The Ultimate Webmaster
I rarely think about weddings, even in June, but I admit being excited for my friend Charlotte Wyatt who’s soon to marry Gordon Smith, her best friend since middle school. Since Charlotte and I both hail from Tennessee, I started thinking about some of the extravagant Southern nuptials I attended back in the ’60s when June weddings often looked like animated flower shows. They were pretty, very showy affairs but none remotely compared to an extravaganza in antebellum Louisiana that still has people talking. It was the brainchild of one Charles Durande. Durande was a rather mysterious Frenchman who appeared in New Orleans around 1820 and multiplied his already considerable wealth by becoming one of Louisiana’s largest sugar planters. He not only...
Read MoreCreole Defined: Not An Exact Science
It’s unexpected fun when a book title raises questions, i. e., Creole Son, my novel about painter Edgar Degas’s time in New Orleans. When people ask me to define Creole, I say it’s probably not what they think but lots more besides. Few ethnic terms are more misunderstood. The word comes from the Portuguese/Spanish criar meaning “to breed” and was applied to those born and bred outside the mother country. They were called criollos, which morphed into Creoles. The two most famous Creoles are probably Empress Josephine, born on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, and Simon Bolivar, a Spanish Creole born in Venezuela. Degas’s New Orleans-born mother Celestine made him half Creole. Creoles can also be of Portuguese, Italian...
Read MoreBelle, Book & Kindle
What a difference a few decades make. Back in 1979 when I was contracted to write historical romances as Maggie Lyons (see “her” story in my blog, “Romancing the Unknown”), I knew zip about the genre. Luckily I was given a tip sheet by my publishers regarding what to do and, more importantly, not to do. My heroines were supposed to be chaste as well as chased, and a big taboo was sex before marriage. If and when anything finally happened after 300 pages of foreplay, it was to be discreet. Think Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster on the beach in From Here to Eternity or a train going into a tunnel. You get the picture. In 1999 when I was asked to write more Maggie Lyons books, the rules had changed. Seriously. It was no surprise that readers...
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