More excuses and more from Ygerna for #WIPpet Wednesday

The last week has been filled up with marketing business and Christmas shopping, and my word counts have suffered accordingly. I had two 1000 word days in the last week, but I also had a couple with next to nothing, when I was formatting Looking Through Lace for Createspace, and everything else surrounding the new cover. The new ebook cover is now live, but the paperback is not yet available. I will let you know when it is.

I also managed to get a BookBub ad for Chameleon in a Mirror in the UK only, and I spent some time on various discussion boards, trying to figure out if it would be worth it. Pretty much everyone agrees it is, so I plopped down my $100 for an ad on January 5th. Maybe it will even get my sluggish UK sales going a bit. 🙂

Summary for the week: formatting, marketing, and 2900 words. 🙂

With that out of the way, I can offer you a little more fiction for WIPpet Wednesday. Today, I’m giving you 6 short paragraphs for the 6 in 16. This snippet comes directly after the one I gave you last week from Ygerna:

“My third eldest daughter, Ygerna,” Erbin said.
She stretched out her hand. “It is good to see you again. Welcome to Dyn Tagell.”
Uthyr took the proffered hand with both of his, hands so large they engulfed hers. “We have met before? I find that hard to believe. I am sure I would have remembered a young woman so beautiful.”
Ygerna felt herself blushing yet again — and wished her complexion did not always betray her so. “Several times, Dux. But if I remember right, the last time was over two years ago now, at the funeral of my brother.”
Vortigern’s chief commander released her hand and tilted her chin up with one forefinger. “Ah, yes, I think I recall a red-headed hoyden who might have been you. But now you are a woman grown. Forgive me for not immediately recognizing you.”
She stared into the Pendragon’s eyes, flustered, confused, and strangely happy, her heart beating so fast she could feel it in her chest. Her betrothed, Gurles, had never made her feel this way.

Tintagel, Wikimedia Commons

Emily Witt is our host for the snippet sharing session, in which we post an excerpt from a WIP on our blog, something that relates to the date in some way. If you want to play too, add your link to the Linky.

Word counts slowing down, and more from Ygerna for #WIPpet Wednesday

For the last week, I’ve been catching up on other things, like marketing, that I mostly ignored during Nanowrimo. Since my last update, I’ve gotten another 4100 words written. Not as much as I would like, but at least it’s still steady progress. Seeing as the hubbie and I went out for a long bike ride on Saturday (yes, the weather here in Central Europe is still good enough for that); we had kids and grandkids over on Sunday for cookies and home-made ice cream; I got some more ads and a free promo for one of my books organized; and tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes from the garden made — I think I can be happy with that word count. 🙂

Ygerna is coming along nicely, and I’m still feeling enthusiastic about the project. That makes me hopeful that I can fill in all the holes I left in the Nano draft by the end of the year. Wish me luck! 🙂

On to the excerpt for WIPpet Wednesday. For the 9th day of the month I’m giving you 9 paragraphs. This excerpt comes immediately after the one I gave you last week.

Just before they reached the courtyard between the upper and lower hall, Ygerna grabbed Geraint’s hand and pulled him up short. She smoothed down the front of her dress, pulled his tunic into a semblance of order, and brushed his curly blond hair away from his forehead. “You must join the wedding party as befits a relative of the bride, looking respectable.”
He tugged on a lock of red hair that had escaped from her braid. “So should you.”
Ygerna grinned. “How right you are, little brother.” She wound the stray strand around her braid and tried to tuck the edges in somewhere before taking his hand again.
When they joined the rest of their family, her mother gave her a stern look.
Argante shook her head. “Where have you been, Ygerna?”
There was no time to answer, even if Ygerna had been inclined to do so, which she wasn’t. The first guests were already entering the courtyard as she and Geraint took their places next to their sisters according to age, with Argante at the head and Blodewedd between them. Names passed by in a blur as she curtsied and kissed hands and murmured words of welcome along with her mother and father and siblings.
That is, until Uthyr, leader of battles, stood in front of her. Suddenly the event was no longer a blur of unfamiliar faces. The Pendragon of Britain was the most handsome warrior Ygerna had ever seen, tall and muscular, with penetrating blue eyes, golden blond hair, and a short-cropped beard in the British fashion, not like her clean-shaven father who kept to Roman ways.
“Ah, the spy with hair the color of glinting rubies,” Uthyr murmured. “If you want to remain unseen, you should consider covering your head.”
Ygerna blushed and rose from her curtsy.

This gal is a little like I imagine Ygerna. Licensed through Shutterstock.

Emily Witt is our host for the snippet sharing session, in which we post an excerpt from a WIP on our blog, something that relates to the date in some way. If you want to play too, add your link to the Linky.

P.S. After posting this, I got the new cover designs for “Looking Through Lace” — you would be doing me a huge favor if you would click to the next post and vote! Thanks in advance. 🙂

Gaetano goes to Prague for #WIPpet Wednesday

I skipped last week again and opted for a quarterly wrap-up instead. The thing is, I really have to concentrate on getting this translation finished, and blogging is not high on my list of priorities at the moment. But I will continue posting excerpts at least every other week. Not only do I want to keep in touch with other WIPpeteers, I also like the way it keeps me focused on this project.

So for today I’m giving you three paragraphs from Facets of Glass for the 3 in the day of the month. This is the beginning of a new chapter, and finds Gaetano on his way north to commission a glass coffin — and find Chiara:

Before setting out on his journey to Prague, Gaetano had been assured that his command of Italian and French would be sufficient during his travels. Unfortunately, his French was much worse than he had thought — at least when he tried to understand what passed for French among innkeepers on the road — and after leaving the borders of the Venetian Empire, speakers of Italian were much less common than he would have expected. The rest of his journey took him through the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, where German was the predominant language, and speakers of Italian rare.

At least his French began to improve with practice, and the farther north he traveled, the better was his command of the lingua franca.

He had been hoping that communication would become easier when he reached the imperial city of Prague, but here too men and women on the street spoke only some guttural language Gaetano couldn’t understand, either German or Czech. He couldn’t tell the difference and he didn’t care. All he wanted was to find someone who spoke a civilized tongue, and who could point him in the direction of Friedrich Glassworks.

A trip to Prague, almost 10 years ago now.

WIPpet Wednesday is the brain child of K. L. Schwengel. If you’d like to participate, post an excerpt from your WIP on your blog, something that relates to the date in some way. Then add your link here — where you can also read the other excerpts.

The guard and the princess for #WIPpet Wednesday

Hi, everyone, I’m back! I still haven’t really gotten back into the swing of things as far as writing is concerned, with only a measly 800 words written so far this week. But on the family front, things are looking a lot better, and my head is free for creativity again. In the next few days and weeks, I will be working on reestablishing my old writing habits, and hopefully the word counts will pick up again. I still have some present wrapping to do, but I got most of that done while I was still having more difficulty writing.

I realize that I have not yet done a write-up of the Villa Diodati workshop in France last month. I hope to get around to it in the next few days.

As a result of the family complications, I am woefully behind on all of my goals. Some of the things I did get done:

– Completed Life in the Fjord Lane and published to Createspace (I’m not sure if I want to bother publishing that one to Kindle, since it’s mostly a photography book)

– Published my first erotica story under a pen name

– Created the Epub version of Ein Krieger der Wikinger, the German translation of Judson Roberts’ Viking Warrior

– Set up a Countdown Deal for Shadow of Stone, including experiments in advertizing a 99c ebook

Gosh, looking at that list makes me feel that I got more done than I’d thought! Just not much in the new words department. But marketing and formatting and publishing has to get done too.

With the update out of the way, on to WIPpet Wednesday. This week I’m returning to Facets of Glass, and an excerpt directly following the last one you may or may not have seen here. As a result of critiques at the last Villa Diodati workshop, Gaetan’s name has been changed to Gaetano, since Gaetan didn’t sound Italian enough for my fellow writers. My math for 12/17 is to take 12 away from 17, giving me 5 paragraphs for today’s excerpt:

Gaetano bowed low, honored to be called into the presence of the dowager princess for a personal task.
When he straightened again, she gave him a warm smile. It always amazed him how beautiful she still was, although she was the mother of the most powerful prince in Venice. And today she was particularly stunning. The gleaming gold of her hair, usually covered, was pulled up on top of her head in a crown higher than the modest circlet she wore. In the back, curls tumbled artlessly around her long neck. Gaetano couldn’t help imaging how long her golden locks must be to achieve such an effect. Did they reach to her waist? Her hips?
He shook himself mentally. He shouldn’t be thinking about her this way — not only was she the female head of House Foscari (since no one took the new Princess Anastasia seriously) — she was old enough to be his mother. Not that anyone knew how old the dowager princess really was, but Prince Vittore was her son, and he was older than Gaetano.
Ergo … It was wrong on any number of levels to feel lust for Her Grace the Dowager Princess Zilia of the Foscari Dynatistic Princes of the Venetian Empire, Princess of Trentino, and Dowager Duchess of Ferrara.
There, much better. Reciting even a mere handful of her many formal titles in his mind made him feel much more like himself.

I doubt if I’ll have any time to post next week, since it’s Christmas Eve, and I will have a house full of people that I’ll be cooking for. So wishing you all a Merry Christmas ahead of time! As a little Christmas present from me, my short story collection Dragon Time is free through Saturday. 🙂

WIPpet Wednesday is the brain child of K. L. Schwengel. If you’d like to participate, post an excerpt from your WIP on your blog, something that relates to the date in some way. Then add your link here — where you can also read the other excerpts.

Bowing out for the time being

The Villa Diodati writing workshop in France was wonderful, but it was overshadowed by news of a medical emergency in the family that occurred while I was away. I will still try to get a report on Villa Diodati 13 up when brain cells allow, but after that, I make no guarantees for anything happening on this blog for a while. We’re in a state of limbo at the moment. As I have already learned this year, grief eats creativity, and fear doesn’t seem to be any better.

As a result, my writing progress has come to a halt, and at this point, I am declaring Nanowrimo lost. I got some weekly words done before the news hit, but right now, I don’t give a flying wombat for how many or how few they were. Depending on how things develop, I may well also declare ROW80 over for this year. Life happens, sometimes more than we want, but life is way more important than words.

I have no math for WIPpet Wednesday today, just an excerpt from a short story I was polishing at VD13 “The Pool of Souls”:

Rubbing her eyes, she hurried to the Pool of Souls on the opposite end of the square. The light of the moon, a day from full, rippled on the surface of the water. The broken reflection flickered brightly, and below she could see the glinting ashes of dormant souls.
Imila knelt down next to the side of the pool. The marble was hard against her knees, but she hardly noticed the discomfort. She was closer to Terya than she’d been since her death; she imagined she could feel her daughter’s presence there in the water. She lifted the thick paper she’d made to her nose, breathed in the scent of cinnamon and almonds, thought she caught a whiff of Terya’s own dear smell.
“Come to me sweetheart,” she said as she immersed the paper in the pool. The water was cold, the warmth from the sun long gone, escaping during the night like a soul from the ashes of a burning body.
Imila had never caught a soul before, but she had often watched soul catchers at their work. The true trick of it was in the paper. She swirled the paper around in the pool, panning for ashes as she’d heard some men panned for gold in mountain streams.
Flecks of souls eddied in the small vortex she created, circling around her hands as if trying to determine if this paper was meant for them. Imila watched in wonder as some of the silvery ashes detached themselves from the rest, coalescing in a shiny mass. She continued the circling movement, coaxing her daughter’s soul closer. Then the ashes caught in the rough texture, and the paper turned a shimmering bluish gray as it absorbed all that was left of Terya.

WIPpet Wednesday is the brain child of K. L. Schwengel. If you’d like to participate, post an excerpt from your WIP on your blog, something that relates to the date in some way. Then add your link here — where you can also read the other excerpts.

I’ll be back, I just need a break for a while. I hope everyone is appreciating the health and well-being of their families.

Enter the Magic Mirror for #WIPpet Wednesday

Since posting my goals for this round, I haven’t gotten a lot of writing done — only 1000 words. My time has been taken up with other goals: preparing for cover reveal and book launch for Island of Glass, and getting book blurb, bio, and and various other things translated for the translation project (more on that soon — we’re almost there!).

So today we’ll be moving on very quickly to the excerpt of the day for WIPpet Wednesday. Math is super easy: 10 sentences for the 10th month of the year. This excerpt is from Facets of Glass again and follows directly on the one I gave you last week. Dowager Princess Zilia of House Foscari has sent for a witch:

Vanna arrived at Palazzo Foscari in the course of the afternoon, trailed by two servants carrying her magic mirror. The witch had nearly snow white hair that tumbled in curls around her strangely unlined face. The dowager princess had often wondered if this too was some kind of magic — but if it was, why hadn’t Vanna also given her hair the illusion of youth?
“You requested my services, Your Grace?” the witch said after rising from her curtsy, the silk of her skirts swishing richly around her ankles. Witchery was a profitable business in Venice, especially for a witch as talented and powerful as Vanna.
Zilia nodded shortly. “I need you to use your magic mirror to find someone for me.”
“You have something from the hands of this person that will lead the mirror to him or her?”
“I do.” She held out the glass apple.

Ca’ Foscari in Venice, inspiration for my House Foscari in The Glassmakers

WIPpet Wednesday is the brain child of K. L. Schwengel. If you’d like to participate, post an excerpt from your WIP on your blog, something that relates to the date in some way. Then add your link here — where you can also read the other excerpts.

Yes, I did forget Wednesday: More from Facets of Glass a day late

That’s not entirely true. By the time I saw the other Wednesday Wippet posts in my mailbox, it was too late and I was too tired to write a blog post. So without further ado, a day late, here are 4 short paragraphs from Facets of Glass. My math for 10/2: 1+2=3, plus the extra sentence to end the scene. This excerpt comes shortly after the one I posted last week. I only skipped a couple of spoilery parts:

The Dowager Princess put the telltale glass apple back into its box and laid it with the invitation from Prague on a side table. Then she called one of the guards standing watch at the double doors of her audience chamber to her side. He was one of her favorites, an attractive young man with soft golden-brown hair tied in the neat queue at the back of his neck required of the Foscari guardsmen. She knew she’d asked his name before, thinking it might come in handy someday to help bind him to her. What was it again? Something unusual, not common in Venice.
Yes, she had it, a name from the south part of the Italian peninsula. “Gaetan, could you please fetch the witch Vanna for me? Oh, and tell her to bring her magic looking glass.”
She saw the way his eyes widened and a smile touched his lips at her use of his name. He bowed low and straightened again. “It will be my pleasure, Your Grace.”
Yes, she could build on that.

A soldier during the period of The Glassmakers

BTW, I’m still taking volunteers for the cover reveal on Oct. 14 for the first book in this series, Island of Glass. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to help out!

WIPpet Wednesday is the brain child of K. L. Schwengel. If you’d like to participate, post an excerpt from your WIP on your blog, something that relates to the date in some way. Then add your link here — where you can also read the other excerpts.

The last excerpt from Island of Glass and a request

First off, I want to apologize for being such a bad blogger-friend and WIPpeteer in the last couple of weeks. Normally, I always try my best to at least return the favor and post on the blogs of those who posted on mine. But since my dear friend Jay Lake was admitted to hospice and died only a few days later, I haven’t even managed to respond to the comments on my own blog. I hope you will all forgive me.

For over the last week, I haven’t been doing much new writing, allowing my creative brain to recover a bit from mourning. Instead, I returned to Island of Glass, a project I’d put on ice when I heard that Jay’s condition was rapidly deteriorating, and switched to our last novella, Recontact — which I didn’t finish in time, unfortunately.

Anyhoo, my writing work so far this month has revolved around final editng, formatting, bio and blurb writing, and making the paperback cover for Island of Glass. I’m publishing this project ass-backward, for reasons I will explain later, and am doing the Createspace (hard copy) version first. Most of you have already seen the beautiful cover for the novella done by Rachel Cole of Littera Designs. Based on that, I started a paperback cover, which my daughter cleaned up, given her superior Photoshop skills. I then added the spine and back description:

It will probably be about two weeks before I publish the ebook version of the novella. If anyone would like to help out with a cover reveal, an interview, or anything else, please let me know, either in the comments or email. I’m happy to return the favor. 🙂

The last time I posted an excerpt from Island of Glass, Chiara had just presented decorative glass slippers to Prince Vittore. To her dismay, he is determined to try them on. (BTW, I have no math for this week’s WIPpet, just a snippet ending on a nice cliffhanger.) Here is what follows the last excerpt:

Once his feet were encased in no more than fine silk stockings, the prince looked at her. “Signorina Dragoni, the slippers please?”
He obviously meant for her to put the shoes on his feet herself. She repressed a sigh and fetched them from the side table. Kneeling in front of the prince, she lifted his right foot, slid the glass over his toes, and pushed it onto his heel.
To Chiara’s astonishment, it was a perfect fit.
“Amazing, Maestra!” Prince Vittore exclaimed. “I have had custom-made dancing slippers that do not fit as well as this crystal work of art. I will be curious to see if the second shoe is as perfect a fit as the first.”
She picked up the second shoe and looked up into the prince’s eyes. “My prince, even if by some miracle this slipper too fits, please do not try to walk on them. They are glass, they cannot hold your weight. They will break and cut you.”
He lifted her chin a touch higher with one finger. “Nonsense, my dear. As you say, it is a miracle. We are living in an age of magic, after all. You may not have grown used to that fact, but I am fortunate enough to deal with magic on a daily basis. I may be mistaken, but these shoes seem touched by magic.”
“I am no wielder of magic, Your Highness. I am a glassmaker.” She wasn’t about to tell him about the magic of Signora Gutfe, some of which she had learned.
He smiled. “And as a glassmaker, you must admit that glass itself is often much like magic. Or am I wrong?”
She nodded. Cristallo was the most magical substance she knew — and the stones for this glass had been delivered by the birds she had foreseen in the oil on Signora Gutfe’s serving tray.
“The second shoe, Signorina?” the prince reminded her gently.
Praying he was right about the magic in the shoes she had made, she pushed the second one onto the royal foot.
“Again, perfect!”
Prince Vittore rose. The glass slippers held.
From her kneeling position, she watched as the prince strode around the audience chamber. She was not the only one staring — the guards and servants all watched, their mouths half open in surprise. Sunlight from the high windows streamed into the room, and the slippers tinkled with bright music when they touched marble. The prince paced in front of an immense mirror, more expert work from the glassmakers of Murano, and admired his reflection. Cristallo, clear and in shades of red and blue, glittered in the spring sunlight, and the colorful slices of millefiori on the carelessly tied rosettes seemed to dance with the prince’s steps.
He halted in front of her and held out his hand. Chiara took it and rose.
“Did I not tell you there was magic in these shoes?” he murmured close to her ear.
“You did, my prince.” She tried to pull her hand out of his grasp, as was proper, but he held her fingers tight.
Once again, he lifted her chin with one finger. She repressed the urge to jerk her head away.
“Rich, beautiful, talented, unusual, and with hands like an angel and perfect knowledge of my feet.” He gazed at her with a slight smile and an intensity that scared her. “I believe I will marry you, my little glassmaker.”

WIPpet Wednesday is the brain child of K. L. Schwengel. If you’d like to participate, post an excerpt from your WIP on your blog, something that relates to the date in some way. Then add your link here — where you can also read the other excerpts. 🙂

#WIPpet Wednesday: An excerpt from Recontact and the first attempt at a cover

In the last week, I’ve switched from editing Island of Glass to Recontact, the SF novella I wrote with Jay Lake that I’ve mentioned before. So today, I would like to share an excerpt from that again. I’ve uploaded the first 9,000+ words to be critiqued at the next Villa Diodati workshop, but just in case anyone is so blown away that they want to read more, I intend to upload the complete novella as well. Not that I think it’s going to happen, but who knows, I might get lucky. *g*

Given some of the feedback I got from beta readers, I did some reorganizing and made part of the second section of the book into a prologue. Rog, the narrator of this section, is a pretty foul-mouthed guy, so if that offends you, you might want to skip it (and forgive the asterisks — I don’t want this site to end up indexed or anything). Since this is going to be the new beginning, I’m hoping it’s self-explanatory. So without further ado, here are 16 sentences for the 16th day of the month:

Rogelio Crandall-Yui

Hesperides loomed from the iron-gray waters of Naxos Bay, the rusting stub of her narrow neck a monument whose meaning had long been lost. Or transubstantiated, I suppose, if the old mission logs and current radio transmissions were to be believed. The people on this planet had hand-wound crystal sets and a lot of passion. Just no Tesla yet to get them firmly on the road.
They’d find their way.
Meanwhile forty billion jo-dollars worth of hardware from the Smith-Ayapurtam expedition had been rotting in saltwater for well over a hundred years. Even if we were interested in salvage, we wouldn’t be getting much more than materials reclamation.
Hesperides had become the door to the heavens, or the gates to a particularly dissonant h*ll, depending whose theology you believed. One side or the other was even now setting fire to something big farther west along the bay. I hadn’t had the opportunity to see a city burn before, but I suspected I was now.
By all the gods and martyrs, had we f***ed this thing up. I’d never seen a Recontact in such a mess. Not even Hy Wyoming, which was literally the textbook case in How Not To Handle Recontact. The broken-backed starship with the flowering vines growing all over her lee side, crewed now by pale yellow monkeys who fished from the blown hatches just above the waterline — she was the literalized metaphor of the state of relations between the world of Bonificium and the rest of humanity. Ruined, filled with monkey sh*t, with no way back to where things belonged.

My daughter and I have also come up with a first attempt at a cover:

Very happy for any and all feedback on both the excerpt and the cover. 🙂

WIPpet Wednesday is the brain child of K. L. Schwengel. If you’d like to participate, post an excerpt from your WIP on your blog, something that relates to the date in some way. Then add your link here — where you can also read the other excerpts.

Editing Chameleon in a Mirror, and an excerpt for #WIPpet Wednesday

I didn’t get around to posting an update on Sunday because we were painting in the new apartment where my son and his family are going to move in. Afterwards, catching up on the translation and new word goals took up too much time and I didn’t feel like blogging anymore.

Last week, I managed to get 1600 new words written. I also started to go through the edits for Chameleon in a Mirror. I don’t remember if I posted the latest incarnation of the cover yet, so here it is:

Right now, I’m up to chapter 6 on the edits. I really want to get this baby published by the end of the month, so I’m giving up on new word goals until I do. So far this week, I’ve managed 500 words on the thriller, and that will be it until I get CIAM done.

Anyway, since I haven’t been working on A Wasted Land, this week I’m going to give you an excerpt from my Aphra Behn time travel for WIPpet Wednesday. WIPpet Wednesday is the brain child of K. L. Schwengel. If you’d like to participate, post an excerpt from your WIP on your blog, something that relates to the date in some way. Then add your link here — where you can also read the other excerpts. 🙂 Today I’m using the date in this way: I went to page 14 of the manuscript and counted 29 lines. In this scene, Billie has just been sent to the past by a magic mirror after reciting some lines from a play by Aphra Behn. Now she is trying to reverse the magic:

Pulling a notebook and pen out of a back pocket of her jeans, Billie sat down at the table in front of the mirror. The little pocket-sized notebook was her constant companion, her resource for notes for all occasions. She liked to “collect images” as she called it; they were the raw material for her poems and songs.
Desperation made her memory especially clear, and she soon had a working copy of the lines to Clarinda.
Her stomach clamping painfully, Billie looked into the mirror and read the verses out loud. Nothing. She read the verses last line first. Nothing. She read them backwards, word by word. Still nothing. She stood up, gripping the lute, posed and pranced and tried all three methods all over, but the only feeling of nausea she experienced was from disappointment. She sat down again, her insides hollow.
She drew a deep breath, and another. It all had to be a dream anyway, so what did it matter? She wished she could force herself to wake up, but since she couldn’t, she might as well acquaint herself with the lute. Unfortunately, she’d never played a lute before. She knew it was related to the mandolin somehow, but that didn’t solve her problem of how to tune the damn thing. What was she supposed to do with the extra pair of strings or that last single string?
Simple: ignore them. The main thing was to get the instrument into some kind of working order so she could play it. She would tune the fifth to second courses like a mandolin and the others an octave higher. That way at least she’d know where to put her fingers.
Luckily, the strings appeared to be relatively new; the lute must have been restrung before it was stashed in the cellar. By the time she had urged the instrument into “G”, “D”, “A” and “E”, she’d regained some of her usual equilibrium. But just as she almost reached the second “G”, the string snapped with a loud twang. She jumped, the lute sliding out of her lap and onto the floor.
Billie put her head in her fists and burst into tears.

If anyone is so inclined, I’d love some feedback on the blurb I’ve come up with:

Take:
– one graduate student who wants to change history;
– one dead playwright who did change history, now forgotten;
– the colorful and turbulent times of the English Restoration;
– one magic mirror.

Mix thoroughly, and you have a Chameleon in a Mirror.

Billie Armstrong has long wanted to give Aphra Behn, the first professional woman writer in English, the prominence she deserves. But when Billie accidentally activates the magical properties of a baroque mirror, propelling herself into the seventeenth century, she gets more than she bargained for. What develops is an unwilling masquerade in a tale of license, love and literature, a high-spirited Restoration romp, as Billie does her best to survive in a strange era and ensure Aphra’s literary survival in the future.

What do you guys think? Too silly? Not silly enough? 🙂