Stuff on My Desk

Last week, while I was proofreading my galley, my desk looked like this:

Another Library Catalog Card :)

Comfort Reads

As my library pics have shown, I greatly enjoy Mills and Boon novels. Of course, this is in part because of all the secret babies, amnesia, second chance at love stories, and those wonderfully grumpy, brooding, sulking alpha guys. But even more importantly, I think this is because reading a Mills and Boon novel is one of the best ways for me to relax. Other novels might grip me more deeply and over a longer time, but this can be a disadvantage when my. mind is full of other things. With a Mill and Boon novel you can dive into the story and come out of it only a short time later, feeling happy and refreshed.

Mills and Boon novels are the only books I re-read front to back on a regular basis. Indeed, I can safely say so far I've I re-read nearly all of my M and B novels at least three times. One of the authors who never fails to give me a warm, fuzzy feeling is Susan Fox. My favourite book of hers is THE PRODIGAL WIFE -- rancher plus second chance at love. Luvehly!

More about this tomorrow before I fall asleep over the keyboard.

Good night, everybody! :O)

And speaking of libraries ...

Library Pics

After having cataloged a tiny part of my library online at LibraryThing (see bottom of sidebar), I've now also taken a few pics of my library to show to you. (I used my new digital camera.) (Which is, thanks to the crappy quality of the pics, ... uhm ... pretty obvious.)

Looking into the room & at the romance section

The Romance Section

The vampire bear is one of the goodies Rosemary Laurey brought to the German Booklover Conference last year. The multi-colored, fluffy kitty is a present from one of my author friends, and the Totoro a present from one of my readers, who knows of my secret (or not so secret) passion for Studio Ghibli films in general and Tonari no Totoro in particular. :)

Out of the night that covers me ....

Galleys ...

Galleys ...

Galleys.

Riiight.

So, this is the fourth time (FOURTH!!!) (in numbers: 4th) (1-2-3-4th) time I'm proofreading CASTLE OF THE WOLF. My agent read it at least twice, and my editor read it at least twice, too. And none of us (none!) (nada!) (zilch!) found these two really big whoopers:

1) hero & heroine drive through the forest (lots of fir trees, we're in the Black Forest, right) -- and the sunlight falls through the roof of green leaves. *head-desk*

2) strawberries blooming in early March. *head-desk*

Now I can only hope that I haven't got the Rhine flowing in the wrong direction ... (and you really don't want to know how often I've already checked this!)

And something sad ...

Today we had to put one of our cats to sleep...

More Library Cards

New Toys

Look what I've found here:

Furthermore, I've got my galleys and coverflaps today. The coverflaps are gorgeous -- AND you can fold them and wrap them around another book and pretend you're already holding your finished book in your hands. (Hey, I've never pretended to be sane! *g*)

More esoteric research

Winter solstice will play an important part in BEWITCHED, thus I needed to find out on which date the solstice fell in 1820 (or rather in the years 1817-21 because I still haven't quite decided in which year the story is set) (well, I'm using quotations from Byron's "La belle dame sans merci", which was first published in 1820, so I'd better not set the nove lin 1817 ...). Anyways, found this lovely site where you can calculate the dates of solstices and equinoxes: here.

500 Words -- how difficult can it be?

VEEEEEEERY difficult, I tell ya. I've signed up to write two entries for the forthcoming ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR FICTION, ed. Geoffrey Hamilton: 500 words on Julia Quinn, 750 words on Julia Quinn's ON THE WAY TO THE WEDDING. The first of these is due tomorrow and the whole morning I've agonized over the revisions. That's right. I needed the whole morning for the fricking revisions of a 500-word text. *headdesk* After I have already needed a whole afternoon and most part of an evening to write these dratted 500 words. *headdesk-headdesk-headdesk*

Oh my.

'Tis and That

A new episode of Sandy's Podchatter, complete with a reading of Chapter 8 of BETRAYAL, is now online. Check it out here.

Oh, and have you noticed? At the bottom of the sidebar you'll now find randomly selected books from my library. :) At the moment these are:

Dark Lover

The Regency Underworld

The Courtesan's Revenge

The Pride of Lions

Arrows of the Queen

Two for the Dough

&

Mrs Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha

A nice selection from all the different genres which have made their home in my bookshelves.

Travel Plans

I'm hard at work at BEWITCHED (given that I have to hand in the dratted ms in little more than 2 months) (PANIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) (okay, okay, all's well again). Right, so today I'm researching travelling by carriage and on horseback.

In Austen's PRIDE & PREJUDICE Mr. Darcy at one point states that 50 miles on a good road are little more than half a day's journey.

The wonderful THE ROMANCE WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE NOBLE HORSE from the San Diego RWA chapter gives the following as average speed for travelling on horseback (at least I hope that's what they mean) and THE ANNOTATED PRIDE & PREJUDICE provides the average speed of a carriage

• men normally let their horses trot; a horse can trot from between 3 miles per hour to 14 miles per hour
• good carriage can do 7-8 miles per hour (moderate pace; mail coaches gallopped and such went faster, but they also had to change horses about every half hour); very good private carriages could a bit more

So, off I went to figure out the distances I needed for my story -- online travel route planners are such nifty things! But wait! -- in order to use a route planner, I first had to figure out where about in England all the different settings of the novel are situated. Sooo ...

• first important setting: London (that was easy)
• second important setting: Rawdon Park, the estate of my hero's brother, situated somewhere in the East of England, in the Fens, to be exact. I chose Downham Market in Norfolk to represent Rawdon Park
• third important setting: the estate of my heroine's uncle, somewhere in the Midlands. In Warwickshire to be exact. So I simply took Warwick to stand for that one.

And then I could finally go one of these wonderful route planners. Here's what I've found there:

• Warwick - London: ~ 99 miles
• London - Cambridge: ~ 62 miles
• Cambridge - Downham Market (Norfolk): ~ 34 miles
• Downham Market - Warwick: ~ 110 miles

Why did I choose these particular routes. Easy: hero & heroine meet in London, then they all pack up and rumble to Rawdon Park sometime in late October / early November, and on the way, spent the night in Cambridge (see link above) (I'm actually quite proud of myself that I figured out the distances correctly the first time around when I didn't use the route planner, but simply my big, nice Baedeker map! :O) ). That's the journey by carriage.

On to the horses: at one point in the book hero needs to travel fast from London to Warwick (or rather house of heroine's uncle), from Warwick to Rawdon Park, and then from Rawdon Park back to Warwick.

Hmm ... Perhaps I should cut down all that travelling about ... *scratching my head*