I’ve been taking a week for pleasure reading — i.e. still haven’t finished Forever Amber — since I finished my book draft. Of the several books I’ve gone through, I greatly enjoyed Naomi Novik’s Her Majesty’s Dragon. Napoleonic wars, except with dragons. Her writing is much in tune with the era of the story, which probably annoys some readers, but kept me up late several nights for just one more chapter. Had I a physical copy, I’d shelve it between Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and A Natural History of Dragons. None of these are romances (Natural History comes closest with a love arc covering the series it starts), but they are good books.
I’ve also been doing research reading for my next book, still heavily reliant on the publications scanned by Google Books. As my heroine is a bicycle racer (in 1897! Yes, it was–briefly–a thing!) topics have included
- The Riotte Kerosene Bicycle Motor
- Victorian women learning to ride bikes
- An 1850s song entitled ‘The Bloomer’s Complaint‘, and
- The Psycho Ladies Safety Bicycle
I could spend a year just reading old magazines! But then I wouldn’t get any new writing done, so I have to find a balance between research and writing.
