Sandra Gulland's Blog, page 17

A historically dressed-up book club gives thumbs up to “Mistress of the Sun”

Tami Grondines, one of the Chapters/Indigo employees who gave editorial feedback on an early draft of The Shadow Queen, reported to HarperCollins Canada that Mistress of the Sun was “very well received” by her book club, and that it scored a “solid 9 out of 10.” :-) 

Some members of the book club dressed up!

I love that there are three editions of Mistress of the Sun in that snapshot. 

Here is Tami with The Shadow Queen, pointing to her name in the acknowledgements.

She wrote: ”… seeing the changes that Sandra made due to MY feedback was amazing and emotional.”

Thank you, Tami!  

Happy Mother’s Day … my newsletter

Happy Mother’s Day, one and all.

What a wonderful day I’ve had:

calls from daughter and son, Carrie and Chet

flowers!

lunch out with my husband Richard

a very long nap

garden puttering (five new plants in and watered)

And I sent out a newsletter: http://bit.ly/SGnewsMay2014

Now I’m going to curl up with Maeve Binchy. ;-) 

Reviews and cross-writing: not what you think

I’ve just made summary of links to some on-line reviews of The Shadow Queen. Have a peek. 

Additionally, there are wonderful reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Here is a quote from one review I like very much, by “Curtis” (otherwise known to me as @gariovich on Twitter): 

Athénaïs wields such power over the king that she is referred to as The Shadow Queen. Some may think that the title of this novel is a reference to this, but I would argue the title refers to Claudette. She is the true queen of the novel. She emerges from a life riddled with strife to one of self-determination.  In the end, it is Claudette who has emerged from the shadows of poverty and disadvantage to reign over her own destiny.

I especially like this because early reviews took exception to the title. Now reviewers are interpreting the title less literally, which is how it is intended. (I have written about the title here.)

A few review quotes:

JustOneMoreChapter.com: ”I adored The Shadow Queen right from the first page.” I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting Margaret, the reviewer, at one of my readings. 

A bookish affair: “My fellow historical fiction fans will eat it up!”

Trudy Morgan-Cole at Compulsive Overreader: “While the glimpses of court life are intriguing and, as always with Gulland, beautifully drawn, what really fascinated me in this book is the theatre world.” (I’ve been very pleased by the number of readers who love the theatre world of The Shadow Queen.) 

This post is going on too long … . As Mark Twain famously said, “If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

I learned today that in Jane Austen’s England, the receiver of the letter paid according to how many pages the letter was, as well as by how far it had travelled. People put a very great deal onto one page by “cross” writing.

Imagine writing a novel this way …  Actually, that rather fits. 

Happy Mother’s day, one and all. May there be the gift of time for reading in your day.  

Fun podcast interview with Tim Knox for “Interviewing Authors”

I very much enjoyed being interviewed about my work by Tim Knox for his series “Interviewing Authors.” (Here is the link to the recording.)

“Interviewing Authors is one of the Web’s premiere blog and podcast destinations that focuses on the process of creating, writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and selling an author’s work.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but Tim made me feel very much at ease and asked informed writerly questions. It was a fun chat. I love “shop talk.”

I invested in a funny-looking ball of a USB mike for it, thinking that I might like to make podcasts of my own.

(Ya, in my spare time? Well … I just might!)

You may read a print transcript of the interview here.

What you don’t see in the transcript is all the laughter. (Tim got a chuckle out of my brief bio: born in Miami, raised in California, aged in Canada.  I should have added, “like Cheddar.”)

 

Links, for those of you who are reading this on a non-hotlink site:

http://content.blubrry.com/interviewi...

http://interviewingauthors.com/sandra...

 

Voltaire multitasking … in a nightcap

Don’t you just love this? 

“Voltaire in his night shirt, putting on his trousers while dictating to his secretary, at his house in Ferney, France”; painting by Jean Hubert, 18th century. 

I especially love the silly nightcap Voltaire is wearing. 

Mad Men and the review swirl

I’m going to be brief here, because I want to watch “Mad Men.”  :-)

Too, I’ve been reading OVERWHELMED; Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte.

The cover says it all:

Leisure is important! 

But before I escape into the worlds of Don and Betty, I want to say that I’ve returned to writing (gearing down from promotion-land), and it’s such a pleasure. 

Also to mention that today was an excellent day for reviews of THE SHADOW QUEEN. 

Reading an issue of Renaissance, I came upon a glowing review. It’s not on-line, but here’s the concluding sentence:

This book is a treasure for any lover of literary historical fiction.

The second is from the Pittsburg Examiner, which concluded:

The Shadow Queen will prove to be one of the top historical fiction novels in 2014 because of interesting characters, a unique story, and such attention to detail and research. This is a walk back in time you don’t want to miss!

Of course I’m smiling!

Now to the on-going saga of Don and Betty …  

The challenge for historical novelists: sorting out common-law wives, mistresses, courtisans & shadow queens

Given the recent revelations about French President François Hollande’s personal life, I think future writers of historical fiction are fortunate. They will have so many details to go on, from photos of President Hollande arriving for a rendezvous on a scooter…

… to tweets sent by the former First Lady, his live-in mistress Valerie Trierweiler.

In writing biographical historical fiction that involves a public figure, it’s often difficult to discover how an intimate relationship evolves. 

While writing my newest novel, THE SHADOW QUEEN, it was easy enough to see how lovers met, but a little more difficult to sort out how, exactly, a more intimate relationship came about—for these lovers were all “in the family,” so to speak:

Athénaïs, Madame de Montespan (Mistress 2) was the good friend of Louise de la Vallière (Mistress 1)—or so Louise thought.

Madame de Maintenon (Mistress 3) worked for Athénaïs (Mistress 2), as governess of her children by the King. 

Claudette des Oeillets—heroine of THE SHADOW QUEEN who has a child by the King (rather a Mistress 3.5)—also worked for Athénaïs (Mistress 3) as her lady’s maid, and one has to presume that this arrangement was with Athénaïs’s approval. 

The Hollande family tree, however, will be as difficult for future historical novelists to sort out as in days of old, and in this respect I don’t envy them in the least. Ms Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former common-law wife, is the unmarried mother of his four children. Ms Trierweiler, his second partner, has three children by her second husband. That’s a family-menage of seven children—way too many to manage in a scene. 

Film actress Julie Gayet, the newest Other Woman, has two children by her first husband, but it’s up for grabs whether or not she will be moving into the Élysée Palace, the official residence of the President of the French Republic. If she does, the international Press, you can be sure, will be watching.

There is a general perception that it is not uncommon for French leaders to have a mistress. Is this, however, fair? In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, having a mistress was almost a requirement for a French, English, Spanish or German king. Understandably, in my view, given that royalty had to marry for political reasons, not love.

Louis XIV, the Sun King, was a rather monogamous adulterer: he usually had only one mistress at a time. His cousin Charles II of England, however, had several mistresses at once. (The most famous was actress Nell Gwynn, who is reported to have once sabotaged a rival by putting laxatives in her food before her rendezvous with the King.)

In modern history, Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 in order to be with his mistress, the divorcee Wallis Simpson. Prince Charles married his long-term mistress Camilla Parker Bowles. And then, of course, we have President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. 

In one respect, I venture to say that the French do take the cake.  A number of French shadow queens were significantly powerful women.

Gabrielle d’Estrees, the Catholic mistress of Protestant Henri IV, helped end France’s religious wars.

King Henri II’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers, imposed taxes, appointed ministers and made laws.

And, lest you think that the role of shadow queen is strictly sexual, consider Madame de Pompadour, who was King Louis XV’s mistress for almost two decades, despite—I’ve read—being unable to have intercourse. Instead, she provided the King with young women to sleep with.

I admire the French public for considering it none of the press’s business what their leaders do in their personal life … which makes me feel just a little trashy for even mentioning it all here. But then, I’m just thinking ahead, academically speaking. ;-) 

Have you ever noticed how the word “courtesan” has the word “court” in it? From Wikipedia:

“In Renaissance usage, the Italian word cortigiana, feminine of cortigiano (“courtier”) came to refer to “the ruler’s mistress”, and then to a well-educated and independent woman of loose morals, essentially a trained artisan of dance and singing, especially one associated with wealthy, powerful, or upper-class men who provided luxuries and status in exchange for companionship.”

Medicine & Magic: a fantastic new website

{Marquise de Brinvilliers is tortured before being beheaded. She had confessed to using poison to kill her father and two brothers, a horror story that was shortly after followed by the revelations of The Affair of the Poisons.}

My virtual friend Holly Tucker is a professor at Vanderbilt University, and as part of her honours seminar, “Leeches & Lancets:  Early Medicine in Cultural Contexts,” her students put up a website: Medicine and Magic. This will be part of a larger website, “Imagining the Past.”

Holly is the creator of the wonderful group-blog “Wonders & Marvels.” Anyone interested in history will love it. (For example, see a recent post, “Book Hoarding, 10th-century style.” A camel-carried library!)

I’m writing this as a shout-out to Holly’s students’ work: simply awesome. The website is a treasure-trove of information: 

Fertility and birth control

Witchcraft and medicine

Poison

Given how key all these subject areas are to the Court of the Sun King and the lives of my characters in both Mistress of the Sun and The Shadow Queen, I’m in revery.

Explore! 

Down for the count: getting sick on Tour

{I love the review quoted here.}

My poor publicity assistant Kelsey Marshall and those who attended my reading/talk last night at A Novel Spot (a fantastic little bookstore in Etobicoke)—by the end of the day, I was in the truly ugly stage of a cold.

I thought of Caroline Leavitt, who recently got sick before an author event, but carried on—and so I carried on. Mostly I was worried about infecting others, so I elbow-bumped greetings and had the hand-wipe handy while signing.

It was my first full presentation for The Shadow Queen. I have a week before my next one (at the Toronto Public Library on the 24th), so I will have time to think about it. People seemed to enjoy the talk, but I usually try different selections, and notice which ones go over best. This particular reading evoked the memory of my father, which made me a little emotional. 

I saw the Canadian edition for the first time: it is the same cover design as the U.S. edition, but with very subtle differences. I love the matt cover and the blue-green inside cover and end-papers—beautiful touches.

Those of you who posted a review to Amazon and/or Goodreads: thank you so much! (And those of you who tried to post to Amazon, but couldn’t, I hope you persevere.)

I’m staying in a studio apartment not far from my daughter Carrie and her family. I don’t think I’ll ever forget little Kiki running to greet me, “Nana, Nana!” It’s cruel to be so close and now cooped up with a cold. 

It’s an amazingly busy time, this birthing of a book. Fortunately, a lot of it can be done from a bed. :-) 

(How did we ever manage before without smiley faces?)

 

Highlights of my Shadow Queen mini-tour & blog hop … so far

{Ad for The Shadow Queen in the New York Times Review of Books!}

Publication swirl: ups, downs, ups! Fatigue, exhilaration—and then, of course, a cold. (Grrrrr.) Plus snow (!) today in Toronto, which I hope doesn’t affect the turnout at the reading tonight at A Novel Spot in Etobicoke. 

My task today is to prepare for the talk/reading—my first full-on one. I never take this type of thing lightly. I think I have it basically plotted out, but I’ve not timed or honed it. That’s going to take time.

Plus, I need to get my talk printed out. This is surprisingly difficult on the road. I’m tempted to get a travel printer—but this would add to my already overly-bloated luggage. 

Some guest blog posts I’ve written: 

Getting around to it—on why I became a writer, for Meg Waite Clayton’s blog. 

Interview with Margaret Donsbach on HistoricalNovels.info. (Margaret asks great questions.) 

The Page 69 Test: I love page 69 of The Shadow Queen. I plan to use this scene in my talk tonight. 

What I’m reading now: Are you a Penelope Fitzgerald fan? I am!

I was pleased with this review from The Free-Lance Star: Real life characters inhabit intriguing story, which concludes: ”A remarkably different and very interesting historical read.”

There have been some excellent reviews on Amazon.com that please me very much. 

Highlights from the tour so far: 

• The woman in North Vancouver who named her daughter Josephine after reading the Trilogy. She had a beautiful book her daughter had made a drawing in, and she asked me to sign the page opposite. I wish I had taken a photo. 

• Moderator Jen Sookfong Lee at the “Enlivening the Past” panel in North Vancouver asking me if I’d brought my clown nose. (No, of course not—but it does  make me wonder if I could pull off a reading wearing it. Doubtful!) 

• Dinner in North Vancouver with writers Mary Novik and Roberta Rich. Shop-talk pals! 

• The best highlight from tour so far: seeing my daughter and her wonderful family in Toronto. The wee-ones are growing!