Saralee Etter: Holiday Traditions

Ahh, the holidays! Every year at this time, we travel several hours for an extended-family potluck dinner. It's great to see the kids growing up, and catch up on everybody's lives. Someone brings a turkey or ham; Aunt Joan makes her famous deviled eggs, and there are lots of side-dishes. I like to bring dessert—my chocolate cream pie usually gets rave reviews, which is nice to hear, but there are never any leftovers to take home.

So let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Traditional Regency romances are light and sweet, just perfect for curling up in a comfy chair with a cup of tea or cocoa by your side.

My traditional Regency romance, A Limited Engagement, begins at a dinner table. Not a holiday meal, just a family-style dinner at home. In a few hours, Miranda Luce will make her debut on stage, and she's a little bit nervous. Little does she know that she will soon meet a man who will change the direction of her life!

Miranda joined her brother-in-law Edward's acting troupe when her father's death left her penniless. She is ready to embark upon her new life as an actress. But after her stage debut, Edward is taken to debtor's prison. Miranda and her sister Mary have to find a way to pay his debt, or the theater will be closed down and they will lose everything.

Lord Justin Devereux needs a fiancée right away, so his uncle will give him access to his inheritance. But he doesn't want to get married, especially not to his aunt's protégée, a predatory little beauty named
Lettice Tenley.

So he hires Miranda to play the role of his betrothed. They have it all worked out: After her one-night appearance, his "fiancee" will be conveniently called to a distant sickbed, never to be seen again. Miranda will be able to pay her brother-in-law's debt, and Devereux will be free to carry out his dream of buying land far away from the brittle, unsatisfying London social scene. But when Justin hired Miranda, neither of them expected to fall in love….

I hope you enjoy reading Justin and Miranda's story as much as I enjoyed writing it. And I hope your holidays are full of all the love and laughter that make the season memorable.

I've heard so many good holiday stories from my friends. One woman made her "special recipe" every year for twenty years, even though it was a nuisance to make and she didn't really like to eat it, either. Finally, she told her sister-in-law the awful truth.

Shocked, her sis-in-law replied, "But we only asked for it because we thought you liked it!"

What traditions do you enjoy in your family? What are your most memorable recipes and events of the season?

Saralee Etter

Stories so charming and disarming, it's alarming!

A Limited Engagement
Cerridwen Press - Cotillion Regency romance
ISBN 978-1419911590

Maggie Jagger's Regency Debut

Every Midnight is my first book. I knew this book was odd, strange, to say the least. It shows the Regency world as it really was, with a syphilis epidemic raging.

Dare I say it is comedic in tone? Surely not! Who would dare write funny things about that? The humor is in the voice and the attitudes of the characters--or only in the mind of the author. Lizzie is afraid of catching syphilis because her mother died of the disease. She will do anything to make sure the man she is being forced to marry does not do wicked things with harlots and return to infect her. She insists on making a pact with him. Her offer of sex once a month is soundly rejected.

Lizzie held her head high and lied like a Felmont. “I shall never marry you if you insist on a mistress. As for your appetite for sin, I might consent to endure it occasionally. Once a month is all I offer. Surely you can live with that--it isn’t as if you find me the least bit attractive.”

Lizzie saw him try to quell his laughter as he signaled his refusal of her offer.

She slid into her chair before she spoke again. “Then once a week, if you are going to insist on being depraved.”

Poor Lizzie has to settle for every midnight, and she must pretend to love him during the day. Every midnight came back to haunt me as I wrote the book. Like Lizzie, I would cry, it can’t be midnight again! I began to wish she had insisted on once a year. The only person happy was the hero, who appeared behind my chair as I typed to remind me it was almost midnight. It made me very conscious that every day had to be filled with action and seduction, and some strange funny bits, before the next midnight loomed.

To my surprise, Every Midnight became a fictionwise.com bestseller. My publisher, New Concepts Publishing brought it out in print in October. I am thrilled to find my odd story about syphilis has been bought by so many readers. I hope they enjoyed it and didn’t just buy it to find out how weird I am.

My next book is a medieval called, Perfect Obedience. It will be a December release from New Concepts Publishing. I can only hope that the artist took no notice of any of my suggestions for the cover. To reassure the nervous reader, there is absolutely no mention of syphilis in Perfect Obedience. I am sure a little mild bondage is perfectly acceptable, isn’t it?

I return to the Regency for a few more books, with some characters from Every Midnight having stories of their own. If you have read Every Midnight--yes, I am writing about Angel and how he falls in love, and if he manages to lose his virginity.

Happy Reading, Maggie

Diane Gaston talks about Scandalizing the Ton

What would you do if the paparazzi were hounding you?

The last couple of years have thrust the paparazzi onto the front page again with their incessant hounding of celebrities like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Anna Nicole Smith. Even my fav actor, Gerard Butler, has been in the news lately for allegedly punching a paparazzi in the face. So, what would you do if the paparazzi were hounding you?

Scandalizing The Ton, my October 2008 release from Harlequin Historical, was inspired by this question. What would it be like for a proper Regency lady to be hounded by an 1800s version of the paparazzi?

Scandalizing the Ton tells the story of Lydia, Lady Wexin, whose husband's scandalous death has left her impoverished and at the mercy of the gossip-mongering press. They camp out on her doorstep and are whipped into a frenzy of speculation when they discover she is pregnant. Who is the father? One man knows. Adrian Pomroy, the Viscount Cavanley. But how can the once betrayed Lydia trust her baby's future and her own to the ton's foremost rake?

The Regency period (England 1810 to 1821, the time of Byron, Jane Austen, and the war with Napoleon, when George III went mad and his son was declared Prince Regent) was also a time when the news media loved to fuel their readers' love of gossip. The celebrities of the time were mostly members of the aristocracy and the convention at the time was to use initials instead of names. The Duchess of Devonshire (popular in the late 1700s and the subject of the film The Duchess) became "the Duchess of D—," Mrs. Fitzherbert (the Regent's secret, unlawful wife) became Mrs. F—tzh—t. Everyone knew who the initials represented.

This didn't entirely protect the press from charges of libel, however. The Hunt brothers, editors of The Examiner, went to prison because they wrote scathing criticisms of the Prince Regent, but Theodore Hook, editor of The John Bull, got away with blatant lies—about the Regent's enemies, that is. Like some of today's tabloids, truth wasn't an important element of the news stories, as you will see in Scandalizing the Ton.

The Regency even had its version of YouTube (see my book trailer on YouTube). Print shops did a brisk business selling caricatures of the beau monde. Caricaturists such as Gillray and Rowlandson depicted scandalous acts in satirical splendor.

Lydia and Adrian fall victim to the caricaturists as well as the Regency's version of the tabloid press. Can they rise above them and find their happy ending? Leave a comment and I'll select one of you at random to win a copy of Scandalizing the Ton.

What do you think of today's paparazzi? 'Fess up. Do you like to read about celebrities? What do you think it would be like to be pursued by paparazzi?

Scandalizing the Ton is on sale in bookstores through October and will remain available online afterwards, but don't delay. Get your copy now. There are easy order

links on my website.

Diana Gaston