by Sherry Thomas

I read romance sites and blogs and have for a long time. Becoming a publish author myself, however, means that from time to time I suddenly run into mentions of my name or my book when I’m least expecting it.

The first time it happened it nearly gave me a heart attack. I was reading this opinion piece on DearAuthor.com, about the truths and perceptions of historical accuracy, when I came across this paragraph:

Recently I read a book set in the late 1800s in England that referred to New York harbor on Independence Day (1885); werewolf (Old English); velvet lined handcuffs (pre 1900s). The book was historically accurate but because I have had a decade of reading almost solely Regency related romances, when I first started reading, I had to remind myself of the time period. The more immersed I became in the story, the less this became a concern.

That book, of course, was Private Arrangements. And what gave me the heart attack was that I’d never thought to check up on any of those things, especially Independence Day, which according to Jane’s research came into use only 8 years ahead of the time setting of the scene in which it was mentioned — I totally lucked out there.

And it’s not as if I don’t research. I’m constantly looking up words, phrases, people and constantly learning dates that surprise and sometimes dismay me.

For example, the word “dreadnought“. I had my heroine’s mother barge into a duke’s path like a dreadnought. I loved that simile: this refined, petite woman compared to a deadly hulk of steel. Alas, according to my dictionary, the term “dreadnought,” at least as referring to a class of battleships, did not come into use until 1906. There went my wonderful imagery.

Another place in my manuscript originally had a phrase that went “Mycenaean bronze, still-vivid relics of Minoan fresco, glass-encased fragments of papyrus from the time of the Pharaohs.” Upon further research, however, I discovered that the word Minoan was coined by British archaeologist Arthur Evans, who had yet to start his major digging on Crete when this particular scene took place. And I couldn’t find mentions of fresco being found lying around, so Minoan fresco became “seals from the island of Crete.”

And other examples abound. My first copyeditor caught quite a few of them. The phrase “femme fatale,” for example, isn’t old enough: it came into use only in 1912. The word “deadpan” is even newer: 1928.

The word “Marquis,” however, is too old. My copyeditor commented that in England, the word “Marquis” had been deprecated in favor of “Marquess” since the early 1800s. At which point I said “You’ve got to be @#%&ing kidding me!” and hauled myself to the university library. I went through several hundred pages of a Debrett’s Peerage from the turn-of-the-century, and sure enough, not a single marquis in sight.

So, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, now we have words that are too old, and words that are not old enough. What are words that are just right? Yep, we have a few of those too.

“Shag,” for example. I know a lot of people think Austin Powers but shag, as in to copulate with, dates from 1788. The word “bang,” as referring to sexual intercourse, dates from some years after the setting of my book. But I took a little artistic liberty as the dates given in dictionaries are when the words first make it into written media, and it’s safe to assume that vulgar slang words could hang around for years — especially in those more restrictive days — before showing up in print.

And of course, the word “fuck” is as old as dirt. And the first instance of it in known writing? A satirical poem composed partly in code, which when deciphered, reads “they [the Carmelite friars of Cambridge] are not in Heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely [a nearby town]“.

Hehehe.

CONTEST!

Comment on any of today’s four Sherry Thomas guest posts with whatever crazy thing you’ve done for love, or the strangest anachronism you’ve ever read in a book or seen in a movie, and you could win an ARC of Sherry’s 29 July 08 Bantam release, Delicious, and a Private Arrangements t-shirt! (Two prizes, one winner.)

Remember, only one entry per IP address is eligible for the prize, but you can comment as often as you wish. Winners will be chosen from comments entered between now and midnight tonight, 24 March, according to the blog’s timestamp (U.S. Central).

Good luck!

by Sherry Thomas 

Everything under the sun pushes somebody’s button; that is an inescapable fact of life. So I feel it is my moral duty to be up front with readers about elements of my book, Private Arrangements (Bantam, 25 Mar 08), that might cause consternation.  Here we go:

1. OMGWTFBBQ, she be not chaste during their long separation! Back in 2001, a kindly NYC agent, after she read the first incarnation of Private Arrangements, called me and told me that while she thought the book had potential, she couldn’t sell it the way it was. One, she said, the story should not be told from the very beginning, but from the point when the hero and the heroine meet again. Two, she said, the majority of romance readers live below the Mason-Dixon Line and would not tolerate a heroine who takes other lovers. I tend to take 50% of the advice people give me, so guess which 50% I did not take? Seriously, I live below the Mason-Dixon Line and I would have a problem with a woman who does not take a lover in ten years, when her husband has vowed never to return to her.

2. There be flashbacks. That’s what I get for taking the advice about starting the book in the middle. And here’s a funny story. I once e-mailed Susan Elizabeth Phillips in the hope that she’d read my book and give me a blurb. The classy lady that SEP is, she turned me down in a way that made me feel wonderful about myself. Some weeks later at RWA Nationals in Dallas, I sat in on one of her workshops. She expounded on things that would take a reader out of a book. And she stressed, “Do not, do not write a wonderful first chapter and then start your second chapter with ‘Ten years earlier.’

Guess what my second chapter starts with? Wrong. It’s “Eleven years earlier.” Ha!

3. Omgwtfbbq, he be not chaste during their long separation! You saw that one coming, didn’t you?

4. There be a virgin hero. His first time is with her and it is on-screen. So this book qualifies as a book with a virgin hero. (But it’s so totally hot! Come on, Sybil, testify!)

5. There be a secondary romance. I understand some readers want only the primary relationship. Believe me, I was in that camp, because I felt that the secondary h/h often usurped the primary h/h. But then I figured out that the secondary h/h cannot have a problem half as bad as the primary h/h, they should have a problem only about 1/6 the severity of the primary h/h’s. That way, it makes for a pleasant change of pace and a good way to insert a bit of humor and levity.

6. There be bodice ripping! Months ago, I googled Private Arrangements and came across it on a Swedish college student’s nightstand. She called it a “bodice rippern”(sic). I laughed uproariously. Then my husband said, “But she’s not wrong. There is some sort of ripping in your book.”  I stared at him, dumbfounded, until I recalled this one scene where the hero was, um, impatient with the heroine’s nightgown. My jaw dropped and a wail was heard throughout these lands, “Omigod, I write bodice rippers!”

I wanted seven reasons. Seven is the most fabulous number — there are seven days in a week, seven colors to the rainbow, and seven books in the Harry Potter series — where as six is kind of stand-offish and weird… But my h/h do not sleep with other peeps on screen, there is no skanky villain sex — not even a real villain anywhere in sight — and no overabundance of prior-book characters visiting. So I guess I’ll have to settle for six.

Now don’t say I didn’t warn ya!

CONTEST!

Comment on any of today’s four Sherry Thomas guest posts with whatever crazy thing you’ve done for love, or the wildest reason imaginable for not reading at all, and you could win an ARC of Sherry’s 29 July 08 Bantam release, Delicious, and a Private Arrangements t-shirt!  (Two prizes, one winner.)

Remember, only one entry per IP address is eligible for the prize, but you can comment as often as you wish.  Winners will be chosen from comments entered between now and midnight tonight, 24 March, according to the blog’s timestamp (U.S. Central).

Good luck!

For a fact, Private Arrangements is one of this year’s most talked about books. And while that normally means it’s awful, I’m happy to say that isn’t the case for this one. :)  And that, my dear friends, is why Sherry is guesting today because the book really is THAT GOOD.

It is always a fear of mine that when a book is built up so much, there is no way it can live up to the hype. So when I read this forever and a day ago I was beyond excited to realize it was great. And emailed her I think a year ago and said “you have to guest.”

Ten to one she thought I was insane, most likely she still does.

Stick around and meet the author. Learn a bit more about the book and than tomorrow when you buy it keep your receipt because I need it. Yep… more on that in a min. (And shit I knew I was forgetting to do something. GWEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

by Sherry Thomas

I want to be Lisa Kleypas when I grow up. Yeah, I know that’s not an original wish, but the woman is beautiful both on the inside and the outside, has legions of adoring fans, and, according to bloggers who’ve lunched with her, totally knows how to order wine.

(And look at this: according to the marketing campaign enumerated on the ARC of Blue-Eyed Devil, the first print run for the paperback edition of Sugar Daddy is 1.2 million copies. Holy @#$%! I hereby coin a new publication milestone: the Lisa Kleypas call, for when an author gets news that her print run will be 1,000,000+. Sooo, J.K Rowling, how did you feel when you received the Lisa Kleypas call?)

I have irrefutable evidence that Ms Kleypas’s destiny and mine are inextricably linked. How so you ask? Well, I won my copies of Sugar Daddy and Blue-Eyed Devil right here on this blog. Blue-Eyed Devil releases the same day as my debut Private Arrangements. And Sybil is hosting a book club for Sugar Daddy right after my guest stint, again on the day Private Arrangements hits the shelves. Okay so it was to coincide with Blue-Eyed Devil’s release but it’s destiny I tell you.

It so happens I have read Sugar Daddy. And I had a blast reading it. It was during some of my most desperate hours, with a deadline hanging over my head like a guillotine — and I said screw it and kept on reading. So herewith, seven reasons you should also read Sugar Daddy:

1. Liberty Jones, the heroine. She is the kind of friend and sister you would love more than life itself.

2. The voice. Ms. Kleypas has a great contemporary voice. I didn’t expect it, but I was entirely carried away by it.

3. The vivid writing. “The late afternoon sun was as round and white as a paper plate tacked to the sky.” “Her skin was webbed and furrowed, constantly shifting to accommodate her animated expressions.” “No dirt on earth sticks to you like East Texas red clay. The wind blows it over you and it tastes sweet in your mouth. As the clay lurks under a foot of light tan topsoil, it expands and shrinks so drastically that in the driest months Martian-colored cracks run across the ground.”

4. The trailer park. I admit I had my doubts about a story in which a significant portion is set in a trailer park. But it would turn out to be the setting I most enjoyed. Ms Kleypas made the community of Bluebonnet Ranch Mobile Home Estates — and by extension the nowhere town of Welcome, Texas — come alive.

5. Diana Jones, Liberty’s mother. In the hands of a less-skilled writer, she might come across as foolish and brittle. But depicted by Ms Kleypas’s astute and deeply humane pen, she is a complex and fully developed character and engaged all my sympathies.

6. Hardy Cates, especially in the Welcome years. There have been lots of heroes from the wrong side of the tracks. But young Hardy is something else. From the moment you meet him you know that there is something different and special about him, that he had the grits and brains and the drive to rise to the sky, and charm many a pair of pants off along his way. And there is absolutely nothing emo about him. Hooray!

7. Ms Kleypas herself. The best reading experience, for me, is a kind of communion between the author and the reader, whereby two possibly very different sets of outlooks and opinions and experiences somehow meld into a single beautiful whole. And Ms Kleypas is the kind of author who does far better than coming half way to meet you. She brings such warmth and compassion to the story that it becomes easy for a reader (me) to let go of her cynicism and lose herself in the story, which is all any reader (me) wants.

I could easily come up with more reasons, but I will keep it at the mystical and elegant seven. And here’s to the inaugural success of the TGTBTU Book Club. Long may it prosper and bring great rejoicing to bloglandia. (And may I be the next guest if it works out!)

CONTEST!

Comment on any of today’s four Sherry Thomas guest posts with whatever crazy thing you’ve done for love, or give us another reason to read La Lisa, and you could win an ARC of Sherry’s 29 July 08 Bantam release, Delicious, and a Private Arrangements t-shirt!  (Two prizes, one winner.)

Remember, only one entry per IP address is eligible for the prize, but you can comment as often as you wish.  Winners will be chosen from comments entered between now and midnight tonight, 24 March, according to the blog’s timestamp (U.S. Central).

Good luck!

Sherry Thomas, author of Private Arrangements (Bantam, 25 Mar 08), is today’s Guest Author and she’s here to share several posts with TGTBTU’s readers.  So read on to learn more about this amazing author…

Learning English the Passionate Way
by Sherry Thomas

Some of you might know — Sybil, for instance, though I’m not sure whether she remembers such things — that English is not my native tongue. In fact I hardly ever spoke it during the first eighteen years of my life — the first thirteen couldn’t be helped, I was living in another country; the latter five, well, let’s just say I found American teenagers to be more alien than Martians and observed them from a distance with a mixture of astonishment and alarm.

But while in my teens I did not speak English in any noticeable quantities, I read a great deal of it. My bio tends to give the exaggerated impression — as bios are wont to do — that I learned English solely from reading romances. That was, of course, not strictly true, as I had a vocabulary of about 200 English words — likely less — when I got off the jumbo jet, not enough to read anything beyond little booklets provided by my English-as-Second-Language classes.

But I disdained those little booklets as a French gourmet disdained le Big Mac. I’d read thousand-page wuxia novels for breakfast back home, and here I was, stuck trying to decipher 10-page picture books about puppies.

So as soon as I could, I moved on to bigger and better things; and by bigger and better things, I mean those books with very colorful covers depicting a man and a woman in various stages of proximity, books that were stocked in K-Mart, Wal-Mart, the grocery stores, and the university bookstore that was a ten-minute bicycle ride from my new home (the married student dorm, since Mom was a grad student then.)

I still remember trying to decipher the back blurbs on some of those books with my very limited English. One book touted an “infamous pirate”—and left me scratching my head. I knew if you put “in” in front of another word, the resulting word meant the opposite of what the original word meant. So why would anyone care about a not-famous-at-all pirate?

Another book said it featured a governess. I got excited. I knew that a governor was the head of a state. And a governess was, of course, a woman governor. As I flipped through the first few pages, however, I became more and more confused. Since when was a governor given a small room in somebody’s house and expected to look after the children?

The first romance that I bought and brought home was Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers, when I was a few months short of fifteen. I still have it. A couple of days ago I flipped through it and its tonnage of adverbs rather struck me. Characters stared dourly, interposed lazily, and exploded violently. But you know what, the lack of finesse in the writing was one of the reasons it made perfect reading material for me — all those I-hate-you’s were easy to understand for someone whose grasp of the language was still shaky at best. And the histrionics kept me turning the pages.

I went on to read Lindsey, Devereux, and McNaught, though no one else gave my dictionary quite the workout Rogers did. It wasn’t obvious to me then, but in retrospect, I see that at eighteen I possessed the vocabulary of a Victorian old lady. It was perfectly slang-free, since I never talked to the kids at school, and remarkably old fashioned.

For example, I am almost sure that I didn’t know—or at least never used—the words “pee” and “poop” until after I’d had a baby of my own. “Dweeb”, “twerp”, “nerd”, were those even words? And all the infinite variety and splendor of the words and phrases that could be made out of “fuck?” They were Greek to me until I started reading blogs in 2003.

But I knew just about every synonym of ardor that could be found in a thesaurus. I knew that a marquess was ranked higher than an earl, who was ranked higher than a viscount. And I knew a thousand and one ways not to call a penis a penis.

And so…I became a historical romance writer!

CONTEST!

Comment on any of today’s four Sherry Thomas guest posts with whatever crazy thing you’ve done for love, and you could win an ARC of Sherry’s 29 July 08 Bantam release, Delicious, and a Private Arrangements t-shirt!  (Two prizes, one winner.)

Remember, only one entry per IP address is eligible for the prize, but you can comment as often as you wish.  Winners will be chosen from comments entered between now and midnight tonight, 24 March, according to the blog’s timestamp (U.S. Central).

Good luck!