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

by Mary Jo Maggie Robinson has visited the Word Wenches before to talk about her delightfully original historical romances. Now she's turned to murder! Her first Lady Adelaide mystery, Nobody's Sweetheart Now, has just been released, so I've inveigled Maggie to visit us and talk about this new direction. MJP: Welcome back to the Word Wenches, Maggie! Could you give a bit of information on your background and how you got into writing? MR: I was an English major in college a thousand years ago (even in the English honor society, LOL), but didn’t get around to writing seriously until... Continue reading

by Mary Jo In a perfect world, every book would have a perfect harmony of story, title, and cover. Of course the world isn't perfect, even with a book named One Perfect Rose. It's often difficult to recall how I've come up with a story, but I actually remember the origin of the plot for OPR. I had been writing my Fallen Angels series, which was built around four men who had attended Eton and became close as brothers because they all needed a family. Other friends appeared so the series got longer as more intriguing men appeared on the... Continue reading

by Mary Jo I've got an old mule and her name is Sal, Fifteen years on the Erie Canal! She's a good old worker and a good old pal, Fifteen years on the Erie Canal! We've hauled some barges in our day, Filled with lumber, coal, and hay, And every inch of the way I (we) know, From Albany to Buffalo! Did you grow up singing this Erie Canal work song, usually known as "Low Bridge?" Or do I know it because the Erie Canal was a part of my childhood? I grew up in Western New York in the... Continue reading

by Mary Jo This is definitely my year for islands! In July, I visited Orkney and Shetland , and now we're back from a shorter, more low key New England cruise. (I took the picture above on Block Island.) We were traveling on American Cruise Lines, a small ship cruising company that specializes in American waters, from the coast of New England to Southern rivers, the Mississippi, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. We've cruised on ACL once before, traveling from Baltimore to Charleston, SC on the IntraCoastal Waterway, and we had a fine time. Our ship, the American Star, held... Continue reading

by Mary Jo I've already blogged about the RNA conference in Leeds and our wonderful visit to Orkney. Now it's time for the last chapter of our journey: Shetland, the island group that is the farthest northern reach of the archipelago that is Great Britain. The islands are due west of Norway, and the ties between Norway and Shetland are ancient and deep. Shetland has over 100 islands, about 15 of which are inhabited. Like Orkney, Shetland was never a Celtic land, and the ancient language was Norn, which influences the present day dialect. Our fine driver/guide, Grant Redfern, said... Continue reading

By Mary Jo After the fun of the RNA conference, it was time for the tourist part of this trip, which meant flying to the far north of the UK: Orkney and even farther north, Shetland. Fellow Wench Pat Rice and I flew to Orkney from Manchester with our husbands The Mayhem Consultant (mine) and The IT Guy (Pat's.) The islands have been settled for at least 8500 years, first by various Neolithic groups, then by Norsemen in the 9th century CE. The Norwegian king pledged Orkney and Shetland as a temporary dowry for his daughter, Margaret of Denmark, but... Continue reading

by Mary Jo I love writers' conferences, and I've been to my share of them. The sight of so many introverts blossoming into temporary extroversion is delightful. Creativity and connections and chocolate are all much in evidence. I've met many of my best writer friends (and most of the Wenches) at writers' conferences. Which is why when Wench Nicola, currently president of the British professional romance writers' group, Romantic Novelists' Association, invited all interested Word Wenches to come to this year's annual RNA conference in Leeds, I jumped on it. (No, of course this had nothing to do with the... Continue reading

by Mary Jo Most countries of the world have national days that celebrate their identity. That usually usually means the day that independence was proclaimed, as in the US, or negotiated, as was the case in many countries that had been colonized like much of Africa. But there can be lots of variations. Hungary, for example, celebrates St. Stephen's Day. The United Kingdom doesn't exactly have a national day, though sometimes the Queen's Official Birthday the second weekend in June is treated as such. (Her birthday is actually April 21st, but the weather is better for speeches and parades in... Continue reading

by Mary Jo I'm not a major mystery reader. I'm not especially interested in puzzle solving, I want interesting, likable characters, and wit is always good. I absolutely do NOT want gory stories and high body counts. In short, I tend to like cozy mysteries if they're well written and have good characters. So every now and then I go on a cozy mystery binge with some of my favorite authors, so I thought I'd chat a bit about what I've been reading. Mrs. Pollifax The oldest series is Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax books, which started in the '70s and... Continue reading

by Mary Jo Apart from a vague recollection of the British protectorate called Bechuanaland becoming the independent nation of Botswana, the country never registered with me until I read the first #1 Ladies Detective Agency book by Alexander McCall Smith. The protagonist, Precious Ramotse, is a mature, "traditionally built" woman with a lot of common sense who solves small mysteries through her understanding of human nature. The series is now up to 18 books. More recently, Botswana has been mentioned in connection with Prince Harry of Wales , who loves the place, and reportedly it was where he and Meghan... Continue reading