Penultimate guest blog! I did a Q&A with Gerri Russell over at the Chatelaines blog today. I talk about my writing process, the embarrassing yet hilarious things I wrote in high school, and what I do in my free time. And I’m giving away another book in the comments. Here’s a sample:
GR: What influenced you to write about Regency England?
RL: I’ve always been a fan of romance in the comedy of manners tradition. Which mostly translates to “I love banter,” and Regency romance usually has plenty of that. I imprinted on the era early: my mother read me the complete works of Jane Austen in fifth grade, and a friend loaned me my first Georgette Heyer when I was thirteen. We made dozens of trips to the bookstore to buy Regency romances together over the next four years and even exchanged in-character letters between Regency debutante friends like the ones in Sorcery and Cecelia. (I’m sure they were mostly awful, but we thought they were brilliant and hilarious. I remember in one of our favorite scenes, her character’s hero opened his snuffbox with a delicate flick of his wrist–very common in old-skool Regencies–and accidentally spilled snuff all over her dress.) So it’s probably not surprising that it’s what I started writing. Plus, I think the clothes are sexy.
That “delicate flick of his wrist” thing was a running joke with us, actually. We had a whole series of them, but right now the only other one I can remember was we would say “Her bosom swelled” (another common sentence in old-skool Regency romances) and then make gestures like our breasts were exploding. And then laugh really hard. We were a sophisticated lot.
Tell me about an in-joke you and your friends had when you were a kid. Do you still think it’s funny?