Rootin’ for the Home Team…

I love sports. I love playing a few, but I also love watching sports live or on television. In fact, I seldom have enough interest to record the standard TV fare, but my PVR is usually filled with sporting events. I never have time to watch it all but it’s there if I’m of a mind.

I play golf and used to avidly watch their broadcasts nearly every weekend, though even in the days of VCR, I mostly recorded the games and watched in the evenings so I could enjoy the outdoors during the day. Lately I have not been watching much golf. I chalked it up to waning interest for not having as much opportunity to play as I used to. And then I thought about it and realized how fickle I am as a fan. In the days I was passionate about watching golf, Canada had some stars. Sandra Post was the first player living outside the US to gain an LPGA tour card (in 1968). Lori Kane, who was four at the time, later shone on the same tour. Mike Weir spent over 110 weeks in the top ten of the Official World Golf Rankings between 2001 and 2005, winning the prestigious green jacket of the Masters in 2003. All three were given The Order of Canada – we tend to honour our athletes after the fact. Stephen Ames has done very well on the men’s tour.

But Lori faltered and Mike became injured. Stephen deals with a bad back. No Canadian has stepped up to replace them. So I lost interest and seldom watch any more. Yep, fickle.

I’m not a huge fan of hockey. I’m not much enamoured of any contact sport and enjoy individual sports over team. Vancouver’s Canucks Hockey team was on top of the world last year and were expected to win the coveted Stanley Cup. The whole country was on board and I right with them, glued to the television throughout the entire finals. After all, hockey is our national sport and in recent years the cup has resided in the US. Lord Stanley would not be amused. Then the ‘Nucks lost in the final game and we rioted in the streets. Yes, we did, we who did not do such a thing. We were shamed and had to take a good long hard look at ourselves. Lord Stanley must have turned over in his grave. We made it to the finals this year but lost in the first round to the LA Kings, who went on to win the Cup. I did not watch a single game. Fickle.

I have watched tennis off and on all my life, though we never really had any Canadian stars to get excited about. Then last year a young Canadian burst onto the scene. Milos Raonic is twenty one, six foot five and has the best serve in men’s tennis right now. He jumped from #156 in the rankings at the start of 2011 to #37 a month later, reaching #31 in November. He continues to shine, rising to #21 this year. He was featured in the New York Times recently and has earned the nickname ‘Rocket Raonic’. Heady stuff. Vasek Pospisil, who grew up in my last hometown of Vernon and now resides in my current home of Vancouver, continues to make his way up the charts and was #95 earlier in the year. Two women players qualified for Wimbledon. To top it off, our former best men’s singles player has resided at #1 in doubles off and on for several years with different partners from around the world.

Milos Raonic

I have spent more hours this week than I care to admit watching the Wimbledon matches – and that’s just the start. There are thirteen days of Wimbledon, the granddaddy of them all and the only major still played on grass. Yesterday Raonic lost in a heartbreaker, our last Canadian hope at the tournament. My dream of a matchup in the finals between Raonic and Roger Federer of Switzerland was squashed. The Fed is the best in the sport at present and beautiful to watch. Tennis is a finesse game and Roger plays it like a dance. He could make history if he wins, tying William Renshaw who last won in 1889 and Pete Sampras who won his seventh ‘gentleman’s’ title in 2000. I would have been torn between Roger and Raonic had my dream match been realized, but I’m pretty sure it would be Roger to whom I gave my heart. Though it would have been his first major win, Raonic is young – plenty of time to make his own big mark on tennis if he remains healthy – and I feel certain he will. Roger is considered ‘ageing’ at thirty. He already holds several titles, but each one now he could topple will take tremendous effort.

Following the match in which Raonic lost, Roger played an epic of his own. Down two sets out of five, he had to dig deep to find the strength to win. In his stellar career he had seldom faced such odds. Heart pounding, I cheered him on for two more hours. It was getting dark in Jolly Olde and the stadium roof was closed, making it an intimate affair. Every hit of the racket reverberated. He took the next set handily. The following set went to a heart-stopping tie break. Every fan in the stands was holding their breath, wondering if he could pull off a miracle. He pulled out several smashing serves to take it, and they were tied 2-2. It was still an uphill climb. In the end his opponent tired and Roger took the match.

Even if Roger had not won, I would have continued to follow the tourney to the end. I still have other players who remain faves. Perhaps I’m not that fickle after all.

But I won’t be following as closely as I might have. There are two other sports in which Canada has shone this year. Earlier this spring, Canadian-owned horse ‘I’ll Have Another’ won the Kentucky Derby, followed by the Preakness. Everyone was cheering for him to win the Belmont, making an historic Triple Crown. Alas, he had to be pulled just before the race with a tendon injury and now stands at stud. But the story of the jockey who rode him was just as inspiring. Mario Gutierrez was a poor Mexican kid trying to make a name for himself in the dust of Mexico. Through a series of serendipity he found himself in Canada riding at a minor-league racecourse, and was subsequently lured to race at the Santa Anita course in Southern California. He is now an international star. But Gutierrez considers the folks at our little Vancouver track his second family and we have embraced him as one of our own. He has been back a couple of times since the big races. He’ll be here this Sunday. I think I might just go watch him ride.

In May, Canadians found themselves rooting for a cyclist at The Giro, a grueling road bicycle race second only to the Tour de France in the Grand Tours, the Triple Crown of Cycling. As the days went on we were surprised to see a Canadian in the hunt. Road bicycle races are near to impossible to watch and the Giro takes over three weeks to complete. A pink jersey (maglia rosa) is awarded to the overall leader at each stage and stays with him until another rider takes over the lead. Ryder Hesjedal of Victoria BC, a former mountain biker riding a Canadian-made bike, took the lead at the 7^th stage and we started to pay attention. But it’s a long race and though we were proud of his accomplishment we knew it didn’t mean all that much; Hesjedal was the fourth to receive the pink jersey of the race thus far. Sure enough, a fifth rosa was awarded to a Spanish rider at the 10^th stage. Hesjedal took it from him again at the 15^th stage, only to lose it to the Spaniard for the remaining five stages. Then came the 21^st and final stage. Hesjedal had not won any individual stage and further, only once had the race been won by any other than the holder of the pink jersey from the previous stage. By all accounts he was not expected to win. But still we were fastened to our seats as the racers completed the final stage. Hesjedal was behind the lead by only thirty one seconds. Each time trial was a nail biter. As Hesjedal turned the corner to the finish line, he found the strength to spurt forward. The Maglia Rosa was awarded to a Canadian for the first time. Lance Armstrong tweeted: ‘gotta love it when the best man wins’, and a new hero was born. You can bet I will be watching the Tour de France more closely this year.

As if I won’t have watched enough sports by then, several of the athletes listed above will be representing Canada at the London Olympics in their respective sports.

I sometimes wonder what it is about sport that has me so captivated. I think it may be the passion with which individuals work so hard to achieve their dreams, overcoming their hurts and digging deep for mental focus under pressure, which inspires me.

Whatever it is, I’d best get that PVR emptied!

Poetic Justice: A Research-phobe Has to Research

by Guest Author Alicia Rasley

Thanks to Lee for inviting me to guest-post!  It’s great to be able to talk to you all about writing Regencies and historical fiction.

I write Regencies and read them, too.  So it’s almost like I’m my own focus group.  That is, when I’m writing, I consult the Regency reader in me, the one who has decided tastes and expectations.  That helps me decide what to do next.  And I need that, for I’m sort of a heretical Regency writer.  I don’t really like to do research.

You see, I’m not actually all that big on history.  I’m mostly a relationship writer.  I like to write about people falling in love, and I started writing in the Regency period because falling in love then was so complicated.  In the early 19th Century Britain, most aristocratic marriages were more like business contracts than romances.

But we know even then young people (and some not-so-young) longed for love. We can see it in the poetry of Keats and Byron, and in the novels of Austen and Scott.  In order to understand how love could blossom in such a cold climate for it, I had to read and study the period.  And along the way, as I read about famous marriages of the day and courtship customs, I picked up enough Regency lore that I at least knew what to look for as I wrote—who the Almack patronesses were, which countries were allied with Napoleon, what the names were of all the Regent’s many siblings.  That satisfied that nagging Regency reader within, who wanted authentic period detail along with the scandalous waltzes and discreet but sexy kisses on the inner wrist.  (You can tell I’m a Regency reader.  Just the thought of that kind of kiss makes me weak in my knees!)

Each book posed its own particular research requirements.  The Reluctant Lady has a naval hero for a romantic hero, so I had to learn all about—or at least a little about—ships and the naval war.  Royal Renegade was the knottiest book for research, as it involves vast geo-political intrigues and Wellington’s Peninsular progress.  (The heroine is a Russian princess sent to cement the alliance with a marriage to the Regent’s brother.)  And I’m not all that interested in war, but heck, it’s not so hard for someone so entranced by Regency-era military uniforms to figure out if her hero’s scarlet coat would make him a target at the battle of Ciudad Rodrigo.

Usually then, I practiced “just in time” research—studying up on whatever was needed to answer a pressing question in my book.  But then came Poetic Justice.  This was the only book that actually centers on a historical question.  See, I knew I wanted to write “Captain Dryden’s story.”  He was a secondary character in Royal Renegade, the hero’s bastard brother, and I could just tell he needed his own love story.  For various reasons (I needed the war over and the seas open), I set it six years after the original book, and when I considered what the “now-Dryden” would be interested in, I just knew he’d become a rare-books dealer.  (Don’t ask me why.  I just knew.)  And as a good Englishman, he had a particular love for Shakespeare, another “jumped-up” tradesman made good without ever being accepted by high society.

So here came the question—How could I get Shakespeare in here, considering that he’d been dead 200 years?  Fortunately, I have a friend, Lynn Kerstan, (and a book we wrote together, Gwen’s Ghost) who studied Shakespeare in graduate school and even handled some of the First Folios of Shakespeare’s plays.  I told her I thought maybe the plot should center on a forged Folio, but she pointed out that in the Regency time, there were still hundreds of First Folios and most were right there in England.  There wouldn’t be much reason to forge them, as they could (then) be gotten cheap.  “What was really cool,” she said casually, “is that lost play they discovered around 1830.”

Well, I am not, as I said, a great one for research, but I know a cue from heaven (or its earthly representative, my friend) when I hear it.  I hied off and began to research this lost play, and found myself soon descended into the murky depths of Shakespeare denialism.  (You know, that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, etc.)  This play, it turns out, is solid evidence that the man called Shakespeare wrote the scene in this play attributed to him.  (It was a joint effort by a group of playwrights.)  It’s in his handwriting, and many graphologists have compared this manuscript to the signatures on his will and other scraps of Shakespeare penmanship and pronounced them all from the same hand.

I just knew I wanted Captain Dryden to get hold of that manuscript and—well, surely along the way he had to fall in love, right?  So he needed a heroine, and heck, as long as I was doing all this research into old books, I decided I’d make that her passion, too.  Dryden is, after all, something of an intellectual, and he wouldn’t be interested in some ditzy heiress.  A well-read heiress, well, that might get his attention.

Of course, I had to make some adjustments, like having Dryden be the one who finds the manuscript and moving the date of discovery earlier a couple decades.  Fortunately, I learned enough about the first Shakespeare denier to be able to base my villain, Wiley, on him, though of course I had to make him much slimier.  But for more drama I had to invent a completely spurious secret rivalry with the Vatican librarian, complete with Borgia-style poison rings and hired assassins.  (And wouldn’t you know it, several readers have told me that they’d love a sequel where the murderous Vatican librarian—a priest, mind you—finds love and redemption.  No one, I must point out, wanted a sequel starring the Shakespeare-denier villain.)

Still, even after I’d sketched out the historical plot, I had the usual Regency research to do.  Back to “just in time!”  In any book, the author must make thousands of tiny decisions demanded by the plot.  In a Regency, that number is multiplied because so many little historical questions come up—did they have pencils at that point?  Was Vauxhall open in June?  When were knighthoods announced, and how?  Even the romance brought questions.  At what age could a girl marry without her guardian’s consent?  How and where would an importunate groom procure a special marriage license?  How much would that cost?  The Regency reader within me was demanding to know these things, so I had to scout them out to provide that air of authenticity my Shakespeare plot deserved.

(Not that historical accuracy was that big a priority for Shakespeare, but then again, he didn’t have Google to tell him that there is no seashore in Bohemia.)

Now I’ve started a new Regency romance.  I’m back to starting with the romance—two mature lovers, both widowed from passionate marriages and wary of loving again.  For some reason—don’t ask me why I do this to myself—I decided the hero is a physician, in order to make the romance with the countess heroine more scandalous.  What do I know about Regency medicine?  About as much as I knew about Shakespeare deniers and rare books, I’d say.  But by this time next month, I hope to write authentically about what doctors did before stethoscopes, anesthesia, and antibiotics, not to mention give the doctor and his new lady a second chance at love.

* * * * *

BIO:  Alicia Rasley is a RITA-award winning author of Regencies and a Kindle bestseller in women’s fiction.  She teaches writing at two state colleges and in workshops across the country.  Rasley lives in Indiana with her husband, a retired attorney.  They have two sons, one in training to be a military officer, the other a technical assistant at a film production company.   She blogs about writing and editing at www.edittorrent.blogspot.com.  

Besides one more full-length Regency, Charity Begins At Home, that was not mentioned in her guest post, Alicia Rasley has written a women’s fiction novel called The Year She Fell, a drama of love, loss, family, and betrayal set in the mountains of West Virginia.

Also check out her nonfiction books about two different aspects of writing— The Story Within Plot Guide For Novelists, newly released as a Kindle book, and The Power of Point of View: Make Your Story Come To Life, published by Writers Digest Books. 

More information about all her books as well as her novellas and short stories can be found at her Amazon author page.

Sort of a Review

Deciding whether or not to review Poetic Justice by Alicia Rasley was a real dilemma because what I wanted to say was more about me and my reading tastes than it was about the book.  Our reviews on this blog are very personalized and is, I believe, one of their strong points.  But this time I’ve probably managed to cross the line and make it too personal; there’s way too much about me and not enough about the book.  Nevertheless, I’m still going to call it a review, so just think of it as a badly written review of a good book.

When I was younger, I mostly read romances, with my favorite being Regency romances.  This genre goes all the way back to Jane Austen, who wrote about ordinary people dealing with everyday life and relationships in the early 1800s in England.  Although her books became classics, the genre was popularized by Georgette Heyer, who updated the style enough to appeal to a much broader audience.  The main thing these two authors had in common, besides the setting and time period, was neither one wrote what I consider to be “regular romances.”  Although there were “romantic” elements in their stories, there was always so much more to them.  In fact, some of them, especially Georgette Heyer’s books, have so much plot going on that you could remove the romantic relationship entirely and still have a darn good story.

The publishing industry took note of this new popularity and jumped on the Regency bandwagon, unfortunately turning them into more traditional romances, with the main focus of the story being on the romantic relationship.  Plot became almost inconsequential as the stories focused more and more on the attraction between the hero and heroine.  For a while, I didn’t mind this because I was reading romances for the relationship story and for the “happily ever after” ending.

But now that’s not enough.  I want a real story to follow with something actually happening and with the relationship story in a supporting role.  So I hardly ever read romances any more.  But even though I now primarily read nonfiction, I do still fall back on romances when I’m in the mood for light reading because I haven’t found a new fiction genre to replace them.

That finally brings me to Alicia Rasley’s book, the full title being Poetic Justice, a Traditional Regency Romance (Regency Escapades).  It starts out, not in England, but in Greece where the hero (and I use that term loosely since he’s in the process of bilking a nun) is at a convent purchasing a valuable old religious book at a bargain price.  What makes this acquisition an even bigger coup for him is that he just barely beats out his rival from the Vatican, who was also on his way to buy the book.  My immediate reaction, after only a few pages, was this was definitely not a “traditional Regency romance” as the title claims.  But upon reflection, I have to modify that opinion.  It’s not like the Regency romances that I have become accustomed to reading.  This book is far more similar to the stories that Georgette Heyer wrote.  It has a plot.

My quibble is with calling it a romance.  If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re liable to be disappointed.  The flaws of both the hero and heroine in Poetic Justice go beyond the usual superficial pseudo-flaws, such as “steely eyes” or the ever popular “mouth that’s a little too wide for classical beauty.”  Their flaws are deeply rooted in their motivations and behavior.  And their strongest passions are reserved for books, of all things, not for each other.  Sure, the story has a typical romance ending, but it’s one that makes sense.  It’s completely believable that these two odd ducks, who don’t really fit in with the world they live in and who share a similar passion for old books, really will live happily ever after—in their own odd duck way. 

Another aspect of Poetic Justice that sets it apart is the way Alicia Rasley used historical events and details in it.  The complicated plot made it necessary for there to be a lot of information about old books, antiques, art, and the time period.  I have a bad habit of skimming over those kinds of details and descriptions, retaining only enough to follow the plot.  So it wasn’t until about halfway through this book when I became aware of how well she was using details to create a real feel for the time and place.

It happened when the hero and heroine were sneaking through the backstreets and alleys of London in the middle of the night.  The hero stops because there is a very dead, decaying dog in their path.  Instead of jumping over it as he probably would have done if he had been alone, he uses a stick to push it out of the way so that the heroine can pass by without brushing it, since it might be diseased.  (If that isn’t true gallantry, I don’t what is.)  The incident was so unexpected and vivid, it temporarily shook me out of the story and awakened the writer in me.  I was suddenly aware that the details had been so well done that even with my tendency to skim I had still been skulking right along with the two of them, seeing, hearing, and smelling everything they encountered.

After that, I was more conscious of just how well historical information and details were slipped into the story to support the plot and to give the reader a real sense of place.  Well, maybe not that conscious of it because I quickly got back into the story, but it was there in the back of my mind.  And I was so impressed by it that after I finished the book, I emailed Alicia and asked her if she would write a guest post for us about writing historical fiction.  I’m very happy to report that she agreed to do it.  So look for her post on Wednesday, June 27.

P.S.  I also recommend Gwen’s Ghost, a paranormal Regency, by Alicia Rasley and Lynn Kerstan, which not only has an interesting plot to follow but also does a great job of portraying character evolution in the hero.  He gradually changes during the course of the story in a very logical and convincing way.