A remnant of Northumberland House

The hero of Silk is for Seduction requiring a domicile in Town, I looked around early 19th century London for a little something suitable for a duke.  I'd already moved characters from previous books into St. James's Square, so that was getting crowded.  Where, then?  Berkeley Square?  Nope.  I'd already stuck a family there.  Somewhere overlooking one of the parks? Nice, but none of the houses seemed to suit my hero

Eventually, my real estate search led me to the Strand, a much less fashionable neighborhood.  Once upon a time, (the time of Susan's historical novels, for instance) all the great noble palaces lined the Strand.  By 1835, the area had gone into trade.  But Northumberland House, home of the Duke of Northumberland, remained. 

So I stole—borrowed it, called it Clevedon House, made some architectural and decorative adjustments, and gave it to my hero.

Over at Two Nerdy History Girls, you'll find a post with lots of links to historical information about this fascinating holdover.  It occupies several pages in Christopher Simon Sykes's wonderful Private Palaces:  Life in the Great London Houses.  In London today all that remains is the street named after it, Northumberland Avenue, a doorway carefully preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a miniature of the room the doorway belonged to, the Glass Drawing Room. 

Photos courtesy me.

Last Night's Scandal in glorious purple

Last time I mentioned page proofs.  This is the first pass at the print version, when the book really starts to look like a book, and the author looks for the mistakes she missed, as mentioned in an earlier post, the previous ten thousand times she—not to mention the copy editor and various other editors—went over it.  No matter what, I always find mistakes in the page proofs that can't all be blamed on the printer.  Somehow all those eagle eyes on the manuscript missed, say, missing end quotes.  And then there are the sudden realizations, e.g., "What was I

thinking

?" or "Didn't anyone notice I used the same word three times in the same paragraph?" or "Wait a minute!  Isn't that an anachronism?" (It usually is.)

I'm happy to report that the page proof phase is now behind me, too, and the next thing I'll see, somewhere down the road, are the Advanced Reading Copies.

Then, before we know it,

Last Night's Scandal

will actually be on bookstore shelves—while I'm watching Deadline-for-the-next book loom ever larger upon the horizon.

But in the meantime, here for your delectation is the brand-new cover, before even Amazon has it.

Is it done yet?

After the usual frenzy attendant upon my finishing a book, the fifth book of the Carsington trilogy (I know) is now in production. LAST NIGHT’S SCANDAL follows into adulthood Olivia and Peregrine, the two troublesome children of Book Four, LORD PERFECT.

The thing with a manuscript is, it keeps coming back, like the undead.  We finish it—we think—and send it to our editors, who send it back for Revisions.  Revisions can involve anything from tweaking a few lines here and there to massive rewrites of less-than-deathless (as in OMG, I can’t believe I wrote that crap) prose.  Then we send it back again and a few weeks later, there it is on our doorstep, this time as a Copy Edit.  The copy editor has gone through the manuscript looking for errors and inconsistencies.  This phase usually requires our Gentle Author to scream quite a bit and bang her head against the wall in frustration.  Then the manuscript goes back with a lot of Stets (for the uninitiated—and you’d do well to stay that way, like a virgin—that means “put it back the way I wrote it”).

Several weeks later, there it is again, on the doorstep.  This time it’s Page Proofs.  But nowadays, thanks to so much being done electronically, this phase is fairly painless and even enjoyable.  We get to see the book the way it’ll look in print.  All we have to do is check for printer’s errors or our own mistakes we somehow missed in the ten thousand times we went over the manuscript already.

I’m not at that phase yet, but I’ll be sure to make a big deal about it when it’s done, because then, really, the book is done.  The next time I see it, it’ll have a cover and everything.

For

LAST NIGHT’S SCANDAL

, that will happen at the end of July 2010.  Since that’s a long way away, I’ll save talking about the book itself until we get closer to the date.  But for now you have an idea why a book takes so long after I “finish” it to get to the bookstore.