PUT OUT THE DAMN LIGHT

Tags

Byron, corsets, England, etiquette, genre, history, manners, mystery, pet peeves, regency, Victorian, writing

Judi Lynn/Judith Post recently wrote a blog about ten steps to make your mystery better and started off with “kill somebody.” I can’t think of any opener to top that, so will just start off with the things I look for and try to incorporate in historical fiction to make it believable and immediate. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? To immerse the reader in a world that has been before.

Character/s

How often do we see the same man or woman over and over in a story and nothing changes but their eye and hair color? In reality, people don’t look the same, even when they look sort of the same. People are unique. So should characters be. It’s best if they possess the kind of personality you’re drawn to, but perhaps you prefer the challenge of finding a way to make a somewhat off-putting man or woman sympathetic to the reader. But an initial connection must be made from the get-go and that’s kind of difficult if they have the charisma of yesterday’s pancake.

The Four Es of Character Building

Entice, entrigue, engage, and excite. This doesn’t mean making them attractive. It means making them accessible. They should have traits and personalities similar to the human conditions that haven’t changed over the ages. We all have baggage. Give them reasons for reacting the way they do when “showing” their responses, instead of just “telling” or explaining them on the page. Lets’ just get over it. We’re products of our environments until we do something about it. Give your protags some emotional warts so you can show how they’ve grown (removed) them by the end of the book.

Mary Balogh’s more recent regency works are peopled by the challenged. Her characters have been blind, lame, deaf, suffering from disabling war wounds, including PTSD. The ubiquitous fiesty heroines and sardonic men have become tedious, which is why Balogh is considered the comemporary queen of historical regency. Her people have the problems, joys, and triumphs we understand and seek, or find lacking in our own lives. They have some amazing emotional warts to overcome.

The Three Cs

Complication, conflict, conclusion. You better have all of these nailed. Throw in some juicy subplots while you’re at it to pick up the pacing and tension. If dried up of ideas on how to inflict misery on your beloved protags, there’s always a nasty or annoying family member. We’ve all got one.

Situations

An opening incident that involves one or both of your main characters must suck us into the storyline, establish the time period, or atmosphere, and most importantly, get the reader invested in the primary charatcers.

More and more we’re seeing historical stories striving to tweak genre themes to fit into a niche market or category. In doing so, the story can become secondary to the magic of creating a period piece or just a dang good story. The deliciousness of sinking into the past can get lost from its primary goal by forcing conformity to a parameter. It’s vitally important to keep the time period immediate, to bring the reader into that world, become saturated by the surroundings. In other words, don’t lose sight of the magic of the site, the joy of being there.

Know your history

 OK, so I have a pet peeve about blatant incongruity, like women in corsets doing impossbile physical feats while wearing what should be more accurately called a torso vice made of whalebone or metal slats. It’s impossible to lounge, leap over small buildings, or mount a horse via stirrup without creating a puncture wound. Regency versions (stays) were not quite as viscious as the later, Victorian versions.

Incorporating the etiquette of the time period makes it real, the necessary realities. Calling cards were vital social accourtrement and came with a precise set of rules. A card corner turned down meant the card was delivered personally. It was the most convenient way for both parties to find out whether or not your company was welcomed, or more kindly told to get lost, when there is no reply to the card.

Men went up stairs before women for many reasons but most often to spare them the display of their ankles. Then there’s my always favorite, wait for it…clear vision in rooms where no candle or lamp is ever lit or extinguished.

Even though strict rules were ingrained, behaviors/actions considered not done often were during the regency where gossip had lethal results. A great deal was written about people like Lady Caroline Lamb (flagrant adultery), Brummell (viciously insulted his prince), Lord Byron (too raunchy to list), and Jane Austen (dared to write and evetually use her real name) to list a few. When the Victorian Age descended, the not done stuff still happened, it just got shoved underground.

So many rules, so little time.

If you would like to read Judi Lynn’s excellent advice, here is the link to her blog:

https://writingmusings.com/2018/05/22/10-steps-for-writing-a-mystery/

M.L Rigdon (aka Julia Donner)

Follow on Twitter @RigdonML

Website http://www.MLRigdon.com

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

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

 

 

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OK, So I Lied

Tags

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

Shut up! They Didn’t Do That in Vickie’s Time

Tags

Byron, hysteria, sexual repression, vibrators, Victorian

So it had been a while since I’d read up on the Victorian Era, and I gotta tell ya, I laughed out loud going over some of the stuff I ran across. We all pretty much accept that the word Victorian brings to mind priggishness, but I noticed a decided penchant for extremism. At least, that’s my take on that time in history, roughly 1830 to 1901. The weirdest/sickest part was the whole sexual repression thing.

Certain words were not to be spoken, such as “leg” which got rendered down to one’s “limb.” Far be it from me to suggest we not be antiseptically clinical about such things, but I have a hard time associating my body parts with trees.

And while we’re on the subject of sex, in Victoria’s time, doing it was meant for procreation, not fun. Try another one, Vickie. You and Prince Bertie had a cartload of kids, so we all know who was busy in the bedroom.

I could blame Vickie for the whole repression of sex thing—the love of her life died young and she wasn’t getting any—but all one has to do is read a little more and it’s pretty obvious that men with issues, radically religious or frustrated with secret, naughty urges, needed to make someone pay. Why not women? They had no rights, no reason to think, no laws protecting them, and more importantly, possessed the means to make afflicted males nuttier than they already were.

It was in this era that the diagnosis of hysteria was liberally flung at every female for just about any reason. Hysteria had been around since the Greeks were wrestling naked in the arena. Back then, only the platonic love of one’s best buddy was worth any mention. Women weren’t important unless they were one of the gods. By the time the 19th century rolled around, any disgruntled female was labeled as hysterical, and the usage of hysteria didn’t get taken off the books, medically speaking, until the 1950’s, for pity’s sake!

So what did those gents in Victorian times do to get intractable wives to calm down and act like the prim, obedient queens of their domains? Wait for it, ladies and germs, they sent them to physicians for a restorative massage. And when physicians got bored using their hands, they invented vibrators. Yes, gentle readers, there were all sorts of contraptions and devices, and one guy in 1880 took out a patent on the best version.

Guys, you gotta love’em for putting off on someone else what they didn’t feel like doing themselves. Thank heavens men have changed. Not all of them, but most of them.

So what’s wrong with this picture? The H-word. That self-righteous time period was so hypocritical on every level. Prostitution was at an all-time high, pornography wasn’t hard to find, children were dying in the factories, and the occult was in style. Séances were party favorites. And as much as they put down sex, they talked about all the time. Confessing it in church, tattling vicious accusations, browbeating their form of morality into nonbelievers, screeching about it on street corners as a direct path to perdition.

It strikes me that the era wasn’t as sexually repressed as showing off their prudery, while expending a lot of effort to keep their immoral quirks suppressed and/or hidden, especially within the middle class. For the gentry and aristocracy, this was the heyday of the country house party, swap-outs actually, where the bedtime opening and closing of doors was the embodiment of a French farce.

Give me the Regency. They let it all hang out, especially people like Lord Byron, who wrote naughty ditties. I loved the one about why he loved the waltz—so he could hold a lady in public and look down her décolletage! Byron was a bad boy and proud of it.

And I didn’t even get to the fun stuff written in the uninformed-minds-needing-to-know-rag sheets, like the woman who died from eating her own hair. Those Victorians sure knew how not to have a good time.

Next time: Chicago Can Kill You

You Can’t Make Me Wear That Corset

Tags

corsets, Gary Cooper, Hugh Laurie, Ingrid Bergman, period costumes, stays, Victorian

If you can believe it—conscientious mothers in the nineteenth century strapped their little girls into corsets. Healthy support clothing for kids, or so physicians thought at the time. Huh. Go figure. (Oops, sorry about that.)

Anyway, back to corsets, the contraptions have been around for thousands of years but became de rigueur for women around 1830-40, when waistlines returned to fashion. The high-waisted empire style was “in” during the regency period (fashion-wise approx.1800-1820), when short stays were sometimes used to support the bosom. A really racy gal in those days wore only a thin shift under her gown and dampened both, for full disclosure, if you will.

A camisole or comfy shift was worn under the corset, and a corset cover over the foundation (torture) garment. Corset covers were often beautifully embroidered. After that came a bustle (usually tied on), either over or under petticoats, then the dress or gown. That’s a lot of clothing, but men had their own layers to contend with, which included long underwear of cotton, linen or wool, a dress shirt closed with studs and cuff links, then braces (suspenders), next a stiff collar that was pinned or tied in place, the vest, and coat. Lack of a hat stamped a man as someone of lowly birth or in a state of partial undress. We’ve got a lot of near naked or underbred guys running around nowadays.

Before the guys start with superior snickers about women getting laced up, men also wore corsets, including the Prince Regent, who was lampooned as the Prince of Whales. It was sad enough when the BBC series (I think it was Blackadder) with Hugh Laurie potraying the prince as a scrawny, bumbling idiot, which history attests that Prince Florizel was not. The future George IV left as a legacy some mighty fine cultural works that nearly bankrupted England. Darn, I’ve digressed again.

The corset, more commonly known back then as stays, reached its zenith by the late nineteen hundreds. The fashionable lady boasted a wasp-waist, at the most sixteen inches, and I’ve read an account of thirteen inches. When autopsies started revealing horribly distorted innards, physicians spoke out against the garments, and the practice of tight-lacing started to fade in popularity. If you think women were nuts for buckling under to the fashion imperative of the day, just imagine what they would have thought about getting their faces injected with botox. Yeah, it’s all relative to the times.

The introduction of women in the work force during WWI changed women’s lives and attitudes forever. Stays were set aside for comfort’s sake. Women had always worked in factories; they just started to get uppity about it. Freedom from stays may have helped to free minds and ambitions.

When I was seven, my aunt opened her museum, The Old General Store. Also a fine seamstress, Aunt Marie dressed me up like a girl of the times in high-buttoned shoes and a dress she made with a sewed-in, modest bustle. There were more dresses as I grew older, and I always loved wearing them. The style felt so comfy, even during the heat of summer. I’ve seen many actresses in films wear period clothing without any sense of the time period, lifting the skirts on the sides to move or step up, and crossing their legs, which only harlots did to proclaim their slut-status. (Check out cigarette pictures from later1800’s.)

The finest portrayal and use of period costuming I’ve ever seen is Ingrid Bergman in Saratoga Trunk, from the Edna Ferber novel. (IMHO, the movie is far better than the book.) You can see the corset ridges under the exquisite gowns by Leah Rhodes, and Bergman moves and sits as women did in that era. It’s also fascinating to watch Bergman and Gary Cooper’s attraction for each other burn up the screen. It was rumored they were having a flaming affair during the filming, but that’s often said when a couple click in acting roles. The way Coop looks at her makes my heart go pitty-pat. Yee-ow. This time, I’m glad I digressed. I’m going to go watch it again.

Next time: Shut up! They Didn’t Do That in Vickie’s Time