Festivey thoughts and so on and so forth

1. Christmas was lovely, just lovely. We're still eating turkey. Turkey curry tonight and I'm not even kidding. In fact, we're generally in the 'hoovering up' phase between Christmas and New Year. After our turkey curry, Mr T and I will once again attack the port and stilton and quince jelly and the children will probably polish off the After 8s. We have heaps of brandy butter and nothing to put it on now. Christmas pudding and mince pies all gone.

2. The children loved their presents, as did Mr T and I. A Kindle for me! I LOVE IT, I really do. Mr T already regrets buying me it. My very first buy was a Mary Balogh: A Secret Affair, fifth in the Huxtable series. Only bought a handful of books so far but today I downloaded lots of free classic books onto it. One of the major reasons for this is that when Mr T's family descend on us tomorrow, I will have to demonstrate the Kindle to them and I refuse to be teased for the rest of my life by my in-laws about my choice of reading material. I simply refuse. So far as they are concerned, I am reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and The Iliad. Once they've gone back to Yorkshire, I will go at the Kindle Store.

3. The T-in-laws are arriving for a 4 night visit so we have to buy in a lot of stuff because they are GANNETS. We have planned this minutely. Tomorrow night is date night for me and Mr T. The next night we'll be going out early evening for the Night Afore torchlight procession and fireworks on Calton Hill so dinner will be hearty soup and apple crumble. Then on Hogmanay, since we're having lunch out, we're having a light supper (Mr T doing rare rib of beef sliced thin, dressed with something fabu and served with various salads). Fireworks again after supper - first up the hill for the official ones and then in the garden at home for our own. New Years Day will be our big sit-down meal. I'm doing Scottish fayre (which the English in-laws lap up and it has the advantage of being easy): Cullen Skink, Haggis & Clapshot and Cranachan for pud (banoffi pie for the kids).

4. But before all of that, there is the Panto! It's the traditional one again at the King's Theatre: Jack and the Beanstalk this year. One slight glitch is that littley went with his nursery class and was scared witless by the baddy. Every time we mention it, he gets very upset and says he doesn't want to go. I forsee tears.

5. Reading-wise, before the Kindle was opened, I was reading print books. Just before xmas, I read the only Kresley Cole I hadn't read - the Daniela/Murdoch story in Deep Kiss of Winter. It was quite good - I liked the no-touchy ice thing anyway. Had a few other print books bubbling around first chapters at that point (Coulter's The Sherbrooke Bride, that Deanna Raybourn I took out the library forever ago) but everything was ignominously abandoned as of Christmas day. Can't seriously see myself picking up a print book for a week or two until the first flush of Kindle-crush wears off. So my next reads will probably be other Kindle buys: Naive Bride, Defiant Wife by Lynne Graham, Forbidden or for Bedding? by Julia James, Ruthless by Anne Stuart, The Marriage Bed by Laura Lee Guhrke or Always You by Megan Hart.

That's probably me over-and-out til the gigantic Annual Monday of the Year that is January. Hope you're all well and having fun.

Execution over content... and a xmas round-up

There's nothing new under the sun when it comes to romance novels. As a general rule, dedicated romance readers will already have seen every possible permutation of a love story. So quality becomes about execution. (On which, see this recent-ish post of Robin's at DA).

And if anyone doubts that it's possible to make something old and tired into something new and exciting, I challenge you to listen to Amy Winehouse's version of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, until now one of my least favourite Christmas songs.



Love that girl's voice.

So, quick Christmas round-up:

1. I'll probably take a break from blogging

2. The tippling starts now. I'm having a port. It's at this time of year that Mr T and I go into Drunken Baker mode.

3. I'm reasonably organised, for me. A few more days of work then off for two blissful weeks.

4. I think Santa may bring me a Kindle. However, I also have quite a lot of print books I'm keen to read. I've got Kresley Cole and Gena Showalter's Deep Kiss of Winter (library). Very excited to read the Cole and I've never read Showalter before so that'll be interesting. I will probably set aside Catherine Coulter's The Sherbrooke Bride, which I had just started to read, for the Cole. The lovely cover of Soulless by Gail Carriger (impulse buy) is calling to me too as is Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby.

5. My littlest one's favourite game at the moment is to play Santa. He has a "sack" in the form of a bubble wrap bag that came with a delivery of something or other. He dons a Santa hat, fills the sack with toys from the playroom and carts them into the living room saying Ho ho ho, what do you want for Christmas? Luckily, since the sack is semi-transparent, we can all see what's in there and choose something he actually has: a plastic stethoscope or a blue power ranger or a googly-eyed Scooby Doo. At the end, he dumps everything he has left under the tree. This means I have to scoop everything up again about twenty times a day and take it back to the playroom. Mr T thinks this is pointless. Why take it all back when I will only have to do it again and again? Well, I say, that way chaos lies. And anarchy.

On which note, I will go again, now, and clear up under the tree. Drink my port. Look at Google Reader. Perhaps try and work out what I think about Twitter. I've been going on periodically to try it out but am not entirely convinced that it is something I will really get into. However, I do see the appeal now. The immediacy of it.

And all that remains to be said, this evening at least, is this: that I wish everyone a very very merry Christmas. My warmest wishes to you all!

T

On Twitter, Instant Gratification and Blogging

After months of resistance, I signed up to Twitter yesterday evening. It felt a bit like going ice skating for the first time. Kind of weird and chaotic until you've done a few laps. This is a bad anaolgy, actually, as I don't ice skate.

Very quickly, I realised the appeal. It was so easy to sign up and immediately, you're having this conversation in real time with people you already 'know'. And not only are you not obliged to articulate detailed thoughts - you can't articulate detailed thoughts (at least not a single tweet). So there's a freedom in that. And then the instant gratification of getting immediate feedback. And the fact that it doesn't matter if you get none because you've expended so little on your tweet.

As it happens, I've been doing a lot of thinking recently in my legal life around the whole subject of change and fitness, flexibility and agility and the appropriateness of old, institutional models (identify a need, form a steering group, write a paper - by the time it comes to implement it, things have moved on). It's a big challenge for all business.

Similar ideas have cropped in blogland e.g. RRRJessica's recent(ish) Monday links post that featured 'institutional' professional reviewers rubbishing amateur reviewers.

Even in the five short years I've part of the romance community (indeed, even in the three years I've been blogging) there's been this vast levelling really, of online interaction; a huge move away from hierarchy to mutual engagement. A shift in the fundamental dynamics.

The fact that blogs have a sense of private individual jurisdiction gives them a very different feel to Twitter. The blogger, to a great extent, sets the tone and the agenda. And subtler hierarchies can come into play too, in the form of a blogger's 'inner circle'. I'm sure there are 'flocks' on Twitter that work like this too, but it's fundamentally a purely public arena.

Recently I've been feeling that I've worked out what the real appeal of blogging is for me and it's the flexibility of the form and how it can be used to communicate something actually different and more personal than a traditional review. I think I need that, regardless of the level of engagement I get.

Twittering, I can see, fulfils a different need, a different desire. Not so much a need to express as a need to engage. It's parallel but different.

What do you think?

The romance of winter and Friday music

We are in the midst of winter in Scotland. For once, it really is cold. See above!

We don't get that much snow in Scotland - and almost never before Christmas. But in the last week or two we have had loads. And because we don't usually get much, a lot of people are terribly ill-equipped. There's been a rush on wellies and snowboots.

In some ways it's been a real pain. The school closed for three days, and I've had to leave work early every day this week because nursery has been closing early. But the snow is pretty and we've taken the boys sledging and had snowball fights and made a huge snowman and an igloo and had heaps of snow left over!

It's melting now. However, being Brits, everyone speculates endlessly every day about whether there is an even colder snap still to come. (It's true, you know, that Brits talk about the weather ALL THE TIME. We really do. We're fascinated by it). I went up to the office today in the lift with Colin - a man I rarely speak to - and we had a most animated discussion about whether the rumour, that Monday is going to bring the worst weather yet, could be true.

Snow. Winter. Christmas. It's such romance.

And this. In the Bleak Midwinter. My favourite Christmas carol, sung by choristers in a big echoey church on a cold winter evening. Candles. Candles!

My response to this is so emotional. It's a sort of happy semi-melancholy, and also something settled and nostalgic. Something that speaks to me; a half-remembered memory of something that felt very real once upon a time. It doesn't matter, in the moment I hear this carol, that I am an atheist. My non-belief is important to me, and not to be taken lightly, but it doesn't mean I can't enjoy this; that I can't be moved by this.

I think that's what I love about Christmas.

The romance of ... brokered marriages

The painting above is The Ladies Waldegrave by Joshua Reynolds and it hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. The real-life painting is quite large and those white dresses and snowy complexions are luminous.

They are quintessentially Georgian, aren't they? The powdered hair, the darker eyebrows, chalk-white skin with roses blooming on their cheeks. Their silhouettes too: the towering hair, the rounded shoulders, deep bosoms, wide skirts. All in white, three unmarried sisters, apparently 18, 19 and 20 when this was painted.

I was watching Amanda Vickery's new series At Home with the Georgians the other night (I love BBC iPlayer!) which was full of interesting facts about Georgian life, such as the fact that one in three aristocratic girls would never marry (though all of the three lovely ladies above did). One in three! The programme gave an interesting perspective on love and marriage. This first episode was entitled "A Man's Place" and argued that far from being trapped into domesticity by women, Georgian men longed for it. To marry and set up a house was a mark of maturity and success. Vickery read from the diaries of numerous men to illustrate her point, some of whom positively yearned for marriage with some as yet unknown woman. She also read from the diary of a dissolute rake of a (single) man who was tormented - when sober - by the 'sinful' sexual behaviour he kept falling into when drunk. A reminder that this was a broadly observant Christian society.

The point that really caught my attention though was little more than a throwaway remark. At one point, Vickery spoke about marriage as a "career" for a woman. Not a surprising comment as such - marriages were, of course, standardly brokered on the basis of status and wealth. I suppose the comment made an impact on me because of the sense it gave of the woman herself setting her sights on a particular man and targetting him as a good prospect in a reasoned way. Not so much a pliable virgin, being moved around a chess board by her parents, as a young woman planning her future in the same way a woman today will plan to attain skills and achieve economic independence. Characters who seek out arranged marriages in romance novels are often portrayed as cold-hearted and ambitious, aren't they, seen through the 'companionate marriage' lens? But such girls would have been following the generally travelled path of her peers. And of course, measuring their successes against one another.

This sort of brokered marriage is great stuff for a romance: the immediate, strained intimacy of marriage with a stranger, the growth to knowing the other and eventually to love. It's one version of the much-loved marriage of convenience trope and a great favourite of mine. What about you?

Positive side-effects of blogging

I was reflecting the other day on how blogging and writing and crit-partnering have changed the way I communicate, professionally, for the better.

Lawyers have a language. We begin learning it at university and become fluent in the workplace. Some of us become specialists in particular areas and learn whole new dialects. When your clients are - as 70% of mine are - very familiar with the law (often other lawyers, in-house or in other jurisdictions) even client conversations are conducted in this way and in the courtroom, the language is used at its most formal.

Legal language is precise to the point of exhaustion, and indeed, many lawyers fear generalities. Not to mention giving advice. You might not think it, but it's much easier to provide a 2,000 word treatise on the law than to give someone the real, concrete advice they've asked for. And part of giving good advice is putting across complex, difficult ideas clearly and comprehensibly.

The good thing about legal language is that it is precise. It's full of wonderful and precise words that mean very specific things. There is an art in using it well, in court and in contracts. But it's not quite so good as a medium for face-to-face advice or for giving seminars or doing pitches.

The last few years of blogging, writing and crit-partnering have bettered my communication, increasing my vocabulary, making me more conversational, and releasing me (somewhat) from the chains of traditional legal language. It's made me more agile, more flexible, more determined to express myself fully and meaningfully. It's increased my desire to communicate. To connect. To see the lightbulb come on; to forge a link; to foster a thought. To find the precisely right word that is not a legal word, that is instead a real-world word that articulates what I want to say and that invests it with the right tone and nuance.

I've gained that from my own efforts to express myself here, while writing my MS, from reading the work of other bloggers, from engaging in conversations with them and from thinking - hard - about my reaction to the work of writers whose work I've CP'd. It's all been helpful.

And I thank you all.