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:
.

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.

Read more »

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!

Read more »

Sorry I've been gone so long. I've just emerged from one of my periods of serious writer's block, which this time extended as far as blogging and answering emails. I've got quite a stack to reply to! For anyone who is patient enough to still be reading after all these months, let me see if I can catch you up. It'll probably take several posts!

Read more »