Review: A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant

Cecilia Grant has been floating around on my radar for a little while now - ever since the second in her Blackshear Family series released in May, and especially since I read Robin Reader's review of A Gentleman Undone over at Dear Author. Every good review I read made it obvious that her books would be right up my alley...and simultaneously increased my reluctance to read, because I hate to be disappointed.  But then I met Ms. Grant at RWA12 and she was both lovely and gracious; Courtney Milan took a brief detour from her talk on marketing to insist that "anyone who likes Sherry Thomas would love Cecilia Grant;" and I picked up a free copy of A Lady Awakened at the Bantam Dell signing.

All of that was more than adequately convincing.  (And what a bore all future such explanations will be, when my only reason for reading is that I happened across a good review, or the blurb appealed to me....)

I offer all this preface because, when you really think about it, high expectations are the worst.  A perfectly fine novel can be really disappointing if you crack the cover expecting greatness.  Overblown expectations will ruin your reading experience.

On the other hand, when your expectations have have expanded to truly unrealistic dimensions and the book is even better than you had hoped?  I want to make an Olympics metaphor because that's going on right now, even though I'm indifferent to sports and not watching any events, but also because the comparison fits nicely - when expectations meet reality, the result is awe.

So, yeah.  I am in awe.

A Lady Awakened pairs an uptight, upright heroine (Martha) blessed with an abundance of moral rectitude but a dearth of charm with a hero (Theo) who's handsome, charismatic, good-natured, and fickle.  An opposites attract story, at base.

Newly widowed, childless Martha has one month to impregnate herself before her deceased husband's estate passes on to his villainous brother.  She enlists Theo to give her daily doses of seed, hoping to keep the villain at bay with a quickening.

Theo prides himself on being a skilled and generous lover.  He's a sensual connoisseur who's learned to appreciate women in all their varied forms, and he's pretty cheerful about the idea of sex with a prim, crusading widow.  He sees the possibilities.

But Martha is determined not to enjoy herself.  Sex with her fist husband was a trial rather than a pleasure, and that's scarred her. What's more, she's deeply uncomfortable with her own scheme.  From the beginning, Martha knows that what she's doing is fraud, and immoral.  She justifies her own acts by refusing to enjoy the process, and she actively discourages Theo from making their sexual encounters at all enjoyable.

The rest of my comments are on the spoilery side, and probably best for people who've already read the book.  Click through to read.

What I loved about A Lady Awakened is how perfectly Martha's and Theo's character arcs intersect.  Early on, Martha disparages Theo and his conviction that sex should be about fun and pleasure.  She imagines a perfect conjugal evening, with an appropriately perfect husband - a churchman:

And as to marital obligations, likely a churchman would exercise his rights with a becoming modesty. Without so much fuss and fanfare as other men found necessary.  Afterward, he and his wife would lie side by side and talk.  He might try out bits of the sermon he was making that week, and ask her opinion.  She might tell him what she'd observed in visiting the cottagers that day.  Together they would confer, and hatch plans for bettering the lives of everyone in the parish....

[He] might come to his wife's bed some nights with no other purpose than to talk.  To know what were her ideas and judgments, and to share his own with her....

A Lady Awakened, 59

It's not that Martha doesn't think she could ever enjoy sex, it's that she believes sex should be secondary - maybe tertiary or, who knows, even lower on the list - in a relationship.  She sees pleasure as conditional upon respect, rapport, a meeting of minds and hearts.

And because Theo is such an agreeable sort of fellow, because Theo's primary goal is to be the perfect lover to whoever he's currently sleeping with, he slowly but surely shapes himself to fit Martha's dream.  He comes to admire Martha as a person, to consult her about his plans, and he obligingly makes the sex as brief and as bland as possible.

Just in time for Martha to realize that she was wrong.  She gets exactly what she asked for, only to realize that she doesn't want it anymore.  She's changed - but it's more than that. Her vision of perfection was flawed, the reality unsatisfying.  To me, that's the novel's real black moment - the moment of greatest intensity and despair - though the scene itself is companionable and pleasant, on the surface.

In some ways, the changes in Theo's character are more interesting than the changes in Martha's.  I felt Martha, how sharp her emotions were, how guarded she was, how much she needed to change and how reluctant she was to actually do so.  I rooted for her, especially when her behavior was prickly or cold.

Theo's journey felt more like a commentary on the romance genre, maybe even rebuke.  Because he starts out with the kind of attitude most heroes have at the end of their character arc.  He aims to please.  He tries hard to be the man his woman wants, in bed and out.  He's a nice guy, a good guy.  But Grant shows us, through a lens that only a woman like Martha can provide, that Theo has a serious flaw.

He overvalues his desirability.  He overvalues his sexual prowess.  He's entirely too content with himself - as a lot of cocky Romancelandia heroes are - until he meets Martha, who rips him to shreds.  Martha is not impressed, and Theo is forced to rebuild his ego almost from scratch.

There's one quote in particular from Theo towards the end that made me realize how far he had come, and how important it was that he change - that it wasn't enough, not by half, to make Martha loosen up and enjoy sex: "No lust, it developed, was so gratifying to a man as the lust that blossomed only after esteem had taken root. He might have gone his whole life without finding this out, if he'd never been exiled to Sussex." (A Lady Awakened, 276)

I'll admit that I found the ending unsatisfying.  Martha makes this spur-of-the-moment, out-of-character decision to hire Theo as a lover and that's necessary to make the novel happen, so I was happy to suspend disbelief and read on.  Her bargain with Theo played out beautifully, full of subtlety and nuance.  Both characters go on this tremendous emotional journey, though the action itself is quiet and subdued.

But all along there's the threat of this villainous brother-in-law and, to Grant's credit, there's no neat and easy solution.  When he finally shows up Martha finds out that he has two young sons, and Martha's fraudulent pregnancy is wronging them, too.

This is a pretty intense moral dilemma and Grant just doesn't have time to do it justice.   The big intervention and comic hijinks everyone gets up to - teaching the housemaids self-defense moves, for example - felt so thin and inadequate, especially in comparison to everything that had come before.  In the final pages, I couldn't rejoice at the knowledge that the villain is sent away to prey on women in some other part of the country, where the neighbors aren't so vigilant; that just seems like passing the buck to me, nothing to be proud of.

Anyhow, this is a minor quibble and I can't wait to read the next book in the series, A Gentleman Undone.  A Lady Awakened is magnificent, a new favorite and highly, highly recommended.

RWA12 - Saturday, 7.28.12

Saturday was not my best day.  It was the only day I tried driving myself to conference and naturally I managed to get lost, show up late, and miss the first workshop.  I hit up the book signings instead, collecting huge numbers of free books from Ballantine Bantam Dell and Berkley, and that set the tone for the day: a little more self-indulgence, a little less self-improvement than the previous three. I swung by the Spotlight on Samhain, which was pretty fascinating.  They were really transparent about their sales numbers and royalty rates.  The editor who did most of the speaking on this subject, Lindsey Faber, seemed really excited to break down the numbers so I'll repeat them here.

She claimed that their "low-selling" authors, defined as books that sell under 1000 copies, are almost exclusively authors that only publish one book with Samhain, maybe two - authors who don't build and audience and gather the momentum necessary to see good sales month after month.  ("Your frontlist sells your backlist," she explained)

Their "midlist" would include authors that sell between 1,000 and 10,000 copies.

And their "high selling" authors would be anything over 10,000 copies.  Their m/m books tend to top out at around 15,000 sales, their non-erotic novels at 30,000 sales, their erotica in the 45,000 range.  All of this over a period between 24-36 months.

(Since their standard royalty rates are 30% of list for digital, 40% of list for books bought direct from the Samhain website, and 8% of list for print, it's easy to get an accurate range of how much money low, middle, and high selling authors are making).

According to Faber, over 20% of US authors who write for Samhain make $10,000 a year or more, but only 3% make over $100,000.  (Which simultaneously means that 80% of authors make under $10,000 per year).  They have about 600 authors total, but only 400 were counted in the statistics that Faber quoted, and only 150 of those had new releases in 2011.

Content wise, they emphasized that they're not stuck on any particular genre; that as long as "story is everything" they can build new genres, or publish cross-genre books, and survive all trends.

Other interesting tidbits:

They have an author-friendly rights policy.  They only insist on keeping rights to any book for 7 years; after that point, the author can request a reversion for any reason.

Their contracts are fully negotiable.  There's usually a gap of 8 months or so between acquisition and pub date, sometimes more for newbie authors.

They're not interested in wading into the YA market, but New Adult is fair game.

I thought they gave the best answer I heard the whole conference to the "How much social media do I need to do?" question (and I heard that question asked, and answered, a lot).  They said there are three must-dos for any author:

1. Have an easily navigable website

2. With a list of books you've published and the order in which they should be read

3. And clearly indicate what's coming next.

After the Samhain spotlight I...went to lunch.  And then more book signings (Kensington, Sourcebooks, and St. Martins!).  Once I'd gorged myself on free stuff, I took myself off to a couple more workshops.

The Girlfriends' Guide to Being a Debut Author: the Stuff No One Ever Tells You (Kristen Callihan, Miranda Kenneally, Roni Loren, and Sara Megibow)

Ok, so this one was a little aspirational but there's nothing wrong with that, right?

Like most of the panel-style workshops, this one started off with each member of the panel giving a quick speech, making whatever points she thought most pertinent.

Kristen Callihan's advice seemed...dangerous.  Her first tip was to be casual and show personality with your editor, and then she admitted to sending a three-page letter with photo attachments to the art department to help them prepare her cover.  She loves her cover!

Then she said that she collected a lot of her own blurbs.  She said she wrote to a bunch of authors that she really loved, telling them with great honesty and enthusiasm how much she admired their work.  She attached her manuscript to the emails and mentioned, at the end, that she'd appreciate if a blurb - and she got twelve blurbs from authors she really liked, including Diana Gabaldon.

I'm repeating all of this but...as a listener, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop because, man, all of her advice seems like it could backfire so easily.  Lucky her, I guess.

I found Miranda Kenneally mesmerizing.  She was like some sort of lady sheriff in the old west, with this very understated but cool demeanor and a gravelly voice.  Someone would say something like, "Nobody goes on book tours anymore," and then she'd be like, "Well, my publisher sent me on a book tour..." and it was kind of like the book-con equivalent of winning a duel at high noon.

Kenneally made a couple of important points though.  One is that she responds, even if briefly, to every email or tweet she gets - she thinks it's important to acknowledge her fans.  Another is that she's not precious about her own work; when Barnes & Noble asked her publisher to change the title and cover of her debut, she did not protest, because she wanted to keep Barnes & Noble happy a lot more than she wanted to keep her original title.

Roni Loren had some great tips about promo.  She regretted going overboard promoting her first book; she agreed to a 40-stop blog tour and it was exhausting and took time away from writing the next book, so much so that she struggled to meet her next deadline.  Writing the next book is more important than covering the internet in promo.

The lesson from this experience?  Be realistic about what you can commit to.  She also suggested that 5-question interviews are about the right length (not 20!)

Loren talked about the post-publication crash, about a week after her debut, when the buildup is over, the big day is done, reviews have started to come out and inevitably some are bad.  "You get over yourself real fast," she observed.

Loren also talked about making the shift from being a "writer" to a "published author" - she'd been a blogger for years but found that, all of a sudden, she had to be a lot more careful about what she said in public, especially about other authors; she cut back on negative reviews.

Megibow, the agent, chimed into say that it's important to celebrate every victory - there are so many frustrations in publishing, she said, so much waiting and being patient, that it's really important to grab onto a reason to be happy when you can.

Other assorted tips, most of them without attribution...

Editing is a partnership; you don't have to agree to every suggestion.

Build a support network early.

Don't be upset if people don't treat you like gold from the get-go.

Nobody cares as much as you about your career; take charge of it.

Make It Work! Getting Your Novel Down the Runway (Michelle Marcos, Deb Marlowe, Miranda Neville, and Heather Snow)

This was the last workshop of the conference, and my favorite of the Career workshops I went to.

The panelists first warned that advances on debut novels tend to be low ($10,000 and under), but went on to say that even books that make lists earn surprisingly little money.  For romance, the panelists warned, 4 weeks is a long time on the New York Times list; 1-2 is more common.  And books that only spend a couple of weeks on the NYT might earn something on the order of $50,000 (they were citing figures that Lynn Viehl posted on her blog; I googled the actual post and it is here); they further noted that advances have been trending downward, rather than upward, and Michelle Marcos chimed in with "$50k is the new $100k."

Rather than measure success in dollars, the panelists suggested, it's better to look at the overall trajectory of an author's sales, from book to book.  It's better to sell 10,000 of your first book and 20,000 of your second, they warned, than 35,000 of your second if your first sold 70,000.

Just strive to be profitable, earn out your advance.  And work really hard.

They noted that authors can't do much to affect their print sales, but can make a difference in their digital sales.  Most of them regretted expensive promo efforts like sending excerpt booklets and postcards to independent booksellers.

They emphasized the importance of review copies (as did Patrick Brown of Goodreads), and when asked why an author would want to be reviewed they said: good reviews lead to library and indie bookstore sales.  When asked about how to respond to bad reviews, Miranda Neville answered: "Drink heavily and shut up."

Miranda Neville had heard that one should hope to be living on royalties and advances alone after publishing 10-12 books.

Even though getting books into Wal-Mart and Target is a huge goal for most authors, it's important to remember that books only stay on the shelves at big-box stores for a month; huge numbers, yes, but a very brief window.

Michelle Marcos said she struggled with jealousy initially; "there's always someone higher up on the ladder, don't compare yourself." Others noted that it's helpful to your career to draw attention to other authors (the rising tide lifts all boats theory), and someone said, rather eloquently so it's a shame I don't have any attribution: "it's okay to marinate in your current level of success."

Miranda Neville advised befriending other writers a little further on in their careers, said "information is power" and also admitted to feeling the sort of post-publication crash that Roni Loren mentioned in the previous workshop; Neville described it as post-partum depression & lamented that "trumpets didn't play" when she entered the room (Neville has a truly enviable British accent and made this observation about the trumpets very wryly).

My final note, again without attribution, is: Protect the work - the joy of putting words on a page.

A good way to close out the conference.

After that came the Golden Heart & Rita awards ceremony.  A list of this year's winners has been posted here; I'm just going to do a highlights reel.

First off...there were cake popsicles and carafes of hot coffee, along with plates of fruit, at all the tables.  I liked that!

I only knew one of the Golden Heart nominees (Heather Nickodem, for "Cat on a Hot Steel Flight Deck" - we met at a previous conference), and the work isn't published, so I couldn't pick favorites or root for anyone.  I did think the ceremony got off to a good start when the Paranormal Romance winner, Lorenda Christensen, gave her acceptance speech in the form of a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air parody rap.

A bunch of winners cried, naturally.  One of them, Elisa Beatty who won in the Historical Romance category with "The Devil May Care" said she'd won in a previous year, thanked Diet Coke, and then developed an allergy to caffeine, so she wasn't thanking anyone or anything this time around; and Talia Quinn Daniels, who won in the Contemporary Single Title category, stayed for the conference and ceremony despite having a child with a health crisis at home.

Elizabeth Bemis won a Golden Heart in the Romantic Suspense category and used her speech to insult an English teacher who told her she'd never amount to anything; later in the ceremony, when Joanna Bourne's The Black Hawk (which is awesome - I love everything that woman writes) won a RITA for Best Historical Romance, she thanked all her teachers, and all the teachers in the room.  I don't know if Bourne meant to issue a challenge with her speech, but if I were Bemis I'd have felt about two inches tall.

Thea Harrison won Best Paranormal Romance for Dragon Bound & had one of those impossible stories about getting a call from her agent when she was unemployed, only a couple of weeks before her savings ran out.

Cindy Dees' Soldier's Last Stand won for Contemporary Series Romance: Suspense/Adventure & she used her time at the podium to say "nyah nyah nyah" to her 1 star reviewer on Amazon.

And then Fiona Lowe's Boomerang Bride won for Contemporary Single Title Romance - she listed off her pre-pub stats, 32 agent queries and 12 print pub rejections before she ended up selling her book to Carina Press.  For all the RITA awards, both the author and the editor got a chance to speak - but instead of Lowe's editor, the executive editor of Carina, Angela James, took a turn at the podium & she dedicated the award to all the e-presses, everyone who'd participated in the rise of digital-first publishing, and said "This one's for you!"

There weren't a lot of digital-first books nominated for awards, certainly not in single-title categories, and this was the first year I think it was even possible to nominate the digital first books, so Lowe's win is a real landmark for the genre.

Tessa Dare's A Night to Surrender won for Regency Historical; I, for one, was so, so thrilled to see a chaptermate stand up to accept an award on our home turf in Orange County.  I'd been rooting her like crazy, and her speech was fantastic.  She told an adorable anecdote about her children ("they just called me on my cell phone to ask if they could order room service ice cream sundaes and I told them no, but now I think I'll call them back and say yes...") and then said that she'd "always said romance is about finding someone who accepts you for your worst self and empowers you to be your best self," and that her husband had always done that for her.

Dear reader, I teared up a bit.

Ann Aguirre did an interpretive dance to accept her RITA for Young Adult Romance, and then J.D. Robb won for Romantic Suspense.  La Nora had been invoked so many times at that podium during the conference (it was the same spot, and the same room, as all the luncheon keynotes) that it seemed only natural for her to be the last one to accept an award, the last thing we'd see before the conference ended.  She was wearing a very, very sparkly necklace and chortled, "Nora's going to be so jealous," before leaving the podium.

And that's all.  RWA12 was over, done, no more.

RWA12 - Friday, 7.27.12

My first workshop of the day was Where the Hell Are We? The Importance of Setting in a Novel (Alyssa Day, Kristan Higgins, and Elizabeth Hoyt) Here - as was often the case with the panel-style workshops - the speakers simply divided the hour into four fifteen-minute parts.  Each author talked for fifteen minutes, reserving the final quarter-hour for questions.

Alyssa Day said that the best way to make an imaginary world believable is to give it an underpinning of reality and fact; she incorporates real sites and mysteries of history (vanished civilizations, etc.) into her worldbuilding, for example.  She also emphasized the importance of keeping invented details (whether it be a rule about vampire behavior or the location of a fantasy landmark) consistent from scene to scene and book to book.

Hoyt's take on setting was very, very interesting.  She's passionate about research but said, firmly and without apology, "romance is the noun, historical is the adjective."  Perfect historical accuracy isn't her goal; she strives for a "half and half" mix of history and fantasy.

Higgins had the most conceptual approach to setting.  She uses setting to focus plot elements and scenes, and sets her scenes in locations that will naturally increase the conflict she's writing about, or mirror the issues that her characters face -- i.e., a character who tries to be, and seem, perfect ends up living in a town that strives to maintain a perfect, idyllic appearance.

Next up came Michael Hauge's two-hour workshop on Using Inner Conflict to Create Powerful Love Stories.

I've been a big fan of Michael Hauge for a while now, and for the most part he spent his two hours walking the audience through his story structure; I won't recap the various parts and turning points, as they're all available on his website.

Hauge joked at the beginning about how he just recycles the same talk no matter where he's speaking but...is it a joke if it's true?

That was fine with me, as I'd never heard him speak before.  Hauge's talk was one of the two highlights of the conference for me, and definitely the best workshop on craft that I attended at RWA12.

I found myself thinking, throughout the workshop, that what I really wanted to hear was a version of Hauge who really understood mass market romance.  He's a screenplay guy, not very familiar with the genre, and couldn't tailor his talk to its conceits.

I was lucky enough to be sitting next to Cecilia Grant during the talk, for example, and when Hauge explained that a story can have only one protagonist, that the hero and heroine in a romance can never be equal, she said, "I disagree, they must be equal," under her breath and I agreed completely.

I also think that he goes badly astray by separating out his main Primary Character Types (the Hero, the Nemesis, the Reflection, and the Love Interest) as he would for a generic hero's journey, when in a romance the Love Interest often assumes the role of Nemesis (providing painful spurs to the partner's character growth) or Reflection (identifying, and pushing, their partner toward their best self).

Robyn Carr gave the luncheon keynote address.  I've heard her speak before and, as she did the first time I heard her, she talked about becoming a consistent New York Times bestselling author after spending the bulk of her career, thirty years or so, struggling in the midlist.

Her talk was emotional and personal in direct contrast to Stephanie Laurens' scientific, business-minded talk from the day before; it was moving, inspiring, and highly quotable: "Success isn't measured in decades," she said. "It's measured in minutes and seconds." That stuck in my mind through the rest of the conference; always the little celebrations before the next long haul, the next slog.  Success isn't ever a state of being, is it?  Or, "I kept hearing people say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but I kept seeing the squeaky wheel get replaced."

And maybe best of all: "The greatest gift is the knowledge that I had everything I had ever wanted...before I had everything I had ever wanted."

After lunch I went straight to a presentation on How to Get the Most Out of Goodreads, given by Patrick Brown, the community manager.

Brown was pimping Goodreads obviously - 10 million members! 21 million monthly visitors! - and also explaining how authors can set themselves up on the site and use it most productively.

The basics?  Set up an author page.  Do giveaways.  Use the site like a reader, not a promo robot.  Feed your blog through to the site.

He said that the author's goal, early in the life of the book, should be to get reviews.  Reviews help readers discover a book.  And he also said that several hundred people need to shelve your book to get it into the site's recommendation algorithm.

Next I hopped on over to Courtney Milan's Be Your Own Lead Title workshop.

First off: Courtney Milan looks an awful lot like Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Second: She's just as frank and charming as she is on Twitter and in the Dear Author comments.

Her talk was relatively detail oriented, and certainly most useful to authors who are self pubbing.  She talked about the nitty-gritty of putting together a book, about growing an audience, about social media.  Like Patrick Brown, she emphasized the importance of reviews - honest reviews, in as great a quantity as possible.

On the subject of covers, she said that covers should be eye-catching, readable, and professional, but that "if you have to choose between eye-catching and professional, choose eye-catching."

The devil is definitely in the details here - as Milan pointed out, her own stress level went way down once she became her own publisher and took control, but a lot of authors would have the opposite reaction.  It also sounds like she's one of those people who doesn't need a whole lot of sleep.

I got the impression that her greatest expense in putting together a self-pubbed novel is paying for an excellent freelance editor.  One of my favorite comments during the lecture was this: "I have never regretted paying for quality."

RWA12 - Thursday, 7.26.12

I started off the first day of the main conference with the PRO Retreat.  The first part, about book contracts, was pretty useful - and a smart topic to target at PROs, all of whom have finished a manuscript and started their search for an agent/publisher, most of whom haven't reached the contract stage.  By the time we hit PAN, the next step up, it's too late. After that came an editor panel, featuring May Chen from Avon, Debra Dixon from Belle Bridge, Lindsey Faber from Samhain, and a fourth I'm blanking on.  The mix alone was a sign of the changing times - one e-first pub editor, an indie pub editor, and two Big 6 editors.

They were charming and forthcoming, but after attending regular local chapter meetings for the past couple of years, the questions trod familiar ground...How much  promo is an author expected to do (as much as they can stomach), do they look at the slush pile differently after recent self-pub successes (not really), etc.  Great questions and really interesting the first ten or twelve times you hear them answered.

Verdict: won't be going to the PRO retreat again.  It was fine, but not nearly good enough to compete with the nine other workshops going on at the same time.

Stephanie Laurens gave the luncheon keynote, and it was ballsy.  Debra Mullins pointed out to me afterwards that Laurens has a background in science (a peek at her about page tells me that Laurens has a PhD in Biochemistry which...wow), and she set about analyzing the massive upheavals rocking publishing right now with a scientist's eye.

I live tweeted this whole thing, so I'm mostly going to pull those tweets out and place them in context.

Laurens described "offline" publishing as a chain that starts with the author, but then passes through the publisher, the distributor, and the bookseller before reaching the reader.  She described "online" publishing as a process with only two essential elements: author and reader, rendering the intermediaries (publisher, distributor, bookseller) non-essential.

She said "publishing is not our business" to all the authors in the room - that publishing is just transmission, moving a book from one place to another, a small part of the whole.  And she recommended that publishers learn to make themselves essential to authors, if they want to survive.

Part of the problem, for publishers, is that they "never see the reader right down at the end of the chain, because they don't need to in offline publishing," while online publishing has reminded everyone of something that has been true all along: "readers rule, always."

By the time she got to the end of her speech -- by the time she said "readers rule, always" -- I'd teared up.  Her speech started a little slow but by the middle, when I realized that she was throwing down a gauntlet, I started to worry that we'd all be struck by lightning.  Yes, anyone who's been following the conversation around self-pub has heard most of what she said before, but in that venue?  With every major romance publisher in attendance?  Wow.

But her conclusion was inspiring, empowering, and emotional.  Write good books, choose the best method of transmission for you at that moment...and let the readers decide.  If I smoked, I'd have grabbed a lighter and started waving it around.

Instead I joined in the standing ovation.  Good speech.

[Edited to add: Stephanie Laurens posted a transcript of her speech on her website, here.]

After lunch I headed to Julia Quinn's workshop: Dialogue: It's More Than What You Say

First of all: Julia Quinn is gorgeous.

Second of all: Julia Quinn is hilarious.  She spent at least half of her hour-long talk on dialogue tags and had her audience laughing regularly.  Dialogue tags are not naturally humorous at all, so I think all the credit there goes to the speaker.

I went to a talk on grammar particulars at a local chapter recently where the speaker insisted that dialogue tags must come at the beginning or the end of a sentence.  Since I like to put them in the middle, more often than not, I've since spent a lot of time agonizing about dialogue tag placement and feeling very, very wrong.  So it was liberating to hear Julia Quinn say that it's perfectly fine to put tags anywhere you please.

I really loved the way she talked about the tags as a form of punctuation - this was an absolute revelation to me, crystallizing something that I've felt for a long time but never with such clarity.  Dialogue tags, she said (i.e.: he said, she said, he muttered, she squeaked, etc.) are like commas, while action tags (he smiled, she fiddled with her hair, he stroked her arm, etc.) are more like periods.

A few other tidbits...Ms. Quinn noted that being funny in a book probably requires being funny in person, and described herself as "naturally goofy".  I can say from personal experience that the humor that shows well in my books is the kind of humor I do well in person, too; understated and wry, not so obvious.

Not new but still interesting was: vary speech patterns between characters, vary sentence structure to keep pacing up.

The final event of the day for me was The Romance of the Cocktail Seminar run by Van Gogh Vodka.

I went with a couple of friends (Alison Diem and Mary K. Norris...actually, Mary was a stranger at the doorway and a friend by the time we actually sat down).  Tara Lynn Childs was already sitting at a mostly-empty table with her agent so we snagged some seats and then, over the next fifteen minutes, Miranda Neville, Kate Noble, Shana Galen, and Sophie Jordan all sat down next to us.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) over those same fifteen minutes a bevy of waiters also handed out several rounds of some sort of sweet, pomegranate-flavored vodka drink.  And then several rounds of a creamy, milkshake-flavored vodka drink.  And then just a great big ol' glass of peach-flavored vodka, in case we hadn't had enough.

Sitting down amongst a bevy of wonderful, established authors who all write in my genre at a vodka-based event is what I'd call a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, I'd never choose to meet any of those people while three drinks distant from perfect decorum.  On the other hand, it was very fun and friendly.

There was a mixologist giving a talk, but the sound system was horrible and none of us could hear a word he said.  So instead we snagged free drinks, laughed and chatted...we all contributed to the sea of empty glasses that clogged the middle of the table.  By the end of the event, it looked like the alcoholic version of a fairground ring toss game.

On the way out, I ran into chapter-mate and, as of last Saturday, RITA-winner Tessa Dare at the bar...and she introduced me to Vivian Arend, who turns out to be easy to recognize because she was the only one to wear a cowboy hat every day. I admit, I felt pretty lucky and starstruck by the end of the evening.  And tired.  Very, very tired.

Beau Monde Mini-Con - Wednesday, 7.25.12

Highlights of the Beau Monde mini-conference: meeting all the members I've followed on Twitter or through the chapter email loop (especially Rose Lerner and Susanna Fraser, who introduced the topic of a "Time Machine Free Pass" - my pick was Sir Richard Francis Burton, naturally) and learning to lose at loo. So...workshops.  I'm going to type up some notes and impressions.

Popular Magazines of the Regency (Sandra Schwab)

Sandra Schwab is an academic and she has a proper academic approach to scholarship: thorough and precise.  I miss the good old days sometimes, so I enjoyed this quite a bit.

The talk seemed to have two main points.  The first was naming periodicals to which authors might turn when researching specific topics - The Lady's Companion or La Belle Assemblé for fashion info, for example.

The other was to sketch out the rise of periodicals that started with the Gentleman's Magazine in 1731 but exploded during the Regency, with over 4,000 new magazines launched between 1790 and 1832.  The earliest magazines covered all bases; town and country; local and international news; politics and culture.

With time, magazines magazines began targeting specific audiences (women, for example) and subjects (sporting).  The fact-based reporting of the early years gave way to more opinionated articles; snarky book reviews in Blackwood's, for example, resulted in an endless stream of libel suits.

Horse Sense Through History (Shannon Donnelly)

Shannon is a horse person & a chaptermate who's corrected several horse-related mistakes in my manuscripts in the past - my primary observation about horses is that everyone I know who's passionate about them has been severely injured as a result.

She covered basic horsemanship, breeds, markings, and carriage types.  Meanwhile, Joanna Bourne kept interrupting with questions that began, "So if your heroine has been kidnapped..."

This was my first clue that the conference was going to be awesome.

Delilah Marvelle gave the luncheon keynote.  I always love listening to authors talk about how they got published, or how they revived a flagging career, really any kind of from-the-trenches wisdom.  No two are alike and Delilah Marvelle's was particularly harrowing.  She ended up saying the thing that an aspiring writer most wants to hear: believe in yourself, write what you know is good.

I think romance as a genre can be deceptive; the titles and covers are so interchangeable, but the books themselves?  Absolutely the opposite.  I once heard James Scott Bell say that the secret to rising tension is to write to the climax, not the resolution of a novel; until you reach it, the writer's endpoint should be that moment of maximum peril.  Writing toward a happy ending will only take you in the wrong direction.

I suspect that romance genre covers could teach a similar moral: don't write the novel that deserves a pastel-colored clinch cover; it will end up blander than most of the novels that end up sandwiched between them.

The last workshop of the day was...

How Clothes Worked (Isobel Carr)

Isobel took us through the nitty gritty of dressing and undressing during the Regency - how corsets laced (and unlaced), how garters tied, what shifts and nightgowns looked like.

The highlight of this talk?  When she explained that Georgian corsets sculpted "baby's bottom" boobs, while Regency corsets engineered a "lift and separate".  And when someone asked how realistic it is, in historicals, for a gentleman to expose a fully-clothed woman's breasts, her response was: "You push up a little bit, you tug down a little bit, you've got boob."

So, there you go.  Totally realistic.

After the workshops came the literacy signing.  Some 400 authors sat at booths, signing books and chatting with the public at large.  I wandered up and down the aisles, looking for favorite authors, and discovered how rewarding it is to tell people that I think their books are great.  It's really fun!

A special shoutout to Julie James, who agreed that the hero of my favorite book of hers, Just the Sexiest Man Alive, is appealing precisely because he's cocky and enjoys his fame, and Lauren Willig, who recommended Jennifer Lee Carrell's Interred With Their Bones so I could enjoy the pleasure of reading about the wanton destruction of Widener Library.

Last but not least, the Soirée.  About half the attendees at the Beau Monde soirée showed up in costume, and a couple busted out rakish male alter-egos.  I sat down at the card table and learned to play loo.  Despite being a relatively simple game, I lost every round.