Lauren Willig
I'm an eighteenth-century girl at heart. I wouldn't mind being set down in London in 1715, in the midst of all the drama of the Hanoverian succession.
If I stay in academia, I might end up going someplace random.
I'm not sure that teaching a Core course is necessarily the best introduction to teaching.
Ever since reading Jean Plaidy's 'Queen in Waiting,' I've felt deep admiration for Caroline of Ansbach.
Romance tends to be the whipping boy of genre fiction.
People who would never sneer at sci-fi and murder mysteries have no trouble damning the whole romance genre without reading one.
One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well.
I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels.
Iris Johansen's lovers weathered the sack of city states and the vagaries of the French Revolution; Judith McNaught's heroines endured amnesia, social ostracism and misunderstandings so big they deserved their own ZIP code.
I couldn't make myself write serious; I was surrounded by serious: in monographs, in articles, in my own dissertation prospectus, in the very earnest e-mails of students telling me just why that paper couldn't be in on time, cross their hearts and hope to get an A-minus.
Did I invent anything? I don't think so, not really. But if I've helped make history fun... then my work here is done.
There's a horrible stereotype of both the romance writer and the romance reader as somehow undereducated and unprofessional, when in fact there are a number of incredibly well-educated professional women who have chosen to leave their other careers and go into writing romance.
My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance.
I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.
I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.
I've had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn't a romance - with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader's expectations going into the story, and that's very hard to predict person to person.
When I was 6, a family friend gave me E.L. Konigsburg's 'A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver' and launched me on a full-blown Eleanor obsession. I wanted to ride off on Crusade, to launch a thousand troubadour songs, to marry a king - and then jilt him and marry another.
Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.'
As a friend once pointed out, the crotchety dowagers do tend to get all the best lines. That may be why I have so many of them in my books.
Say what you will about Queen Eleanor, she was a savvy, quick-witted woman who made her mark on history. And as the founder of the Courts of Love, what better patron monarch could there be for a romantic novelist?
My official field was Tudor-Stuart England; I also considered myself reasonably competent when it came to Renaissance and Reformation Europe.
My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.
I tend to navigate by indirection, meaning that most of the major things in my life have happened when I've been thinking about something else.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week... there's not much room for novels.
Every young girl wants to be a princess. Then, when you find a real-life one, it's very easy to imagine yourself in that role.
'Purple Plumeria' I dithered over for months and then wrote the whole thing between the beginning of July and end of August. The dithering and procrastination time was three times the writing times.
The minimum I need is six months to allow for dithering, procrastination and the research. The research times varies from book to book; some are faster because they're based off resources I have at my disposal.
When I'm in heavy-duty writing mode, there's something great about reading a series. Soothing, but not distracting too much.
Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.Collection: Book
There is, I have heard, a little thing called sunrise, in which the sun reverses the process we all viewed the night before. You might assume such a thing as mythical as those beasts that guard the corners of the earth, but I have it on the finest authority, and have, indeed, from time to time, regarded it with my own eyes.Collection: Eye
Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.Collection: Waiting
But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.Collection: Morning
Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.Collection: Morning
There's nothing so attractive as a blank slate. Take one attractive man, slap on a thick coat of daydream, and voila, the perfect man. With absolutely no resemblance to reality.Collection: Reality
It is a truth universally acknowledged that one only comes up with clever, cutting remarks long after the other party is happily slumbering away.Collection: Clever
They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.Collection: People
Why was it that cheering expressions were invariably so infuriating?Collection: Cheer
I know historians aren't supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie's Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation's organization look positively humdrum.Collection: Falling In Love
It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better.Collection: Battle
LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome: a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women.Collection: Disease
Amazing what the application of a knitting needle could do for one's manners.Collection: Knitting
Tell them I have the headache--no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious.Collection: Nice
They were close enough that he could feel the hurried beat of her heart. He could feel Charlotte's indecision in every word she didn't say and every move she didn't make. She was tense with uncertainty, quivering with irresolution. She might not be leaning into him, but she wasn't pulling away, either.Collection: Moving
The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.Collection: Speak English
It was lovely to see cynicism in one so young. It positively restored his faith in human nature.Collection: Lovely
I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.Collection: Beautiful
Miles was still mourning the loss of his Romantic Plan. 'There was going to be champagne, and oysters, and you' - he held out both hands as though shifting a piece of furniture - 'were going to be sitting there, and I was going to get down on one knee, and...and...Collection: Loss
Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.Collection: Cousin
Gentlemen do so appreciate a nicely trimmed décolletage.Collection: Appreciate