What is it about Heyer?

I have only recently started to read Georgette Heyers wonderful Regency romances and it is quite a stable to work my way through!

So far I have read THE TALISMAN RING and A CIVIL CONTRACT (a book that is no doubt historically accurate but somewhat bleak!). However on the strong recommendations of Heyer fans I launched myself into the 18th century Alastair family trilogy THESE OLD SHADES (the book cover pictured here is clearly historically inaccurate as it must be set in the 1750s/60s not the regency), THE DEVIL’S CUB and THE INFAMOUS ARMY. I confess to reading the last one first, more out of my own interest in the Battle of Waterloo (did you know that until recently Sandhurst used this book as a textbook of the most definitive description of the battle?). So having encountered the Lady Barbara Childe, I turned to her family story beginning with her great grandfather Justin (THESE OLD SHADES) and her grandfather (THE DEVIL’S CUB).
Coming to both these books with 21st century eyes, I have to confess I really wondered what on earth I was getting into with them. When we first meet Justin Alastair he is mincing down a street in Paris wearing high heels and a purple coat. He then proceeds to buy a young boy to use as his page. Hmmm….? As for Dominic, by the end of the first few chapters we have met an immature homicidal maniac with a mother fixation. One of my reading rules is I have to fall in love with my hero… and there is nothing immediately lovable about either Justin or Dominic. So why did I read on? Why couldn’t I put these books down?
I think Heyer’s strength is in her writing. She has a wry , witty style that gives humanity to her characters, particularly her heroines and somehow these truly despicable heroes, who put the BAD into 'mad, bad and dangerous to know', are redeemed. (An example of the wonderful repartee that had me in stitches is found in the scene in THE DEVILS CUB where the truly awful Mrs. Challoner visits Lady Fanny and Lady Fanny gets it into her head that Mary Challoner is some by blow of the Duke of Avon).

I know many of you are Heyerites of much greater devotion than me, so I would love to know what is it about Heyer that not only makes me want to read to the end but makes these heroes worthy of my devotion?

Vale Marysville

The world has watched in shocked horror, the devestation wrought by the terrible bushfires that have burnt through some of the lovliest parts of Victoria over the last week. At times like this it makes us realise that Melbourne is a small town and the rules of six degrees of separation dictate that no one remains completely untouched. Although I know two people who lost their lives defending their home and others who escaped, only to lose everything, in some ways it is the loss of the little town of Marysville that has become emblamatic of the fires. Five hundred people lived in the town - barely a dozen buildings are left standing and it is estimated the death toll may rise to one hundred - a fifth of the town's population.

I am not alone when I say Marysville always held a very special place in my heart. We arrived in Melbourne in 1968 and in July 1969 we took our first holiday - to Marysville. Mum booked us in to a slightly ramshackle old guest house called, at that time, Mt. Kitchener Lodge. We shared a large room with three beds with saggy matresses and chenille bedspreads that had seen better days. Meals were taken in the communal dining room and in the evenings, the hosts organised different sorts of entertainment. I can still recall a game that involved a blindfolded tour of 'Lord Nelson's life' - where a chewed up minty passed for his eye and the child had to insert a finger into an orange for his eye socket. Gruesome but great fun!

It was in Marysville that I met my first Aussie BBQ. On a day of pouring rain (yes, it used to rain in those days, Virginia!) all the guests tramped down to the football ground and we huddled under the shelter, watching the rain, the smell of cooking sausages and onions mingling with the scent of the wet gum trees, eating sausages wrapped in white bread with onions and tomato sauce. I thought I had never tasted anything so wonderful in my life.

We went back every year for the next 4 years. Sometimes in winter (my favourite time of year) and sometimes in summer. The ownership changed and the lodge was rechristened "Mountain Lodge". A swimming pool was built (luxury!), we played croquet, I learned the rules of "21" (played with matches) and I read my way through the entire works of Agatha Christie (the local store had an unending supply!). I rode horses, hired from the hacking stables in those happy days before insurance and compulsory head gear (see photo age 11 - the horse was called 'Cisco'). We walked the ferny gullys and climbed to Keppels lookout and stuffed ourselves on Devonshire teas (another new taste sensation for me) at the Fruit Salad Farm.

Our last holiday to Marysville was in September 1973 when I was fourteen. Who would be 14 again? Gawky, socially inept and terminally embarrassed by my parents. The photo says it all really - the compulsory Saturday evening entertainment - a bunch of equally miserable teenagers entertaining the guests with "Rocky Racoon" (that's me on on the far left). It all belongs to a far off, more innocent time.

I have been back to Marysville many, many times and more recently twice in the last six months. I had forgotten how pretty it was and in a moment of impulse, I grabbed the brochure for the local real estate agent. I had it pinned to my fridge until last week. Ironically my husband and I had walked the firebreak to the north of the town and talked about how this resilient little town had survived Black Friday of 1939 and the Ash Wednesday Fires of 1983. It seems third time unlucky.

I know the strength of the community will rebuild it again but the old guest houses are gone now and it will never be quite the same again.

HEROES - Pt 2

Alison Stuart Interviews – Kit Lovell, hero of THE KING’S MAN


AS: It’s 1654, England has been under the rule of Oliver Cromwell for the last three years, and things are looking pretty grim for the supporters of the late Charles Stuart and his son, currently in exile in France. I have with me one of the King’s most loyal supporters, Christopher Lovell.
KL: Please call me Kit, everyone does.
AS: I believe things have been tough for your family since the defeat of the royalist cause, Kit?
KL: They certainly have, Alison. My father and I took the royalist side in the wars of 1642-1648. Father died in the defence of our home and I went into exile. Most of the estate has been sold off and my step mother and my sister live in the ruins of the family home. I send them what money I can make off gambling and …other means, whenever I can but I’m afraid I’ve not been very much help to my family.
AS: I thought you had a brother?
KL: I don’t wish to talk about Daniel. He was lost at the battle of Worcester in September 1651. Stupid young fool thought he would follow in my footsteps. Not particularly worthy footsteps to follow in! My step mother blames me of course…
AS: So what have you been up to since the battle of Worcester?
KL: Oh, I spent an uncomfortable few months as a prisoner but managed to escape. Since then I’ve drifted between Paris and London, trying to make whatever money I can to keep body and soul together and a decent pair of boots on my feet.
AS: I hear you have something of a reputation with the ladies?
KL: Now don’t believe everything you hear, Alison. It’s true I have managed to land a wealthy widow as a mistress who keeps me in the manner to which I am accustomed and obligingly gives me the time I need for my other occupation.
AS: Which is?
KL: Cards and, oh yes, planning the overthrow of Cromwell’s regime and the restoration of the King.
AS: Any success?
KL: Well, I’m very good at cards but every plot to overthrow Cromwell is foiled by that master of spies, John Thurloe. Cromwell picked a wily man as his Secretary of State. Trouble is it’s hard to know who’s in Thurloe’s pay and who can be trusted these days! Even the most loyal of the King’s men may have good cause to turn coat. Let’s talk about women…that’s my favourite subject…
AS: You told us about your mistress, do you have any other women in your life?
KL: I take it you are referring to that infuriating music teacher, Thamsine Granville? I rue the day I ever saved her life!
AS: What happened?
KL: The stupid girl had just lobbed a piece of rock at the Cromwell’s coach. If she’d been caught…well I shudder to think what would have become of her.
AS: Why would she have done such a thing?
KL: Thamsine is like me, the flotsam of war. Her family also paid a price for supporting the King. In her case she found herself thrown out of her home and living off the streets of London. If I hadn’t saved her that day she would have been forced into prostitution just to keep herself alive. Now I’m stuck with her.
AS: What do you mean?
KL: Look, my life is… complicated. I’ve got a job to do and she’s a distraction I don’t need distractions. I’ve got the girl a job at an inn, what more does she want?
AS: You, perhaps?
KL: I don’t want romantic attachments, Alison. Anyone who gets involved with me is just going to get hurt. I use people for my own ends and she may find she’s no different.
AS: What do you mean you “use people”?
KL: Is that the time? I really must get going. The plotters are meeting at the Ship Inn and I’m expected. Perhaps I will see you there?
Read Kit and Thamsine’s story in THE KING’S MAN by Alison Stuart
For more information on the period, how the story came to be written and to read an excerpt go to http://www.alisonstuart.com

HEROES - Pt 1

The Australian Romance Readers Convention (ARRC09) is coming up next month and I will be appearing on a panel with Stephanie Laurens, Anna Campbell, Sara Bennett and Kinley Macgregor...wow...that's pretty august company! I will be the quiet one on the end!

The topic of the Panel is "What's so great about rakes and assorted historical heroes?" It should be a lot of fun.

I don't write about rakes... not sure I could if I tried. My heroes are men with pasts, dark secrets that make them the way they are.

So in honour of ARRC and the panel, I am repeating an early blog I did which is a "Character Interview" with the hero of BY THE SWORD, Jonathan Thornton. I will post an interview with the hero of THE KING'S MAN in the next day or so.

I hope you enjoy them! (They were a lot of fun to write)

Interview with Sir Jonathan Thornton Bt. at Seven Ways Hall, Worcestershire.
JT: Are we on?
AS: Let me adjust that microphone…going live…
AS: Sir Jonathan Thornton, welcome. It’s 1660 and London is buzzing with the news that the King is to be restored to the throne. As a loyal supporter of the royalist cause how do you feel about that?
JT : Well, delighted, of course. It’s been a hard time for those of us who remained loyal to the King.
AS: In what way?
JT: Our estates have been subject to heavy fines and the continual threat of sequestration. As an outlaw, had I inherited Seven Ways on my grandfather’s death, the entire estate would have been forfeit.
AS: But didn’t your grandfather find a solution to that problem?
JT: He did. The old fox left it to my young cousin, Tom Ashley, but even the Ashley family’s parliamentary connections couldn’t entirely prevent the privations of the last few years. Of course, my marriage to his mother didn’t help much either.
AS: There were those of us who were surprised at your decision to settle down with Kate. You had, how can I put it, a wild youth?
JT: I can’t deny that I was the cause of my parent’s despair on more than one occasion. My mother , god rest her, never recovered from that troop of Parliamentary horse trampling her garden and ruining her orchard. Of course I look back now and regret that I never really made peace with my parents before they died.
AS: Any other regrets?
JT: Of course I have regrets. I’ve always had a tendency to act with my heart rather than my head and people I care about have got hurt in the process, badly hurt. Thank heavens for the wisdom of age and the love of a good woman to knock some sense into me.
AS: I presume you are talking about Kate?
JT: Of course.
AS: And how did you meet Kate?
JT: She was working in the garden at Seven Ways. I’ll never forget it. She wore an old, shabby gown and a battered straw hat. I thought I’d never seen a woman look quite so lovely. At the time I had a price on my head and no intention of falling in love. That’s what I mean about my heart ruling the head. Talk about a doomed relationship.
AS: But you managed to overcome the problems?
JT: We did, but our happiness came at a price. If you have a little time to spare, let me tell you the story….
Read Jonathan and Kate’s story in BY THE SWORD by Alison Stuart
For more information on the period, how the story came to be written and to read an excerpt go to http://www.alisonstuart.com

Australia - The Movie (A review)

I wanted so much to like Australia - The Movie. Not just because I am a huge fan of Hugh Jackman but there is also so much to love about Australia - the Place!

I was so disappointed. After three long, long hours, I was left feeling like someone who has been given a large box of chocolates, has scoffed the lot and feels both slightly ill and unsatisfied.

Firstly how can you define this movie? Is it epic, is it romance, is it drama, is it a western, a war movie, is it fantasy? It is all of those things and none of them. You are left with a mish mash of all the genres with a heavy handed overview of political correctness. The treatment of the politics of the Stolen Generation is dealt with so much better in THE RABBIT PROOF FENCE.

The characters, with the exception of the Aboriginal actors (particularly young Brandon Walters who plays Nulla) were completely two dimensional. The baddies were bad and wore black hats just so you knew who they were and the goodies were good. The acting was stilted and wooden and the dialogue...oh my god! I stopped counting the number of times poor Hugh Jackman said "Crikey" and when he had to say "Shut your damper hole", I nearly fell under the seat! Who says that...ever???

The plot divided into two completely separate stories - lacking a clear story arc for either. One hour into the movie and they have arrived in Darwin, then follows filler during which everyone lives happily ever after and then on to the war and the bombing of Darwin. Now, if the story commenced in 1939 then three years have passed since the drive to Darwin and yet Nulla has remained exactly the same age! Continuity problem? Just one of many and I won't even go into the historical inaccuracies.

The winner is the wonderful Australian outback which is beautifully filmed. I think it was mostly filmed near Bowen in far north Queensland. I love the Australian outback and I hope that this film inspires people to come and visit but don't expect to find this Wild West frontier. 90% of Australians are urbanised and are unlikely to say "Crikey" even when provoked!

Welcome to the Seventeenth Century

What is it about the seventeenth century that makes it so unapproachable for readers and publishers?

This was the century that had it all, the century that marked the turning point between the medieval world and the modern world. In England it was a century torn by a civil war, a revolution from which the whole basis of modern concepts of democracy arose; a king was executed by his own people; another king spent years in exile, yet another was deposed. It saw wars, spies, warming pan babies, dispossed royal bastards, the battle for religious freedoms, London burned down and rebuilt, plague...and on the list goes.

As a writer of historicals with a romantic bent, what could be a better source of inspiration than the English Civil War, where the cavaliers "were wrong but wromantic" and the roundheads were "right but repulsive" (to quote Sellers and Yeatman from 1066 and All That)? Yet I have been told by publishers that as a setting for a historical novel it is "unsaleable" and "unmarketable".

I am a reader too! Sitting on my bookshelf is a small selection of my favourite writers of the period beginning as a youngster with Rosemary Sutcliff ("Simon" and my all time favourite "Rider of the White Horse"), Barbara Softly ("Plain Jane", "A Stone in A Pool" and several others now out of print and hard to find), Ronald Welch ("For the King"). My desert island book and the book that began my passion for the ECW "The King's General" by Daphne Du Maurier, the Wintercombe and Heron series by Pamela Belle - all read until they are falling to pieces.

Please add your own favourites to my list...

In the meantime, watch out for a new space for writers and readers to get together - coming soon!

Du Maurier Revisited

(Warning: may be spoilers)

I have just finished reading Daphne Du Maurier's JAMAICA INN. I last read it as a teenager (prescribed school text) and I loved it! Mind you I was already a Du Maurier fan, having adopted THE KING'S GENERAL quite early in my life. I also think "gothic romance" novels appealed to me - JANE EYRE being my "desert island" book of choice.

So it was interesting to go back to it with an adult's eye and realise what a highly inappropriate book it was for a 13 year old - being black with the overwhelming threat of violation and the murderous deeds of the wreckers. No one can write like Du Maurier. She has the power of words to bring the Bodmin Moor to life as a character in its own right, as black and dangerous as the landlord.

But it has left me with a question. Is it a romance?

I had to give a lecture at a school on this subject. The girls were studying REBECCA specifically as a romance and the teacher thought it would be diversionary to get a romance writer in to talk about the subject. I'm not sure if she was best pleased with my conclusion - that REBECCA is NOT a romance and neither is JAMAICA INN...yes the hero and heroine end up together but there is no promise of a 'happy ever after' and the reason for this, I think, lies in Du Maurier's heroes. They are, to a man, flawed almost beyond redemption, incapable of love. Maximillian in REBECCA never really appears at all and while Jem Merlyn displays some heroic qualities, you are left with the query in the back of your mind as to whether blood will out and Mary, is in fact, going to end up just like her Aunt Patience. As for Sir Richard Grenville in THE KING'S GENERAL, there was never going to be a HEA there. The heroes of Du Maurier's books are "mad, bad and dangerous to know" and the heroines love them without reserve, but it is an animal attraction. Mary Yellan even accepts this...she says at one point in JAMAICA INN that her attraction to Jem Merlyn is not a romantic attraction, but an attraction as old as men and women. An irresistable attraction she describes as love but not romantic love.

I would love to know what you think...Would you describe Du Maurier's books as "romances"?

Alison

Secret Lives

You can see from my profile that I have a number of "lives", of which writer is only one! I have been pondering this strangely schizophrenic life. In my 'real' life (the one that pays the bills!), I am a senior executive with a large not-for profit organisation. For three days a week (in real time, more in emotional time!) I balance the demands of board meetings, board reports papers and ongoing requests for legal advice. For two days a week I try (not terribly successfully) to be Alison Stuart, writer...and in between I fit wife, mother etc. into the equation.

The people you meet and interact with in your day to day life form a certain image of you in their own mind. For many years, when I first started writing, I would no more have admitted to my secret life than stood up in front of a Melbourne Cricket Ground crowd and declared myself a born again Christian! It was even something a little shameful , a secret vice like eating too much chocolate ... or buying really expensive Italian shoes...

I had to really trust a person before I confessed my secret life, generally prefaced by something like: "Just for fun! Just stories, not great works of literature..." I was so afraid that if my colleagues knew I wrote historical fiction (with romance) my professional credibility would be undermined in some way. This is one of the reasons I chose to write under a pen name. It freed me up to be another person, the Jekkyl to my Hyde!

As I've gone on, I have gained a little more confidence in my work colleagues and most of them now know that beneath the senior executive in the tailored suits (that is a look I am definitely trying to shed!), there is a whole other side to my life. This has, in its turn, invited similar confidences about the secret lives of my work colleagues - martial arts champions, crime writers, poetry writers...

I would love to know how you balance your secret lives? Do you have work colleagues with secret lives? How does knowing a person's secret life affect the way you interact with them?

The Book of My Heart!

If you have read my earlier blogs and visited my website, you will know that BY THE SWORD is the book of my heart. A little story that began when I visited Harvington Hall at the age of 11 and has been with me through thick and thin - endured rejection and rewrite, consignment to sock drawers and resurrection is now an Eppie Award winner.
The awards were announced in Portland on Saturday night but, of course, being in Melbourne Australia I did not see the results until Monday morning. My husband, hearing the shriek, came bounding up the stairs two at a time, convinced I was being savaged by a monster spider....
Thank you so much to those out there who have sent me so many good wishes that I am sloshing in cyber champagne and to Fiona Lowe and Mel Scott for "blogging me"...and most of all to those of you who have read and enjoyed the story. THAT is why I write :-)

A Room of One's Own

I have no pretensions to be the next Virginia Woolf but that superlative writer wrote an essay on this subject which you can read in full at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791.txt . In short she said to write fiction, a woman needed money and a room of her own.


I have always had, in one sense or another, a room of my own or should I say, a place of my own where I worked and I could make identifiably MY space. My sons had their bedrooms, my husband his shed and I claimed the room in the house loosely termed "the study". Two and a half years ago I lost that space when my husband's employer unilaterally decided my husband should work from home. I don't propose to go into the fine details of that (still ongoing arrangement) that left my desk stranded on a (large) landing.


I attempted to claim that space on the landing as my own, but nothing I could do altered the fact that it was still a thoroughfare. I mourned for my space and my writing effectively dried up, except, oddly, on those few days when I was home alone and the whole house once more became my space, but crammed into a corner and subject to the continual interruptions of sons and husband was not a good place for a writer.


There are probably those of you who say, a good writer can write anywhere, and certainly when the muse is with me, I could write in a train station in the middle of peak hour, but I need a sense of order around me to get that muse kick started and working on the landing, I never seemed to achieve that sense of physical or mental order.


When I lived in Asia, I learned quite a bit about Feng Shui - certainly enough to know that the basic precepts of not cluttering and freeing up energy lines have some considerable credence. Certainly they do for me!


My eldest son has upped stakes and is travelling overseas for the next year so I, after some basic consultation with him, claimed his room. Over the Christmas/New Year period I painted the room and moved all my "stuff" into it, hung my pictures on the wall and made the space mine. I am not just a writer, I also sew (quilting/ embroidery) and with all my sewing materials pushed into available spaces around the house, I have even felt myself unable to pursue that side of my creativity. Now it is all with me again and I feel the space in my head opening up again.

Along with the space, I have also embarked on some new year's resolutions which I fully intend to keep (and by declaring them publicly - I can keep myself honest!). The first was to undertake one of Margie Lawson's on-line courses on "Beating Self-Defeating Behaviours". Through the course, I have hooked up with a wonderful fellow-writer in Canada, Alice Valdal , to be my change coach. We share a lot in common - including the same self-defeating behaviours.


The second was that old chestnut - exercise! I have given up on the unused gym membership and taken up a programme called "Step Into Life" - group exercise in the great outdoors. With a stressful job and the general pressures of daily life, physical fitness is the most worthwhile investment I can give myself. So keep me honest! Exercising outside is wonderful at the moment because the days are long and the weather is warm - roll on winter and it may be a different story.


Two questions:

1. Do you need a "room of your own"? Or If you have a "room of your own" tell me about it.

2. What new year's resolutions are you absolutely committed to keeping this year?


I look forward to hearing from you.

Alison