By Mary Jo and the rest of the Wenchly Crew Has it really been thirteen years since we cautiously launched the Word Wenches blog? Indeed yes, and so much has changed in the world, in publishing, and in us. We've lost beloved Wench sisters Edith Layton and Jo Beverley, entered into new genres and new forms of publishing, and we've expanded to having Wenches from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US so we can truly say that the sun never sets on the Wench Empire! Here is the very first Word Wench blog post, also written by me. (I... Continue reading

by Mary Jo On Wednesday I talked a bit about museums I visited on my recent week long getaway in London, and they were great. Today I'm going to riff about the people and non-museum spaces, which was even more fun! (The very British shop window to the left was in the St. James area, about which more below.) A catalyst for the trip was the opportunity to take an interesting workshop, which I did and very interesting it was, but what made London special was the people. Firstly, I stayed with a writer friend at her home in Chelsea,... Continue reading

By Mary Jo I've always been an Anglophile. I'm not sure if it's my DNA or all the books I read with British settings and British authors. I remember being surprised in school when a world map showed me the actual location of the British Isles. So far north and so SMALL! But mighty in world history, and in my imagination. My interest in Britain and British history had a lot to do with living there for over two years in my 20s, when I was the art editor of a start up magazine about third World Development. I lived... Continue reading

by Mary Jo We Word Wenches love doing these posts because we always find new authors to try! Starting off with Pat Rice: One Plus One by JoJo Moyes I love the way romance has expanded into women’s fiction, and One Plus One by JoJo Moyes is a masterful example of how it’s done. It’s clear from the very first that we have a conflicted hero and heroine. Ed is owner of a software company about to go mega-huge. Jess is his housekeeper—and he doesn’t even know she exists because she cleans his vacation home, and he never takes vacations.... Continue reading

By Mary Jo Long term readers of the Word Wenches know that I look forward to the biennial show of the Baltimore Heritage Quilters Guild. I'm told they don't have annual shows because it takes time to create so many new quilts, which I totally believe because I could never do what they do! The long, narrow hanging at the left is the phases of the lunar eclipse of 2017. There are wonderful traditional quilts like traditional grannies used to make, but there are also many that are brilliant works of art intended for walls rather than beds. Clearly the... Continue reading

by Mary Jo I've already blogged about our cruise to Antarctica , but as I mentioned there, we visited other interesting places as well. (The picture above is from sailing into Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego.) A few highlights: Buenos Aires It was pleasant sunny summer in Argentina and Buenos Aires was beautiful--a city of trees and sweeping boulevards. One of the largest cities in Latin America and a major port, it's cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic and has been called the Paris of Latin America. Here is the view from the window of the hotel where we stayed for two nights.... Continue reading

by Mary Jo I'm delighted to welcome Karen Harper to the Word Wenches again! She is a wonderful, and wonderfully prolific, writer of historical novels, mysteries, and so much more, and she is here to tell us about her just released novel, American Duchess, the story of Consuelo Vanderbilt, which has been chosen by Women's Day Magazine as one of the 10 Most Anticipated Books of 2019. Over to you, Karen! “Everyone was calling it the wedding of the century. I was calling it the worst day of my life.” This quote is not from a tabloid article or scandal... Continue reading

by Mary Jo When you're in Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, a lot of things are said to be at the end of the world! The Mayhem Consultant and I have wanted to see Antarctica for decades, and now we have. Why Antarctica? Because there's something compelling and romantic about far distant places. Luckily, these days such places can be visited in comfort, which means a cruise ship rather than sled dogs and massive layers of protective clothing. Our cruise began and ended in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and there were a lot of sea days because... Continue reading

Three Good Things by Mary Jo Because of extreme busyness, I'm exercising the Word Wench prerogative of rerunning an older post--from 2006, our first year of blogging!--partly to fill this space, but also because it's a post I like, and good thoughts to make us feel better are never out of place. The original blog was written just before Christmas, while this rerun is shortly after the holidays. Stress, however, knows no boundaries! Enjoy this old post to which I've added some new pictures of cats and snow. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ There’s lots of warm fuzzy sentiment in the air just now,... Continue reading

by Mary Jo Christmas decorations are being packed away now, and that includes train gardens, which might be a custom unique to Baltimore. I was once told that they're done in Pittsburgh, an industrial city rather like Baltimore and not far away, but when I googled "train ," the only hits I got were for locations with them in the Baltimore area. Basically, train gardens are train sets on steroids. I'm told they began at firehouses, where the firefights often had time on their hands so at Christmas they would build elaborate train environments for people in the community to... Continue reading

by Mary Jo For the second of our Word Wench Christmastide posts, I wanted to tell you about a wonderful article on the history of the beoved Christmas carol Silent Night, which ran in the Baltimore Sun on Christmas Day. Written by Youngsuck Kim, a music professor at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, it commemorates the 200th anniversary of the song and starts with the lovely story from WWI when three armies in the trenches sang Silent Night in German, English, and French for a moment of Christmas peace. I knew that story, though not that a Scottish piper in the... Continue reading

By Mary Jo Eight authors collaborating on an anthology is not the simplest of projects, but we Wenches thought it would be fun to work together, and The Last Chance Christmas Ball (now on sale for a mere 99 cents!) was the result. Our Kensington editor, Alicia Condon, suggested we might do something like a holiday ball where our characters can meet and mingle. This sounded like a fine idea, so we agreed. We had no idea how much work it would be to integrate the stories into a larger framework! Jo Beverley created a wiki for us so we... Continue reading

by Mary Jo The Sound of Shattered Rainbows I don't spend enough time driving to be much of an audiobook listener, but I know a lot of romance fans love them, so ideally I'd like to have all my classic backlist titles available in audio for those who prefer the format. However, producing them myself is very expensive and after doing audio of The Bargain, Thunder and Roses, and Dancing on the Wind, I gave up doing them for a while. However, the market and the economics are continually changing, so I decided to give it another try, starting with... Continue reading

by Mary Jo Few authors can be credited with inventing a genre, but Georgette Heyer is one of them. Her witty and insightful novels set in early 19th century British society created an irresistible world that has been drawing in readers and writers for decades. I am one of them. My first novel, The Diabolical Baron, had a few hints of the writer I've developed into, but overall, it's so influenced by Georgette Heyer that I should probably pay royalties to the Heyer estate. <G> I cherish the discussions I've had with other Regency writers on Our First Heyer Novel.... Continue reading