Sandy's Chatterblog has moved!

I will now be blogging from my own website. The design of the blog isn't perfect yet, but it does resemble the look of the old blog here (which is what I wanted to achieve).

A Summer for Love Blog Hop: Summer in Scotland (with Giveaway!!!)

Ahh, summertime! It's the perfect time for strawberry ice cream, for peach bowle, for spending lazy days outside, and for going on vacation.

In the summer of 1839 this meant for a lot of people to go to Scotland because a young Scottish lord, the Earl of Eglinton, was hosting a medieval tournament on his estate in Ayrshire. He and a group of his friends donned medieval armor in order to joust like knights of old. The event drew several ten thousands of people to the Scottish countryside - and caused unspeakable traffic jams in the area around Eglinton Park. And because everybody was to come in costume, the coaches all over the country were piled high with boxes, parcels, and packages of all sizes.

In Edinburgh, a reporter for Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, ready to embark upon his journey, was utterly astonished by the amount of luggage - and he was not the only one:

Arriving at the office in Prince's Street a little before the hour at which [the coach] should have started, we were astonished at the immense pile of luggage which we saw heaped on the street in order to be packed upon the carriage. When Mr. Croal, the coach-proprietor, came up, he was so much appalled by the sight, that, apologising for the delay which he must inevitably  occasion, he informed us that he must send back the coach to the yard, and get out a stronger one, that might be more certainly able to bear such a load without risk of breaking down.

When this more potent vehicle arrived, any impatience that might have been excited in us by the delay, was subdued by the interest which we could not help taking in the ingenuity which the coachman and his assistants displayed in packing and piling the various articles in and upon it; till I, and my companion, and two officers of our acquaintance, who had all of us placed ourselves comfortably on the hinder seats, could no longer see those in front, even when we stood up to try to do so. We felt some comfort in thinking that  the superior construction of coaches, now-a-days, admits of this being done with more safety than was formerly the case.

Besides all the ordinary kinds of trunks, portmanteaus, band-boxes, and carpet-bags, which are usually attendant upon a coach full of passengers inside and outside, there were innumerable white deal boxes of all manner of shapes and sizes. Most of them were ingeniously suspended like sausages on strings all around the carriage; and, to crown all, on the very top perched a wicker cage, containing a great, long-legged, large-bodied, awkward-looking pair of Chittagong fowls, belonging to an Indian who had a seat in the interior. The cock not only seemed to know that he was going to the Tournament as well as other people, but to think that he was to be triumphant there; for much to the amusement of all who beheld him [...] he crowed away so loudly that he brought some of the sleepy citizens of Prince's Street, in their night-caps, from their beds to their windows, to wonder at so unwonted a summon.

(from Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, November 1839)

My latest release THE BRIDE PRIZE is set against the backdrop of the Eglinton Tournament, and my hero and heroine are among the people travelling to Scotland in August 1839. Click below to listen to an excerpt.

THE BRIDE PRIZE is available from Amazon US / UK (and all other Amazon stores) & from Kobo

But wait! You can also win a signed copy of the novella if you sign up to my newsletter during the Summer for Love Blog Hop!

And there is even more!
Leave a comment here on this blog with your name and your e-mail to be entered into the Grand Prize drawing for a chance to win one of six $50 Amazon or B&N giftcards! Just tell me about your favorite summer destination.

Comments without name and email will not be counted.

Commenting on each and every stop will increase your chances of winning.

You can find the list with all stops here.

The Grand Prizes will be awarded to randomly drawn participants / commenters.

Winners will be drawn and announced on THE ROMANCE TROUPE blog by June 10th using random.org to determine each winner.

Phone box? No, it's a library!

I went to Hofheim today, and this time I remember to take a picture of this pretty thing here: the phone box that has been transformed into a mini-library! (I snatched up an older German children's book.)

This Week in 1844: Awesome Ad

In contrast to the second half of the nineteenth century, in the first half, illustrated ads were the exception due to the high taxes on advertisements. So I was tickled pink to find this lovely thing in this week's ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS. It's a traveling dressing case with an in-built writer's desk. Very cool, isn't it?

Writer's Desk: Plotting Falling for a Scoundrel

Let's put it like this: I'm a tad late with this....

Fiction vs Reality

There's a scene in Mercedes Lackey's MAGIC'S PRICE where Stef, one of the main characters, plays the harp for too long and ends up with terrible, bleeding blisters on his hands. I've always thought this was some kind of dramatic exaggeration.

Eh.... not quite. In this case fiction seems to be uncomfortably close to reality.

An hour with the sweet thing in the picture up there and I have the beginnings of a fiendish blister on my index finger. As a (former) piano player, I've never fully appreciated the physical problems players of stringed instruments have to deal with.

But isn't it a pretty thing? It's a concert ukulele from Luna

This Week in 1844: Metropolitan News

 One of the columns in the Illustrated London News was titled "Metropolitan News" - and the following snippet appeared in the issue from 18 May 1844:

On Wednesday evening the Lord Mayor entertained her Majesty's Ministers, and several members of both houses of Parliament, at dinner, in the Egyptian Hall, at the Mansion-House [= i.e. the residence of the mayor of London]. Among the guests, who were very numerous, we observed the Lord Chancellor, Lord Wharncliffe, the Duke of Buccleuch, the Earl of Lincoln, Earl Delawarr, Earl of Devon, Earl of Shaftesbury, Earl of Jersey, Earl Jermyn, Lord S. Somerset, Viscount Barrington, Lord Canning, Lord Ashley, Lord Eliot, the Bishop of Llandaff, Sir Robert Peel, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Monteagle, Sirs G. Murray, James Graham, E. Knatchbull, Mr. E. Gladstone, Sir J. Nicholl, Captain Gordon, &c. All the leading members of the Corporation were also present.

(I assume that "Corporation" refers to the Corporation of London, the local government.)

This Week in 1844: News from America!

From The Illustrated London News, 18 May 1844: 

The city of Washington, the seat of the American Government, has just been the scene of two events of a very opposite character - the signature of the treaty for the annexation of the Republic of Texas to the United States, and the delivery of a Message by the President in communicating this treaty to the Senate; besides an affray in the House of Representatives, and the attempted assassination of one of its members.

This bit of juicy news was run by a number of British newspapers with reference to the New York Sun. What happened was that a brawl broke out between representatives during the discussion of a bill: Mr. Wright from Kentucky made a pass (and yes, that would be a physical pass...) at Mr. Rathbun from New York and both proceeded to hit upon each other. While the rest of the representatives tried to separate the two men, one William S. Moore, who had for some weeks tried in vain to obtain a claim from the government, tried to enter the house, was hindered, and proceeded to shoot at the representative from Ohio. He missed this man, but wounded another instead.

The whole affair was referred to a committee of five for investigation, with instructions to report a Bill for the punishment of offences committed within the House. At the solicitation of friends, Mr. Rathbun and Mr. White shook hands amid the applause of the House. Thus that affair ended.

Launch of THE BRIDE PRIZE

I'm thrilled to announce that THE BRIDE PRIZE, the first in the Allan's Miscellany series is now available on both Amazon and Kobo, with B&N soon to follow. Here's the blurb:

It's 1839, and Lord Eglinton's tournament in Scotland is the most anticipated event of the year: he and some of his noble friends will don medieval armor and joust like knights of old.

Does this mean a revival of true chivalry? Miss Florence Marsh thinks it might.

Or is the tournament mere tomfoolery and the greatest folly of the century? Mr. Robert Beaton thinks it is.

But when Flo and Robbie meet at Eglinton Park, they'll soon learn that a dash of romance can make the greatest differences look rather small and that true love might find you in the most unlikely place.

If only Robbie wasn't working for that scandalous new magazine Allan's Miscellany! If only Flo's father didn't detest the periodical press!

And if only they had remembered to bring an umbrella!

The novella is available in two different editions: a plain edition for 99 cents and an enhanced edition for $ 2.99. The latter includes detailed info about the historical background and illustrations. Here are the buy links:

Plain edition:
Kindle US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K9TEZ5S/
Kindle UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00K9TEZ5S/
and all other Amazon stores

Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/ebook/the-bride-prize-1

Enhanced edition:
Kindle US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K9TLA38/
Kindle UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00K9TLA38/
and all other Amazon stores

Addictive Research

I recently stumbled across an Ebay auction of a double volume of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS. Of course, I had heard of that newspaper before (after all, my current academic research focuses on Victorian periodicals), but I hadn't realised what a gem it was. But the person selling his copy on Ebay kindly provided pictures. OH MY! Where are my smelling salts?!?!?!?

That volume on Ebay was in a bad shape and the price was already quite high when I discovered the page, so I decided not to bid on it. The volume that I ended up buying (because, hey, it's for research, right? and I can use it for both my academic work and my creative work -- awesome! it's like "Buy one get one free"!!!) arrived today. In a word: it's gorgeous!

So far I've just leafed through it and took pictures of some of the highlights, e.g.

• intriguing bits of paper pasted into the newspaper (pic on upper right)
• prize cattle
• masses of people emigrating to the New World
• the construction of the Crystal Palace for the Grand Exhibition in 1851
• the new railway station in Newcastle upon Tyne (pic on upper left)
• some sheet music
• the Assyrian sculptures from Nimrod at the British Museum*
• Stamp Duty in action

____________
* I yelled "Wheeee!" when I came across that particular picture because DEVIL'S RETURN deals with the excavations in Nimrod in the mid-1840s. :-)

That moment when you realise there was no direct train between London & Edinburgh in 1846....

from BLACK'S IRON HIGHWAY FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH, 1850

... and it totally messes up your story.

Well, a little anyway.

Thanks to the somewhat belated realization that perhaps I should check whether there was indeed a direct train from London to Edinburgh in 1846 or whether my heroine is sitting in a horrible anachronism, I had some digging to to earlier this afternoon. And this is what I 've found:

The Great Northern Railway, that is, the line between Newcastle and Edinburgh, was opened either in late 1850 or at some point in 1851 (a guidebook from 1851 mentions that new connection), so in 1846 my heroine wouldn't have been able to take a train on that line. As to the Berwick-Edinburgh connection, I couldn't quite figure out when exactly this was opened (it was at some point in the late 1840s). So in the end, I decided that my heroine would take the train to Newcastle and from there the stagecoach to Edinburgh. (Grrr....)

In other news, the revisions of A TANGLED WEB are all finished; I just need to type up all my edits. I'm not yet quite happy with the prologue (should I ditch Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" or not?), but I hope I'll be able to iron this out tomorrow morning. Then I'll just need to Americanize the whole manuscript before I can send it off to my copy editor. Wheee!

Invitation to a Tournament

Today I'm guest-posting on Risky Regencies, where I'm sharing some info about the historical background of THE BRIDE PRIZE. And no, we are not talking about medieval romance here. :-)

Click here to find out more

(There are men in kilts! Noble knights! People in medieval costume!)

Breakthrough!!!!!

As you know, I was working on the revisions of THE BRIDE PRIZE these past few days. These were the hardest revisions I've ever done (mainly because I didn't properly plan the story from the get-go), and there was a lot of red on the pages. Like, A LOT!

In the end, I was so very frustrated that I decided to switch colours to make the pages look a little less horrid. And with a little help from my friends (in the picture below you can see a promo pen Debra Holland gave me when we met at the IndieUncon in San Francisco back in February) I muddled through a few more chapters, until....

....until I hit a major, major roadblock. I grappled with that one scene for days and days and days and DAYS. And it was beyond depressing because I just couldn't figure out how to resolve this dratted scene -- until this afternoon!!! Wheee!!!!

Well, actually, I had already scribbled what eventually became the solution onto a post-it the night before: just before I went to bed, the Muse struck me over the head. :-)

After a final read-through tomorrow morning, both THE BRIDE PRIZE and DEVIL'S RETURN will go to my copy editor, and for me it's then on to A TANGLED WEB (which will probably be a similarly hard nut to crack as THE BRIDE PRIZE - oh joy!)

In Support of Jackie Barbosa

If you're looking for some good books to buy this week, I ask you to consider the books of my colleague Jackie Barbosa. Jackie writes in various different genres, so there's a little something for almost everybody, especially if you like your stories a bit spicier. I've just bought the contemporary According to Luke myself because the excerpt sounded so very delicious. Check it out here.

And here's the blurb:

Luke Finley, the eldest of four brothers, is a committed serial monogamist. He’s all for one woman at a time, but not one woman forever. He knows a lifetime of fidelity just isn’t in his genes.

But when his latest girlfriend kicks him out–of his condo–the woman he’s always thought of as “one of the guys” turns out to be the one woman who can rock his world and make him believe in forever.

A friends-to-lovers story! Love those!

Or perhaps you'd like to have a look at her two free historical shorts, The Reiver and Nine Ladies Dancing.

The reason I'm asking you to support Jackie is a sad one: You might have already heard that earlier this month Jackie lost her 17-year-old son Julian in a car accident. Most of us will never be able to fully understand what Jackie and her family are going through right now, the terrible pain they must be feeling.

There is nothing we can do to ease this pain, but we as her colleagues wanted to show her our support, and so Beverly Kendall and Courtney Milan came up with the idea of authors highlighting Jackie’s books on their blogs or FB pages.

There is also a memorial fund set up in Julian's name. Details to donate can be found here. Any and all donation amounts are greatly appreciated.

Doggie-walking Duties & a Tournament

Today, I was once again on doggie-walking duty. :-)

I'm also still hard at work at the revisions for THE BRIDE PRIZE. At the moment my characters are at a tournament (which is not exactly surprising, given that half of the novella takes place during the aforementioned tournament). As per my editor's suggestions, I'm working on increasing the conflict between hero and heroine. In this particular scene it needs to be clearer that he regards the whole tournament thing as a rather silly affair. Sooo..... (insertions in red)

Around them the crowd fell silent as the knights retired to their tents in order to don their helmets and await the formal challenge to combat. Yes, very much in the manner of Ivanhoe (though minus the nasty Prince John and the general bloodlust of the audience) and as good a show as anything you might see on a London stage.
Here and there a few laughs could be heard as the jester rode across the field, swinging his bells in a somewhat dampened tingle over his head.

And then, finally, a blast of trumpets sounded, and the first challenge of the day was issued: the Knight of the Swan sent his defiance to the Knight of the Golden Lion. Having donned their helmets, both knights rode forth, plumes fluttering in the wind.

Everyone around the lists seemed to hold their breath. This was it! This was why they had come here from all corners of the kingdom; indeed, even from all corners of the world!

Breathless excitement gripped the stands & slopes, Robbie scribbled into his sketchbook right next to a very hasty drawing of a round gentleman staring in open-mouthed wonder at the silly spectacle unfolding in front of his eyes.

We do so need somebody for satirical illustrations, Robbie thought ruefully.

The knights took their positions on opposite sides of the barrier that had been set up for the tilting.

Miss Florence sighed happily. "Isn't it wonderful? It's so --"

Another blast of trumpets, and the knights rode furiously -- or at least as furiously as was possible in the rain, which was not very furious at all -- towards each other... further and further... and past each other, without so much as scratching their shields, let alone splintering anybody's lances.

Out and about with the Doggie Sister

I've taken over doggie-walking duties for a few days, and today was just perfect for going down to the river.

On the way back, we passed the car park where my Mum usually parks her car when she takes Tinka down to the river. Tinka was utterly flummoxed that today THERE WAS NO CAR TO TAKE HER HOME! Wait, wait, what? I actually have to walk home???? She just couldn't believe it. *g* 

My New Editorial Assistant

 For tackling Chapter 3, I had a very special editorial assistant today:

"Edi-what???"

Editorial assistant. Which means you're helping me to improve my book.

"Does that mean I'll get a treat?"

Uhm...

"Well, then..."

"No treat, no assistance!"

The Cutting Continues

I did indeed manage to condense Chapters 1 and 2 into one single chapter (YAY!); and now I'm cutting away at Chapter 3.

Btw, did you know that there were horse-drawn railways? Neither did I until I researched this scene. :-)

Add a bit of pink...

... in order to increase the general confusion. This is the page from the second pic in my last post. Cut even more stuff. Snip-snap.

My Editor Made Me Do It!

I call this "My Editor Made Me Do It": it's Chapter 1 in all its red glory. Quite a frightful sight, isn't it?

And the next pic shows the beginning of Chapter 2, which isn't much better. But at least the cutting has become easier. Yay! However, I need to cut a lot more text if I want to merge those two chapters into one. *sigh*

(I'd also like to know why the heck my pictures come out so very dark when I upload them here. Until two or three days ago, I've never had this problem before. Grrr....)