Motherhood

Book 8 is almost ready! The copyediting is done, most of the formatting is done, and there's just some processing over at Createspace before it can released on all formats, which will hopefully be late next week or early the following week. Remember that Book 7 is still on sale until December 15th for the Kindle, and books 1-3 are on sale for some unknown amount of time (Sourcebooks decides these things, not me) so if you don't have them on Kindle but you can't go anywhere without them you'll want to scoop them up.

The print version of Book 8 will be a little pricey. There is nothing I can do about this; Amazon has a minimum price to print the book. I will just say this: You will be getting a lot of book for your money. Lots and lots of book.

Anyway. Motherhood.

In the romance/historical romance genre that I started out in, motherhood isn't addressed a lot. Usually the story is about the man and woman meet, usually under less than perfect circumstances, and then by the end of the book they're together, or by chapter 3 if it's regular romance and they need to get to the sex before the reader gets bored. With a lot of Pride and Prejudice sequels you need to have some plot before that (or don't) because Darcy and Elizabeth are already together, but unless there's something wrong with Elizabeth's child-bearing abilities and that's the plot (I have yet to see one where the problem was on Darcy's end), they usually pop out a kid within a year and all is well. And they are perfect parents. Darcy may be cold and Elizabeth independent, but G-ddamn if they aren't the best parents ever because any other possibility would be horribly depressing to us.

In certain instances in my large cast I decided "this relationship is going to be like this" and this relationship is going to be like that" and there were occasions were I just let the text flow as the characters acted like I thought they would. In real life, there are all different kinds of parents, and in real life once kids get older their relationship with their parents cannot be described as "perfect" unless things are creepy and weird and the kid needs a life. After the kids are about age 3 you need to start seeing a push-and-pull for both the mother and the child to be real.

One of the more awkward situations I got into with my fans was that people thought Georgie (Georgiana Bingley) was not really a good parent, which is a subject that comes up a lot in Book 8, but I think it's because her relationship with her daughter is harder to understand than the typical Regency "I love my kid to bits and now that they popped out of me my whole life is dedicated to tickling them or whatever" thing you see in fiction which certainly wasn't true to life. Mothers were expected to have servants take care of their children for the first three years, even to send them to another house if the current house was crowded to be raised by a wet nurse. Hanging around babies was not a Regency rich people thing to do, but Georgie also connects to her child (and her mother) differently than the original cast in that she's not outpouring with visible affection all the time, which is how a "good mother" acts in romance fiction. Just like you don't treat your child like you would a puppy doesn't mean you don't have a deep emotional connection that is the strongest thing in your life; it was just very hard for me to express it the way I felt was true to her character. At this point in the series I was more interested than being true to characters than genre norms, which you probably figured out by the fact that they also go to Japan.

Of course I'm probably preaching to moms to know way more than I do about the subject, but oh well. ;) That's right. It's 2013 and I'm finally into smilies. I'm a late bloomer.