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My primary New Year’s Resolution this Rosh Hashanah was to be better about self-care.

To be honest, that’s because as I sat there, making a list of all the things I want to be better at, they all boiled down to:

I want to be less cranky.

And I finally realized that the simplest way to be less cranky isn’t to exert more willpower and self-control. It’s to do things to make myself feel better. When I feel better, I am a more patient coworker and a more generous and present friend. Also, I feel better, so that’s pretty cool, right?

I wasn’t entirely sure how to be better about self-care, though, and I have to give credit for my breakthrough to Mel Jolly at Author Rx. I subscribe to her excellent newsletter, and this summer she said something that really stuck with me:

I hate making the same decisions about what to do in which order day after day, so I try to put myself on autopilot as much as possible.

Then, a few weeks later, she shared a story about a friend whose young son got easily distracted during his morning routine, so she made him a list:

Shower
Brush teeth
Make bed
Get dressed
Put on shoes
Eat Breakfast

Mel did something similar for her morning routine.

The truth is, I already knew what I needed to do to feel better. The problem was actually doing it. I’d come home from the day job all keyed up and stressed out, look at my to-do list, and say to myself, I don’t have time for self-care. So I’d jump straight into work, but I’d be unfocused and stressed out, and end up procrastinating on Twitter while feeling guilty.

OH MY GOD, I realized. What if I set aside a certain amount of time each day (I started with an hour and a half, but it wasn’t enough, so I ended up with two hours), and then made a self-care checklist? If I did everything the same way in the same order every time, and I made a commitment to do it “every day after work unless I had something scheduled with another person”, that would eliminate all the fussing and debating. I would just do it.

And look, I know two hours, three or four times a week, sounds like a lot of time. That’s possibly eight hours, just to make myself feel better.

But you know what? It is so, so worth it. I’m not gonna say I’m always perfect about follow-through, or that I never skip a day, because I totally am not, and I do at least once a week. BUT usually once I do start, I go through the whole two hours, and I feel great afterwards. Not only that, but I’m ready to actually sit down and work at my writing and career!

I use a page protector and dry-erase marker, just like Mel suggested:

Continue reading “My new self-care routine”

Okay, I said I was going to do this and I’m going to do it! BUT OH GOD THE HUMILIATION. ::covers face with hands::

While I was decluttering I came across…this. This is the very first query letter I ever sent to an agent, back when I was 20 (this query letter has my college email address on it, y’all). Yes, I actually mailed this to an actual agent. Please don’t mock me TOO harshly!

A little mockery is fine, and probably WELL deserved.

*

Dear [NAME REDACTED]:

Ever since I read my first Georgette Heyer novel, The Corinthian, back in eighth grade, I felt that many authors of Regency Romances had forgotten what it was like to be seventeen.

“A woman—no, a chit of a girl! An impertinent, atrocious, audacious brat—whom I am very sure I cannot live without.”

“Oh!” said Pen, blushing furiously. “How kind of you to say that to me!”

In my opinion, no young woman of seventeen with anything stronger than milk and water flowing through her veins would thank a man for calling her an audacious brat. And being twenty myself, I’m rather an expert.

And the heroes are worse. It is the outside of enough to act as if being condescending were romantic. Personally, I’ve always felt the potential of the Byronic hero has been greatly overlook by Heyer and her literary descendents.

Look at it this way: on the one hand, you have a sardonic Corinthian with cool grey eyes, a list of inamoratas that would stretch from here to Hyde Park, and an iron self control so perfect that if his own mother died he’d merely go a shade whiter under his tan. Moreover, his gift of repartee makes you feel like a babe in arms every time you open your mouth. On the other, you have an ardent young man with flashing eyes and dark curls tumbling over his forehead who writes sonnets to your eyebrows. To whom would you give your hand, your heart, and control over your property?

And that’s precisely the choice my heroine Helen Ardsley has to make in Chimaeras and Cream Cakes. She’s a clever young bluestocking with a taste for poetry, intrigue, fine pastries and flashy jewelry—all of which find an outlet in her friendship with the Byronic Lord Beauregard, who soon turns out to have a sense of humor after all. And yet, she always thought she wanted a Corinthian, like the dashing Lord Fairfax. After all, they strip to such advantage! Things are complicated when a penniless marquess begins hanging out for Helen, her twin brother forms a tendre for a Cit’s daughter, and an old feud between Beauregard and Fairfax threatens to put a spoke in everyone’s wheel. Will Helen succeed in finding true love?

I’ll give you three guesses. This is a Regency Romance, after all.

I have enclosed the first chapter of Chimaeras and Cream Cakes. If you are interested in reading more of it, please contact me. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours, &c.,
Rose Lerner

*

Yeah. So that happened.

So…I have an extremely trivial subject to talk about, which is that I was watching an old (2013) interview my favorite wrestler was conducting and he said something sexist about women wrestlers and it really upset me. I know it’s tiny! But that’s why they’re called microaggressions, because they’re MICRO, and the thing is, I felt sad about it all evening yesterday and most of this morning.

So here’s what Kevin Owens said:

INTERVIEWEE [in response to a fan request for his rendition of “Beauty and the Beast”]: [Girl’s name I couldn’t hear] wanted to do a duet on your show!
KEVIN: I don’t want her. I don’t want her. I don’t want girls on my show.
INTERVIEWEE: No? Why?
KEVIN: […]I just don’t think it’s interesting.
INTERVIEWEE: She could have been in her underwear.
KEVIN: That’s not interesting to me at all[…]There’s so much of that on the internet.

Because a woman in her underwear = porn. Which, DUDE. Hilariously hypocritical. You have lots of close friends who wrestle in their underwear. Your best friend wrestles shirtless in leggings. But I guess a guy in his underwear is still a human being, while a girl in her underwear exists solely to jerk off to.

My point is NOT Kevin Owens and whether or not he’s a jerk. 95% of the time he seems like a sweetheart and a mensch, but that’s really not the point. I’m not interested in talking about whether he’s changed his mind or what he meant or why he might have had negative views of women’s wrestling or whether of course an athlete in a male-dominated field BLAH BLAH BLAH. Today, I don’t want to center Kevin Owens in this conversation.

I want to center me.

I want to talk about how fucking sad I felt when he said “I don’t want girls on my show.”

It just hurt my feelings. And I feel so stupid that it did. That this shit hurts every fucking time. It’s not like the existence of misogyny comes as a surprise. It’s not like I didn’t know Kevin Owens was a dude. It’s not even that bad a comment in the grand scheme of things. But it hurts to hear someone I have a lot of affection and respect for say that he barely sees me as human.

I’m sure he didn’t mean to say that. I’m sure he didn’t mean for anyone to take it personally. It’s personal to me, though.

And look, I KNOW I don’t have a personal relationship with Kevin Owens, and yes, the way one-sided fannish relationships function is also a very interesting topic, but that’s not the point either right now to me. Guys I DO know, guys who love me back, guys who I have real-life personal relationships with, say fucked-up shit all the time too. My desire to preserve those relationships—and in some cases my loyalty to them—just prevent me from calling them out on my blog.

Although if I’m being TOTALLY honest, shit like this is part of why the majority of my close relationships with men ARE fictional these days.

But it doesn’t just hurt coming from someone I care about. Microaggressions from strangers hurt too. It hurts when someone I don’t know tweets me like “I saw a movie yesterday with a Jewish person in it and I thought of you because you are also Jewish!” Yeah, it’s more likely to manifest as churning rage and not this bleak betrayed sadness, but.

And to add insult to injury, I feel humiliated, because here I am caring about the opinion of someone who doesn’t even see me as really human.

Somehow I never get to the point where that just rolls off me like water off a duck’s back, even though I know I’d be happier if I did. That there’s no point to getting hurt and angry.

I seriously considered tweeting Kevin Owens this morning to tell him how much he hurt my feelings. I didn’t do it, but I really wanted to. And when I asked myself why…I wasn’t even hoping for an apology. I wasn’t hoping to hear that he’d changed his mind and he was embarrassed by his past self. I just wanted him to know. I wanted him to have to face for however brief a second that I’m human and I have feelings. I wanted to assert my existence and its value.

But why the fuck do I need Kevin Owens to see me in order to feel visible? I want to be able to validate my own existence.

There’s this bit in Courtney Milan’s Suffragette Scandal that, look, probably you’ve read it, but if not, here it is (with some of the best bits chopped out for length so if you haven’t read it, you should really go do that):

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“Your cause may be just. But you’re delusional if you think you can accomplish anything…Rage all you want, Miss Marshall, but you’ll have more success emptying the Thames with a thimble.”

…“You’re right,” Free said…“If history is any guide, it will take years—decades, perhaps—before women get the vote…Do you think I don’t know that the only tool I have is my thimble? I’m the one wielding it. I know. There are days I stare out at the Thames and wish I could stop bailing.” Her voice dropped. “My arms are tired, and there’s so much water that I’m afraid it’ll pull me under. But do you know why I keep going?”…She lifted her face to his. “Because I’m not trying to empty the Thames.”

Silence met this.

“Look at the tasks you listed, the ones you think are impossible. You want men to give women the right to vote. You want men to think of women as equals, rather than as lesser animals who go around spewing illogic between our menstrual cycles.”

He still wasn’t saying anything.

“All your tasks are about men,” she told him. “And if you haven’t noticed, this is a newspaper for women…You see a river rushing by without end. You see a sad collection of women with thimbles, all dipping out an inconsequential amount…But we’re not trying to empty the Thames,” she told him. “Look at what we’re doing with the water we remove. It doesn’t go to waste. We’re using it to water our gardens, sprout by sprout. We’re growing bluebells and clovers where once there was a desert. All you see is the river, but I care about the roses.”

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I try and focus on the roses.

Even so: fuck you, Kevin Owens. You hurt my feelings.

Who: 10 amazing historical romance authors–Joanna Bourne, Alyssa Cole, Isabel Cooper, Elizabeth Hoyt, Susanna Kearsley, Eva Leigh, Jeannie Lin, Molly O’Keefe, Deanna Raybourn, and yours truly!

What: A sweet party full of prizes! (Including a $50 Amazon gift card for one lucky guest!)

When: TODAY 6/8, 6-11PM Eastern time

Where: Facebook!

Why: To celebrate our new releases, especially the Gambled Away anthology!

How: I don’t know, sometimes things just work out!!!

Come on by!

ETA: the giveaway is closed. Kim won!

Readers, thanks for visiting! Today, Theresa Romain and I are chatting about our recent historical romances. Mine is Listen to the Moon; hers is A Gentleman’s Game.

Theresa Romain is the author of a dozen historical romances, including the Romance of the Turf trilogy and the Royal Rewards series. She loves having coffee with friends, baking with her daughter, and reading (preferably alone). Please find her on Facebook or Twitter, and visit her website at http://theresaromain.com for free short stories and excerpts.

Theresa is the bomb, y’all! And someone I am deeply honored to have drunk blue Klingon drinks with.

This is part 2 of 2 of the conversation. You can find the beginning on Theresa’s blog here. And please stick around to comment, because we’re offering a book + snack giveaway on each site!

A little orientation before we start:

In A Gentleman’s Game, when valuable racehorses fall ill before a rich stakes race, Nathaniel Chandler must work with his father’s mysterious new secretary, Rosalind Agate, to protect the horses and get them safely across England to Epsom. Along the road, Rosalind and Nathaniel fall for each other—but she’s keeping some secrets that will tear them apart. Read the first chapter here.

And in Listen to the Moon, John Toogood is a very starchy, very proper valet…who’s currently out of a job. Sukey Grimes is a maid-of-all-work with a big mouth and a mean boss. The local vicar is looking for a married couple to head his staff of servants….Read the first chapter here.

You may remember we were talking about the Romance of the Turf series and the other Chandler siblings’ books…

Continue reading “Theresa Romain, ladies and gentlemen!”