Today was finally, wonderfully, painfully the kind of day that I need to have as a full-time writer -- even though I didn't write a single word for zee romance novel. Instead, I spent much of the day consumed with finishing the main assignment for my magazine class; I rolled out of bed sometime after nine (it would have been earlier, but my bed was warm and my house was approximately 55 degrees due to ongoing thermostat issues (not poverty issues, as I had to clarify to Gyre)) and took a shower before starting to jot down ideas for vignettes to write in the article. I think I need to find a whiteboard that I can put on suction cups in my shower, since I have all sorts of great ideas there and always fail to remember them all -- but perhaps I'm not ready for that level of eccentricity yet.
Or perhaps I am, given that I then sat around in my pajamas and bathrobe and wrote until I was running late, at which point I hurriedly threw on some clothes and makeup and sped over to my old workplace, where I had lunch with Gyre. It's funny that I've been gone less than two weeks and already had people doing the gasping "it's been so long!" thing -- but then again, most of them probably think it's ridiculous that I'm already back for lunch, so perhaps they were making fun of me. Of all my coworkers, Gyre was one of the more-annoyed ones over the fact that I left, mostly because I resigned when he was out of the office and couldn't talk me out of it. But, he's come to the realization that if we have lunch every three weeks like we always did, he's going to see me just as much as always, so he can pretend I never left (and I can score delicious food and keep up to date on the gossip).
After lunch, I stopped at Philz to fuel up with a large coffee, and was going to stay there to work, but the tables were too full and I decided to brave the freezing conditions of my apartment to write at home. With some judicious applications of the furnace (which still works -- I can turn it on and heat the place up to 75 degrees in about ten minutes, then shut it off before it turns the house into a sauna) and several layers of loungewear (which I'm going to have to buy more of if I'm going to insist on wearing clean pajamas all day every day), I stayed comfortable long enough to crank out a decent 1200-word article about this year's romance writers convention. We'll see what the class thinks; I should have spent more time on the assignment, but I think I acquitted myself pretty well.
However, by the time I printed it, ate a quick sandwich, and changed into real grownup clothing, I ended up fifteen minutes late to class. I didn't really miss that much; class was rather blah today, and I'm finding myself a lot less enamored with the class than I had hoped. The class is a strange combo of hostile/argumentative people with odd opinions, a few people who seem to think it's a fiction class, a large clump of mostly-silent people, and a teacher who really knows what he's talking about but sometimes talks too much to overcome the silent and hostile factions. It's too bad; there are several people that I think I could like if I could hear from them more, and I think the lecturer has a lot of interesting stuff to say that is unfortunately lost on most of the class. It's too late to drop, though, and I'm interested to hear what he has to say about pitching freelance writing, so I'm going to stick it out.
I came home directly after class with the intention of relaxing, but instead I got sucked into a book called COURTESANS: MONEY, SEX AND FAME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. It's fascinating, at least to me; the author gives a brief overview of highclass prostitution from ancient Greece to the 1700s, and then writes long, well-researched, fascinating profiles of five of the top courtesans of the "long nineteenth century" (generally accepted as the period from the French Revolution to the start of World War I, although her first courtesan was active slightly earlier than that). Since Madeleine is an actress, her life and story touch on issues similar to some of the courtesans of the age, at least in the sense that if her reputation is ruined she would be no better or different than them regardless of how nobly born she was (and yes, I realize I'm talking about my own fictional character as though she were real -- suck it).
So needless to say, this has been sitting on the top of my to-be-read pile for awhile, and I'm glad I got to it tonight. I didn't read all five profiles; instead, I focused on Elizabeth Armistead and Harriette Wilson, both of whom were active around the time that Madeleine and Ferguson's story takes place. Harriette was a more typical courtesan, flying high for a few years and setting the fashions for the London aristocrats even though no well-bred females would ever accept her, before winding up destitute and dying young while in exile in France. But, while she was active, she bedded the highest echelons of society, including Wellington. This all came out in her memoirs, published in 1825, which she "kindly" offered her former lovers the opportunity to opt out of for two hundred pounds (about ten thousand pounds today). Now I want to read her memoirs, since the quotes were really entertaining and shed a lot of light on Regency society.
But while Harriette was more entertaining, Elizabeth Armistead was truly moving; I cried some major tears at the end of her story, reading her diary entry in which she recounted the death of her true love and eventual husband, Charles James Fox, a major Whig politician who fiercely opposed George III as a tyrant, supported the American and French revolutions (to the obvious displeasure of most of his peers), and ultimately succeeded in abolishing the slave trade in Britain. Elizabeth had been a high-flying courtesan for over a decade (an eternity in those circles), and was the mistress of several dukes, marquesses, earls, and the Prince of Wales (later the Prince Regent, later George IV). But when she was 33 and he was 34, Elizabeth and Charles fell in love, and she retired from being a courtesan to live with him exclusively. They eventually married in secret, divulging their marriage seven years later while on a trip to France. She wasn't completely accepted by the ton, but she wasn't utterly cut, either -- the author claimed that she was the only woman to ever bridge the gap between the world of the courtesans (the demimonde) and the aristocracy to the extent she did. Still, Fox died in 1806 and she lived into her nineties, and when she died, she was refused burial with him in Westminster Abbey. Sad.
So now that I've bored you with all of that (when I'm sure you would have rather heard all the salacious bits about adultery, primitive contraceptives, prostitutes, etc.), I think it's time for bed. This book has given me a lot to think about; it's only tangentially relevant to the book I'm writing, but there are some fascinating details to weave into my manuscript as a result. Goodnight!
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