The Inspirational Value of Finger Exercises

Last night I wrote a scene in which my heroine plays finger exercises on the piano (finger exercises tend to be somewhat dull and monotonous - in other words, they're just perfect for a heroine who feels sad and depressed) (yes, I like torturing my characters, but then you already knew that, didn't you?). So I dug out my old piano music and studied the book with finger exercises, Hanon's Der Klaviervirtuose (yes, indeed, I've got a WHOLE BOOK of finger exercises - the bright red book of horror). I laughed out aloud when I stumbled across the following note written by my piano teacher: "Please don't place the fifth finger of your left hand like a fried sausage on the keys!" Needless to say that I just had to use this in my story. :-)

And here's the raw scene (note: the cousin is not the hero, and as you'll see, the poor chap doesn't have a name yet, though I did try out Edward & decided against it; for now, the cousin is XX):

Susanna sat at the piano and concentrated very hard on the finger exercises she was practicing. The left hand was still too weak, the notes too uneven. Drat that little finger! And the ring finger!

She started again, concentrating even harder.

51213141 - 51213141 - two octaves up, and then all the way down again - 15453525...

"Drat," she said as her little finger failed to comply. "And again."

15453 -

The door opened, and her cousin walked into the drawing room.

- 525 - 15453525....

From the corner of her eyes she watched him sit on the sofa in that nonchalant, but elegant sprawl that was so characteristic of [Edward? No, not Edward - we're not in Twilight for heaven's sake!]

The fifth finger missed a key.

XX flinched.

Susanna swore softly. Start again, at the top.

15253545 - 15 -

Her little finger hurt, but she only gritted her teeth and continued. If she concentrated hard enough, she would master this, she was sure of it.

- 45352 -

"Are you intent on torturing that piano for the rest of the afternoon?" came her cousin's somewhat pained voice from across the room.

Susanna clenched her jaw. "Yes," she forced out. "As long as my little finger lies on the keys like a fried sausage, I will continue with this."

"Don't you worry your ears might start to bleed?" he drawled.

Susanna scowled at her fingers. She would not deign this with an answer.

She would not.

"My ears might start to bleed," he said plaintively.

Conference Preparations

I will be meeting up with a few other indie authors in San Francisco next week. I've already started to prepare my sketchbook, a mid-sized Moleskine, and as you can see, my mini watercolour box is indeed tiny - it's simply perfect for travelling!

Thinking about which colours to put into the box is a perfect way to distract myself from my dratted travel anxieties. I'm so not looking forward to that long flight, but I'm cheering myself up with thoughts of sketching in San Francisco, eating cheesecake, and, of course, meeting my friends. :-)

Beautiful Books

Michael Ende's DIE UNENDLICHE GESCHICHTE (THE NEVERENDING STORY) was one of my favourite novels when I was a child. Not only is the story magical, but also the book itself is beautifully made (or at least the edition I own was beautifully made). As you can see from these pictures, the book was printed in two colours: red for the real world and green for Fantastica.. There were also beautiful illustrations at the beginning of each chapter.

An amusing side note: I always thought Atréju had green skin. When I looked up his description a few months ago, I realised that he isn't really supposed to be green: he is described as olive-skinned. (But who cares? For the past thirty years, my Atréju has had green skin... *g*)

I need a hero...

Actually, I need two ...

Well, three ...

Um ... four?

Better go with four because you'll never know what might happen. They might come in handy and all that. Just sayin'.

So last night I was casting heroes for my spring project. (I know it's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.) Since I had already cast Damian Lewis (loved him in LIFE and THE BAKER) as one of them, and one of Kim Killion's male models as another (the advantage of self-publishing? you can make sure that the descriptions in your novel fit the pictures of the people on the cover!), I decided to do a casting for the rest of them, too.

The chap whose story I'm currently writing is Robbie Beaton: when we meet him, he is in his early twenties; he's got a boyishly round face and a sweet smile (yeah, definitely beta material *g*) (but hey, not all of my heroes can be dark and crumpy! we need some variation!). I had a vague, fleeting idea of how he looked, and I was pretty certain that I had unconsciously based him on somebody I had seen (in other words, on a real-life person), yet I just couldn't figure out who that might be.

But hey, we've got Mr. Google! :-)

So I asked Mr. Google "actor round face."

Hmm.

How about "young actor round face"?

(Actor, Mr. Google, acTOR, not acTRESS!!! Argh!)

I'm afraid that particular experiment was not altogether successful, given that among the first few results of this image search were a guy with very sharp cheekbones, a guy with an off-putting self-satisfied smirk on his face (Note: People whom you'd like to slap at first sight, don't make for good heroes.), a rather worrying picture of Anjelica Huston, Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, a bloated Boris Becker (dearie me, what has happened to him?!?!?), several women, a scary Snow White holding a little girl hostage - but no Robbie Beaton.

Right. So let's try "young actor round face sweet smile".

Thank you, Mr Google. I do like Tom Hiddleston, and I do like Richard Armitage as well, but really, they're not Robbie Beaton. Sorry. Also, what's with all the women????? I'm still not looking for an actress with a round face and a sweet smile!

Eventually it was my brain which made the connection between "young actor round face sweet smile" and the image I was looking for: Kevin Whately! No wonder then it took me a while to figure this out: after all, I had lately seen him only in Lewis (one of my favourite TV shows). There he plays Detective Inspector Robert "Robbie" (see? see? my brain is working in strange and wonderful ways!) Lewis, a reprisal of his earlier role in Inspector Morse. Whately has this very homely face (in Lewis it's a rather crumpled homely face; the young, smooth version can be found in Inspector Morse), but his smile is just adorable.

So there you have it: a young Kevin Whately as sweet, boyish Robbie Beaton, and a smouldering, intense Damian Lewis as William MacNeil. Now all I need to do is to move Robbie and Mac up to Ayrshire. :-)

Btw, I'll soon send out a newsletter with an update on my projects for 2014. There will be cover reveals and a special free goodie, too. Curious? Then make sure to sign up for my newsletter!

Respect for Your Fellow Authors

What's respect for your fellow authors?

Well, let me tell you what it is NOT.

Let's imagine you're an author who writes literary fiction. And then you happen to see how much better romance sells. (Note: Of course, you don't really like the genre.) And you pick one specific subgenre of romance (hmmm... let's say sweet Western historicals), you pick a novel by a bestselling author in that genre (hmmm, who could that be, I wonder? *cough* Debra Holland *cough*) in order to deconstruct it and learn about the conventions of the genre. Then you go and hire that author's cover designer and make sure that your cover is designed along the lines of the other author's very specific branding. And then you write a blog post about "Experimenting with Genre"/"Genre vs Platform" and make sure it's blasted across umpteen different blogs.

AND YOU NEVER ONCE MENTION THE NAME OF THE OTHER AUTHOR WHOSE BOOK YOU'VE USED FOR INSPIRATION AND WHOSE BRANDING YOU'VE COPIED.

That is not respect for your fellow authors.

And when you continue to blast the aforementioned post across even more blogs, even after it has been pointed out to you that it might be nice to give credit to the author -- when you continue, even after the author herself left a reply on one blog, voicing (in a very polite, roundabout way, mind you) her obvious astonishment at the way her branding has been copied and at the way you fail to give the tiniest bit of credit to her? WOW, that shows a whole new level of disrespect for your fellow authors!

(And in case you're wondering: I'm frigging mad about the way this author is behaving. It goes against everything I've experienced both in the romance community and the self-publishing community.)

But actually, it's even worse...

~~~~ 

19 January 2014: A short addition:

In case anybody is wondering: I have never met Debra Holland in person, even though we are both members of a large self-publishing e-mail loop. But you know how it is with such large e-mail loops. When I spoke out about this whole issue, I certainly did not consider her a friend nor any kind of acquaintance. I spoke (and still speak) up about this issue because of my outrage at the disrespect shown to a fellow author and at the way so many people seem to be okay with that kind of behaviour.

Stalking Dead People (Again!)

John Leech's first cartoon of Mr Briggs, a middle-class gentleman residing in the suburbs with his family. Mr Briggs's adventures are partly modelled on Leech's own experiences with middle-class life in the suburbs

Today I did some research on the editor (Mark Lemon) and one of the artists (John Leech) of PUNCH, the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful British magazine (of which 70 kilos reside on the shelf in Sandy's sitting room). In particular I tried to figure out how long the Lemons and the Leech(e?)s lived at No. 10 and 12 Brook Green after finding a reference that by July 1849 the Lemons lived in Notting Hill.

So I started to dig.

The letters of Charles Dickens proved to be particular helpful for, as it turns out, Dickens was a very good of Lemon's until the former broke up with his (and PUNCH's) publisher, Bradbury & Evans. Unfortunately, the transcribed letters only seldom give the address of the recipient (grrrr!), and for 1848 (the year I was particularly interested in) only one letter to Mark Lemon includes an address - 11 Bouverie Street, home not to Mr Lemon, but to Mr Punch: this is the address of the PUNCH office. *sigh*

But as if to make up for his shocking lack of foresight, Dickens referred to a most interesting tidbit in one of his letters from 1847. On 3 August 1847, he wrote to a friend: "What a tremendous chance that Leech's little girl was not born on the Railway!" A footnote was helpful to supply further background information: Mrs Leech, heavily pregnant, had gone into labour during an outing with Dickenses and a group of other people. In another letter to another friend, Dickens described how she was brought to the Victoria Hotel in Euston in a Bath Chair and had her baby girl in a hotel room. "She is a capital little woman!" Dickens concludes (11 Aug. 1847).

Ha! You do know how much I love such anecdotes, don't you? :-)

The Joys of Research

One of the great joys of writing historicals, I find, is doing research. I'm curious about how people lived in the past and I think it endlessly fascinating to stumble across new tidbits about their everyday life. Thus, for the story I'm currently writing, DEVIL'S RETURN (to be released in April *fingers crossed*) I explored old maps of London. The National Library of Scotland has come up with the most wonderful feature: not only did they digitalise a lot of their maps, but their website also has a section called "georeferenced maps", where the images of the old maps are laid over a modern map. And you wouldn't believe the details that can be found in some of these old maps! For example, they have a map of London from the 1890s, which shows drinking fountains, troughs, and urinals (!!!) scattered throughout London. Magical!

One of the characters in DEVIL'S RETURN lives in Brook Green, in Hammersmith, and as some of the PUNCH men lived there in the 1840s, I tried to find out as much as possible about the area. Thanks to that very detailed map from the 1890s I was even able to locate John Leech's house (I guess that could be called stalking a dead person....). In a letter to a friend, he described it as being opposite some almshouses "at the corner of Cornwall Road". That bit stumped me for a while until I found out that Cornwall Road had been renamed a few years later and had become Rowan Road by the time the map from the 1890s was created.

 Well, but how to get one's characters from Town to Hammersmith? Because of my studies involving the magazine PUNCH, I already knew that there had been an omnibus service in London since 1829. (The following picture is a cartoon from PUNCH, drawn by my favourite illustrator of the time, Richard Doyle.)

And thanks to Google Books, I had soon found a guidebook with omnibus timetables: MOGG'S OMNIBUS GUIDE from 1844. It has to say the following about the bus to Hammersmith:

Hammersmith, 4. European Coffee House, opposite the Mansion House, daily, Sund. included, every 10 min. from 9 morn till 1/2 p. 11 night, Black Horse Coventry Street, a 1/4 of an hour later, and from the White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, 1/2 an hour later. Leaves Hammersmith daily Sunday included every 10 min. from 8 morn. till 10 night.

Right-ho. But how long would it take to ride the bus from the White Horse Cellar to Hammersmith? Again, Google Books came to my rescue: in another guidebook (this time from 1871), I found a timetable that gave listed the times of departure in a similar manner as modern bus or train timetables:

Neat, isn't it? :-)

My Year in Books

Happy New Year, everybody! I wish you all the best for 2014!

As this is not just the time to look forward, but also to look backward, I thought I'd do a review of 2013 in terms of books I've read.

2013 was the very first year I've managed to keep a reading journal (yay me!). While I haven't kept track of all the books I've read (for example, I don't note down the books I read for university), I think very few have actually fallen through the cracks.

Gloms

I went through three four five major gloms last year:

1. I re-read a lot of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher books in January (she had a new one out in September: Murder & Mendelssohn - loved it!)
2. In spring and summer I read and re-read most of Michelle Reid's books. I even bought the M&B Special Edition set (because the books looked so pretty). Reid's books are a bit of a hit or miss with me: either I really, really like them, or they fall into the meh category for me. One of my favourites of hers is The De Santis Marriage, which plays with the conventions of Italian tycoon stories. Here's a very nice example:
   

   Lifting up her hand, she caught hold of his fingers and pulled them away from her mouth. "That was really good," she commented. "Quite breathtakingly arrogant and rightfully proud of your mighty fine self, in fact, and it should really have put me squarely in my lowly place."

3. In May and June I read several of Anthony Berkeley's Roger Sheringham mysteries. I thought the first three or so quite delightful - very entertaining, with a clever twist at the end - but eventually I figured that the "clever twist" is one of the characteristic features of those mysteries. (When an author insists on depicting his hero as a bit of an arrogant, know-it-all moron, he shouldn't be suprised when said hero gets on readers' nerves after a while.)
4. In October I re-read all of Jacqueline Gilbert's books. *happy sigh* They're just so lovely! Old-fashioned, but really, really lovely. With grumpy heroes and all that! *another happy sigh*
5. I also did a mini-glom / re-read of Dorothy Dunnett's Dolly series once I realised they had become available as e-books. Her prose is - oh my goodness! - so, so wonderful! Take this sentence from Roman Nights:
   

   Every ruin is packed like a biscuit box.

   Or this:
   

   In Rome there is a pathological shortage of small coins. For change, the little shops tend to use candy.

   Or this:
   

   If a Roman junction during one of the four normal rush hours is suicide, a Roman junction while the traffic lights are off resembles nothing so muhc as a her of myopic rhinoceroses meeting eye to eye with a her of dim-witted elephants and attempting to copulate.

 DNFs

I had quite a number of those, alas. Several of the historicals I bought (luckily, I bought most of them cheaply or got them for free) were simply unbelievable: not only was the writing often stilted or the story mind-numbingly boring, no, several books also abounded with historical inaccuracies. As in: a debutante dances the waltz (!) at Almack's in 1806 (!!!). *head desk*

I'm afraid even one of Michelle Reid's books fell into the DNF category: I thought the The Italian's Revenge was truly, truly awful ("thoroughly disgusted" I wrote in my nifty little reading journal). But then this was one of her older books (originally published in 2000), so this might have had something to do with it. Many of her later books have an underlying humour that I simply love!


Discoveries

At some point in September, I thought it would be nice to have a nice reading copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South aka one of my favourite classics EVER! So I perused various different editions on Amazon and eventually stumbled across the Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of Cranford. Oh my. I mean.... OH MY! Here's what happened then (Part 2 of my September Book Haul):

Favourite Classic

And speaking of classics, my favourite work of 2013 in that category was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (translation by Simon Armitage). I read it for the class on medieval literature I'm teaching this semesterand was thoroughly enchanted. There's also an audiobook available of that translation, read by the translator himself - which didn't work for me at all, alas. In fact, I had to switch off after a mere five minutes because I felt the desperate urge to throttle the narrator. Ugh. (Why couldn't they have let RICHARD Armitage read the story? He would have done such a great job, I'm sure, and they would have sold oodles of copies. Hmph.)


Favourite Romance

Apart from my re-reads, my favourite romance of 2013 was Courtney Milan's A Kiss for Midwinter, her Christmas novella from 2012. The premise is rather unusual, the hero is rather unusual, and the heroine is all prickly. Nice. :-)


Favourite Books

But two most favourite books this year were Robin Sloan's Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (a book about books and the love for books and really strange bookshops) and Joyce Dennys's Henrietta's War (which I called "Cranford for the 1940s!" in my reading diary). I have to admit I was drawn to both books because of their beautiful covers (well, in Mr Penumbra's case, I had to order the novel from Canada because all other editions sport rather ghastly covers) - I'm shallow like that. But it's such a joy when something that looks so pretty turns out to be wonderfully written as well. I highly recommend both books.

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So, that was my year in reading. Which books and authors did you discover in 2013? Which were your favourites? Which were the books that you re-read? Let me know!