A Cover & Austen Reveal

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AUSTEN, Cover Reveal, regency, Scotland, writing

The brain is a curious hoarder. So many facts and impressions are tucked away in its curly crevices. It was my critique partner (Judy Post/Judi Lynn) who pointed out a recurring theme in my Regency Friendship Series—how women of all classes in the past had limited choices. That didn’t stop the brightest or most stubborn from finding ways around pesky barriers. Austen was one of them.

Historical writing requires constant fact-checking, not only for integrity’s sake, but more importantly for me, keeping it real for the reader. Readers of the regency genre are avid students of the time period. It’s not unusual for them to be acquainted with activities in Parliament for any given Season. An error can catapult a reader from the story. This means that it’s like hitting pay-dirt for this anglophile when a fine work on the time period comes along. I just found Lucy Worsley’s Jane Austen at Homeand feel like I’m living high on the hog (or more in line with the time period, in transports) as I read every delicious line.

Happily for me, there’s lots left of the book to relish, and what delights me most is the author’s learned opinion of what drove Austen. Jane, her sister and her mother lived separately from the brothers. This always confused me. Two brothers were wealthy through inheritances. One brother was stingy and another provided assistance, but it was Jane’s insistence on independence and her reasons for it that are illuminated in this book. As I read this intimate accounting of Austen’s life, so much about her emerges.

As writers, we need time alone to do the work. Concurrently, we must have support from either spouses, family or friends, especially friends who write. Jane came from a “middling” household where there wasn’t a great deal of money, and both her parents worked tirelessly to better the finances. Although she came from gentility and there were servants, the females were expected to pick up the slack around the house. The boys would be expected to spend their time with studies. It must have been a constant struggle for Jane to find time to write. There is also the hint of resentment, a vague sort of disappointment that makes one wonder if her brothers might have acted on this due to their lackluster writing attempts and Jane’s subtle brilliance.

The more I read Worsley’s book, the more my ideas about Austen become clearer, mainly because I’ve encountered her barriers. My first husband threw every kind of stumbling block in my way, but my late husband, John, was the opposite. When I sat down in front of the computer, no one was permitted to interrupt. Phone calls, anybody at the door, were put off. No disturbances allowed, a constant wall of protection and support with the exception of quietly setting a cup of coffee on the desk. He read everything and acted amazed and excited. He never boasted about me in public, knowing that would make me uncomfortable, but constantly talked me up to his/our children. Jane knew she would never have this from a spouse and she had marriage offers to decline. Most of her male contemporaries would not have allowed her to write and certainly not seek publication.

Regarding this cover reveal, A Laird’s Promise is about Caroline, who has all options, choices and dreams removed or placed out of reach. All she has is her pride and the determination to protect her fragile-hearted mother. And Alisdair, who must make a choice for the sake of the many, and does so knowing that it will break both their hearts.

The presale starts today, April 20, with the release date of May 01.

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Blog: https://historyfanforever.wordpress.com/

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/julia-donner

https://www.facebook.com/Julia-Donner-697165363688218/timeline

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OUTLANDER

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castles, haunting, Highlands, Outlander, Scotland

Friend, Barb, is a fan of the Outlander Series. I read the book when it was first released and a few of the following installments. Anything to do with Scotland had, and has, a draw for me. Barb’s insistence that I watch the series finally took root. I bought Season One the other day, sat down to watch a bit of it and didn’t stop. See me hooked and under the spell of this series. Part of this addiction comes from my enjoyment of the story. (What’s not to like about guys in kilts?) The clincher for me is that I’ve never seen Scotland’s landscape so perfectly captured. Photographs and other forms of media didn’t take me back there. This series does.

Thirty years ago, I took my mom with me to do research in the Tayside area, specifically, the village of Killin. The rough draft of Where Wild Winds Blow, a WWI romance between a Scot military man and Wyoming cattle baron’s daughter, still sits unfinished. It’s a story that I’m not yet ready to complete. It’s aging in its barrel, like whiskey, until its time has come. The inspiration for it came from an old movie with Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey, I Know Where I’m Going, about an English city girl going to Scotland to marry a rich man. Misfortunes stop her from getting to Kiloran, the island where the ceremony is to take place. While waiting to get there, she finds herself attracted to Torquil McNeil, a poor WWII seaman on leave before heading back to the war. She subsequently learns that her rich fiancé is renting the island from its laird, McNeil, the seaman she can’t stop thinking about. He’s connected to a curse they both come to embrace.

Anyway, I needed to get to Killin to see and absorb the atmosphere. There is a scene with Claire and Frank in the beginning of Outlander, filmed in a castle ruin that wrenched me back to that trip to Killin. I had found someone who could show me the site of a keep with a beheading pit. A keep is tiny in comparison to a castle, but the movie setting was so like that moment when I investigated the ruin and found the spot at the back of the keep, almost engulfed in bracken, shrouded by history and the presence of spirits no longer restless.

My present regency WIP, The Dandy and the Flirt, will be largely set in Scotland, a country house outside of Callander, a lovely town not far from Killin. The “dour Scot” appellation has me puzzled. Everyone—with the exception of one—I met in Scotland had beautiful manners, lovely complexions and a jolly sense of humor. There is a resilience and dignity that reminds me of the people of the Ozarks in the Wright book The Shepherd of the Hills, another story of haunting and that haunted me.

Now I can go back to Scotland anytime by plugging in Outlander, to soak in its enchanting beauty, rugged hillsides and tough yet delicate flowers. There is a wild openness in the Highlands, a sense of freedom and connection to the land. How did they survive leaving it? And yet they did, settled here, and shared their heritage.

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Donner

And thanks to Judith Post, for inviting me to do an interview on her blog. Please check out her most recent releases and media sites:

http://writingmusings.com/

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5023544.Judith_Post

I’m hopelessly hooked on Babet and Prosper. (I call them Babsper)

http://www.amazon.com/Babet-Prosper-Collection-Warlock-Different-ebook/dp/B00FBS5NCQ/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432552069&sr=1-12&keywords=judith+post

 

OK, So I Lied

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creativity, fantasy, horses, regency, Rob Roy, Scotland, Trossachs, Victorian, YA

I know, I know. The last blog post had me saying that I was going to return to fantasy. See me with my pants on fire. Can’t help it. Another story crowded its way into my head, hogged all the space, and now intends to rule until it has had its say. Another regency installment rules, not a cleansing of the creative palate with a YA fantasy, which are so much easier to construct. With fantasy, I can plug into whatever storyline weirdness comes into my bean. It’s the ultimate creative freebasing—the imagination on a bungee jump into a strangely familiar, alien world of our own making. (Insert a shiver here.)

With historical works, there are parameters and pesky restrictions, like actual historical sites and events. So why do I do it? Mostly because I’m addicted to history and can mentally immerse myself into any time period with an eighteen-hundred in it. Blame it on Aunt Marie, who had me working in her museum. She called it a “Step Into the Past” and being there was really like being there.

Yes, I’m an anglophile, but when it comes to GB, I’m a real nut about Scotland. Fell head over heels with the place the one time I visited for research. This is why the setting for the next regency is in an area bordering Rob Roy country and the Trossachs. Photographs can’t capture what the landscape is like, in my opinion. Haunted, wild and lovely all at once.

Add to the mix that I’m a horse freak. Loved riding and playing with my two mares, now happy in knee-deep grass in heaven. The Arabian proverb says that the horse is God’s gift to man. In the past, Englishmen felt the same. A gentleman was either riding, driving or betting on them. It wasn’t unusual to put a child in a saddle at the age of two. Many women were competent riders because it was the only respectable sport in which they could participate.

My WIP, The Dandy and the Flirt, won’t have horses as an integral aspect of the storyline, as in the last work. This work has two mischievous boys, a sloppy mutt, a forceful, enigmatic prig and a woman who is open about her enjoyment of sex. Remember, this book is set in the time period before Victoria ruined everybody’s fun because her Albert passed on without her. In other words, if she wasn’t getting any, the rest of the nation could do without. Not so forty years earlier when country parties were an excuse to bed-hop up and down the hallways, wife-swapping in comic overdrive. There must have been more door slamming than a French farce.

Let the games begin. I’ve got some feisty characters waiting to let loose.

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Donner

Something Not So Grim

Tags

beheading, castle, feud, Killin, Loch Earn, Roman, Roman Camp Hotel, Scotland, travel, warriors

While doing research, I read about a keep near Killin, (pronouced Kill-UN) Scotland where the original beheading pit and its stone still existed. That’s as grim as it’s going to get but will serve as a jumping off point.

When we’re lucky, writers get the opportunity to visit the faraway places where we set our stories. It’s been thirty years, so I can’t remember why I picked Killin on Loch Tay. Mom was up for a trip to visit family friends in Southampton, England. We would stay with them and take a night train north to Roman Camp Hotel in Callander, a 17^th century shooting lodge close to Killin. We made a stop in Stirling to visit the library. (Back then, the best way to do research was locally.) While there, I rummaged up what I could on Killin, but got sidetracked by this story.

Three hundred years ago, local clans, the McNab’s and the Campbells, did not get along. To avenge a slight, the McNab’s plotted a raid on a secure holding of the Campbell’s located on a small island in the center of Loch Earn. The McNab crew got a boat, shouldered it, and trotted it miles over rough terrain to Loch Earn. The safest approach was a hillside over the loch. They hauled the boat up the hill and stealthily down the other side, silently crossed the lake, made mayhem and returned. They changed their minds at the top of the hill and decided to leave the boat. That they succeeded with their endeavor is not the “rest of the story” as old time radio announcer, Paul Harvey, used to say. But I’ll explain more later.

I think Mom was a bit overwhelmed by the Roman Camp Hotel, built near the remains of—you guessed it—a Roman campsite. The date of sixteen-something is imbedded in the door lintel, only a few inches over my head. People were shorter back then. The library then boasted a bar and a restful view of the salmon stream that drew visitors. I sat there the first night, watching as the piper marched and played the evening song along its bank. All very lovely, but there was a problem.

There were no rental cars available, not that I yearned to drive up to Killin. It wasn’t a matter of staying on the “wrong” side of the road, but that the so-called road wasn’t much more than a trail. I asked the proprietor for help. She said that a mail truck went there every day and wouldn’t mind taking me along. I didn’t like the idea of leaving Mom alone in a strange land. The next suggestion was a driver, what they call a courier. That way, when we were done in Killin, he could drive us to Glasgow for the night train back to Southampton.

Mom and I waited in the foyer early the next morning, where she almost expired when the courier arrived, a strapping monster of a man with ruddy cheeks in a porcelain complexion and a nimbus of red-gold hair on his head. (To clarify, Mom was not afraid, but in slack-jawed awe and my dad was no slouch in the looks or bearing department.)

Mr. Over-the-Top-Highlander brought along his son to learn the biz and makes the kid drive at pants-on-fire speed to Killin, which can barely be called a village. Mr. OTTH goes into a shop, asks about the ancient keep. We drive to the end of the road, where OTTH points at the dark green forest blanketed in bracken. I’m out of the car and plowing through the ferns.

The keep wasn’t hard to find. A tree had grown through one of its walls. There was some evidence that attempts had been made to shore up the structure. I entered, curious if the beheading pit would have been dug indoors, as a form of entertainment. Unfortunately, a back wall had collapsed. I climbed the dirt and debris, looked down through the opening, and there it was. Someone else might have thought it was just a hole in the ground, but it was perfectly square after centuries and I spied the edge of a mottled-grey stone. I had to jump in. Spooky.

By this time, everyone else had come around to the back of the keep. Mom told me to get out of there and OTTH designated the entire place grisly. I got what I wanted, the “feel” for a scene setting, and was ready to head to Glasgow.

Here is the part that amazed me most. On the way to Glasgow, I asked to be driven by Loch Earn, explained about the McNab raid, and that locals had found bits of the castoff boat. OTTH had never of it, other than knowing some discord between the Black Campbells and the McNab clan. He stopped the car under a hill and said this was the elevated side of the loch. I got out and stared.

Elevated? It was practically straight up. The raiders had carried the boat for miles, hoisted it up a nearly vertical hill, down the other side, rowed the lake, fought hand-to-hand, and rowed back. No wonder they left it behind. Do ya think they might’ve been a little bushed? Known for its do-or-die warriors, that hill was proof as to why the English threw the Scot regiments at the enemy in the first wave of every war.

The best part for me was that Scotland was exactly as I imagined it, with jolly, accommodating people. The landscape, so mystical and mysterious, can’t be captured in a photograph. It has the same feel of ancient history as England, where centuries of the blood and bones of its peoples lie buried. I love being an American but could live in Scotland’s countryside.

Next time, as the Python’s say: Something Completely Different