the unmediated product of the moment." All the Way uses the actual words of the characters in many cases. It's set from November 1963 - November 1964. And though we talk about "the sixties' as we talk about "the Regency" or "the Victorian era", 1960 was certainly very different from 1969, and 1963-4 was very different from either. All the Way gives a richly detailed portrait of a specific moment in time. The start of the LBJ presidency, the maneuvering over the Civil Rights Act, Freedom Summer, the presidential campaign, Hoover's vendetta against Martin Luther King, the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Yet it creates this complex portrait of the time period through the personal portraits of the characters - their goals, personal and political, their alliances and conflicts, in many cases their relationships with their spouses. Some of the most haunting moments are personal snapshots. LBJ telling Lady Bird to fix her lipstick just before they get off the plane where he's been sworn in after JFK's assassination. Coretta King helping MLK pack and telling him the kids are starting to see him as a stranger. LBJ telling his aide Walter Jenkins he's the closest thing he has to a son and Jenkins gently removing LBJ's glasses, visibly touched, shortly before Jenkins is photographed in a tryst with another man and shunted off to a mental hospital.

I realized that it's similar personal details that evoke a time and place in our books. In The Garden Intrigue, Lauren captures Napoleon's court just before it becomes an actual court when Napoleon makes himself emperor. Napoleon is at the height of his power, still married to Josephine though he's under pressure to divorce her. Hortense Bonaparte is unhappy in her marriage to Louis, pregnant with her second child, not yet in love with Charles de Flahaut. Some of the informality of the Consular era lingers as while Imperial formality begins to creep in. A couple of years before or after Paris would be a different place. In Vienna Waltz, I tried to use the circumstances of the characters to evoke the complexities of the Congress of Vienna. Prince Talleyrand holding on to power in the restored Bourbon government and using all his wits to keep defeated France a player in the international game. Dorothée Talleyrand feeling her wings in love and politics. Wilhelmine of Sagan desperate to recover her daughter and using both Prince Metternich and Tsar Alexander to do so. These characters appear again in my forthcoming The Paris Affair. It takes place only a year later, but in the post Waterloo world their circumstances and goals have changed.

What are some favorite books of yours that capture specific moments in time and what detials evoke the time period?

Plots & Devices

My daughter Mélanie and I just got back from a lovely few days in New York, including fun visits with my editor and agent. There we are to the left at the Nancy Yost Literary offices. As often happens, I'm in multiple stages on multiple projects. I’m revising The Paris Affair which will be out in April 2013, I just got copy edits for His Spanish Bride, the novella about Malcolm and Suzanne’s wedding which will be out in e-format in late November, and I’m starting to plot the next Malcolm and Suzanne book, which is one of my favorite parts of the writing process.

And of course, inevitably plotting involves research. I usually interweave the research and plotting. Often the plot idea comes from research. But then I need to start thinking about the plot to figure out what direction my research needs to take. And as I do more research, that further drive the plot. Even though I've written in the Regency/Napoleonic era for over twenty years (hard for me to believe!) it seems as though there’s always more to learn. A different setting, a different aspect of society, a different set of real historical characters. That's what keeps it both challenging and interesting.

With Vienna Waltz, the idea for the book grew directly out of research. I'd been fascinated with the Congress of Vienna for years, and the the premise for the book came specifically from my research into two real life women, Wilhelmine of Sagan and Princess Catherine Bagration, who were both involved with both Prince Metternich and Tsar Alexander during the Congress. What if (two of my favorite words in the plotting process) there was a third, fictional woman who was involved with both men? What if she was murdered after summoning both of them? What if my hero, Malcolm, found her. No, what if my heroine, Suzanne, his wife, found her husband kneeling over the murdered woman...

The idea for Imperial Scandal came to me as I was driving home along a pretty stretch of country road after taking my cats to the vet. I already knew the book would involve the battle of Waterloo, but that was when I got the idea of Malcolm summoned to a mysterious meeting at a château outside Brussels, an ambush, a British officer's wife who shouldn't have been anywhere near the château killed in the crossfire. Then it was a game of "what if" to figure out what the woman was doing there, who she was, why she was killed.

With The Paris Affair, I knew I wanted the murder victim to be threatened by the post-Waterloo White Terror reprisals against Bonapartists. I wanted him to appeal to the British for help, which would pull Malcolm and Suzanne in. And I knew I had to add in something to make the stakes personal for Malcolm and Suzanne.

My idea for the book I'm starting to plot came while driving with Mélanie to a one-year-old's birthday party and thinking about Shakespeare. It's still too unformed to say much more but I'm excited about it.

I’ve always been the sort of writer who plots in advance, so once I have my plot idea and some initial research, I begin laying out the story. I used to write down plot elements and scene ideas on index cards and then lay them out on my dining room table, shuffle around the order, look for gaps in the plot. It’s a great way to build the story arc, though my cats have a tendency to walk over the cards and wreak havoc on my plot order.

Then, in the midst of writing Imperial Scandal, I discovered the writing software program Scrivener. I love Scrivener for numerous reasons, but one is that it has a corkboard built in. You can lay out scenes on index cards, switch to a writing view to draft a scene, then switch back to the corkboard. Because of this, with The Paris Affair, which is the first book I wrote completely in Scrivener, I found I could write as I was plotting. If knew a scene had to occur later in the narrative, I could jump ahead and write it while I was still working out plot details earlier in the story. I spend a lot of time mulling when I’m working out a plot, and this way I was able to write while I was mulling. I was a little nervous about writing out of order, but I found it was surprisingly easy to pull the scenes together with transitions and other scenes that needed to be filled in. And being able to switch to the corkboard view at any point (as well as an outline view) makes me feel much more in control of the plot than I did with loose index cards. All of which made me more efficient, which was particularly helpful for this book as I had a baby in the midst of writing it.

Writers, what’s your plotting process? What tools have you found that help with it? Readers, do you find it interesting to read about the writing process behind the book? What questions do you have?