You may have noticed the new link under
.
Susan Holloway Scott & I have joined forces to indulge our historical obsessions.
We've been working on it quietly in the background for a while, but finally decided it's time to spring it on an unsuspecting public.
Michelle Buonfiglio at
hosts our launch party.
She's got more at her
blog at Barnes & Noble.
It's not too late to stop by and say something.
Historical fiction author Susan Holloway Scott interviewed me at the Word Wenches blog. Here's how it went, (minus the very flattering intro, which I've edited out because, well, because):
Susan: First, Loretta, what’s it all about? In a nutshell.
Loretta: Zoe Octavia Lexham, a harem captive for twelve years, risks her life to get home to England again, only to find that England’s not wild about having her back. (Here’s English Society’s idea of a harem). The only man who can make Society change its attitude toward her is a childhood friend, the Duke of Marchmont. Handsome, witty, rich, and very, very fashionable, he’s also the laziest man in town and, apparently, not overly intelligent. But he says “Nothing could be simpler” than making her respectable again, and Zoe can’t afford to be picky. And if I say any more, it’s no longer a nutshell but an essay.
Susan: While Don't Tempt Me is a “stand-alone” book for you, the hero and the heroine are hardly “stand-alone” characters. Their families and friends are very much part of their lives and decisions in both good and bad ways, and yet Zoe Octavia and Lucien de Grey, Duke of Marchmont, are completely separated from their families for years at a time. What role did you see “family” play for both characters?
Loretta: I think family, whether dead or alive, is crucial to character development. We don’t come out of nowhere; we come out of a context. In this story, though, I brought the family up close and personal to the hero and heroine, partly because it’s funny and partly because it’s poignant and partly because of that separation you mentioned. Lucien’s reacted to his experience by becoming detached from everybody. Zoe’s the opposite: She made a family of sorts for herself in the harem and she's determined to be part of her family when she gets back to England. She takes desperate measures to keep from being ejected from the nest--and her refusal to let them eject her is what, eventually, brings Lucien the connection he’s missed. Too, family interactions are a great way to demonstrate character: People behave differently with family than they do with friends, and I loved the opportunities this story gave me to show the comic aspects of aristocrats acting like a normal family.
Susan: In your last book Your Scandalous Ways, your heroine Francesca was a genuine, unrepentant courtesan and not simply one as a titillating plot contrivance. In Don't Tempt Me, Zoe has spent nearly half her life in an Egyptian harem, and you don’t sugar-coat that experience, either. How did you research the life of a European woman in a harem? How did it affect Zoe? And how did it make her uniquely ready to conquer London society?
Loretta: I’d learned quite a bit about harems in Egypt while researching Mr. Impossible. This book offered a chance to explore the material further. Zoe’s harem, though, was bigger than the average Egyptian harem--which refers, basically, to the the women of a family. But the more important the man, the bigger the harem. I’d read that Ali Pasha of Albania had three hundred women in his harem. Considering how small Albania was/is, this sounded like half the female population!
This is why my model was the Sultan’s harem, of the Topkapi Palace. With hundreds of women, and all the slaves and eunuchs, things get complicated. I thought a smart, educated young English woman, even at twelve, could adapt and, as she matured in that world, would master its ways. This experience makes it easy for Zoe to deal with, say, the hierarchy of English society and the hierarchy of household staff.
Too, in the harem’s hothouse atmosphere, a smart, observant girl would develop a keen understanding of human psychology. The cultural differences are important,too. She’s coming from a world in which people are more demonstrative. Emotion isn’t a dirty word. And dirty words aren’t dirty words: In that world of women, the focus is on sex, and this is what they talk and think about. So she walks and talks and generally behaves differently from English women. It's comedy material, yes, but it's also an eye-opening--and arousing--experience for the men, especially her jaded duke. (For more harem gossip, see my post at the Avon Romance Blog.)
Susan: The proliferation of dukes in historical romances is epidemic, and for the most part they’re often depicted as pleasure-seeking-slacker-rakes. But Lucien takes his title and responsibilities very seriously––and I have to say it earns him a solid place alongside the other great Loretta Chase heroes. You make him suffer, yes, but he also gets over it, and gets along with his life. Is he based on a real-life peer?
Loretta: I stole the Duke of Norfolk’s house for him, and shoved the Duke of Richmond (descendant of Louise de Keroualle, the heroine of your latest, THE FRENCH MISTRESS) down a rung on the ladder of precedence to make room for Marchmont. But he wasn’t based on any duke in particular. I was thinking about what happens to a young man psychically when he’s abruptly thrust, in the most unwelcome circumstances, into a position of great responsibility. I was thinking, “teenager--rebellion--avoidance--denial.”
But this is also a man strongly influenced by a father figure, Lord Lexham, who takes his public duties seriously and is a devoted family man. That made for a conflict between the outside Marchmont--the detached nobleman who refuses to take anything seriously--and the inside Marchmont, who knows his Duty, and gets it done via his secretary.
As to raking, it seemed to me that a man as detached as Marchmont couldn't be the serial seducer type. He has his 19th C equivalent of girlfriends, but it’s one at a time, for a (short, because he gets bored) time. I wanted us to be aware, all along, of a the kernel of goodness at heart that's necessary in a proper hero--and I think the bond with family helps account for his not turning out all bitter and twisted and selfish. I like to think the sense of humor and the wry self-awareness have grown out of interactions with the Lexham brood.
Susan: One of the hallmarks of your books is to establish the setting as a real place, and in Don't Tempt Me you’ve again managed to make early 19th century London seem fresh and vivid. What aspects of the era did you choose to emphasize to make this work?
Loretta: Zoe's point of view helps revive endlessly worked-over ground. She comes to England from another culture, and sees everything so differently. Showing London through her eyes made it fresh. She allowed me to delve more deeply into the old, familiar places. In her eyes, Hyde Park and the Green Park
are wonderlands of greenery. Everything, from the exterior of White’s Club to the claustrophobic royal Drawing Room, is unfamiliar and needs to be interpreted, and her interpretation isn’t like everyone else’s. (The black and white drawing is of the famous Almack's Club.)
Susan: You’ve always been aware of how fashion and clothes make your characters behave (or not.) The stunningly awkward hoop skirts required for formal court dress play a major part in the courtship been Lucien and Zoe –– and that’s all I’ll say so as not to give too much away. Would you share a little more about these ritualized hoops?
Loretta: Reading about hoops elsewhere had opened my eyes to their seductive possibilities, but then you suggested DANGEROUS LIAISONS--not the Laclos novel but a book published in connection with an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The marvelous illustrations offered the sort of detail one longs for--as well as abundant inspiration. But I think with hoops, the pictures really are worth a thousand words, so I’d direct readers to Candice Hern’s wonderful collection of prints
and I’ll point out that Cruikshank’s comical illustration strikes me as more accurate an illustration of a Drawing Room than the one below it by Rowlandson--certainly it's closer to the one I describe in Don't Tempt Me.
Susan: You've given us three very different Fallen Women so far. What's next?
Loretta: Another Carsington book, featuring a woman of weak moral fiber, a man who prides himself on having no imagination, and a haunted castle in Scotland.
Susan: It seems that's all we're going to get out of her. For more background info, check Loretta's website for links to interviews and blogs.
(Originally posted at Word Wenches)
I recently learned that 24 September is National Punctuation Day. In honor of the occasion--which coincides nicely with my recent blogs dealing with Annoying Errors, I thought we could talk about those interesting squigglies and dots and dashes we use to help readers understand what we mean.
In my last blog, I indicated that one way to get a group of authors ranting and raving was to bring up the subject of copy editors. Among other things, a copy editor is supposed to check our punctuation. For some reason, copy edit changes used to disturb me far more than editorial changes. I would go ballistic when a copy editor removed or added a comma, yet not even blink when an editor suggested I delete three chapters.
It must be some kind of mental condition. That would explain why I still twitch when I remember a very weird set of mistakes in at least one volume of Byron’s Letters and Journals. Throughout, it’s was used where its should be and vice versa. It drove me insane.
I know Byron was clueless about punctuation. He admitted it. I know a dash tended to be his universal punctuation tool--but he did dash very dashingly, we must admit. I can understand his failing to master the art of commas, semi-colons, and colons. An apostrophe, however, is sort of a spelling tool, isn’t it? It marks contractions. And he seemed to understand this aspect of punctuation..sort of...or was that his editor? He uses tons of contractions. They appear in practically every piece of his poetry I quoted in Your Scandalous Ways. Here’s a sample from Beppo.
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.
Yes, he had his own unique style but his grammar was fine and his spelling no weirder or more inconsistent than others of his time. It seems bizarre that he got it’s and its backwards consistently. I can’t help thinking those errors were not in the original letters but were committed by a typist, copy editor, or printer and somehow went through the whole production process without anyone realizing--or with everyone thinking that’s how he did it.
I’ve always wondered why it’s and its confuse anybody, but they clearly do because I see it all the time, including in newspapers. Is it because English teachers don’t drum it into kids’ heads early and often enough? It’s one of those things, like the use of lie and lay, that need to be drummed in because it’s easy to get confused. In English we form possessive pronouns differently from the way we form other possessives, e.g., “Pavarotti’s voice was distinctive” but “its engine was broken.”
However, while I can--sort of, and with sorrow in my heart--understand how apostrophes get misplaced, I have never figured out how apostrophes got into the plurals business--as in “Banana’s 89¢ a pound” or “keeping up with the Jones’s.”
Here is one approach to explaining the correct way to use apostrophes. Here's a politer version of same. And here are many examples of punctuation abuse.
A few years ago, Lynn Truss got so exasperated with stupid punctuation that she wrote a book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, about it. Funny thing is, the book’s got some...um...punctuation errors. Louis Menand, in the New Yorker (28 June 2004), reviewed her book, and suspected it was a hoax, because the errors, he said, started in the dedication and continued with gay abandon throughout the book.
In Jasper Fforde’s alternate reality novel, The Eyre Affair, a form of specially engineered bookworms (as in actual larval things, not nerds--and I cannot possibly get into the technical capabilities of these bookworms) excrete apostrophes. That would explain the wretched excess.
Here's one proposed solution to apostrophe atrocities: abolish that little squiggle.
I don’t agree. I’ve devoted my life to the English language, trying to master its intricacies. Punctuation, grammar--all those dull, technical matters to me are part of the big game of exploring the expressive possibilities of a remarkably elastic language. To eradicate a punctuation mark is like eliminating, say, metaphors. Yes, it would make things simpler, but should language always be simple? A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but it’s not necessarily the most beautiful route.
Merely my opinion, of course, but when the technical niceties of language are under discussion, people can get very...intense. In the words of Randy Newman, "I could be wrong...But I don't think so." And I think he speaks for all of us.
Originally posted at Word Wenches.
