Welcome back to Wednesday Links!
I picked up a copy of Mineko’s Night Market on the Switch last night and I only regret I don’t have a ton of free time this week to play it. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
Thank you for sharing some great recipes last time! I’ve had a slew of mediocre showings in my recipe options lately, so I definitely overdue for a real winner. I also attended a wedding last weekend in another state and we spent more time in the car than at the reception. It’s wild how exhausted you can feel just from sitting in the car.
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Romance author, Barbara Metzger, passed away over the summer. Susie Felber, daughter of Edith Layton, wrote some kinds words about Barbara on Twitter.
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If you love hobby drama, I highly recommend the YouTube channel, Emma in the Moment. Emma is a knit and crochet pattern designer and has videos on current and older hobby drama. Emma also has a separate channel for their designs.
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Sarah shared this article from The Mary Sue regarding a YA fantasy novel with a very adult preorder incentive. In my opinion, publishers sometimes send mixed messages, like wanting the hardcover buying power of YA audiences (which while adults can and do read, there are still young people–minors–consuming these books), while also trying to court the adult fandom and fanart community.
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We posted part one before, well now here is part two of “Redesigning Historical Romance Book Covers to be Actually Historical.” Thanks to everyone who sent this our way, including Victoria, Gillian B., and Michael B.
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
If you enjoyed the video about redesigning historical covers to be actually historical (as I did!) you might also like frockflicks.com which does a similar thing for film and tv costuming.
Went down a rabbit hole with the romance cover video, and came across this video that ties in with Elyse’s recent post on the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival. I’ve developed an interest recently in spinning, not that I plan on taking it up, but trying to understand the process better, and it’s fun to watch other people work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up5wZrvToiI
The redesigned covers were lovely. Why, oh why, did illustrators of a particular period draw faces so insipid and chinless and narrow? The men all look like Ashley Wilkes or Disney’s Prince Charming; we know they weren’t muscular and ripped, but couldn’t their faces have had some character? And the women are the same. Surely not everyone looked like a fainting couch should always be at hand.
I saw a two-hundred-year-old x-ray of a woman who’d worn a corset all of her adult life. Now THAT could be the basis for a great horror novel. And maybe a good reason for a fainting couch.
Barbara Metzger is my favorite of the trad Regency writers – Lord Heartless and The Luck of the Devil are especial favorites and I encourage the bitchery to check them out. I had wondered if she would publish again, so I am grateful for her extensive backlist.
We lost Kasey Michaels over the summer, as well. She wrote under a number of names but this is one she used for Regencies, usually with humor. I have been reading her work since I started reading Regencies decades ago in an an effort to avoid the rapey-ness of the romances way back when. We have lost some of the greats recently.
@Darlynne – the aforementioned frockflicks (that I aforementioned) has some interesting comments about how corsets are portrayed in modern popular culture.
Also, very, very in agreement about the illustrations of that particular era – the women’s heads look like someone’s taken a sharpie and drawn a face on a balloon.
Also also, I immensely enjoyed the Emma in the Moment youtube videos. Who’d have thought I’d spend an hour and a half on yarn shop drama* – fraud! bleeding dye! faked death! A fascinating and unexpected rollercoaster.
*says the person who was fascinated by an hour and a half dissection of the history and intricacies of the Disney theme pass system (Defunctland, if you feel the need – an excellent YT channel that digs deep into theme park history and kids TV).
Not Barbara Metzger! She was right up there with Michelle Martin for Humorous Regency works (I especially recall AN AFFAIR OF INTEREST which made consols and debt instruments part of the plot. Ok, I’m an accountant and easily amused). She will be missed.
@Darlynne: Did you mean an x-ray from 100 years ago? There weren’t x-ray machines in the early 1800s, I think they didn’t exist till much later in the 19th C.
As for Barbara Metzger, when at the top of her game she was one of the best at combining humor and a love story in classical Regency romance. Still remember one where the hero, who has inherited a title he didn’t want, thinks to himself that as he’d survived years at war, the least his brother could do was survive a curricle race to Brighton (not an exact quote, but you get the idea).
I had no idea that Kasey Michaels had also died. As with most such prolific authors, her books were a mixed bag for me, but I definitely enjoyed the first few Maggie Kelly stories, where romance author Maggie finds that her aristocratic Regency hero has materialized in her living room. Humor and romance ensue.
I haven’t seen The Golden Bachelor, but here’s a good (if rather depressing) analysis of how the Rose God still gets his pound of flesh, and what could have been different:
https://www.vulture.com/article/golden-bachelor-review.html
There’s no replacement for Barbara Metzger, but Mary Lancaster has some books with a very similar combo of humor and romance.