Review: Jane-A-Day: 5 Year Journal: 365 Witticisms by Jane Austen

Jane-A-Day: 5 Year Journal: 365 Witticisms by Jane Austen by Potter Style
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have not yet completed the 5-year journey with this book, but I continue to find enjoyment every night. The daily quotes come not only from Austen's published works, but also from her letters and the letters of her family. After reading the quote and smiling at the memory or wisdom, I use the brief space as a "gratitude" journal to record the events, things and people for which I am grateful that day.
I don't often note it, but I am grateful for Jane-A-Day!

Like Regency romance? Try Shadow Love.  Handsome Codebreaker + Loyal Daughter + Wartime Intrigue = Romance!

View all my reviews

Writing Process Blog Tour - July Edition

Back in March, I hopped into the flow of a Monday Blog Tour answering an invitation from Ariella Moon and her post The Writing Process.  The Writing Process Blog Tour asks four questions of each writer who joins in, and today it's time for an update. At the end of my post you'll find the next "tagged" author. Advantage to you? You can follow this Tuesday Blog backwards and forwards to meet a lot of authors and learn about how this mystery called writing works. 

My thanks to Cindy K. Green for the invitation to "hop in".  Check out her answers to the Four Questions and learn more about her writing process. 

My Writing Process

What am I working on?

I'm finishing the final installment of SHADOW LOVE, a Regency historical romance. Bethany Hathaway tries to deal with the London Season, the fact that her mother accidentally shot a peer, and holding the peer's persistent and attractive brother, Alexander Grayson, at arm's length. The book is being published in installments, chapter by chapter. When the book is complete, it will be re-issued as an entire work. Serial publication is a new concept in romance, although it's popular in science fiction and fantasy.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?
My contemporary novels have been described as "delightful slices of life" and "uplifting", and my writing as "eloquent".  These novels feature a librarian in some way, in honor of my training and second profession. In all of my writing, I add the touch of the Spirit by exploring life's options. For many of us, the choice that lies before us is not between Good and Bad, but between Good and Best. There are plenty of things we can do, judged as Good by society, our parents, our church, our peers. But what is Best for us? What will match our talents and joy to the world's needs? I like exploring that kind of choice through my writing.

Why do I write what I write?

I write sweet romance (little descriptive sex or violence) because I like the tension that builds between people who are caught in social or life situations that keep them apart without the complicating layer of physical love. Elinor's pulsing emotions under the surface in Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" are what I want to reproduce. Other than that, I write what I write when a subject, a character, a scene or a setting grabs me and won't let go. Elsewhere in this blog, you can read how that happened for each of my books.

How does my writing process work?

I start with what grabs me, as I said above, and usually one or two scenes form in my mind.  I'll write those down. After that, I'm a planner. I create character sketches for the hero and heroine using a template that I've drawn from several sources. Those sketches are full-blown biographies, so I'm already doing research as I go. Then I start plotting. I have a couple of plot tools that I use. There's a Conflict Grid and the Book in a Month system by Victoria Lynn Schmidt that help with story line. Finally I create a plot grid using a software program called Writer's Blocks which allows me to keep scenes, settings and timeline all in sync. I write the first draft in one long gulp, usually over a month. Then after another round of research and plotting, I begin rewriting and editing, rewriting and editing, each time looking at a different piece of the novel, such as dialogue or repeated words. Then it's ready to send out to my core of first readers. Whew! Every step of this journey strengthens my writing and the story. You get to enjoy the results!

Fellow Travelers on the Blog Hop

Cindy K. Green is an award-winning author of more than 10 titles both in print and out of print. She's a fellow member of the Heart of Carolina RWA chapter here in North Carolina  A previous middle school history and English teacher, she now writes Inspirational Christian and Sweet Fiction for Adults and Young Adults. 

Next Tuesday, July 29th,  join Lynne Stringer, for your next stop on the Writing Process World Hop. Lynne has been passionate about writing all her life. She wrote her debut Young Adult sci-fi romance novel, THE HEIR, in 2010. THE HEIR is the first book in the Verindon trilogy and has now been joined by THE CROWN and THE REIGN.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas: The Making of Shadow Love

Regency England, January 1815. Napoleon has been captured, and the country explodes into celebration. With her family’s finances in tatters, Bethany Hathaway understands that marriage proposals this London Season are critical for both herself and her sister. The influx of visitors to the city makes this the perfect time to enter the Marriage Mart. If only Bethany had not discovered a man’s body in her home. If only the evidence did not point to her mother as the accidental murderer. To Society’s festivities Bethany must now add protecting her family and shielding her heart from a wounded, persistent Viscount--the dead man’s brother.

I adore Regency Romance, especially the classic, Jane Austen-style. There's plenty of sparks arcing between characters, plenty of deep emotion hidden behind Society's manners and strictures. Tension and wit flash off the page. Shadow Love is my first journey into that world, and I'm publishing it independently as a Chapter-by-Chapter book.

How did this novel come to be? We start with my love of this romance novel subgenre and a fascination with all things related to history and manners of the period, including the American War of 1812, which Britain was fighting while trying to throttle Napoleon on the continent, and the Duchy of Warsaw, the surviving remnant of the Kingdom of Poland after Napoleon subdued it.

Being drawn to Napoleonic topics, let's jump first to my introduction in high school to the Modern Pentathlon, an Olympic event which requires the athlete to master five sports: pistol shooting, long distance running, swimming, equestrian jumping, and fencing. These were all skills needed for a courier of the Napoleonic-era armies of both France and Britain. An aside here, the Olympic event specifies that the horse used in the jumping contest be a horse unfamiliar to the rider. Like the intrepid war couriers whose horse might get shot from under them, the Olympic rider must accept a horse chosen for him by lot and guide it over a jumping course with only a little "getting-to-know-you" time.

Then mix in the wonderful books by Bernard Cromwell and the iTV episodes presenting the career of British rifleman Richard Sharpe (love Sean Bean!) and Richard's work for the intelligence agent, Michael Hogan.  Finally, add a PBS show on breaking the code of the Enigma machine during World War II and a brief mention that there was a group of code breakers who worked for Britain during the Napoleonic War.

Now I'm hooked. Who were these code breakers? How did they work? And then, as all writers will tell you, I'm off and riding the "What if...?" wave. What if my hero was a code breaker? What if he fought in the war? What if he were a courier? What if his brother was a courier? What if someone began hunting the British code breakers?

The main characters of Shadow Love, Bethany and Alex, the persistent Viscount, were part of another storyline which included twin girls, mistaken identities, and ill-conceived marriages. Take those characters and give them a different conflict, a new set of circumstances and Shadow Love is born.

Where do I get my ideas? From tugging on the line of some subject that holds my interest and let the ideas and images related to the subject bubble and simmer until they finally boil out into characters and plot. It took years before this story became clear. But it was well worth the wait!