Old-Fashioned Love

by Caren Crane

First, a confession: I love antique furniture, high-necked blouses, floor-length skirts and men in waistcoats and fedoras. The kind of date my husband and I love is dinner and a movie - not necessarily outside our home, either. My perfect lazy day includes curling up in the padded window seat of a picture window, reading a book, sipping tea and daydreaming. I love my house and, once home in the evening, I am loathe to leave it. I love mom, apple pie and white picket fences. I am old-fashioned to my cornball core.

I guess it should come as no surprise, then, that I adore old-fashioned love stories. The kind that are far more than 400 pages, rife with multiple points of view, myriad secondary plots and a countless secondary characters. I am, perhaps, the last, lone reader who enjoys a slow introduction to a thick, well-crafted novel. I enjoy meandering through a solidly-developed plot with characters so three-dimensional you feel you know them inside and out. My ultimate is the kind of story where the romance is just one aspect of a fantastic and sweeping tale.

In other words, I love the sort of story that is rarely published anymore.

I know how scarce these books are, since I look for them periodically. I try to find new favorites, but few authors tell the kind of story I am after when I want a slow meander. I have found a few authors who manage it, notably Deanna Raybourn in her Lady Julia Grey series, which began with Silent in the Grave. Because I savored every word of the series, it was doomed to end too soon, of course. The publisher was impatient for soaring sales, which apparently it did not have - at least, not high enough for them. Too bad for us. Lady Julia's family, the Marches, are an entity unto themselves. Each one more interesting and eccentric than the last, they should have an endless stream of books in which to live their lives. Alas, HQN killed that one!

I also recently found - thanks to my lovely sister, Holli - A Private Hotel For Gentle Ladies by Ellen Cooney. Curious about what others thought of this lovely, rather old-fashioned tale, I found many reviewers did not understand the story. Without the obvious signposts in most of today's fiction (Hero! Villain! Black moment!) and an immediate statement of the heroine's ultimate goal (which, according to the reviews, should be unchanging), some readers were lost. It was, at heart, a story about a woman coming into her own and learning who she is and what she wants outside her Victorian marriage. Yes, friends, it was about that least popular theme - a death knell in fiction today - personal growth. It was a book that begged for sequels, yet none have been published. Another one bites the dust.

I like books where people are flawed, cranky, imperfect and trying really hard to do the best they can, like I am most days. I don't always need or want action, murder, mayhem, shape-shifters, magic or smoking hot sexy time in my reading. Sometimes, I just want to observe the beauty of a summer day in Cornwall with Judith Dunbar, the heroine of Rosamunde Pilcher's exceptional book, Coming Home. I want to witness her loves and losses, trials and joys and heartbreak over the 15 or so years covered in the story.


Or I want to witness the struggle of a young, uneducated mother trying her best to keep her family together in LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory. To see Ellie learn that love can be something different and more than she never knew existed (and certainly didn't have in her first marriage). I want to linger, at times, over the possibility of a first kiss, to agonize over an unbidden and inadvisable attraction, to dally with the notion of a forever kind of love.

I want books where I smile and sigh at the end, because things are beautiful, satisfying and full of promise, just as love should be and would be if I could design it. I want old-fashioned tales of love enjoyed in intricate, elaborate, gorgeous detail (along with observations from the cook, the gardener and Great Aunt Lavinia, if I can get them). My love of these stories has garnered much disdain from relatives and friends who prefer serious fiction. What, I ask, is more serious than establishing a love that will last a lifetime? I will happily remain a cockeyed, old-fashioned optimist.

Do you have some old-fashioned love story recommendations? Any long, detailed and fulfilling stories that have filled your heart and brought tears of sorrow and joy to your eyes? I am always looking for new favorites, so please share!

Here Be Dragons

by Nancy

"Here be dragons," read the margins of old maps, warning of dangers in the seas beyond the known (flat) world. Today, however, we know what's in those spaces, or think we do, and dragons are consigned to the realms of myth and magic.

A book I've been using for research on the current wip says dragons are part of almost every culture on the planet, that they're associated with the Great Goddess and are symbols of power and royalty. Pretty cool.

The book also mentions an herb called dragon blood that's used for a variety of magical purposes, such as those involving love, purification and protection. Some sources say it can add power to particular spells.

Helping carry a long paper dragon is part of Chinese New Year celebrations. King Arthur's surname has come down to us in legend as Pendragon, and Wales historically used a red dragon on its flag. Beowulf fought his last battle against a firedrake, a winged serpent that breathed fire.

The Vikings, as I imagine we all know, carved dragon heads onto the prows of their ships. In Norse mythology, the dragon Fafnir guarded a treasure hoard until Sigurd, or Siegfried, slew him. Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, coiled around the world with his tail in his mouth and created the oceans.

One of my favorite children's songs is "Puff the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul and Mary. If you're too young to know who they are, click on the link. I think "Puff" is probably available from iTunes or from their website. It's a sad song about what happens to our childhood's imaginary friends when we move on, but it has an upbeat ending. And no, I never made the counter-culture associations with it until someone pointed them out to me.

The boy has led us to many fictional and fabulous dragons. Playmobil makes wonderful, if pricey, knights and dragons. One of the boy's favorite Pokemon was the orange dragon, Charizard, who had a very obstinate and independent personality. From Pokemon, our son moved to Yu-Gi-Oh, which featured the Blue Eyes White dragon and several others.

If you like dragons, you should check out the beautiful, detailed children's book Dragonology, which I would never have seen if the boy hadn't been the right age to care when it came out.

Much as Sherlock Holmes's adventures are presented as John Watson's chronicles, the material here is supposedly the result of extensive research by a Victorian dragonologist into types of dragons, preferred foods, ability to fly, ability to speak, and pretty much anything else a person might ponder about dragons.


The boy also had a gorgeous picture book about why dragons left the world, but I can't remember the title. One of his favorite picture books was Saint George and the Dragon (original cover pictured at left), with text by Margaret Hodges and illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman, who won the Caldecott Award for it.

The tale of St. George and the dragon, of course, is an old one. This version comes from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, but it's beautifully retold. When the boy weeded his childhood books, we refused to let him discard this one or Dragonology.


Our search for adventure books to share with our young son, who had no bias against stories starring girls, led us to Patricia C. Wrede's wonderful series about Cimorene, a princess who hates court life so much that she runs away to cook for a dragon. When knights come to her aid, she finds creative ways to discourage them because she has no desire to be rescued, thank you very much.

The first book, Dealing with Dragons, is pictured at right. The books are rich in story and humor, and the princess has major but endearing attitude and quick wits. She eventually finds true love. The last book in the series, actually the first published, features her son.


Now the boy is into Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars in which the armies have air forces mounted on dragons. In the first book, His Majesty's Dragon, a Royal Navy captain captures a rare dragon egg, only to have it hatch on his ship. The dragon, Temeraire, chooses the captain as his rider, changing his life forever.

Novik won SFWA's John W. Campbell Award for the most promising newcomer with this book. The series is now up to six and still going strong. They're on the "must read" list for me, but I'm putting them off until the first of the year, when I'm not teaching, lest I be swept up and unable to stop until I reach the end. The Aerial Corps, as England's dragonriders are known, seems like the Napoleonic equivalent of World War II's RAF, and I'm a real sucker for Battle of Britain stories. And dragons.

As an adult reading Tolkien for the first time, I met Smaug, the greedy creature who has a riddle match with Bilbo Baggins in his cave outside the town of Dale. Given my weakness for archers and Smaug's sly malevolence, it's no wonder I loved the scene where Bard the Bowman's expert shot brought down the dragon. I didn't love the Bakshi version, so I'll be interested to see how this comes across in the forthcoming movie.


The first dragons I remember finding really cool were in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight (pictured at right with the beautiful Michael Whelan cover that graces my copy), the book that launched her epic Dragonriders of Pern series. The planet Pern suffers from periodic invasions by something called thread--long filament spores that fall from the sky, starting fires and eating through anything they touch. To combat them, the Pernese bond with dragons when they hatch. As pairs, they take to the sky to fight thread before it reaches the ground. The riders feed the dragons stones that help generate fire breath, and the dragons destroy thread before it reaches the ground.

F'lar, the dragonriders' leader, knows a queen egg is about to hatch. Because dragons choose their riders, not the other way around, he needs a selection of girls available to greet the hatchling. When he rescues Lessa, an abused servant, and takes her back to the weyr for the hatching, he doesn't realize she and the golden queen, Ramoth, will win not only the planet's future but his heart.

I also loved Melanie Rawn's Dragon series, which starts with Dragon Prince. In a land threatened constantly by war, a new ruler and his wife struggle to protect the dragons tradition demands he slay. Doing so may be their best hope of avoiding war. There are six of these, shelved in fantasy but including a lot of romance. Another wonderful book is Barbara Hambly's Dragonsbane, which kicks off her Winterlands series.

There are plenty of other dragons out there. Allyson James's Stormwalker features a shapeshifter dragon as a hero, and Deborah Cooke has a series about shapeshifter dragons, just to name two. One of my favorite guilty pleasures movies is Reign of Fire, starring Christian Bale and Matthew McConnaughey, an alternate future tale about humans trying to destroy the dragons that have decimated them. Dragonheart, with Dennis Quaid and Sean Connery, has lots of fans, and How to Train Your Dragon has done well in theaters this summer.

So what are your favorite stories about dragons or other mythical creatures? A package of books I picked up from RWA National, including a signed copy of Jessica Andersen's wonderful Demonkeeper, will go to one commenter today.

Isn't It Romantic

by Tawny

I'm about halfway through my current WIP (work in progress, currently titled Breaking the Rules) and it's taking a much more romantic turn than most of my previous stories. Oh, sure, I'd like to think all my romances are romantic *g* But I'm feeling a much sweeter edge to this one.

Sweeter, and more romantic.

Which, since it pertains to writing, makes me instantly want to delve deeper. So in my usual fashion, I started making lists. Romantic lists, that is. Here's what I came up with, and as you can see, the lists aren't complete.

Soooooo.... Help? Can you add to my lists?

Best makeout songs:

1. Always and Forever - Heatwave
2. All My Love - Led Zeppelin
3. Truly Madly Deeply - Savage Garden
4. Wicked Game - Chris Isaac
5. Wonderful Tonight - Eric Clapton
6. 
   

Most romantic movies:

1. Casablanca
2. The Notebook
3. Princess Bride
4. Beauty and the Beast
5. While You Were Sleeping
6. 
   

Most romantic places to make whoopie (to harken back to the Newlywed Game)

1. Under a waterfall
2. In a magical forest
3. On a Harley (okay, maybe not romantic, but it's hot, right?)
4. Against the wall, just inside the front door. It has that, now, as soon as we have privacy desperation to it
5. In a Sheik's tent on a satiny mountain of soft pillows
6. 
   

And, of course, top romance novels?

1. Easy peasy, anything by the Bandits :-D
   
2. 
   

I'd like to build each list up to at least ten - what would you add?

Common Scents

David Beckham has 11 fragrances.

Well, actually the 11 are colognes that he lends his name to but I have no doubt he smells reeeeeallllly nice.

I’d already begun to think about discussing scents for this blog when I heard that tidbit. I’ve always been aware of the power of smells and their associated meanings but hadn’t “scientifically” given it any thought. So I did a wee bit of Googling and found a succinct explanation that while visual cues might invoke memories, scents invoke EMOTIONS linked to events in our lives.

Makes sense (er, scents?). When I smell chicken baking and especially the broth for making dressing I’m immediately sent back to my childhood when I was carefree, safe, loved. Or the memory of happiness I feel when I smell wax melded with spring breezes through the window. This one happened every year and I STILL can remember coming home from school after my Mom had done her spring cleaning and lying on the couch sighing in contentment. When my Daddy passed the only thing I wanted was his sweater…which smelled of him.

Not all aromas bring such positive memories. Some of you may know this from experience but every nurse knows that cancer has a smell. When I was a fledgling nurse, I had a patient who used a certain body powder along with this smell. To this day, if I catch a whiff of that powder every sad moment in that lady’s last days comes back to me.

Aromatherapy is big and I buy into a lot of it. Lavender DOES make you feel more relaxed and helps you sleep. A spa I go to for massages has a whole aromatherapy program. You close your eyes and decide which scent you want your massage lotion to contain. Supposedly, your body knows which one it needs. I never know what is in most of them but one time I stopped her after the second one. I said “That one, because it smells like Ireland.” (And no…it wasn’t the scent of Guinness).

Then there are the odors associated with such lovely things as garbage or the teenager with gym shorts that haven’t seen a washing machine since freshman year. And don’t forget the summer time wafting of SKUNK so many of us are blessed with.

But every person reacts differently to different scents and that’s what fascinates me! I mean my “Gosh that reminds me of my best friend’s wedding” might be your “Gak! Reminds me of that guy Stinky Toes I used to date”.

Genetics or perception?

Take the scent patchouli. I’ve seen this referenced in some books lately and in MY mind associated it with a paint or thinner smell. (I don’t think I’ve ever smelled it before). Yet it was brought up in a discussion on a talk show the other day and the host said “It’s a smell you either like or think it smells like sweat socks.”

This predilection toward invoking memories explains why we use them to describe physical and emotional reactions of our heroes and heroines to each other. Spice, musk, citrus, sandalwood, jasmine and…for some authors…patchouli….ups the desire, the need and helps the reader connect. Hmmmm…..David….beneath the sweaty shirt I smell musk and spice and man!

And a hint of soccer ball.

So I favor lighter floral scents, citrus and for the fellas in my life musk. What about you? What do you like? What do you favor on your guy?