Real Housewives? Meet The Real Duchesses Of London

Before there were Housewives there were The Real Duchesses of London...

I freely admit it. I am a Bravo Real Housewives junkie. I did hide it for awhile, feeling there were so many other things that I could be watching -- and that I probably should actually be writing. It always seemed slightly discreditable, like eating ice cream in bed. And it certainly didn’t help that my husband would roll his eyes and say -- that again -- when I turned it on.

And then I realized what a great character study it was. Yes, all these women know they are being filmed and would probably act differently if they weren’t -- and yes, it is clear that the conflict is set-up to create better television. However, even with the set-up, real personalities definitely shine through. (Have to admit that it is just hot, catty, and fun as well.)

I particularly felt that way with The Real House Wives of Beverly Hills. They almost all lived in what could truly be called palaces (the beginnings of my The Real Duchesses of London idea) and they were clearly all appearing on Real Housewives simply because they wanted to. It was interesting to watch who wanted to play peacemaker, who wanted to be a peacemaker, and who wanted to pretend to be queen and live in her mansion on the hill. And then there were the clothes -- and the shopping -- and the jewelry.


Watching them play dress-up is what truly formed my idea. I watched these women getting ready for party after party (only to be outdone by the NY Housewives this last season) and it reminded me of what life must have been like during the Season in Regency England. I started to imagine a bunch of Regency women being filmed as they went about their daily lives and squabbled and made up.


Obviously, I couldn’t have the benefit of filming during the Regency and so I turned to my other, and much less disreputable, favorite, Downton Abby. I’d loved watching the original Upstairs, Downstairs when I was a child, and Downton Abby reaffirmed my love of watching the servants watching their "betters".

I began to wonder if I couldn’t have the servants watching my duchesses the way TV viewers watch Housewives. It was so much fun thinking about what was really going on in my duchesses’ lives, compared with what the maids thought was happening. I’d love to play around with this idea at longer length someday.


In the meantime, some of the characters from The Real Duchesess of London also appear in my release this coming October, What a Duke Wants.

Thanks you for having me over for coffee, Sia. It’s been fun.

I’d love to give away a copy of the first of my Real Duchesses novellas and one of the cute t-shirts with the cartoon from the book trailer.

And all I want to know is: Mr. Darcy? Or Jaime from Outlander? I definitely have my own favorite in mind.

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THE REAL DUCHESSES OF LONDON
Regency England just got real(ity)



Episode 1: How Kathryn Got Her Passion Back (June 2011)


Kathryn, Duchess of Harrington, has the perfect life: a handsome duke for a husband, riches to spare, a house in Mayfair, and the right group of friends. The only thing she doesn’t have is her husband in her bed. But she’s about to change that. Enlisting the aid of her best friend, Linnette, who knows about these things even though she’s a duchess herself, Kathryn begins her seduction plan.


But Linnette knows a secret and it involves Kathryn’s husband. And, when that comes out, Kathryn’s marriage isn’t the only thing at stake. Can you say Afternoon Tea Catfight?




Episode 2: The One with the Fake Baby (August 2011)


Rumors abound – everyone has heard that Linnette, the Dowager Duchess of Doveshire is pregnant. Beautiful, young, with more freedom than any respectable woman should want; Linnette is no stranger to a little gossip. But her friends can't help her brave the fallout, because this time Linnette has done something naughty...

BUY: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders

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Most days Lavinia Kent loves her life and knows that she has found her own happily-ever-after with her husband and three children But on those other days (you know which ones!), she is very glad for the wonderful romances, sensuous gowns, and tall, sexy men that fill her mind – and then her computer.

Lavinia lives in Washington, DC, with her family and an ever-changing menagerie of pets. She attended Wellesley College as an undergraduate and holds an MBA from Georgetown University.

What a Duke Wants is Lavinia’s fourth book from Avon Romance. She also has a fun and sexy serial of e-novellas, The Real Duchesses of London, available from Avon Impulse.

.Lavinia Kent WEBSITE

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2010—It Wasn’t A Bad Year After All

My guest is suspense author, Lexi Revellian. She hails from London, UK. By day, she creates physical works for the senses as a jeweller, but by night she creates and altogether different pieces for the senses as an author.

So many writers both established traditional and those who aren’t have chosen to self-publish their work. Any author who goes that route will tell you there is an enormous amount of work involved in self-publishing their work. There are also huge rewards. They’re in business for themselves and as such they are content and copy editor, cover artist, marketing/Promotion departments, and publisher. Some don’t have the skill set to do it all and utilize professionals to assist them. There are those who are successful and those who aren’t.

Lexi shares a bit about her journey as an author and what she's learned along the way.



2010 did not start well. Two agents had been reading the full typescript of my novel, Remix, over Christmas, and both turned it down in the New Year with expressions of regret. Then, cycling home from my jewellery workshop in icy darkness, my bike slipped on a speed cushion (bump) and I smacked into the granite double kerb – twelve stitches to my face and a broken shoulder; and believe me, the humerus is not a bone to break lightly. My own stupid fault. What was I thinking, biking in that weather?


But looking back, 2010 was a breakthrough year for me, one of my best.


In June 2009 I’d given myself a year to find an agent; if that failed, I’d self-publish. I really didn’t think I’d have to, though; Remix was my third book, and I knew it was good. A lot of people had read and liked it on various writer sites. Good heavens, even my hypercritical daughter liked it! Four agents expressed interest – two of them actually approached me. But the year sped by, the rejections piled up; it was time to call my own bluff.


Meanwhile, unable to cycle or drive, I walked between home and workshop. It’s not possible to think on a bike – you’re too busy concentrating on the traffic, but walking is different. On those long walks I brooded about how my broken bone had diverted, I hoped briefly, the course of my life; I noticed all the useful stuff Londoners throw out; and I trespassed inside an unfinished, abandoned and vandalized block of flats on my way home. I idly wondered what it would be like to walk those bitterly cold streets without a home to go to, with no money, and maybe someone hunting you. The idea for my next book began to take shape.


Back to Remix. Those of you who have self-published will know it’s a vertiginous learning curve, and you ricochet between triumph and despair. I did everything myself – proofreading, typography, formatting for Smashwords and Kindle, cover design and marketing, though I am the worst saleswoman in the world. Out of consideration for American readers, I changed the speech marks from single to double, which meant checking every single apostrophe after the switch. The whole thing took time and energy. But, like running your own business or being a single mother, the upside of doing it all yourself is that any credit going is yours alone.


August 9th 2010: Remix appeared on Smashwords and Amazon. I sold a handful of paperbacks, and nine ebooks that month. The first three weeks of September’s sales were worse. I felt pretty depressed; this was my last shot, and I’d missed the target; failure stared me in the face, and I don’t like failure.

Then I remembered Eric Christophersen, an American writer friend who’d been very successful with his ebook, Crack-Up. I came up with a cunning plan – I’d interview Eric on my blog, and discover the secrets of his success! Eric is a nice chap, as well as a good writer (he is now represented by a top NY agent) and he agreed. When asked why he charged so little for his novel, he said,

• “Lexi, I would recommend a cheap price at least initially. You'll want a nice bunch of reviews to help attract more readers (assuming the reviews are mostly positive), and yet only one reader in a hundred will leave a review – at best.”

I took his advice and dropped my price. In October I sold 705 books, in November 1,559, December 4,278, and January, my best month, 5,940. Even though sales tailed off a little after that, I’ve now sold over 20,000 copies of Remix.

Replica, a thriller/romance:


Beth Chandler works in a government research institute, and is accidentally replicated in a flawed experiment. The replica has no official existence, and when she overhears plans to liquidate her, goes on the run. Homeless, penniless and pursued by MI5, she has to learn how to survive on icy London streets. Meanwhile, the original Beth, unaware of what has happened, becomes romantically involved with Nick Cavanagh, the spec op she believes is there to protect her. In fact, he’s hunting her double. Excerpt

Buy: Amazon: US and UK, Smashwords

As I write, both books are in the UK Kindle top 100, Replica sold 2,500 copies in its first month, and a Hungarian publisher will be bringing out a Hungarian version of Remix, hardbacks, paperbacks and ebook, in 2012.

That’s what I call a good year.

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For years, I resisted writing because I knew I'd never be as good as Jane Austen. Finally I realized no one is as good as Jane Austen - I started writing and couldn't stop.


My first two books are non-typical fantasy. My third, REMIX, is contemporary fiction with elements of crime, investigation and romance, and tells what happens when Caz Tallis finds a strange man asleep on her roof terrace. He turns out to be - no, I'm not telling you, you'll have to read it to find out...

My day job is designing and making jewelry and silver under my real name, Lexi Dick. I've made pieces for Margaret Thatcher, 10 Downing Street and Her Majesty the Queen.

My website is http://www.lexirevellian.com/; here you can read extracts from my books and entire short stories. There is also a link to my writing blog.

OBSESSIONS

At the core of all romance is finding true love. As a reader, we want the heroine to have all sorts of 'hot' adventures in the course finding her true love.

Please welcome back, Over Coffee, C. Margery Kempe. She writes hot sexy adventures and is fascinated with interchangable identities, strong heroines, adventure, spies, and...obsessions.

Intriguing list, isn't it?

Margery explains a bit about the power of obsessions in our writing:

Hello from London! Thanks so much, Sia, for inviting me back. I was here as part of the Ravenous Romance Ornery Eleven Blog Tour last month and I had such a great time I had to drop by again.

My novel Chastity Flame

Chastity is the story of a government operative who has a lot of sexy adventures on the way to discovering what might be true love -- she hasn’t quite been able to believe it, but she willing to risk a lot to find out. The novel also provided a chance for me to delve into some of my obsessions.

We have a tendency to look at “obsession” as a negative thing. We’re always hearing about dangerous people who form obsessions with celebrities. But obsessions can be quite beneficial, too. They form the base of any good ambitious project. I remember John Irving giving the advice about writing, “You have to get obsessed and stay obsessed” and it’s true. People ask me all the time, “how do you get so much writing done?” That’s the answer in a nutshell. The fact is that for most of us, no one’s going to pay us to write (except sometimes after we’ve already done it), so you have to want to do it very badly.

And you can use your obsessions to power that: a handful of my long-time obsessions make an appearance in Chastity Flame. My very first novel I wrote in high school was called Ace Spies, Incorporated and was a Mary Sue adventure starring a character who was clearly me and some thinly veiled versions of the Beatles (well, it was the second wave of Beatlemania in the 70s). A bit embarrassing to think of now, but I stuck with it for months and wrote a whole novel just to see whether I could do it (and yes, to have lots of fun dreaming constantly about the Beatles). The only people who ever read it were my friends. One of those friends claim to still have a copy; she’s just waiting for me to achieve real success so she can cash in on it. But it did firmly fix the writing bug into my life, though it took a long time for me to really develop it.

I also find it intriguing that even then I was interested in having all these interchangeable identities with my spy heroine. The story line was that she ordered a sort of adventure holiday as a spy, but then got caught up in the real thing (hey, sounds like a certain Bill Murray film, eh? I should sue!). I even wrote it under a pseudonym. So it’s not much of a jump to Chastity’s constant stream of fake names and identities.

Another obsession in the novel is London, my favorite place in the world ever since I first came here in 1980. I loved using various locations around town that I adore like the Millennium foot bridge and the Tate Modern. The opening scene allowed me to not only use the National Gallery, but to begin in front of a painting closely connected to another obsession: British comedian Peter Cook. Les Grandes Baigneuses is not only one of Cezanne’s most famous paintings (and the wallpaper image of my British mobile phone) but at the heart of a beloved sketch from Not Only But Also, the 1960s television show starting Cook and Dudley Moore. It’s not necessary to know this, of course -- it just makes me giggle. ;-)

My advice is trust your obsessions -- they provide fuel for your dreams and if you want to write, you need all the fuel you can get. Writing itself has to be an obsession if you’re going to get anywhere with it. You have to keep believing through long nights of bad writing and sometimes endless rejections. It always pays off if only in the fact that creating is a great joy. Sometimes that’s enough.

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C. Margery Kempe is a writer of erotic romance. In addition to Chastity Flame, she has a number of short stories with Ravenous Romance as well as other publishers. At present she’s working onthe sequel as well as a number of other projects, while keeping busy in her other life as a medievalist and English professor. Visit her website or her blog or follow her on Twitter.