So, my New Year's resolution was to be more regular about my blog posts. You now know how good I am at keeping New Year's resolutions! Anyway....

I attended a writing workshop this morning on world-building, courtesy of the local chapter of the Romance Writers of America. I wasn’t sure how much would be applicable for me, since the worlds I write aren’t my invention: Regency England, which I try to keep historically accurate, and modern-day Woods Hole, which actually exists. But even with the most reality-based settings, writers still have to pick out which important facts about the setting and the society to highlight, which becomes world-building of a sort. It made me realize that I use different worlds even in my Pemberley Variations, which take place in the same years, same locations, and even the same characters.

In Impulse & Initiative, Regency England is a fairly light-hearted place. There aren’t any poor people except a few servants who are quite contented with their lot, nobody gets seriously ill, and I blithely ignore the harsher realities of Regency life. It’s the Victorian view of the pre-industrial Regency as an age of perfect innocence. Well, there’s innocence and then there’s innocence, as it were, but most of us have inherited that quite fallacious view that the Regency was a perfected version of the Victorian hyper-moral universe, when actually it was quite decadent and far from innocent. Mr. Darcy’s Obsession, which comes out this fall, is the story of what happens when Darcy, who believes he lives in the easy world of Impulse & Initiative, discovers he actually lives in a superficial society that builds its pleasures on the back of other people’s pain, where good birth is conidered of vastly more importance than good morals, and that he’s going to have to make some choices about whether to continue to pretend that everything is fine or to pay the price of publicly disagreeing with the status quo. Being Darcy, he of course makes the right decision, with some assistance from Elizabeth. But it’s a completely different world. The joys are different and the conflicts are different.

I’ve always thought of my Pemberley Variations as each highlighting different personality aspects of the characters created by Jane Austen. Impulse & Initiative Elizabeth is the traditional modern view of an arch and witty Elizabeth, whereas the Elizabeth in Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World is the Elizabeth who knows how to bite her tongue when the situation requires and has occasional periods of depression – all of which is described by Austen in Pride & Prejudice. It just depends on which parts you pay attention to. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that my worlds have changed as I’ve learned more about life in Regency England, the things Austen assumed her readers would know but which modern readers for the most part miss. Austen could refer in passing to Elizabeth’s periods of depression because that was a common and expected state for women then, so there was no need to dwell on it. The readers would fill in those blanks themselves. But we, as modern victims of the Victorian rewriting of Regency society, end up missing the significance of those brief references.

But none of this means that the world I built in Impulse & Initiative is in any way superior or inferior to the world of Mr. Darcy’s Obsession, because it’s all fiction. That’s sometimes a little hard to remember, especially when I get hung up in historical detail, but it’s more important for fiction to be convincing than absolutely accurate. Mr. Darcy’s Obsession takes place in a more historically accurate world, but I’ve still made it a happier place than it probably was, and it makes Darcy shine like a beacon of hope. The darker world shows the characters in brighter relief.

I've been so busy guest blogging and doing interviews on the virtual tour for the release of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World (at bookstores now!) that I've been neglecting this blog. But here are some links to the blogs I'm visiting:

~~Savvy Verse and Wit review and interview (and a lovely review it is!)

~~Interview at The Book Tree

~~Guest post at The Burton Review about how I choose scenes for my variations

~~Guest blog at Love Romance Passion about finding new aspects of the characters of Elizabeth and Darcy to explore

Tomorrow I'll be blogging at Fresh Fiction about my life, writing process and routine. I'll have another round of these each week this month. I don't think I've done so much non-fiction writing since college, but it's been fun. Thanks to all the bloggers who have hosted me!

Today I received my first copies of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World and was about to write about that, but then I got distracted by some old photographs of Russia in 1909-1912. In color. Not tinted. They were taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii with a color separation technique he invented using glass plates. The colors had long since leached out, but modern computer graphics wizards figured out a way to restore them. Voila - color photographs of pre-revolutionary Russia. Very cool, I thought, but I expected them to look like the usual tinted daguerrotypes. They didn't. It's very disconcerting. They look just like modern color photographs of a different time, but my brain tells me that can't be true. Russia in 1909 was in black and white - we all know that.

I'll show you a few examples, though to really appreciate them I suggest you go to the Library of Congress exhibit web site where you can click on the images to see full-size versions. Here's the photographer himself:
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The spa at Ekaternin Springs, probably not much different from what Elizabeth Bennet would have seen a hundred years earlier:

Lots of people have obsessed over anachronistic details in the 1995 TV adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, one of which is that Darcy's second proposal takes place in front of a cornfield whose straight rows show it was planted by modern machinery. I thought of that when I saw this picture of agricultural fields in Samarkand. No straight lines need apply!

These pictures make me feel profoundly disoriented. I expect photographs of different eras to be either blurry black and white but authentic, or sanitized color modern recreations where everything is seen through the filter of present-day styles and expectations. You can tell a regency-set film from the 1980s from one in 2005 because they each appeal to ideas of beauty common then.

It makes me think about my own mental images of Regency life. I've taught myself to imagine the smells, the dirt, the poverty of the era, but this makes me realize that I'm still imposing a movie type of sensibility over my own images. I can't subtract all my own expectations from it. Imagine Charlotte Lucas missing some of her teeth - not at all unlikely - but in my mental images everyone has all their teeth. After looking at these pictures, I've decided to try to create a regency color photograph in my mind. It makes me wonder about a lot of my regency writing.

I came out of the writer's closet a couple of months ago. You see, for a long time I kept my writing secret from everyone outside of my family, and even they weren't allowed to read it. After a couple of years, when I had to explain why I was going to writing conferences, I told a couple of close friends, or more accurately I muttered something vague about writing romantic fanfiction, and they very kindly didn't laugh at me. I didn't even tell people in my real life when I self-published my books. Meantime, thousands of complete strangers I'd met on-line knew all about this important part of my life.

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As promised, here's an excerpt from the new Pemberley Variation. If you check this blog frequently, you might have read this excerpt a couple of months ago. I had posted it to my blog, then had second thoughts because I wasn't sure I'd finish it, so I took the post down a few minutes later. Now that the first draft is actually finished, here it is again for those of you loyal enough to stick around!

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