Meet Lily

Today I am interviewing Lily, the heroine of Vain. Her gray eyes are lively, and topped by thin, angled eyebrows. A delicate blue veil covers her hair, though the color of her brows would suggest her locks are dark, perhaps even black.

We are visiting in the cavernous hall of the Lord of Ribeauville’s home. We sit in wooden armchairs with comfortable pads on the seats. A small table between us holds our silver goblets of watered wine. Smoke rises from the central hearth nearby, the low fire warming the chilly spring air.

Lily has been welcoming to me, but tentative, not yet completely comfortable in her role as mistress of such a great house since her marriage to Theophilus last fall, in the year 839. She smiles expectantly as she awaits my questions, revealing tiny dimples in her cheeks.

What do you do to relax?

“This will sound odd. Designing a garment relaxes me. By designing, I mean those first moments when the fabric is spread on the worktable and I have the image of the tunic in my mind but I have yet to place it on the fabric.” She nods, reliving the memory of such a moment. “Perfection is possible then. The pursuit of it diverts me so much that I do not worry about other things.”

I think maybe I can guess, but as a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Lily brushes at the fabric of the cornflower blue tunic that seems simple yet flows around her legs with the perfect drape. “The only thing I ever wanted to be was a tailor, just like my parents.”

Tell me about your family.

“The beginning of my answer is very difficult for me to talk about.” Lily frowns and repositions her arms so that her fingers can caress a needlecase hanging from her simple gold girdle. “My mother died about eighteen months ago. My father abandoned me very soon after her death, leaving me to fend for myself in my parents’ weaving and tailoring shop here in Ribeauville.” Lily smiles faintly. “If not for Theophilus — his friends and your readers would know him as Theo — if not for him, I do not know what would have happened to me, but now he is my husband and the most important part of my family. We have Nox, our orphaned house servant, and my father is trying to get back into my good graces.” She shrugs. “That is my family.”

If you could apologize to someone in your past, who would it be?

Lily looks away to a point near the door to the master chamber. “There is a young noblewoman who thought she would marry Theo. She was very mean to me when I was a lowly tailor, and she tried to…interfere…with Theo and me after he was forced to marry me.” Lily frowns as she looks back at me. “I was sharp with her, without really understanding the trouble she was in. I am not proud of that moment, even though Theo and my friends assure me she was more in the wrong than I.”

Is there a piece of advice that you have received that has really stuck with you? If so, what was it?

Lily smiles. “Marian is an older woman who did her best to advise me in the early days of my marriage. I was miserable. I did not know what to do about my equally unhappy, angry husband. She told me to begin as you mean to continue. It was good advice because she taught me to not accept behavior in myself or Theo that I did not want to persist through the rest of my life.”

Do you have any special routines or rituals?

“Oh, this is embarrassing.” A blush stains Lily’s cheeks and she shakes her head. “To get me to stay in bed when I was little, my father told me to sleep tight against the wall so the monsters could not reach me. Now I find it hard to fall asleep without something solid against my back.” What does your husband think of it? She blushes even more. “He is even better than a wall, so we have both learned to cope.”

Vain, Book Three in the Evolution Series, can be purchased at most online book vendors, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iTunes, and Kobo.

Author Jill Hughey can be found at her blog, on Facebook, or on Twitter @jillhughey.

Travel Through Time, by Jill Hughey

Travel Through Time:  In my last few blog entries I have been discussing the kinds of research needed to make historical fiction accurate, or at least not ridiculously inaccurate.  For most historical novels, the author has to become familiar with the modes of travel.  Even the most protected or ignored romantic characters get at least one or two journeys in their story (think of Jane Austen's Emma or Anne Elliott). How did people get around in the world?  How long did it take to go from point A to point B?  Would they enjoy the trip or would it be an arduous or dangerous undertaking?

Even if our main characters never leave their homes, other players probably have to come and go from our setting in order to keep the story interesting.  Understanding the ways people travelled during a time period can be a challenge but can also add a wonderful element of human progress.  I wrote a short romance call Sass Meets Class- soon to be released - set in Arizona in the 1880s.  I had a very specific time span in mind due to some other actual events that happened around my location.  This was also when railroads were just being built in the region so I had to determine exactly when each line was completed and how that might affect the hero and heroine's movements.  It actually worked out quite well because I was able to bring my hero back to the love of his life much more quickly by train than when he left her behind on horseback.

This leads into how the time required to make a journey can be important to the story.  Figuring out the timeline of a story is one of the biggest challenges for me as a writer because I am always so impatient to start writing!  Once I have the timeline though, a journey has to be accounted for somehow, even if mentioned in one sentence.  For Redeemed, the second story in my Evolution Series, I had to figure out how long it would take my hero Doeg to return home from the Carolingian Army's summer camp in the year 834.  (Determining where the army camped that year was a whole different research topic.)  I knew he would be on a horse.  I had to decide what route he might take, how many miles or leagues that route would add up to, and how many miles or leagues a fully-loaded horse can travel day-after-day-after-day.  A good reference book for the correct time period is invaluable for this kind of information (I use Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne), especially the routes and speed of travel.  Obviously Doeg's horse would not compare to the modern horse so there is some value in finding as much information as you can from the right time in history.  It is doubtful that any book or internet search could tell me exactly how long it would have taken him to ride from Langres to Regensburg but I owe my readers at least a credible estimate.

The rigors of travel were very different depending on the time period, wealth of the traveler, mode of travel, and location.  Many of us are familiar with first kisses stolen in the confines of a luxurious carriage or the forbidden assignation in the deep of night at an inn.  Most of my characters live a slightly more rustic life.  In Unbidden my hero and heroine, David and Rochelle, travel for four days with a small group of travelers.  Unlike Doeg's eleven-day solo journey that I covered in one paragraph, I wrote something about every day of David and Rochelle's trip so David would have time to woo Rochelle as she tried to resist her developing affection for him.   Obviously they could not just float along talking to each other.  The logistics of the trip had to be at least mentioned or more preferably used to establish a strong sense of what traveling would be like in 831 Francia.  Where would they sleep?  Answer:  one night in the open, one night in a monastery, one night outside the walls of a monastery.  During one day they are in a huge thunderstorm with no shelter.  On another day Rochelle is set upon by two petty thieves.  Obviously these occurrences set up opportunities for David and Rochelle to interact but they were also very real dangers of travel in the Middle Ages.  Could one of them, on the other hand, get a bad case of poison ivy?  Preferably not, because poison ivy is indigenous to North America, not Europe.

Research, research, research.  Soon I will blog a little more about sources.

Some of my favorite "classic" romances are set on sailing ships.  What is your favorite or the most unique travel scenario you have encountered in books set on the planet Earth?

Hello fellow lovers of medieval romance.  I am Jill Hughey, author of The Evolution Series, historical romance set in the Carolingian Empire in the 830s.  The Carolingian Empire covered a vast area of Europe that Charlemagne conquered.  I think the 800s are technically part of the Middle Ages but many readers consider medieval romance anything set prior to the frillier times.

Although I read Regency and other types of historical romance, I do get tired of England.  I really enjoy romance that is set somewhere new and has more rusticity than life in the ton.  I love stories that include a little humor; that have reasonably intelligent heroines and strong but human heroes; and are not too long-winded in their descriptions of clothing.  Since this is what I like to read it tends to inform what I like to write.  I have attempted to recapture the basic elements of the classic historical romances that I loved (Judith McNaught, Kathleen Woodiwiss, Julie Garwood) with a modern voice and fast pace.

I have released two books in my series so far.  The first is Unbidden, set mostly in 831 Francia.  Unbidden follows the story of Rochelle who manages her late father's estate and vehemently resists being matched by the emperor with David, a capable soldier and second son of a Bavarian nobleman.   Rochelle  fears that she will lose her independence.  She uses every weapon and tactic at her disposal to avoid the marriage, realizing too late that she may have lost the love of her life.

In print, Unbidden is 318 pages and has all 5-star reviews on Amazon.  It is also available for Kindle.

http://amzn.com/B0067DDX1M