Oh, to Be Entitled

I've spent a delightful week at

Candice Hern's discussion board

, talking with the Bluestockings about

Your Scandalous Ways

& my heroes & heroines, & sharing my addiction to crumbly old books. It made a nice finish to long workdays of trying to beat the WIP into submission.

However, since the battle involved some forays into crumbly old books and buying a couple, that was fun, too.

What isn’t fun is coming up very soon, I think: Titling the WIP.

Oh, sure, I have a working title: Gag Me With a Spoon. This is my reaction to most of the titles I come up with.

I have a fallback title but I’m not in love with it.

Strangely enough, the majority of my books carry the titles I originally gave them. Along with most of the traditional Regencies, the first three Carsington books have my original titles. But Not Quite a Lady, like other of my books, involved considerable discussion with publishing professionals. Likewise Your Scandalous Ways, which started out as Not Quite a Hero.

The Lion’s Daughter started out as The Black Queen.

Captives of the Night started out as The Golden Prince.

Making titles isn’t easy. Sometimes you nail it the first time. Other times you end up with a title you don’t love but accept as the best you can do at the time.

We can’t just stick any title we want on a book. There are titles that might sound “too contemporary” or “too romantic suspense” or “too mystery” or “too historical fiction” or too Monty Python.

Then there are good words and bad words, and these change over time as well as from publisher to publisher.

Many of you can easily list the current popular title words: Scandal, Mistress, Secret...etc. Listing them is one of those entertaining book games, like Make Fun of the Cover.

Some publishers' titles are distinctive, even to me, a writer stupendously oblivious to publishing trends. At Harlequin, for instance, I noticed the interesting He/She titles: Virgin Slave, Barbarian King;Scandalous Lord, Rebellious Miss; Notorious Rake, Innocent Lady.

Thing is, I suspect that Innocent Slut, Lazy Duke is not going to go over really well with my publisher.

Sometimes authors are inspired. The perfect title comes as a bolt from the blue. Sometimes...not.

And sometimes readers (including me) think they can do better. Or at least funnier.

If you want to amuse yourself, here are some titles you can try renaming:

Gone With the Wind

Sense and Sensibility

Moby Dick

Frankenstein

Great Expectations

Originally posted at Word Wenches

--and as you all know by now, the untitled WIP became

Don't Tempt Me

.

Francesca's Tattoo

Fourth of July. U.S. Independence Day. I always wonder, What if King George III and his ministers had handled things differently? What if, over here, the pro-England side had prevailed over the dump-England side? What would we call ourselves? Maybe the U.S. and Canada would all be the same country. We wouldn’t be the U.S. Would we be Canada?

But what I wonder most is, Would Regency-era historical romances be as popular?

Since a great many of our readers are not in the U.S., I’m going to skip the Independence Day blog. Besides, I want to talk about tattoos.

In the course of my cybertour for Your Scandalous Ways, I’ve been asked more than once about Francesca’s tattoo. Readers emailed me about it, as well.

This was one of those topics I’d thought of addressing at some point in the story itself, but the right opportunity never appeared. This happens a lot. There are lots of little substories that don’t get told because it would disrupt the pacing to do so, and the topic doesn’t seem important enough for a detour...and I have only so much time to write a book as well as only so many pages.

So leaving out the story of Francesca’s tattoo was an artistic decision. It bothered me a little at first, but the more I thought about it, the less inclined I was to try to wedge it into the story. I figured this could be one of those “make up your own story” things. Like, “Make up your own story about what happens to Francesca and James after the end of the book.”

Let me start out by saying that anyone who wants to imagine Francesca has one of those henna tattoos that wear off after a few weeks should feel free to go on seeing it that way. It’s a great concept.

Here’s what was in my mind: Tattoos were unheard of among the upper classes in Francesca's day. Edward VII got one when he was Prince of Wales--but that was almost half a century later. Tattoos in Francesca’s time were not respectable, absolutely not for ladies. They were for sailors and criminals and savages. So one element of Francesca’s tattoo is shock value--and that’s clear in the scene at the opera. Even James, who’s seen it all, is shocked to see it. After all, she may be a courtesan, but she’s a lady by birth.

Where did she get it? By Francesca’s time there were professional tattoo artists in major ports, to accommodate the sailors. I imagined that by this time there must be at least one professional tattoo artist in big, cosmopolitan cities like London and Paris. I envisioned her getting her tattoo in Paris, as an act of defiance and a permanent symbol of her having turned her back on respectability.

I chose a serpent partly because of the Cleopatra-asp association. Both Byron and James Cordier associate Francesca's unusual looks with an Egyptian goddess or queen. I envisioned the kind of snakes one sees in Egyptian art and hieroglyphs. Too, given the tools available, a simpler tattoo, say, from a hieroglyph, seemed to make the most sense.

One reader suggested a Garden of Eden connection. That works well, too, given it’s her job to tempt men.

Another thing I considered was the pain and the risk. They used sewing needles and rubbed in the ink. I have no doubt it was a great deal more painful than today’s tattoos and of course the risk of infection was much higher...in a time when there were no antibiotics. Again, this says something about Francesca’s character, her inner toughness, her daring--and the ferocity of her anger with the world that rejected her and which she, symbolically, rejects when she gets her tattoo.

One reader asked why the tattoo doesn’t appear on the cover. Covers are painted long before the book is finished, and they're usually based on the story outline, rather than actual chapters. I did not mention the snake tattoo in the outline (one doesn't go into this much detail). The covers are meant to appeal to a broad audience, and Avon has done a great job, I think, in making my recent covers very beautiful and apt. I also suspect that, given the genre and the fact that not everyone likes tattoos, it would have been left out of the picture, even if I'd made prominent mention of it in the outline.

Originally posted at Word Wenches.

Your Scandalous Ways: The Interview Part Due

An Interview with Wench Loretta Chase

by Susan/Miranda

Welcome to the second part of our release-celebration-interview for Your Scandalous Ways by Wench Loretta Chase, NOW in stores! Today Loretta answers questions about Lord Byron, writing dangerous characters, and the magic of setting a story in Venice. If this still isn't enough about this marvelous book, check out Loretta's new YouTube clips. And please look for Your Scandalous Ways in bookstores everywhere.

Susan/Miranda: There’s a lot of your trademark humor in this book. Some of the bantering between James and Francesca is laugh-out-loud funny, even as it manages simultaneously to be very sexy. Yet this is, in many ways, a “dark” story. How did you decide to use humor the way you did?

Loretta: Completely dark isn’t me. I can go for only so long with a straight face. One thing--among so many--that I loved about writing this story was all the risqué jokes and double entendres the women as well as the men could indulge in. That’s part of my emphasis on giving Francesca tremendous joie de vivre--so that my readers as well as my hero could understand why men throw away fortunes on her.

Susan/Miranda: Lord Byron was another writer who fell in love with Venice, and of course he leaves his mark on YSW. In addition to being an acquaintance of Francesca’s, you’ve chosen to use quotes from his poems as subheads to each chapter. How did he influence you? How did you keep him from hijacking your book?

Loretta: Byron is--as he always was--about impossible to keep under control, even though he’s been dead for nearly 200 years. His voice is so powerful, it comes through even in the dullest biographies, and it simply vibrates in his letters and journals as well as his poetry. So I made him the Narrator, in a way. The Byron quotations help paint the picture and comment on the action and set the mood. I didn’t exactly channel him, but I found his work gave me a strong sense of place and time and a certain view of the characters.

Susan/Miranda: Gambling, drinking, masked identities, and general all-around excess in a fairy-tale environment made early 19th century Venice the equivalent of modern-day Vegas. Or, as Byron notes in one of your many quotations from Don Juan: “What men call gallantry, and gods adultery/Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.” Why are James and Francesca so at home in such a place?

Loretta: They’re both rebellious souls who prize their personal freedom. The cities of the Continent tended to be a little more tolerant of these characteristics than was London’s Beau Monde. Today, except in certain circles, a woman over 21 who’s had a lover or two or three doesn’t raise eyebrows. A divorced woman is not automatically deemed a ho. To an extent, this was the case in Continental Europe in Byron’s time. The upper classes there did the same as the English did--but some Europeans tended to be more open about it and more open-minded. In Venice, the most tolerant of cities, Francesca is simply a divorced woman. And if she has a lover who showers her with nice jewelry--well, then, so do other respectable women.

Susan/Miranda: Plasterwork putti make an intriguing appearance in Your Scandalous Ways. Would you like to discuss them further here for the WordWenches?

Loretta: We’ve all seen those children we call Cupids and cherubs. What I didn’t realize was how much property they covered--literally--in Venice. My model for certain rooms of Francesca’s house came from the Palazzo Albrizzi, whose plasterwork is famous. I loved it because, in a city abounding in gorgeous artistic excess, it was so totally over the top. The ballroom, which I adapted to become Francesca’s Putti Inferno, is described thus in Venetian Palazzi, “The ceiling is completely covered with a closely-folded velarium [basically, this looks like drapery] of stucco supported by twenty-eight winged putti and by four male figures arranged like caryatids at its four corners." Remember, these are not painted on. These are 3D figures in plaster. Here among the glittering folk you’ll find some pix of the palazzo, but not, alas, of the ballroom’s putti. Venetian Palazzi does have beautiful interiors, as do a number of other books on these palaces. Katherine Shaw's photos will give you an idea of these interiors.

Susan/Miranda: The palazzi in YSW are vividly described. Are they based on actual buildings in Venice, or a blending of real places with your imagination?

Loretta: In writing a story, I need a strong sense of place, which meant spending a lot of time looking at pictures of Venetian buildings. The houses in the book are based on real ones, but I might take a room from one and put it into another, or set it in another part of Venice. I kept the layout fairly simple, though, sticking to the basic floor plan shown in Lauritzen’s Palaces of Venice. The Palazzo Albrizzi and the Ca' Rezzonico (more pix here) were the ones I used most frequently but there are bits and pieces of several palazzi throughout the story. (There's more on this topic on my blog Your Palazzo or Mine.)

Susan/Miranda: It’s clear you had a lot of fun writing this book. Will you be returning to Venice any time soon for another? What are you working on now?

Loretta: I fell totally in love with the setting, the characters, and the language--so much so that I started taking Italian lessons. My new book, however, is set in England--or so it seems at the moment. It’s early days yet, and things change. All I can say for certain is that the heroine is another scandalous woman, and she’s going to make the hero’s life very interesting.

Originally posted at Word Wenches.