This blog is moving

From The English Spy

As most of you are aware by now, I've got a fresh new look for my website.  Among other excellent features, it now contains my blog.  From now on, you can read my occasional reports, musings, and miscellaneous other stuff without having to do any tiresome clicking to an entirely different place.

What this means is that this blog, at Blogger, is going into Sleep Mode. 

For new material (and yes, I know, it's not always that new, but I have a lot of writing to do) please visit Loretta Chase...In Other Words here on my website.

Job #483: Proofreader

I got quite a few complaints about errors in some of the digital versions of my earlier books, as mentioned previously.  This was something we tried to put in the hands of professional proofreaders.  That didn't work.  It seems you really need to be the author (and in possession of a good memory as well as a clean hard copy* of the original manuscript) to catch all the errors and not fix things that weren't wrong.

So I'm doing it myself.  And this takes forever.  And because it takes forever I can't do it all at once, or the new book I'm supposed to be writing will never get finished.  I proofread the eBooks in the evenings, after my writing hours.

Not long ago, I did complete the review of Knaves’ Wager.  Eagle-eyed readers will notice that spelling has been Americanized (the attempt at British spelling was a policy of my first, hardcover, publisher), some less-than-felicitous word choices have been corrected, and the scene breaks have been returned.  The OCR errors have all, I trust, been fixed.  Since nobody's perfect, readers may still find an error here and there, but only the normal amount.

What they will not find is a new version of the book.  Even if I had the inclination to go back and rewrite a book I wrote several hundred years ago, I don't have time.  I was proud of what I wrote then; it's impossible to write the same kind of book now that I wrote at a different stage of my life; and I think most readers would rather have the original story.



*Had it been possible to transfer the originals to my hard drive, we wouldn't have had this problem in the first place.

Signing Books in Massachusetts

Stevens, The Letter

If you're in the New England area during the last weekend in April, you might want to think about dropping by the New England Romance Writers Book Fair for Literacy.  I'll be there, signing books—for you, maybe?

New England RomanceWriters Book Fair for Literacy

Saturday 27 April

3:30-5:30 pm

Boston Marriott Burlington

One Mall Road, Burlington, MA

Algae & me

I had my first close encounter with Red Tide recently, and it isn't pretty.  On the Gulf, the culprit is Karenia brevis, a naturally-occurring organism seen as far back as the 15th C.  The algae is not particularly villainous until it has a population explosion.  That's recently happened in these parts,  and it's asphyxiating fish in vast quantities.  My sunset walk on the beach night before last?  Not so pretty.  Dead fish on the shore as far as the eye can see.  Which I did not photograph.  There's a limit to my need to document, though not to my imagination.  Something about this episode may find its way into my work, although I may not recognize it by the time it happens.

Happy Valentine's Day

Puck Valentine's Day edition 1914

To men of early 20th C, fashionable women must have seemed much too thin.  But a glance through photos of the time shows that it was a matter of perspective.  (Below is Lina Calvieri, an opera star and great beauty, in 1914.)

Their narrow skirts made them seem like much smaller targets than they'd been some years before.  A century earlier, women of the Regency seemed half-naked in their light muslins, compared to their mothers or grandmothers in the previous century's double-wide skirts.  For more on the topic of changing fashions, I recommend you click on the "historic dress" label at Two Nerdy History Girls, the blog I share with Isabella Bradford/Susan Holloway Scot.

Lina Calvieri c. 1914

Whatever your fashion choices, I hope yours is a very sweet Valentine's Day.

Both illustrations are courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

The girl on the beach

The sand art gets pretty creative.

A Man & His Dog

Scene from the beach

Leonie's story

Readers have been asking lately about the third dressmaker, Leonie Noirot, and her story.  The short answer is, it's in progress.  This was one of those times—rare but not impossible—when my writerly abilities were not in synch with my publishing schedule.



Her story wanted more thinking than I'd anticipated.  Not surprising that, not having got enough cogitation, it didn't work out very well.  Now I'm rethinking, which means that we've had to postpone the release of Vixen in Velvet until 2014.

The good news is, I've moved to milder climes, and anticipate a great stirring of creative juices, under the influence of sun and warm temperatures.

Expect photos, here and on Facebook, and occasional reports on this new world I've entered.

Right now, it's a beautiful Sunday.  Puffy white clouds are floating across a blue, blue sky.  The fish are jumpin'—literally.  They're mullets, and numerous theories have been proposed to account for their leaping out of the water.  You're at liberty to research these online—or make up your own, if you are fictionally inclined.

A New Interview at Lost in Fiction

I've been on the road recently, as well as brain-damaged by a cold, and falling ever farther behind in communication.  But recently I answered some questions about the writing process and other things at Lost in Fiction ~Lost in Romance.  You can read it here.

And I'll report on my other adventures anon.

Books in Slovenia

These two arrived recently—my first titles in Slovenian!

Don't Tempt Me

Your Scandalous Ways

My first two historical romances

My first two full-length historical romances started a series that continued with Lord of Scoundrels and The Last Hellion.  My French publisher refers to the series as Les Débauchés, which I think is perfect, if not so easy to pronounce.  But in English, it tends to be referred to as the Scoundrels series.  I never gave it a name because I hadn't planned a series.  It just happened.

The last two books have stayed in print.  The first two, which were out of print for quite some time, have returned this year as eBooks.

Here's the series, in chronological order as written.  The stories themselves overlap in time.

(1) The Lion's Daughter

(2) Captives of the Night

(3) Lord of Scoundrels

(4) The Last Hellion

My traditional Regencies enter the 21st century

A little while ago I reported that my out of print books are now available as eBooks.

Readers often ask about the order in which they ought to be read.   As far as I'm concerned, you can read them in any order, because I try to make each book stand alone.  Still, some books are connected.  The first four Regencies came in pairs, as a secondary character from one book got his own story in the next.  The last two are not connected. 

Next time, I'll report on the first two historical romances.

(1) Isabella

 

(2) The English Witch

(3) Viscount Vagabond

(4) The Devil's Delilah

(5) Knaves' Wager

(6) The Sandalwood Princess

Germany, Indonesia, Italy editions

Here are the latest arrivals from outside the U.S.

Germany-Your Scandalous Ways

Italy-Don't Tempt Me

Indonesia-Miss Wonderful

We're at Being Geek Chic

 

My blogging partner author Isabella Bradford* and I are featured on this week's Lady Geek of the Week at Being Geek Chic, "a blog for stylish geeks, sophisticated nerds, tech obsessives, literary hardcores, and those who look for the beauty in life."

Followers of Two Nerdy History Girls are well aware of where our geekdom lies.  But this will be an opportunity to get some of the secret inside info about how we came to be who and what we are.

It's also a great opportunity to discover a blog that's filled with all kinds of fascinating stuff, very much in the spirit of what we do, but about Today, where we're all about Many Yesterdays Ago.

*aka Susan Holloway Scott

Cover of Harper's Magazine, September 1893, Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

What about Lady Clara?

Readers have asked about Lady Clara, who has played a secondary role in my Dressmakers series.

Will she get her own story?
Will she get her happily ever after?

Originally, I'd imagined her story working out over the course of the series.  But the number of enquiries about her future has indicated that this might not be sufficient. Her own book or at least a novella would be sufficient.

Since it takes almost as long to write a novella as it does to write a whole book, I think she's going to get a whole book.  It's going to take some thinking.  But there's time for that.

Right now, I'm still working on Leonie's story.

2013?  I think that will be Lady Clara's year.

Your Scandalous Ways at a special price for August

This month, Avon is offering a dozen eBooks at a special price:  $1.99

One of these Sizzling Scandals books is mine:  Your Scandalous Ways.

You can find out more about the story here at Two Nerdy History Girls, and you can see many illustrations at my Pinterest board dedicated to the book.