10 days until London Gambit – the Berkeley Square breakfast parlor

 

London Gambit is out a week from Thursday! Hard to believe release day is almost here. The picture above is a room for the American Wing at the Met that was my inspiration for the breakfast parlor in Suzanne and Malcolm’s Berkeley Square house, where several key scenes in London Gambit take place. Malcolm thinks about Suzanne redoing the room and making the walls a soft peach, whereas they’d been ice blue in his mother’s day. Any predictions for the book you’d like to share? It’s definitely a story that shakes the series up a bit. A game changer, as one ARC reader said.

On another note, I’m giving away five copies of the Kindle edition of The Mayfair Affair on Amazon if anyone wants that edition and doesn’t have it yet.

 

Oregon Shakespeare Festival Inspiration

Arrived in Ashland in the OSF Member Lounge

Happy Friday! I’m very pleased to announce that the Teresa/Tracy Grant Google+ group is starting up again, thanks to the wonderful Betty Strohecker. If you’re a member, be sure to check it out. If you aren’t a member, do consider joining. There’s a icon to join on this site. i’ll be popping in myself, though it’s primarily a group for readers.

At Crater Lake

Lunch at the Crater Lake lodge

Earlier this month Mélanie and I had wonderful trip to Ashland, Oregon. We saw friends, ate some great meals, went shopping, took a great day trip to Crater Lake (Mélanie was fascinated by the model showing how it was formed by a volcano), and my friends and I saw some amazing theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. As always those performances were a wonderful source of creative inspiration for my writing. Among the highlights was Sweat, the world premiere of a play by the wonderful Lynn Nottage. Set between 2000 and 2008 in Reading, Pennsylvania, a manufacturing town in which the factories are closing down, the play manages to at once offering a broad social commentary and create vivid, heartrending portraits of specific characters so real you feel you could step on the stage and into their world. A great example of examining complex ideas by showing not telling. It opens in 2008 and with two characters being released from prison and then moves back in a time to the events that got them there. This creates wonderful dramatic tension. I love playing with narrative and timelines and how it can affect how a story unfolds.

Shopping!

Après theatre in Ashland

Another highlight was a brilliant Antony & Cleopatra directed by OSF artistic director Bill Rauch. The tension between personal relationships and the political stage could not be resonate for me with my own writing. Suzanne and Malcolm are minor characters in world events compared to Anthony and Cleopatra, but the tension between personal loyalties and desires and political loyalties (and sometimes sheer political expedience) is one they and many other characters in the series know well. Miriam Laube and Derrick Lee Weeden brought Cleopatra and Anthony to life in fabulous performances that made the two characters at once larger than life and very, very human. In the “One more gaudy night” scene, Anthony, who has just talked boldly about charging back to battle, has a moment the reveals his own qualms about success. A few moments later, Cleopatra’s concern for him flashes across her eyes when he isn’t looking. Anthony and Cleopatra are flawed characters who make flawed choices at times. They aren’t always loyal to each other. But in the end their love for each other survives the political maneuvering, even if they do not.

Dinner at Alchemy, one of our favorite restaurants

Après theatre

Family portrait

At intermission, a friend and I were discussing how wonderfully clear and exciting all the political intrigue felt. John Tufts as another stand out as Octavius. Cold, scheming, but not entirely without empathy. All in all a brilliant night of theatre on a trip filled with wonderful theatrical moments and wonderful writing inspiration.

Drinks on our terrace

Dinner at Amuse, another favorite

In closing, a question inspired by blog discussions the past couple of weeks that perhaps is not unrelated to the love and politics themes of Anthony and Cleopatra. At the end of The Mayfair Affair Raoul tells Laura “I have no right to ask you to feel any sort of obligation. But I feel one.” When the novella opens six weeks later, Laura has been muling what this means. What do you think it means? What if Raoul offering/committing to?

Visiting our friends at Weisinger Winery

Brunch at Brother’s, a favorite haunt

 

A Hamper from Fortnum & Mason and the direction of the series

A wonderful friend and reader of the series sent Mélanie and me a fabulous gift –  hamper from Fortnum & Mason. I love Fortnum’s and have had some wonderful teas there, but have never had one of their hampers. Fortnum’s hampers go back to the 1730s. The hamper Raoul brings to Laura in Newgate in The Mayfair Affair would look not unlike the lovely one that arrived at our house yesterday. What a fabulous treat (the Earl Grey tea and biscuits it contained are proving particularly wonderful writing inspiration) and research rolled into one.

Speaking of inspiration, I am hard at work on the next book in the series (working title The London Gambit) and working on it is causing me to do some thinking about the over all direction of the series for the next few books. That made me realize I would love to hear from readers. What do you expect to have happen in the next few books? What would you like to see happen? Answers won’t necessarily change my plans but I would love to add ideas to the mix as I work things out.

Have a great weekend!

Tracy

 

Mayfair Affair out take & Malcolm and Suzanne now in the UK

Concert with friends

Happy Friday! In the midst of a busy Merola Opera Program Summer Festival and work on my WIP, Mélanie and I are managing to squeeze in some summer fun, like a picnic and outdoor concert last night with friends and their kids.

I have some exciting news – all the Malcolm & Suzanne books and novellas are now available as ebooks in the UK. You can kind them on Kindle here and they should be available on all platforms by next week. They have gorgeous new covers – here is His Spanish Bride. I’ll have all of them posted on the site soon.

Though I edit my manuscripts a lot, I don’t often cut whole scenes. But writing in the wonderful program Scrivener, I find it easy to write scenes without always knowing precisely where they will fit in the finished book. Usually they fall nicely into place but I wrote a quarrel between Malcolm and Suzanne for The Mayfair Affair that, though it seemed to fit with where their relationship was, never found a place in the finished book. I thought I would share it here.

Have a great weekend!

Tracy

“Malcolm, I think we should talk about this.”
“No.” His voice had the force of a sword cut. “I think that would prove fatal. Once words are spoken they can’t be taken back.”
“You’re afraid of what you’ll say to me?”
He turned to the drinks trolley, but tension was in the set of shoulders. “I don’t like myself very much just now, Suzette. There’s not much point in inflicting that on you.”
“I hate that I’ve done this to you.”
“Not everything is due to you, Suzette..”
She moved toward him and put her arms round him. “There are other things we could do than talk.”
He spun round and caught her wrists. “No.”
He was so close she could feel the warmth of his breath. “You don’t want—“
“To be manipulated.”
“You’ve been manipulating me since we met, Suzette. Perhaps in bed more than anywhere.”
“You can’t think I was pretending—“
“No.” He hesitated a moment. “Perhaps I’m a fool not to consider it, but no. But how many times have you got me into bed to end a difficult conversation? Or because you wanted me asleep so you could slip out of the house or ransack my dispatch box?”
The memories couldn’t but rush into her mind.
Malcolmreleased her wrists. “Precisely.”
“Darling—“
“I know what we have, sweetheart. But even when we couldn’t talk of love, it was the one place I thought we had honesty.”

 

Triangles

Mummy back from Merola’s Schwabacher Summer Concert

Happy Friday! If you’re like me, you now spend the weekend anticipating the new version of Poldark on PBS Sunday nights. I still have vivid memories of being glued to the original series with my parents in late night reruns in the 80s. Watching Ross Poldark torn between Elizabeth and Demelza (and frequently thinking “won’t you wake up to what’s in front of you?”) I’ve been thinking about triangles. Last night at Merola’s wonderful Schwabacher Summer Concert a fabulous except from Verdi’s Don Carlo also made me think about the fascination of triangles (for those in the Bay Area, the concert is repeated Saturday at 2:00 for free outdoors at Yerba Buena Gardens).

The Mayfair Affair takes the Suzanne/Malcolm/Raoul triangle in some interesting new directions. This seemed a good time to ask what readers think of the current state of that triangle (is it even still a triangle?) and of literary triangles in general, and also to repost a post I originally put up in 2011 on Squaring the Triangle.

Have a great weekend!

Tracy

“Squaring the triangle” is a term the playwright hero of S.N. Behrman’s No Time for Comedy flippantly uses to describe what he does writing romantic comedies. I was thinking about this last week watching one of my favorite television shows, The Good Wife. The heroine is back together, at least on the surface, with the husband who betrayed her. Peter Florek is a deeply flawed character, yet I find him likable in many ways, and in last week’s episode I genuinely believed him when he said he’d fallen back in love with his life. I almost found myself wanting their marriage to work out. And that’s despite the fact that I really like Alicia’s colleague and old love, Will, and most of the time I desperately want the two of them to get together.

That’s the key to writing a really fascinating triangle, I think. Having all the characters interesting and sympathetic enough that one is somewhat torn about who ends up with whom. Which of course can create problems with also having a satisfying happily ever after, if such an ending is the goal of the story. As I’ve mentioned before, I think one of my favorite plays/movies, The Philadelphia Story, does this brilliantly in that both Mike and Dexter are sympathetic and possible options for Tracy (both much better than her stuffy fiancé George). I think often the viewer isn’t quite sure who will end up with whom. And yet the ending feels very right (at least to me).

Both Vienna Waltz and The Mask of Night have several triangles. I don’t really want Mélanie/Suzanne to go back to Raoul, at least not in that way (or mostly not in that way, to paraphrase both Charles and Mel in Mask). But I’m very fond of Raoul and I can definitely see that tug between them. As Jeanne adeptly pointed out in last week’s comments, he represents a world in which Mel can practice her talents to the fullest and be herself, whereas in Charles’s world she has to work more behind-the-scenes (though she manages rather a lot of adventure in any case). Raoul ended up much more sympathetic than I had at first envisioned when I wrote Secrets of a Lady, and I think that makes the dynamic among the three of them much more interesting. Not to mention that in addition to the residual romantic tension, there’s a spy dynamic, ideological issues, and a father-son story between Raoul and Charles that takes on more prominence in Mask.

The plot of Vienna Waltz is more or less built on triangles–the triangle of Tatiana, Tsar Alexander, and Metternich which forms the set-up of the murder discovery and investigation; Suzanne/Mel, Malcolm/Charles, and Tatiana (which, whatever else it is or is not, is certainly an emotional tug-of-war); and real life triangles such as both Metternich, the tsar and Wihelmine of Sagan, and Metternich, the tsar, and Princess Catherine Bagration (Metternich and Tsar Alexander definitely carried their rivalry into the boudoir). And then there’s the triangle which is still very much an open question at the end of the book of Dorothée, Count Clam-Martinitz, and Prince Talleyrand. Dorothée isn’t sure at the end of the novel which man she’ll end up with, and that’s certainly a real life triangle in which I can sympathize with all three participants.

What do you think of triangles in books? What are some of your favorite literary triangles? Are there times when you’ve been dissatisfied with the resolution of a triangle?

 

Guest blogging on Word Wenches today!

Friday night dinner and jazz

Happy Monday! Hope everyone had a great weekend. Mélanie’s and mine started with jazz and dinner al fresco and ended with an outdoor production of Peter Pan (Mélanie loves pirates right now) and a family dinner.

Today I’m guest blogging on the wonderful Word Wenches blog about governesses, Laura Dudley, and The Mayfair Affair. Be sure to check it out.

Have a great week!

Tracy

 

Back at Book Passage & a Discussion Question

Last week I had the fun of going back to my favorite book store, Book Passage, this time for a summer reading event put on my the Larkspur Corte Madera Mothers Club, which I just joined. A great group which Mélanie and I are having a lot of fun with. I got to talk a bit about The Mayfair Affair and to listen to some wonderful summer reading suggestions for the moms and their children.

With the wonderful Elaine Petrocelli, founder and president of Book Passage

With Laura von Waldburg and Erica Applestein who organized the event

And to keep the Mayfair discussion going, I’d love to hear readers thoughts on one of my favorites of the discussion questions.

1. What do you think Raoul is really saying with his last question to Laura and why is he relieved she understands?

At the gate, he turned back, his hand on the latch. “Laura—”

She saw him hesitate, searching for the words. All at once she understood. She smiled. “I’ll look after them for you.”

Relief at her understanding broke across his face. “Thank you.”

Happy weekend!

Tracy

 

Mayfair Affair launch photo diary

Last Saturday, May 30, I had the fun of being back at my favorite bookstore, Book Passage, for a launch event for The Mayfair Affair. Always a treat for a writer to be able to talk about her books :-). Mélanie made the day for me. When we pulled into the parking lot, I said “We’re here because Mummy’s going to talk about her books.” Mélanie said, “I think you should talk about my books.” I said, “What books do you want me to talk about?” She replied, “Pride and Prejudice is my favorite.” (She has a couple of children’s versions of Pride and Prejudice).

For those who missed the event, here’s a photo diary, from arrival at the store through  a lovely dinner with friends afterwards.

And to keep the Mayfair discussion going, I’d love to hear what readers think of the state of Malcolm and Suzanne’s relationship in this book, three months on from the revelations of The Berkeley Square Affair.

Happy weekend!

Tracy

 

The Pelican Inn

The Pelican Inn, the setting for some key scenes in The Mayfair Affair, was inspired by the real Pelican Inn, a wonderful recreation of a sixteenth century inn near Muir Woods in Marin County, not far from the coast where Francis Drake landed. Mélanie and I spent a wonderful afternoon at the Pelican Inn doing research when I was writing Mayfair.

Following up on last week’s great spoiler thread discussion of Mayfair, (which I hope readers continue) this seemed a good time to start a spoiler thread about the developments in Laura and Raoul’s relationship that begin during their stay at the Pelican Inn. What did you think? Were you surprised? What do you think lies in store for them?

Cheers,

Tracy

 

The Mayfair Affair – Comments & Spoiler thread

My image for Trenchard House. It looks remarkably like the image that ended up on the cover of The Mayfair Affair.

Happy Friday! The picture above shows a Mayfair town house that could easily be Trenchard House where the plot of The Mayfair Affair is set in motion (and it looks very like the picture on the book cover, which  I love).  I’m back from a lovely trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and really enjoying delving into the next book in the series.

Mélanie and me visiting our friends at Weisinger Winery.

The Mayfair Affair has been out a week now, and I’ve heard from some readers who’ve read it, so I thought I would start a thread where readers can post impressions, comments, questions for me or for other readers. This is for discussion of the book, so spoilers are fine. If you haven’t finished Mayfair yet, proceed at your risk :-).

If you missed it on Monday, we sure to check out my very fun interview on The Bubblebath Reader. Always a treat to chat with Ashley!

Below is another picture that could be right out of The Mayfair Affair. This view of Hyde Park was in my mind when I wrote a key sequence there involving Suzanne’s late night meeting with a mysterious stranger.

Hyde Park, not for from the stand of trees near the Serpentine where a key scene in The Mayfair Affair takes place.

Happy weekend!

Tracy