Speed Dating for Authors

Author Tierney James has this cool feature on her blog called "Speed Dating for Authors" where she shares intriguing bits and pieces about books and authors -- including trivia or personal details or stuff you wouldn't otherwise know.  It's a good place to find new authors or find out more about your favorites.

This week I'm featured -- along with some photos of my dollhouse. 

Come on over to Journeys, Treks and Daylilies and join us! Here's a sneak peek: 

Yep, that's really a dollhouse!

Authors Chat About Writing Historical Fiction

Recently, I was a guest on Marsha Casper Cook's blogtalk radio show to chat about the challenges of writing historical fiction. Another of the guests, Kelly Abell, has posted her comments and a link to the show here. I hope you'll enjoy listening! 

The Butler Did It!

Since most of us don’t have servants, it’s sometimes tough to picture what people in service in the grand houses of the past actually did all day. If you've read my post on the housemaid’s job, you may have concluded that the upper servants had a far easier time of it. And that’s true, though it depends on how large the household actually was.

In the grandest of houses, the head of the staff would be a house steward who was in charge of hiring and firing servants and paying the tradesman’s bills, but in the merely grand houses, those duties would be split between the butler – assisted perhaps by an under-butler – and the housekeeper.

While the housekeeper is (naturally) in charge of the house, the butler is in charge of the dining room – including protecting, polishing, and counting the silver and maintaining the wine cellar – and overseeing all the male servants. If there was no valet to wait on the master of the house, the butler took care of his clothing and dressing room.

While the pattern of a butler’s day varied greatly depending on the size of the household and the activities of the family, here’s a pretty normal pattern for the butler in a medium-sized house:

It is the butler’s duty to set the breakfast table, bring up the food and drink, wait on table, and clear after the family has finished – a pattern which is repeated at luncheon, dinner, and with the evening tea tray just before bedtime. After each meal he supervises the cleaning of all the silver, china, glasses, and serving dishes and makes sure they are put away in their proper places.

Between meals, he takes up his other duties. He take care of the master's clothes, laying out what he'll need next, cleaning or brushing or mending, and straightening the dressing room. He checks the wine cellar, tending to any wines which may be off in taste or color, or bottling wines which were delivered in casks. He polishes the silver (no tarnish-proof strips in those days!), and he’s on duty to answer the door from morning till night. After the household has retired, he makes sure all the menservants have gone to bed, then locks up the doors and windows before (finally!) retiring himself.

By the Victorian era, when paying calls over tea became a standard afternoon activity, the butler had it a bit easier. The fashion for Victorian ladies was to have a very attractive parlormaid who would answer the door and wait on the ladies and their afternoon callers at tea time. Since the butler was not required, he could rest for an hour.

Pay during the Regency period? From 30 to 80 pounds sterling per year – depending on the size of the family and the household staff. But he also received his master’s cast-off clothes, as well as the leftover pieces of the wax candles, once they were too short to burn! 

Sources: The Complete Servant, by Samuel and Sarah Adams, published 1825
Etiquette, by Emily Post, published 1922

Top Ten --Er, Six -- Pet Peeves in Historical Romances

I admit it, I'm a fan of historical romance. Always have been, even long before I started writing it. But I have to say there are some things that drive me straight round the bend and make me toss a book aside...

1. Getting the titles wrong. Lady Sarah Winchester isn't the same person as Lady Winchester is, and when the author gets it wrong, it's easy to dismiss the story entirely.

(Here's the skinny on how to handle dukes ... marquesses ... viscounts ... barons ... and baronets.) 

2. Getting the succession wrong. Inheritance of money is one thing, titles are another. Illegitimate sons could not inherit titles, period. Oldest sons could not be bypassed in favor of younger ones. Daughters could not pass along titles at all (there are a very few exceptions, by royal decree).

3. Getting the geography wrong. London to Gretna Green is 320 miles. Even if you figure an average speed of 10 miles per hour for a team of horses (and that would be tough to maintain over time, what with having to stop to change teams every few miles), it was impossible to do the trip in a day, much less overnight, during the Georgian or Regency eras. Which was the entire point, of course, since by the time a couple had been together and alone for such a long journey, the girl's reputation was ruined and irreparable. 

4. 21^st century characters who turn up in historical time periods. I don't mean modern-day characters who time travel. I mean people who were supposedly born and reared in the 1300s, or the 1500s, or the 1800s, but who think and act and talk and behave as though they just stepped out of Starbucks holding a latte and an iPhone, complete with modern sensibilities and politically-correct attitudes.

5. Magically-survivable injuries. Before modern antibiotics, being shot in the abdomen was pretty much a death sentence. There are real-life stories of survivors, yes, but they’re remembered because they were rare. Concussions were just as serious then as they are now, and being hit over the head hard enough to cause unconsciousness for a period of time is likely to lead to bleeding in the brain and death, not a nice long sleep and then waking up feeling just fine and remembering everything. (Author Eileen Dreyer, who was a trauma nurse before writing thrillers, does some great seminar sessions on medicine in historical eras and how authors get it wrong.)

6. Trusting other authors to get it right. I swear I’ve read a historical novel where the hero complained about the heroine feeding him pablum – but when I checked, I discovered that particular baby formula was invented in the 1930s instead. Oops.

What about you? What are your pet peeves, the things that make you toss a book aside? Please share!