Your Scandalous Ways: The Interview Part Uno

An Interview with Loretta Chase

by Susan/Miranda

At last, at last! The book so many of us have been waiting for this spring is finally in stores NOW.

Your Scandalous Ways

by Wench Loretta Chase is already gathering a heady share of well-deserved praise, and there are plenty of people (myself included) who think it's Loretta's best since

Lord of Scoundrels

. To help get readers in the proper mood, Loretta reveals the Truth behind this extraordinary book -- or at least the Truth about James, Francesca, the influence of Venice, and all those plaster

putti.

If you'd like to hear Loretta discuss this book via video (think along the exciting lines of "Garbo Speaks!"), please check out her new

YouTube

clips. And please be sure to join us for Part Two of the interview of Friday.

Also: Loretta will be giving away a signed copy of

Your Scandalous Ways

to a reader who posts on either half of the interview. Ask your questions now!

Susan/Miranda

: Many of your previous books have been interconnected, but

Your Scandalous Ways

introduces a whole new set of characters to readers. What inspired you to create James and Francesca?

Loretta:

Casino Royale

was the spark. It made me think, “What about a 007 in the early 19th Century? I didn’t see Daniel Craig, though. I saw tall, dark, and handsome. And for some reason, I saw half-Italian. Once James Cordier took form, Francesca came instantly to life. The exotic looks--the elongated eyes, the wide mouth--came from a model in Brooks Brothers ads. The movie got

Venice

on my mind, too. I studied it, then Byron’s letters from his time there, and started thinking about English exiles and what they found there. Like Byron, Francesca has left England because of a major scandal. The scandal not only helped develop her character, but set the plot in motion--the thing that brings James into collision with her.

Susan/Miranda:

Readers who remember Dain, the hero of

Lord of Scoundrels

, will love James Cordier, another “outsider” Englishman of unusual ancestry who chooses to live apart from polite society. Do you think these two gentlemen would enjoy each other’s company, and why or why not?

Loretta:

Two extreme Alpha males, both with Italian blood? I think they’d stir each other’s competitive instincts in a big way. They’re such different men, it’s hard to imagine their having a conversation. And while they’re trying to decide whether or not to like each other, all the women in the vicinity are swooning from testosterone overdose.

Susan/Miranda:

The city of Venice is almost another character in this book, and you do a wonderful job of catching the city’s mix of East and West, and its general other-worldliness. Yet you’ve chosen to set your story in an unusual era in Venetian history, after the fall of the Republic and well after the city’s glory-days. Why?

Loretta:

Mainly because it’s the time period in which I usually set my stories *g*. But it’s still an interesting time. The glory days were centuries earlier. It’s always had problems with allies and enemies, disastrous wars, plagues, corruption, etc. At the end of the 18th Century Napoleon stomps in. That’s the end of the

Republic of Venice

, and it’s sad and awful.

By 1820, the time of my story, yes, people (especially foreigners) are nostalgic about the Republic (and let’s bear in mind this is the Romantic era) but

Venice

, like my heroine, is resilient. And like her, it’s fun. Though many of its riches have been plundered, so much remains. It’s still beautiful and mysterious and it’s still distinctively Venice--like no other city in the world. What Byron found there was a refuge. Old and wicked as it was, it was a place of renewal for him, a place where he wasn’t judged and where he began to do his best work. It enchanted him--and my characters--exactly as it does visitors today.

Susan/Miranda:

Courtesans are trendy right now in historical romances, albeit courtesans who often turn out to be faux-courtesans for the sake of Polite Readers. However, Francesca Bonnard is the real thing, earning a tidy living in a city infamous at the time for being the “Brothel of Europe.” How did you create a love story for a courtesan?

Loretta:

I thought of

La Traviata

, and my brain does what it usually does when contemplating a tragedy: It changed the characters and plot in a way to make a happy ending. I had in mind, too,

Harriette Wilson

, the famous courtesan of the Regency Era, and so I made my courtesan unrepentant, with a zest for life, and a bawdy sense of humor. (I ought to add that your Bad Barbara of

Royal Harlot

also inspired me.) Francesca has been left penniless and friendless. She’s become a courtesan to survive--but she does so on her own terms. She chooses the men who are to have the privilege of keeping her, and only a very, very few qualify. She’s exclusive and extremely expensive. What she needed, I thought, was a man who truly appreciated what she had to offer, who’d done enough not-so-nice things himself not to judge her and who was at the same time honorable enough to win her trust.

To be continued . . .

.

Please join us Friday for the conclusion of this interview, and more delicious discussions with Loretta about Venice, courtesans, and Lord Byron.

Originally posted at Word Wenches.

Here today, gondola tomorrow

Didst ever see a Gondola? For fear

You should not, I’ll describe it to you exactly:

‘Tis a long cover’d boat that’s common here,

Carved at the prow, built lightly, but compactly;

Row’d by two rowers, each call’d ‘Gondolier,’

It glides along the water looking blackly,

Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,

Where none can make out what you say or do.

(Lord Byron, Beppo)

Thus opens Chapter One of Your Scandalous Ways.

Thanks to all the screen adaptations of Jane Austen's work, most readers have some idea of what, say, an early 19th C carriage looks like. But the early 19th C gondola--the carriage of Venice, whose streets are mostly water--may not be quite so clear.

Since gondolas play a big role in Your Scandalous Ways--much as a carriage might in one of my English-set “road books”--I’m going to expand on Byron’s evocative and witty description. And, as always, I shall supply visual aids.

The first thing we modern readers need to get used to is the cabin or felze. People think of a gondola ride today as romantic, but the passengers are in public view. In the time of my story, the passengers were likely to be inside the felze. It would have a door, casement windows, Venetian blinds, and a cushy interior. (Katherine Shaw kindly sent me this photo. Please scroll down this page to see another.)

Thus Byron’s “coffin clapt in a canoe.” It was quite private--and yes, in Your Scandalous Ways, I take advantage of that privacy in more than one scene, as in this excerpt.

He needed desperately to be taught a lesson.

Unhurriedly she slid shut the casement beside her and closed the blinds. She reached across him, letting her bosom brush against his chest, and closed the window and blinds on his side.

As she moved back to her place, she felt his chest rise and fall a little faster than it had done a moment earlier.

She folded her hands in her lap. “There,” she said. “No one can see.”

“There won’t be anything to see,” he said.

“We’ll see,” she said.

Today, a gondola ride is an expensive luxury, reserved mainly for tourists. It's faster and much cheaper (and noisier) to board one of the water taxis or buses. In Byron’s time the gondolas

were everywhere. Picture these black vessels with their little cabins, like black taxicabs, converging on a theater. “And round the theatres, a sable throng,” as Byron puts it.

Here's a recent view of the rear of La Fenice opera house, where Francesca's gondola would be waiting to collect her after the performance. Below it is a (mid?) 19th C view.

"After midnight, when the theaters let out and the parties began, the lights of hundreds of gondolas danced over the canals and candlelight twinkled in the windows of the palaces. Here, where no coach wheels and horses’ hooves clattered over pavement, one moved in a quiet punctuated only by voices. Carried over the water, conversations ebbed and flowed around her, as though in a great drawing room."

And no, the gondoliers did not then wear the straw hats with the ribbons and they did not sing.

In the time of my story, one would glide along in the vessel in a quiet world. As Lord Byron's friend Hobhouse wrote, “during the night a profound stillness reigns though the canals and streets, interrupted only by the warning cry of the gondoliers, and the drop of their paddles, or by the tinkling of some solitary guitar."

Research is the closest I can come to time travel. The challenge is to make my hero and heroine’s surroundings vivid in the reader’s mind without letting it intrude. I don’t spend pages going into all the details of gondolas. And I cannot illustrate my books. That's where blogs come in so handy.

Originally posted at Word Wenches.

More Scandalous: A Girl's Best Friend

As has been mentioned on a previous occasion, Francesca Bonnard, the heroine of my new book, Your Scandalous Ways, is a..um..bad girl. You know. The two-letter “h” word that used to have a few more letters fore and aft. She’s a very expensive bad girl.

People ask where we get our ideas. Part of her personality was sparked by an article I read in the New Yorker some time ago. It dealt, among other things, with a set of emeralds discovered at the bottom of the sea that were believed to belong to the Queen of Portugal, sometime in the 16th century. Or the 15th century. I don’t remember the date and haven’t yet unpacked my brand-new New Yorker CD-Rom, so I can’t check. But I vividly remember the picture of the gigantic emeralds. Wow. So I not only gave them to my heroine but made emeralds an important part of the plot. And then it turned out that all her jewelry was important, to both the plot and the character development.

We authors do take time, at least now and then, to let our readers know about what the characters are wearing. Clothes tell us something about character as well as help us picture the historical setting. In this story, though, the jewelry really mattered.

Here’s what James Cordier sees the first time he sees Francesca:

“A sapphire and diamond necklace adorned her long, velvety neck. Matching drops hung at her shell-like ears." I found the set of sapphires, along with most of Francesca’s jewelry in a wonderful volume, Jewellery: The International Era 1789-1910, Volume I, 1789-1861.

As Marilyn Monroe informed us in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “these rocks don’t lose their shape”--unlike we frail humans. Today a beautiful divorcee has men at her feet. Tomorrow, if she isn’t careful, she could be in the gutter. And the gutter is exactly where Francesca’s ex-husband would like her to be. But she’s a survivor, and jewels are her IRA-- “saved against the rainy day that often came to harlots as age took its toll.'' They’re also advertising. “Jewelry was a powerful form of financial security. Better yet, unlike bank notes, it was security one might display to the world."

The jewels’ quality is a signal to men: It symbolizes her exclusivity, i.e., if you have to ask how much, you can't afford her.

We usually see Francesca’s jewelry through the eyes of the hero. Being, among other things, a talented jewel thief, James has a keenly noticing eye, and there are times when I wondered which made him hotter: her gems or her body. The combination does make him cranky, as when he tells her:

“You have a high opinion of yourself. But the king’s ransom in pearls you’re wearing is not proof that you are irresistible, only that some men are weaker than others.”

Some man had been weak, indeed. He shifted his gaze from her haughty countenance to the top and drop pearl earrings, then down to the two pearl necklaces circling her throat. From the upper, shorter one dangled pear-shaped drops of graduated size, the largest at the center. It pointed to the space between her breasts, whose rapid rise and fall told him she was not so indifferent as she pretended. The low-cut gown, of silk the color of sea foam, reminded one of the pearls’ watery origins. The pearl and diamond bracelets at her slim wrists glimmered against the butter-soft gloves.

The jewels alone constituted a cruelly arousing sight for a man who was a thief at heart. It was maddening that he couldn’t simply steal them and have done with her.”

I stole the pearls from the Empress Josephine. The picture in the aforementioned book wouldn’t reproduce well even if it weren’t under copyright, but this picture shows similar pearls, although the lady is wearing only one strand.

I include a few more pictures of fine jewels, mostly belonging to the women in Napoleon’s circle.

After all, it was in Paris that Francesca commenced her career as a Bad Girl. Here are a pair of diamond earrings that belonged to Marie Antoinette, and which you can picture on Francesca's shell-shaped ears.

I’m also including a picture of Pauline Bonaparte, not because of the jewels, but because of the red dress. Francesca is aware that a red dress stands out nicely against a black gondola, and readers might want to keep this dress in mind (though it’s from a few years earlier than the time of my story) when they read the book.

For more of Francesca and James, you can stop here, at Romance B(u)y the Book, and read an excerpt.

More glimpses are coming, but I hope this preview of Francesca’s "rocks" gives you a sense of who she is and who James is and what went into creating these characters.

Originally posted at Word Wenches