After many years of leading the carefree life of the perpetual student, I’ve finally knuckled down and plunged into that last great American rite of passage: the Office Job. Having pressed my shirt, bought extra pairs of stockings (since the first few were sure to rip before I left the house) and set no fewer than three alarms, I thought I was all set for my new life as a bona fide working girl. Little did I know the number of missteps and minor kerfuffles that awaited me in the treacherous waters of the workaday world.

Now that I have a whole week and a half under my belt, here a few of the crucial lessons I’ve learnt:

–If you aim to leave the house at 8:00, the laws of time and space will conspire to ensure that you are still searching for your house keys/ cell phone/ left shoe at 8:15.

–Five minutes before you are due to leave for work is not a wise time to return that email to your best friend/ check your Amazon rankings/ read Access Romance All-A-Blog (see laws of time and space above).

–The commute that takes you forty-five minutes on a normal day will invariably expand to twice that if you have an 8:30 a.m. meeting.

–When the elevator light says it’s going up, it means it. It won’t change its mind. Not even if you jump.

–If you try to make it change its mind by jumping, the doors will open while you’re in mid-leap.

–No matter how hard or long you work, the moment you choose to check personal email is the moment your boss will choose to drop by your office.

–Make sure the lid on your coffee cup has been firmly pressed down before gesticulating. Failing that, carry stain remover. Lots of it.

–Coffee is meant to be a beverage, not a perfume (see coffee cup and gesticulation, above).

–Do not put off tasks till a more convenient time. There is no such thing as a More Convenient Time. It’s a myth, like El Dorado or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Perhaps someday some intrepid explorer will find it, but by then it will no longer be convenient.

–Yes, they really do expect you to come back and do this all again tomorrow.

On the plus side….

–Carrot cake makes an excellent breakfast food (the icing has no calories if consumed prior to nine a.m.).

–Ditto Halloween cupcakes.

–And Snickers bars.

–The longer your bus is stuck in traffic, the more novels you get to read.

–The office coffee may not taste particularly good, but it’s free.

–Paychecks are lovely things.

What woes and advice do you have to share from your experiences in the workforce?

All right, so perhaps it isn’t quite Halloween yet. But the displays of plastic pumpkins and light-up tombstones have been up in the drugstore for more than a month now, and I’ve drunk so many pumpkin spice lattes that I’m about to turn into a pumpkin. So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s officially Halloween Season.

I love Halloween. It isn’t just the pumpkin spice lattes (those came fairly late to the scene), or the fact that it’s the one time of the year you can buy whole bags of candy without the cashier giving you strange looks. It’s not even the getting to flounce about in public in a flowing gown and tiara—although that is a strong point in favor of the holiday. I have a long-standing love affair with ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night. Vampires, witches, tormented spirits… dim the lights, bring over that bag of candy, and I’m right there. It should be no surprise that, growing up, my favorite Sherlock Holmes story was “The Hound of the Baskervilles”— although it did come as something of a disappointment to discover that the ghostly apparitions had been perpetrated by a mortal hand.

As the days dim early to twilight, as the air grows crisp, and orange leaves eddy along the sidewalk beneath your feet, there’s nothing like hurrying home to a well-lit room and a good ghost story. Edith Wharton may be famed for her satires of Gilded Age mores, but “Mr. Jones”, her tale of a ghostly butler, still gives me chills. I grew up on Barbara Michaels’ tales of supernatural suspense, traveling with her heroines from Cornish castles to the coast of Maine as historical mysteries were unraveled and unquiet spirits laid to rest. Then, of course, there’s Shirley Jackson’s brilliant psychological take on the ghost story, The Haunting of Hillhouse. Without a single mutilated corpse, she produces the sorts of chills that special effects artists can only dream about. As for movies, you can’t beat The Uninvited, which combines my favorite elements—a storm-wracked cliff, an innocent young heroine, a warm-hearted housekeeper, a dashing hero, his pithy sister (I do like my heroes to have families), and a ghost who obligingly puts in increasingly alarming appearances. And, of course, a happy ending.

What are your favorite ghost stories? Do you have any good (i.e. wonderfully creepy) books or movies to recommend as Halloween season gets underway?

This year, I have an additional reason to love Halloween. The paperback of my second book, The Masque of the Black Tulip, will be making its appearance in stores on October 31st! I couldn’t think of a more auspicious day for it to appear– especially since Black Tulip is the only one of my books so far to boast a ghost of its own, the grandiloquently named Phantom Monk of Donwell Abbey. (A rather pompous spectre, he prefers to be addressed by his full title). In honor of the occasion, one poster will receive a beautiful new paperback of Black Tulip.

Happy (almost) Halloween!

I have an addiction. Well, I have many addictions—tea, romance novels, the scrumptious cupcakes they sell four blocks from my apartment—but the addiction of which I currently speak is an old and deep-seated one. BBC costume dramas. I can go cold turkey for whole months at a time, but flip past an episode of Sharpe or stick the first segment of that eight hour long Pride and Prejudice into the VCR, and that’s it. I’m a goner. It’s like that old potato commercial warning that once you pop, you can’t stop. One episode is never enough. I want more, more, more. It doesn’t matter if it’s two in the morning, I have to know how it’s going to turn out. We’ll ignore the fact that I know exactly how P&P turns out (and I’m pretty sure everyone else does, too), or that the ending hasn’t changed in all the fifteen times I’ve seen it. I still have to watch the blasted thing through to the end.

This is all a very roundabout way of explaining why this blog almost didn’t get written. You see, the other day, I received a package from Amazon. Always a dangerous thing, rather like those mysterious gifts that appear at the beginning of fairy tales, after which the heroine sets out on some long and desperate journey, aided by the acorn that contains a magic cloak or a feather that turns into the latest model flying carpet or whatever it was that set her off in the first place. My dangerous journey involves my couch and my DVD player. Within that package was twelve hours of self-imposed serfdom: the entire first season of The House of Eliott.

Does anyone else remember this series? It aired on Masterpiece Theatre way back when, before there was such a thing as DVD players. I watched it religiously every Sunday, aching to know whether the two sisters, Beatrice and Evangeline (unexpectedly left penniless by their scapegrace father, as all the best heroines are), would succeed in their dressmaking business in Roaring Twenties London, and whether Beatrice—like me, the older, blonder sister—would wind up with the dashing rogue about town, Jack. I had no idea whether it was as good as I remembered, but I was running out of items with which to bribe myself—and a bribed author is a productive author. Or, at least, that’s the theory. I promised myself an episode a night as reward for filling my writing quota. Um, right. Make that three episodes a night… and, no, I did not write three times my quota. All I can say is that Jack is just as dashing as I remembered and, by gad, he has to wind up with Beatrice or I will be one unhappy author. Not like I’m getting a little too into this or anything.

What is about series that exerts that fatal fascination? After my recent House of Eliott binge, I’ve compiled a little list of the strengths of the series format– just to prove that I was spending my time productively. 1) Long term character development. By episode nine, my two orphaned alter egos had grown and changed in ways that were foreseeable in the earlier episodes, but needed time and care to get them there. 2) Side characters and side plots. When you have an open-ended format, rather than a distinct beginning, middle and end, there’s more time for bit players and subplots. Which, when you think about it, feels rather more like real life, where characters and crises come and go in unexpected ways. 3) The chance to work through what happens after the happily ever after. Okay, I’ll admit it, I peeked at the back of the DVD box, and I know that a certain two characters do wind up together, but have to work through problems with their marriage, oh, around episode twenty or so. To tie back to what Julie wrote yesterday about romance novels versus real life, the single episode format provides less room for exploring the ups and downs that occur after the seemingly neat denouement provided by the exchange of a pair of I do’s.

Or maybe it’s just that when I really love a story, I can’t bear to see it end.

What do you think of series? Do you have any secret series addictions of your own (BBC or otherwise)? Do you enjoy the uncertainty and loose ends of an on-going drama, or do you prefer a more structured single story?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, a fresh pot of tea is brewing and Episode Ten awaits….

I’ve just begun writing a new book. Being a veteran author of three whole books, I’ve gotten to the point where I can recognize certain patterns (other people have been heard to employ the term neuroses, but I think I’ll stick with patterns here) that inevitably occur at the beginning of each new book.

The first stage is blinding euphoria. This will be the book that Makes My Career (careers can only be made in capital letters). Dialogue, motivations, those tender Oscar-winning moments—I’ve got it all. The entire story has unfurled in my head like a triumphal banner flying from the turret of a castle. Hell, I can write this sucker in a month! (Forget the fact that all my previous books have taken the better part of a year). High on the brilliance of my Best Idea Ever, I fling myself down on my desk chair—and find myself facing a blank screen.

Wait. How did that get there? Doesn’t it know that it’s supposed to be full of Brilliant Prose ™?

I stare at the blank screen. The blank screen stares back at me. It wins. I break eye contact first, and go to the fridge to find something to fuel my creativity. Because, really, what great writer has ever set quill to paper without first eating peanut butter from the jar? I’m sure Shakespeare would have eaten peanut butter from the jar if he had been in possession of both peanut butter and a jar. Would Shakespeare have had a jar? Even more intriguing, would Shakespeare have had peanuts? They’re obviously a New World comestible. Suddenly, I find myself consumed by a burning need to ascertain the availability of peanuts in London in the late sixteenth century. After all, I was a Renaissance Studies major in college. I’m supposed to know these sorts of things. I go and dig out my old notes on Raleigh’s journeys. Nothing on peanuts in there, but, hey, ol’ Raleigh was really pretty gullible when it came to dealing with those natives. Didn’t he realize they were pulling his leg half the time? No wonder James I put him in the Tower. He was probably trying to protect Raleigh from himself.

Three hours later, I’ve gotten sidetracked onto Elizabeth and Essex, but I still have no idea whether they had peanuts in London in 1600. More importantly, my screen is still blank. Obviously, the thing to do is read a novel. Reading someone else’s prose will inspire me with the pure, clear joy of storytelling and I will return to my keyboard with winged fingers. Or, I could become incredibly disheartened because everyone else knows how to write and I don’t, followed by curling up into a disgruntled lump on the couch. Guess which option I go with. Time for more peanut butter. Even better, I could buy more peanut butter. Everyone needs to eat, and grocery shopping is such a responsible, grown-up type activity… except that my fridge is already full. Damn. I could eat everything in it so I’ll have an excuse to go food shopping, but even in my book-panicked fog, I realize that that probably isn’t such a good idea.

I trudge reluctantly back to the computer and type a tentative word. The. The what? I don’t like it. It’s so indeterminate. And it’s such a cliché. Oh goodness, I’ve only written one word and I’m already being trite. When did I lose my ability to write? This is, in fact, the Worst Idea I’ve ever had. My characters make no sense. My plot line is as full of holes as old gym shorts. My book will suck. My career will be over. I’m going to have to practice law for the rest of my life.

Having done this three times already, I now know to keep the peanut butter jar at the ready and all the windows bolted shut. And when my mother and little sister respond to my moans with, “You say this every time,” I blithely reply, “I know.” And then I whine anyway. (Because if you can’t whine to your family, what’s a family for?). It may not be fun (especially not for my mother, sister, and the various friends who also have to listen to the ritual whine), but it’s become an inevitable part of the process. For some reason, each book needs to be inaugurated with a sacrificial period of elation and despair before I reach the point where I can simply sit down and write.

Do you have similar patterns in your own life? Rituals that simply must be observed before you can get down to serious work? Things you panic over even when you’ve completed them successfully ten times before?

On a completely unrelated note…. Just as I was writing this blog entry, I received word that my second book, The Masque of the Black Tulip, is up for a Quill Award! The Quills are the publishing world’s answer to the Oscars, complete with celebrity presenters, slinky gowns, and televised awards ceremony—and even after lots of jumping up and down and squealing, I still can’t believe I made it into the final five in Romance! Winners are picked by popular vote on www.quillsvote.com, and the televised awards ceremony airs October 28th on NBC. You can be sure that I’ll be blogging with the details in October—with lots of pictures! In honor of my fabulous Quill news, I’ll be giving away a copy of Black Tulip to one poster, selected at random.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog….

Reading Julie’s post yesterday started me thinking about early influences. We all have books from our formative years—Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, Frances Hodgson Burnett—which shape the way we look at the world and inform the sorts of characters and situations we employ in our own writing. Bedazzled by books, it’s easy to forget about those tales that precede our introduction to formal fiction: the nursery rhymes our mothers sang to us; the fairy tales that peopled our imaginations with princesses, dragons, and malicious gnomes; or, in my case, my very favorite childhood bedtime entertainment: family stories.

These weren’t your common garden variety “when I was your age I had to walk twenty miles to school while milking a herd of maddened cows” sorts of stories. My ancestors had a flair for drama and a notable dearth of common sense. Put the two together, and you have family stories that make “All My Children” look tame. They were constantly doing harebrained things like running off to America with nothing but a suit of dress clothes and a gold-headed cane. (That would be my great-grandfather, who got into a tiff with his father and decided to go off and sulk several thousand miles away—but neglected to pack or do any of those other things one generally does before transatlantic voyages. He just booked a first class cabin and hopped aboard in the clothes he was wearing at the time.) But my absolute favorite is my great-great-great-grandfather, Herman Karl Ludwig Maximilian von Willig. As my brother would say, lots of names, not a lot of smarts.

Picture it: 1848. The Austrian Empire seethes with incipient rebellion. Young Herman Karl Ludwig Maximilian, an incredibly unimportant officer in His Imperial Majesty’s army, is stationed just outside of Milan, happily eating his weight in pasta and admiring the pretty brass sheen on his buttons, when the Italian city explodes into anti-Austrian rebellion. A sensible man would have ridden hell for leather back to the Austrian border, which is what the rest of the regiment was doing. Not being the brightest bratwurst in the bunch, Herman decided to go the other way. He rode into Milan, right into the heart of the insurrection. With his Croatian batman trotting along behind him, he limped up and down the streets of Milan, knocking on doors, saying, “Hello. I’m an Austrian officer. Would you please take me in?” This did not make him popular. Unsurprisingly, someone shot him. Did this daunt Herman? Nein! Dripping blood, he kept on going door to door, only this time his line was, “Hello, I’m a wounded Austrian officer. Would you please take me in?” You have to give him points for perseverance.

Fortunately for Herman (and me), at the next house he tried, the door was opened by the daughter of the family, a Hungarian countess with a taste for romantic fiction and about as much common sense as Herman. Her father might be one of the instigators of the rebellion (he was a hard-boiled Hungarian nationalist, committed to the downfall of the Austrian imperial regime), but Sofia-Elisabeth took one look at the handsome Austrian officer drooping becomingly on her doorstep and thought, “Hmm, kind of cute.” Smuggling him up to her boudoir with the aid of a devoted servant (there’s always a devoted servant in these stories), she secreted him beneath a pile of petticoats. According to one of my great-aunts, that’s not all that happened beneath those petticoats. About nine months later, the happy couple (by then husband and wife, with the blessing of the Emperor, who cheerfully executed Sofia’s treasonous father and, in a nice touch, bestowed the Count’s estates upon her new husband—one can only hope that father and daughter had never been close) were delivered of a little bundle of joy. They named him Arturo, in honor of their Italian adventure. And they all lived happily ever after.

Well, sort of. Herman, being Herman, managed to run the estates into the ground, and wound up mortgaging anything that could be mortgaged. As for Arturo, he grew up to rival the magnificent foolishness of his father. But stories always sound much better with a happily ever after at the end—and I like to think that they were happy, at least for a while. And isn’t that as much as anyone can hope for?

With bedtime stories like these, I had very little choice but to become a writer of historical fiction. My dreams were peopled with ladies in petticoats and daft officers in gold-spangled uniforms with a tendency for riding in the wrong direction (sadly, that lack of direction has been handed down in the family from generation to generation—I’ve been known to get lost in my own room).

What are your favorite family stories? One poster, chosen at random, will receive a copy of my first book, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation.

One of these days I will actually get around to writing about writing, but today I’m a bit distracted. Tomorrow—as in tomorrow—I’ll be taking the New York Bar Exam, a whirlwind of two days of examination fun. For the uninitiated, the Bar Exam is, alas, nothing to do with spiritous liquors. Instead, it’s the qualifying exam to practice law in a given state, since the board of law examiners has very correctly determined that over three years of law school one learns very little about the actual practice of law, although a great deal about the fine art of sleeping while in an upright position at a desk.

Over the past few months, I’ve heard my fair share of exam horror stories: there’s the girl who gave birth in the middle of the exam (as far as I know, that shouldn’t be a problem for me); the man who went mad from the pressure and ran up and down the aisles of the Javitz Center announcing the Second Coming (no one seemed particularly interested, unless He appeared bearing exam answer sheets); and, of course, the inevitable boy who filled in all the answers to the multiple choice in the wrong bubbles. Then you have my mother, who has pointed out that she managed to pass the Bar Exam with a small, screaming child in tow. For the record, I don’t remember there being any screaming involved. But Mom flatly refuses to replace “small and screaming” with “utterly adorable.”

None of these test-taking nightmares can beat my favorite grad school exam horror story. In the history department, we finished up our first two years of course work with oral exams, which involved being grilled by four faculty members. In the middle is a ten minute break, where the department secretary brings in tea and cookies for the faculty members while you flee into the bathroom to bang your head against the wall (head banging is absolutely essential to the oral exam process). One year, the examinee made the traditional trip to the bathroom. He didn’t reappear. The faculty, having finished all the cookies, began to get curious. Then they began to get worried. A search of the bathroom yielded no clues. He had vanished, as completely as the cookies on the tray. Three hours later, the mysteriously disappearing historian called his advisor. Forget the bathroom; he wasn’t even in Cambridge. He’d gotten so stressed that when he walked out the door of that examination room, he just kept on going, right past the bathroom, down the hall, and out of the building. He climbed into his car and kept on driving until he hit New Hampshire.

No one has ever been able to explain why New Hampshire (it must have just seemed like a good idea at the time), but when I was studying for my orals, the first piece of advice I was given on how to pass was “Don’t drive to New Hampshire.”

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t know how to drive, because New Hampshire is looking pretty attractive right about now….

What are your worst exam horror stories?

I just moved. It wasn’t a particularly long move (just two states down the Northeast Corridor) or a particularly big one (the movers eyed me askance as they surveyed the sum of my goods and chattels: two side tables, a bed, a desk, and eighty-five boxes of books), but the process of adjusting to a new apartment has whetted my appreciation for all the simple things in life that really aren’t so simple at all. There are so many little things we take for granted until they’re just not there.

Take the mail, for example. We needn’t go into why I’m not getting mine (it would take far too long, and involve language inappropriate for a public post), but the sudden inaccessibility of the contents of my mailbox made me realize what an incredible thing it is that you can take a little piece of paper, scrawl an address across it in your sloppiest handwriting, stick it in a box, and nine out of ten times it will actually get where it’s supposed to go. That’s pretty amazing. When you multiply it by millions, it’s nothing short of mind-boggling. Then there are flush toilets, air conditioners, internet connections– hundreds of amenities that we take for granted so long as they work, and occasion much tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth when they don’t.

You can blame some of this on my Bar Exam review class. You know it’s bad when musing about the mechanics of the mail is preferable to memorizing applicable statutes of limitations. But it did occur to me, as I dozed off in Bar Review the other day, that being forced to stop and think about the amenities we take for granted is no bad thing for an author of historical novels. When we look at the weft of our lives, the fibres that make up the base of the fabric aren’t the big or unusual things, they’re the bits we don’t even notice: the automatic stop at the computer to check for new mail, the unthinking removal and replacement of toiletries in their accustomed spots as contact lenses go in or out, the click that activates the air conditioner.

That, I think, is the hardest part of writing historical fiction: recreating the patterns of daily life. Not the nights at Almack’s or the rides in Hyde Park or the tension-fraught outing to Vauxhall, but the sound of metal scraping the scuttle as the maid cleans out the coal dust or the feel of a porcelain handle beneath the heroine’s palm as she reaches for her morning chocolate, all things so commonplace that our heroine herself probably wouldn’t even notice them– unless they were missing. Like my mail. Um, not like I’m bitter or anything.

Of course, having found a commonplace, the breaking of it provides excellent scope for drama. Our heroine gropes for her morning chocolate. But it isn’t there. Why? Have the servants deserted the house, taking with them various valuables (including the chocolate pot) to make up for their unpaid back wages? Is the kitchen in a furor because the new Lord of Blackacre has suddenly appeared after ten years on the Continent, bringing with him an uppity French chef? Or is the heroine not in her own bed at all? Perhaps she’s been kidnapped… preferably by pirates. There are far too few pirate novels in the world today. I miss those.

That, however, is a topic for another post. Before I ramble on further, I should get back to work. I still have seventy-eight boxes of books to unpack….

Which everyday luxuries would you miss the most if they suddenly weren’t there?