tanning and flooding

I reread Georgette Heyer's 'The Grand Sophy' today, and it threw me into a torrent of misery and self-doubt. This is mostly because I consider 'The Grand Sophy' to be one of the best romance novels ever written; it bears little resemblance to the romance novels of today, since it was written in the middle of the twentieth century, but Heyer virtually invented the Regency romance genre, and her dialogue and rich historical detail is unparalleled.

It's pretty easy to see that most Regency historicals nowadays are just endless variations on the Heyer theme, and the genre as a whole has mostly stolen her previous research and writing conventions. I think that there is a commonly-accepted 'Regency romance history' that may or may not have a lot of relationship to the real history of the 1810-1820 time period, and while any reader of recently-published Regencies probably has a general idea of what happened during the Regency period, most of those books are missing the really close attention to detail that makes Heyer's books so great.

Even Heyer suffers from what seems to be the curse of most romance novelists -- they get successful by churning out a lot of books, but those books gradually all become the same story repeated over and over with the same stock set of characters. Heyer has an awful lot of novels with rather similar characters, but she does such fantastic things with dialogue and writes such interesting plots that it's easy to forget the similarities. But for me, as I am trying to figure out how to make the first draft of my first novel better and more engaging, it's rather disheartening to read an author who was at the top of the game, even if I reread the book to see if I could learn anything from it.

But it says something about the story that, even though I had read it several times before, I got so engrossed in it that I didn't take any notes. Part of that may have had to do with the sun; I took advantage of the gorgeous, non-rainy day to lay out on the sidewalk in front of our house and try to work on my tan, and 'The Grand Sophy' kept me engrossed during that endeavor. By the time I was done sunning myself, it was time for dinner [we went out, where I had a v. disappointing well-done ribeye steak -- it wasn't even a little pink inside, and was a complete abomination and a waste of a cow], and then I finished the book when we got home. Now it's time for bed, so I suppose I'll have to go back later this weekend and search for hints at how Heyer write such a great book.

In other news, it's so strange to see footage of towns flooding under a brilliantly-sunny, cloudless sky; there was no real rain in the state for the first day in what seems like forever, and our county is not part of any thunderstorm or tornado watches, so that's exciting. Jan (the family friend referenced in the last post, who lives in Cedar Rapids, where the river crested over 12 feet above the previous record flooding) wrote a rather moving comment on the last post about the resiliency of her town, and it is great to see people pulling together and helping each other out. The floods continue to be nonstop news; the 12 o'clock news this afternoon ran straight until four p.m. (they couldn't preempt Oprah or else she might have them all killed), and all other news broadcasts ran overtime or broke in to give more coverage. And while Des Moines should be out of the woods after this weekend, towns and cities to the south are gearing up to get the same waters that are currently in Des Moines, so this is going to go on for awhile.

Those of you who listened to me bellyache in California about how I missed 'seasons' and 'weather variety', please remind me about floods, tornadoes, and blizzards when I start complaining again in the future :)