Awards won: RWA RITA, RWA Honor Roll, RWA Top 10 Favorite, RT Lifetime Achievement, RT Reviewers Choice, Publishers Weekly Starred Reviews, Golden Leaf, Barclay Gold, Library Journal, ABA Notable Book, Historical Novels Review Editors Choice.
Bestseller Lists: NY Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Waldenbooks Mass Market, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Chicago Tribune, Rocky Mountain News, Publishers Weekly.
Drum roll, please! We have a wiener: Elizabeth Kerri Mahon, you have won an Advanced Readers Copy of The King's Favorite by Susan Holloway Scott! Please contact Susan/Miranda or Sherrie Holmes with your mailing address and we'll get that in the mail to you. Congratulations, Elizabeth!
Don't run away, now, folks! Check out the next post, below. It's chock full of announcements!
Where to start? Lots of good news on the Wench front.
Pat - Mystic Guardian
Pat's book cover is a finalist in the Cover Cafe annual book cover contest. The covers aren't up yet, but they plan to have the contest up and running by early May, so you should be able to view the finalists then.
Jo - A Lady's Secret
Jo's book has moved up on the New York Times bestseller list and is now #10! Way to go, Jo! You better lay in a big supply of champagne. 
Loretta - Your Scandalous Ways
Loretta's book received a great review over at Publishers Weekly. Well done, Loretta!
Mary Jo and Pat - Pioneers of Romance
Both Mary Jo and Pat attended the Romantic Times convention in Pittsburgh April 16-20 and each came away with a lovely award ("a big chunk of glass" according to Mary Jo!) for being pioneers of romance.
Sneak Previews
Be sure to stop by on Sundays when we post announcements! And just to give you a sneak preview, in May Jo will be interviewing a wines and spirits expert, which we'll announce in more detail next month. In addition, Susan/Miranda will be doing a two-part interview of Loretta the end of May in connection with the release of Your Scandalous Ways. In June we're bringing back costume historian Kalen Hughes to talk about Georgian dress.
Book Reminder
Wenches have books coming out in the next few months. In May, Mary Jo's A Distant Magic will be reprinted. In June, two Wenches have books out: Edith - His Dark and Dangerous Ways, and Loretta - Your Scandalous Ways. In July, two more Wenches have books out: Pat - Mystic Rider, and Susan Holloway Scott - The King's Favorite.
So, we have some busy months coming up, and we don't want you to miss the fun. Drop in early and often!
By Susan/Miranda
When Wench Pat recently asked the eternal question of “What Do We Really Want?”, one of the popular replies was a call for more humor. I can understand this. Who doesn’t want to laugh? Yet a truly funny book is truly hard to find, and historical-funny is even more rare.
And boy, is it ever hard to write!
The hero’s best friend is killed at Waterloo, and it’s terribly tragic and sad, and everyone knows to feel that way. The long-suffering couple finally weds, and readers share their joy. Those are easy. But humor is infinitely more subjective. A scene that strikes one reader as uproariously funny seems irritatingly foolish to another. Readers boards are filled with examples of this. Either you get the joke, or you don’t, or maybe the joke wasn’t really there in the first place, anyway.
Historical humor is even more challenging, because much of what was rip-snorting good fun in the past –– ridiculing the handicapped, huge fake penises, anything with priests and nuns –– doesn’t exactly fly in polite company now.
Wit and wordplay hold up better on the printed page than broad slapstick, but even then there are plenty of pitfalls amongst the pratfalls. Much humor is topical, or at least of its moment, and when the moment is past, so is the humor. Anyone who’s labored through Shakespeare’s comedies understands this, though, to be fair, an Elizabethan audience would be left scratching their heads over an episode of Seinfeld.
Writing a funny historical character was my biggest challenge in The King’s Favorite, a historical novel set
in Restoration London. By all contemporary reports, Nell Gwyn (my real-life heroine) was uproariously funny, a class-clown personality that couldn’t resist making people laugh. Born in a brothel, she had no education beyond “street smarts”, yet through the gift of quick wit, rose from selling oranges in the theatre to become a leading lady and, eventually, a royal mistress. As an actress, she was hugely popular playing “low” comedy: she was always cast as the sly servant with the best one-liners, the comedienne who knew how to get the most out of the earthy, physical humor of the time.
The King adored her, in large part because she’d dare to do and say things to him in the guise of a joke that no one else at court could risk, not without a quick trip to the Tower. Humor can be subversive that way, and Nell knew the power her wit gave her. To many men, a funny woman is a dangerous woman. She’s unpredictable, she has opinions, and she’s often quick to deflate male pride and vanities. But other men find a funny woman a sexy woman, and Nell’s house was always filled with her many male side-kicks, including the Earl of Rochester and the Duke of Buckingham, who were both always ready to participate in her elaborate pranks and skits.
To Nell’s good fortune, Charles was also secure enough himself to relish a witty mistress. (Remember, this is the first English monarch to realize that women on the stage were not a sign of moral civilization's end, and finally permit actresses to play the roles written for women.) Though the official post of court jester was gone by 1670, Nell held it unofficially, and whenever things were grim and gloomy about the palace, the king would always turn to her to cheer him. Even after he moved on to other mistresses, Nelly remained his friend and jester until his death. Her audience from the theatre never forgot her, either. Long after she "retired" from the stage to the palace, she was still cheered wherever she went, and when she died, her mourners filled not only the church, but the streets as well.
But how to write a funny heroine? One of Nell’s most famous roles was Mirida in a play called All Mistaken, or The Mad Couple, by James Howard. The humor comes from her suitor Pinguister’s enormous girth, and his inability to do much of anything with Mirida because of his obesity. If the actor rolling around the stage 
in the “fat suit” as he tries to catch Mirida wasn’t enough, there’s also the scene where Pinguister is given an enema and a laxative, then locked in a vault with other hapless suitors, and with predictable results. Oh, the hilarity! Oh, the [adolescent-boys-lavatory] wit! Oh, how am I supposed to write THAT into a scene!
Of course, not all Restoration wit is like this –- much of it was, and remains, laugh-out-loud clever word-play –– but an awful lot hasn’t aged very well. Or, as Wench Loretta noted when we were discussing this blog, “They drank a lot back then, didn’t they?” Fortunately, there are a great many other examples of Nell's one-liners and general jesting that hold up better over time, and that I was able to incorporate into her character. Virtuous heroines, sentimental heroines, noble, true-hearted heroines –– they're easy. But a funny heroine's a real rarity, and I know how lucky I am to have found Nell Gwyn.
But what do you think of humor in historical fiction? Do you enjoy funny characters or situations, or do you find the risk not worth the punchlines? What’s your favorite historical with humor?
The jury’s still out on whether or not I was able to capture the fun and wit of Nell Gwyn until The King’s Favorite is released in July –– except for one of you lucky folk out there. I’ll give away an Advanced Reader’s Copy of The King’s Favorite to a reader who posts to this blog before Saturday night.
I’m writing this before I head out to the Romantic Times convention--- a week ahead of the posting date, because I won’t be home until the night before I’m supposed to blog. I won’t be at RT all that time. Part of it will be spent brainstorming with a couple of the other wenches, which leads to the subject of this post— brainstorming.
There are as many reasons to brainstorm as there are fish in the sea. Officially, brainstorming started as a business method of breaking out of established patterns of thought to develop a new way of thinking. Obviously, as creative writers, we hardly need to be encouraged to think creatively! Our problem might be on the flip side—we have excessive numbers of ideas floating in our separate universes, and we need to narrow them down into a new and original structures.
According to business guidelines, brainstorming is what is called a “lateral thinking process.” To a business mind, that might mean thinking of a can of Campbell’s soup as square and blue instead of cylindrical and red and white. Shocking stuff! And then the stormers are supposed to create something useful out of this wild idea. I doubt any of them thought of painting a soup can on canvas and selling it for millions, ala Andy Warhol. Really, I think all 
businesses ought to have creative people on staff to shake it up a little. And governments could use us to imagine future scenarios, the “what ifs” that never seem to occur to them as they march off to war or hurricanes.
But I digress. As writers, we use our sessions to access each other’s wide variety of experience and knowledge. Most of us have written well over twenty-five novels apiece, so we’ve spilled a lot of our own knowledge into print already. We could let that back list form a foundation for dozens of more similar novels, but we’re writers. We like a challenge. We like trying new things. We like stretching our wings and soaring into uncharted territory.
So we dig into books and locate gems of material that fascinate us, but then we need to produce entire stories to fit these historical treasures. Or we may have characters in our heads who insist on time 
traveling or building churches or other impossible feats about which we know nothing. As these idea germs start to form into nebulous clouds of creation (just imagine the scenario accompanying this photo!), it’s extremely convenient to let the cloud coagulate over more than one brain. (Did you know that rain is produced by germs in cloud particles? Ponder that for a while!)
After we toss excited “what ifs” around for a while, each outdoing the other (with much screaming laughter and moans of torment), we’ll have three books worth of characters and some degree of plot. At that point, we’re forced to filter the stream of ideas through our various backgrounds and interests, each adding a new twist or turn that one mind alone couldn’t produce, 
creating—we hope—something useful. It’s up to the “owner” of the original nugget that seeded the clouds to sort through the glittering gems remaining to find the ones that make the necklace work. Which may be why we end up beading before the session ends. <G>
Okay, I stretched that metaphor to a painful end. Anyone else use brainstorming—at work or elsewhere? What are your methods?
I love Google Earth. I’m sure some of you are familiar with it, since the service has been around for several years, but I only recently downloaded the small bit of software necessary to run it. Given how hugely graphic Google Earth is, I think you need broadband to make it work. But it’s one of those things that makes broadband worth paying for! You can zoom into the globe, turn the world with your trackball, and click on dots that give photographs of particular places. Very, very addictive.
I suspect that most people, when they first sign on to Google Earth, go directly to looking at their own homes. Not me. I looked at the map of a globe and swung over to Northern England, zeroing in of the Cumbrian coast site of the book I recently finished, and the beginning of the book I’m working on now.
Zoooooooom! Closer and closer, till I could look at the buildings in a small town near where I’d placed my fictional village of Hartley. Then inland, following a route that might be taken by the kidnappers of my heroine. Hills and sheep, oh, my! (Well, to some extent my imagination was kicking in, but that’s part of the fun.)
I have lots of maps, old and new, some of them contour maps that show elevations. I’ve also had the advantage of visiting most parts of Great Britain, from Land’s End in Cornwall to the coast of East Anglia and the wild islands of the Outer Hebrides. (I visited a collapsed old village of stone cottages—“black houses”—on Harris and Lewis many years ago, and thought that the ruins would make a great site for a romantic suspense chase. Years later, I acted on that memory with a scene in Shattered Rainbows.)
Certainly visiting a place in the flesh is the best way to get a sense of it, but that isn’t always possible. (I still haven’t made it to Uzbekistan or India or China or Indonesia, places where I’ve set stories.) A good writer learns to fake it, through reading or asking questions. It’s not unusual on my Novelists, Inc. loop to have someone ask for help with a setting. (“Is West Texas really that flat? What’s an upscale neighborhood in Charlotte?”)
Landscape is an important aspect of setting, both for itself and for how it affects the characters. Jayne Ann Krentz’s sun-baked Arizona books have a very different underlying feel from her green, moist Pacific Northwest settings. Barbara Samuel’s wonderful Western settings make me want to book a 
ticket for Colorado right now. (Indeed, I ate at a restaurant that was the inspiration for the heroine’s workplace in Madame Mirabou’s School of Love. The food was great, and it was a Colorado/mountain state experience, different from eating by the sea in Santorini or in a funky Greenwich village basement restaurant in New York City.
Of course, landscape facts can also be treacherous, especially when writing historical novels. It isn’t just the spread of cities and highways, but the presence of plant and animal species we take for granted might not always be accurate. I remember when an American author of Regency historicals got criticized for putting bullfrogs in England. Sorry, that’s an American sort of amphibian. 
When I researched my one and only medieval, I found that rabbits weren’t native to Britain. Hares, their larger, longer earred cousins were, but your basic bunny was 
introduced by the Normans because rabbits were good huntin’ and good eatin.’ (’m guessing, knowing what rabbits are famous for, that introducing them wasn’t too difficult. Just a matter of bringing over a few pairs and letting nature take her course. <g>
Trees and plants also get around. The Chelsea Physic Garden ( http://www.chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk/ ) in London was founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries to study plants, including specimens collected abroad. To this day, they research the nature and properties of plants from around the world.
The copper beech, one of the most lovely and distinctive trees in the English countryside, with dark reddish/bronze leaves, wasn’t introduced until the 18th century. (I think that's when.) Many of the garden flowers we take for granted were brought for other lands. For example, chrysanthemums were 
introduced from China in 1790. And woe betide the sloppy writer who gives medieval characters a plate of that fine North American vegetable, the potato.
One of the skills that most seasoned historical writers develop is to question the dates and origins of everything: plants, animals, words. In a quote credited to various people (but probably belonging to Josh Billings), “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.” It’s the questions we don’t think to ask that get writers into trouble!
As as a reader, how much attention to you pay to landscape? How do you feel about settings? Are there some you love? Some you hate? Tell me what appeals and what doesn’t!
Mary Jo
Library Journal has awarded a coveted starred review to Jo for A LADY'S SECRET and to Loretta for YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS.
Read the full reviews here. 
They had some very nice things to say about A LADY'S SECRET. They said This cleverly plotted story rewards readers with a captivating blend of thrilling adventure, steamy sensuality, and gratifying emotion ... and went on to praise it as another flawless Georgian gem.
They didn't stint on enthusiasm for Loretta's YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS, either, saying Chase does an exceptional job of turning a ruined woman into a believable heroine of surpassing quality and strength, making her sympathetic and giving her a worthy hero. They also said Loretta was an exceptionally gifted historical romance writer.
Trust a librarian to know.
Congratulations, Jo and Loretta!
Edith here!
I woke up this morning and felt like a Munchkin after the farmhouse had landed!
I opened the door to discover that the Earth is all new and suddenly in Technicolor. Spring has finally sprung here on Long Island, and it smooched everything in sight.
The Magnolia tree is magnificent.
The grass (where the birds didn't eat all the seed) is greener. The fishies in the little pond made it through the winter and are lazing in the sunshine, like tiny golden whales.
The bamboo is shooting up everywhere.
All the little brown birds are building nests on my gutters and eaves, until my split-level begins to look like a witch's cottage.
Miss Daisy lies on her back in the sunshine, all four legs to the sky, showing her speckledy pink belly to the sun. The day is filled with light and birdsong.
You get it. Spring Fever -- I has it. The victim is struck by a certain delicious lassitude. Nothing seems worth doing if it requires too much effort.
Why work? See how effortlessly Nature is producing marvels for us?
Why do we start a new year in the winter, anyway?
This is when it all begins.
And so, what else new with me?
I now have TWO grandbaby boys!
Adam and Jeanne delivered Sebastian Q Felber on March 26th!! Yes! (More pics and more about that "Q" here)
Susie and Ed are nurturing Hugo Norbert Holland, who now walks and giggles, plays jokes, and even has his very own vlog on Babble.com!
And yes! I finally finished the revisions on the Manuscript that Kept Being Interrupted by Life, the Universe and Everything. Plus my Susie refreshed my website anew, with a brand new contest just for you! Do go see -- and enter, do!
So what do I do now? Susan/Sarah (see her recentest blog) said much the same about times between creative efforts. But I'm a victim of the Spring. I feel about as creative as a crocus. I don't want to work at all.
I've my new book, HIS DARK & DANGEROUS WAYS coming out May 27th. But I can't linger in the book aisles too long...
There's a proposal to write.
There's research to do.
Friends to visit.
And a whole lot of lazing to do in the sunlight beside the little fishpond, like a medium-sized pink whale.
What I need from you, dear readers, is for you to tell me how you greet the Spring.
Please do not tell me abut Spring Cleaning. Or anything that requires large muscle activity. (I don't think I have those anymore anyway...did I ever?) That includes Sports and Games, unless, of course, we're talking about good seats at the Stadium.
Just let me know how you would idle away these few fine days.
One brilliant idea that springs forth in the comments here will be picked at random to get an autographed book by moi -- winner to be announced on my next Wenchly blog!
So please, stop and smell the tulips, and say away.
*N.O.L.V. = Caution: This blog contains Nothing Of Literary Value. :)
UPDATE 4.20: The "Q" link was wrong -- but fixed now!
Susan Sarah here ... Jane asked a great question a few weeks ago about how authors fill the creative well after the exhaustive process of finishing a book to deadline (or, um, a little past deadline....). Since I’m building today's wee blog from her question, she gets an autographed book! I’ll send Jane a copy of a Susan King or Sarah Gabriel book with thanks for the inspiration.
I recently finished a manuscript and sent that to my editor, and I have another manuscript in progress with due dates pending ... but that leap from one book straight into another can seem like a pretty wide gap. The creative well needs some refill and recovery first. After submitting a book, there may be only a short time before the work has to start in earnest again – if the editor is as fast and efficient as my Avon editor, that manuscript might come flying back through the door a week or two later with suggestions for revisions or at least a few tweaks. If the editorial process takes more time, the clock starts ticking on the next book in the queue, and all too soon it’s time to do some research or resume actual writing if work has already begun.
But first, a little rest and relaxation, some refilling of the well and author recovery is essential. Writing one book after another can be challenging when deadlines are tight – and flat-out exhausting mentally, emotionally and physically. Without R&R between books, burnout looms. I know -- I’m one of those who can burn the candle at both ends and in the middle, too.
My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
There are certain things that always seem to spark the creative urge again, so that I can start thinking and writing at a good pace -- and not only that, but feel creative and inspired again. If all goes well (barring complications) – and if resuming work almost immediately is a good idea to stay on track with the deadlines – these methods usually help my overworked creative brain to rest, and help refill the inner well and stir that story soup to simmering once again....
The first thing I have to do is clean house. This Phase I is not only imperative after a book has gone in, but therapeutic too. Either I thrive on Chaos in order to Create – or I’m so busy burning candles at both ends at deadline time that I ignore everything but the very basics of household management...the first explanation sounds better, but the latter is probably more true. Anyway, suffice to say there’s a good bit of housework to be done and laundry to be folded once the book goes in ... it’s vastly therapeutic. And when I can see the floor of my office and the top of my desk again, it’s time for Phase II (the photo is of my cousin's daughter a couple of years ago, busy creating a little chaos herself).
This second stage in the recovery process is reading – a glorious glut of reading. It involves sitting around doing seemingly nothing ... but we all know what important work reading is, especially for writers. I’m catching up on what I’ve wanted to read, what I absolutely need to read, what I’ve promised to read. This can last for a few days or weeks, depending on the available time. And it goes hand in hand with Phase III ... which, for me, is catching up on movies and TV. So it's fun and enjoyable, but it’s also therapeutic ... watching movies is visual and auditory, and doesn’t have much to do with the written word. A different part of the brain is engaged, the eyes are not tracking words-words-words for the brain to translate into thoughts and images. And at the same time, films and TV shows fill that story well with character, plot, and other story elements, and as I'm absorbing story structure, I often find ideas starting to percolate. And then it’s on to Phase IV ....
If I can get away from home, I’ll do that next – a vacation isn’t always convenient or affordable, depending on the rest of the family's schedule, but for Phase IV, I’ll try to escape for a few days and rest up a bit. For me, it's an optional phase, as I really enjoy being home without a book to write – that’s a little vacation in itself – and after that break, on to the next stage ....
Phase V is when the urge to be creative in a three-dimensional way comes over me. Writing is two-dimensional and involves so much interior thought -- now I crave doing something on a big scale that's fast and totally different than writing stories, dealing with words. Something with a clear beginning, middle and end where the end is quickly in sight (unlike writing a book....) – a project that needs only a few hours, a day, or a bit longer. This could be gardening, depending on the time of year, or it might be knitting or crochet, or a little painting or drawing. Sometimes I'll just move furniture around in a few rooms (I love a total room swap, though it drives my family nuts)-- I'll redecorate ... and sooner or later, me being me, I'm gonna end up painting a room, wallpapering, or refinishing a piece of furniture. There’s something about that process that really helps balance the whole creative writing process for me. I’m climbing up and down on ladders listening to music, the windows are open, the fans are going, the rest of the family is banished from the vicinity (unless I suddenly need a tall person to do something, which happens pretty often). And at some point, the next story is going to start bubbling up as the paint is being rolled on the walls .... and then it’s time for Phase VI ....
Now the stories and characters are starting to simmer and pop in my head again, and I go out and get fresh notebooks, pens, folders, and whatever lovely, addictive stationery items appeal ... because I’m ready to start writing again.
There’s endless variation in the phases, and the time frame might be days, weeks, even months if I’m on a good elastic schedule (this rarely happens). And I don’t always get to each phase, though my creative brain seems to like this pattern of recoup and refill.
This time, it’s been barely two weeks -- et voila! the manuscript arrived today for some minor revisions and tweaking. I haven’t hit all the recovery stages but did enough to feel ready to start again ... and after the manuscript gets a tweaking, the next book is waiting for some attention ....
I’m sure you all have various ways to rest and recuperate after intense creative work – what works best for you?
Susan Sarah
P.S. The manuscript about to be tweaked is the next Sarah Gabriel: THE HIGHLAND GROOM, the tale of a Lowland lady and a Highland whisky smuggler, an Avon release for January 2009....
From Loretta:
I’m just back from a writers' conference, which reminded me, once again, that I have one of the best jobs in the world. My personal favorite best job ever of my whole experience was being an English major in college, which is at least partly because of the Lack of Responsibility Factor. But being a writer definitely qualifies as a Best Job.
I have had worse jobs, believe me.
As some of you already know, once upon a time, many, many eons ago, I was a meter maid. People screamed at me, made fun of me, and some even threatened me with bodily injury. The downtown characters--the drunks and extremely demented people--raved at me or demanded money or insisted I arrest figments of their imaginations. We had to wear polyester--and this was the old style polyester that did not breathe at all--and we courted heatstroke in the summer and frostbite in winter. Downtown Worcester, wherein lay our “beats,” is small but very hilly. In the beginning especially, I ended the day with aching legs and feet so sore I wept . I wore the ugliest possible shoes for the comfort factor. No matter. I still got blisters. I got sunburned and windburned and broke out in mysterious rashes. When people fought their tickets, I had to go to court, which terrified me. And I had to communicate with police officers almost daily. I was in one of my college dropout phases at the time (these went on for about a decade), and in those days college youth tended to view the police with extreme mistrust. Trusted or not, they were a species of which I had no experience, let alone understanding. For me, it was like talking to Extra Terrestrials, all of them heavily armed and some of whom thought meter maids a far lower and more repellent life form than the drunks & crazy people.
This, however, was not the worst job I ever had, not by a long stretch. I actually kind of liked it a good part of the time because our bosses and the office staff were really nice and the other meter maids were fun to hang with. Bonus: Within a few months, I was in amazing shape. With very strong legs.
The worst job I ever had looked really glamorous. I was hired to sell groovy clothes and shoes in a boutique. I loved fashion magazines, so this seemed to be the ideal job for moi, at the time, a college dropout (again). But as those who’ve watched the reality shows know, what goes on behind the scenes is not always pretty. I got blisters from having to wear fashionable platform shoes for 8-10 hours a day on a concrete floor thinly covered with carpeting. We had to climb up and down ladders while carrying stacks of jeans for the shelves. We used seam rippers to take out the manufacturer’s tags from the clothes and then we hand-stitched in the store’s tags.
But hey, I worked in a jewelry store over the course of several years, and learned the art of writing codes & numbers on price tags barely visible to the naked eye (the kind that went on expensive jewelry of the type my heroine in Your Scandalous Ways would wear). That was tedious, too, but I didn’t mind. It appealed to the fussbudget (now called OCD) in me. I don’t mind detail work. It’s retail that gets to me.
The problem, in short, was Dealing with the Public for 6 days a week, 8-12 hours a day. I’m not an extrovert. In fact, others would find it a considerable challenge to be less extroverted. My Personality Type came out INTJ--at 93% Introverted. Let’s add in the facts that I was still more or less college age (read Immature) and had an Attitude. So I didn’t deal really well with people who needed size 12 and insisted something was wrong with the clothes I was selling because size 8 didn’t fit or the ones who tried on ninety-eleven sweaters only to leave with nothing, telling me the clothes were too expensive or the ones who flung silk blouses on the floor for the menials (us) to pick up, etc., etc. Then there were the shoplifters. And the drunks & crazy people who wandered in, thinking we were--what? The bus station?
Plus, I really didn’t have confidence in my ability to put the right shirt together with the right tie, so I always had a small panic attack when I had to wait on a male person, even though they were less likely than female persons to infuriate me. Too, we had to keep the place shipshape, folding clothes, endlessly folding & even ironing. We had to keep the glass display cases sparkly clean and dress up the dummies. Then there was the behind-the-scenes backbiting and stabbing and alliance-shifting. All of which happens everywhere, but for some reason it felt more like Purgatory there. Looking back, with the advantage of age and wisdom, I think it was simply a matter of a horribly wrong personality fit.
It was useful in terms of giving me a degree of understanding of what it was like to be a servant in early 19th C London.
But it was MY WORST JOB, ever.
Meanwhile, there are those, I know, who’d run screaming from my present job: Sitting alone all day in front of a computer listening for voices in your head? There are people who couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. They are not tempted, even though it means not having to wear pantyhose and being able to work in one's pajamas.
My best job could be your worst job and vice versa.
So RevMelinda gets a Loretta Chase book because she asked the question, “What was the worst job you ever had?”
Everyone else: Let’s see who suffered most. What was your worst job ever?
Yes, it's true! In recent months a very special lady who runs the Immergiti in un Mondo Rosa blog has been featuring several of the Wenches in her romance-friendly site.
The posts are in Italian and English, so you won't have any trouble reading the interviews. Thank you, Rosaria Kimbler, for featuring the Wenches on your blog!
You can read the interviews here:
In July at RWA National, Jo will be on a panel on historical romance for the Bookseller/Librarian day. Details when date nears.
