Is Fashion, Beauty and Beauty, Fashion?

Or, If clothing is both pretty and functional, does that mean it cannot be fashionable?

In doing research for my 1930s set ongoing fiction project, I’ve come to the startling realization that the decade was not considered, well, all that fashionable.  I am using fashion in a very specific sense here, to mean not merely what is worn but rather what is influential in clothing design beyond the moment at hand. 

I noticed this when thumbing through my historical fashion bible: Fashion: The Collection of the Kyoto Institute (A History from the 18th Century to the 20th Century). 

Specifically, the section on the 1930s is about 10 pages while the section on the 1920s is about 50. 

This tells me several things.  First, that clothing in the 1920s was varied, interesting, innovative, and influential.  Second, that clothing in the 1930s was not.  You could give a representative sample and cover the major design developments in a handful of pages.

What this also tells me–perhaps a confirmation bias, since from looking at photographs and design plates from the decade I already considered it as such–is that it was a very WEARABLE time period. The clothes were for the most part simple, underwear was uncomplicated, lengths and styles were practical.  This was the era of the morning dress, the afternoon dress, the cocktail dress, and the evening gown.  A morning dress could last through the afternoon, an afternoon dress through cocktails, a cocktail dress through the evening, if necessary.  The fabrics were practical, the adornments limited. 

This was the era of the beach pyjamas and specific sportswear for riding, tennis, golf, because ladies could do those things freely now.  It was the era of hats and gloves and reasonable heels (2-3″ instead of our ridiculous modern 4-5).

The clothes were beautiful.  They were flattering to the basic shape of women’s bodies.  But they were not that innovative or so over-the-top that they shaped fashion for decades to come.  No wonder I look at all the silhouettes and think, “I want that”–they are so unfashionable as to be timeless.

Yes, please.  More of this.

I Mean Eager, You Hear Anger

Or, Primary Definitions in Individual Lexicons of English

I had an interesting exchange about word meaning recently.  Well.  Let me rephrase; I had a rather boring exchange about word meaning that led me to an interesting point of contemplation.

After the contretemps of That Review Which Will Not Be Named, I saw in my blog stats that Thursday (the day the review posted) was my second-busiest day ever–second only to the day two traditionally published romance authors mentioned via Twitter one of my posts.  Feeling like I needed to make something positive out of the situation, I pointed out my increased traffic.  I used the word “furor” in my tweet to describe the flurry of comments on the review, and the reviewer responded with something like “was there furor?” 

I read that, I think correctly, as her wondering if in fact I had been outraged over the review and just hid it well.  That that interpretation of my words was her first reaction made me question my usage.  I immediately checked Dictionary.com, but it reassured me that I understood the word correctly to be enthusiasm, energy, hectic  events, etc.  It also can, apparently, be used to mean outrage, anger, frustration, etc.  My usage was the first (primary) definition; hers was the third definition.  I sent her the link and “see #1,” and all was well.

It got me thinking, though:  how much do our own individual word definitions or associations influence what we read?  The possibility does not occur in person-to-person conversation, because there is tone and expression to offer context.  When I say “furor” with a laugh in my voice, the way I speak tells my listener I didn’t mean outrage.  But in writing?  All a reader has is the words on the page, as they are presented, and sometimes context is not enough to illuminate the author’s meaning.  In the case I am describing, the misreading occured because the word has more than one accepted (and fairly commonly understood) definition, and either could make sense in the context.

More insidious a problem than that, however, is what writers should do with the words it does not occur to us that someone might have a different “first definition” for?  I am not sure where I learned “furor,” for example, Jane Austen or Shakespeare or Georgette Heyer.  Regardless of its origin for me, it has never been a word I associate strongly with its lexicographic cousin, “fury.” 

Thus, the crux of my conundrum.

I mean, if I understand that I am using a non-standard definition of a word, or that it is a word I recognize as having several meanings, I can add cues in the sentence to make my usage unambiguous.  But how am I supposed to anticipate the confusion engendered by someone else’s idea of that word, when I’m not consciously aware of the definition they go to first? 

Clearly, the pitfalls that trap us are the ones we don’t even realize are there.

Humble Pie Is a Dish Best Served Cold

Or, The Law of Averages Said This Was Bound to Happen

I’ve mentioned that the response to What You Will has, so far, been positive.  I have not been omitting a legion of bad reviews or selectively editing the excerpts or anything like that; there simply haven’t been that many mentions of it.  You can imagine my delight when this morning it showed up at the top of one of one of the best romance blogs out there, Smart Bitches Trashy Books.  This was not a surprise, exactly, since I had approached Sarah about reviewing it, but I didn’t know if she would or if she would have much to say.

She did…and she did.

I do believe I am still blushing.  Apparently I like me some semi-colons like fat kids like cake:  to distracting and destructive excess.  I need to lose 40 pounds of them and view them as special treats.

And my hero was a tool (eh, I can live with that; a lot of people in this world are jerks, including me quite often), and I had some wonky descriptions (this I can’t live with; if I hadn’t already fired my editor for the singular typo which has been pointed out, I would for this egregious blindness in not spotting points of ambiguity or obtuseness or just plain what-does-that-even-mean-osity).

I have no issues with anything Sarah wrote; it was an enlightening perspective for me.  A needed, if embarrassing, reminder that just because I like my style, and just because my friends who haven’t studied writing do, that doesn’t mean it’s not improvable.  I can always, always get better, and I think sometimes I forget to really work to do so, because production is the harder part for me.  And so it is, but that’s no excuse for slacking off on the prose editing end just because it’s mostly okay, or good enough.

In the end the one thing I did have an issue with is the commenter who said the excerpts sounded like the book was written in a foreign language and translated via online translator.  ?!  I may be overly pedantic, but I am quite fluent in English, fuck you very much.  But otherwise, good useful stuff.

And at least one person said she still wanted to read it.  That is called victory.  Even if victory is spelled with a D+. 

You can read the review here (and if you respond with comments please be polite, because I am quite grateful for the advice that was offered!).

As Tobias Funke would put it:  Onward and upward!

Someone Else Loved What You Will!

I had my first unsolicited review pop up over at Smashwords on What You Will.  It got rated 5 stars and the buyer was kind enough to leave some words of praise:

“This is an enjoyable short Regency romance with a great plot. It’s a quick read and I can’t wait to read the other twin’s story.”

So we’re currently batting two five-star ratings and two “looking forward to the next one” reviews.  I call this…winning. 

Also Twelfth Night has been selling quite well, with almost as many copies picked up in the first few days as What You Will got in its first seven weeks (already in double digits between the two sales avenues!). I have no way to tell if these are repeat buyers and thus all the sales I can expect any time soon, or new people who stumbled ontoTwelfth Night first.

Interestingly, I have sold more copies of Twelfth Night in the UK than in the US on Kindle (which does break out separate reports based on location, since technically it is different stores), which…surprised me.  Not sure why, except that the US romance audience is bigger, so I’d expect the proportion of US sales to be bigger. But maybe Amazon UK is such a smaller pool of independent writers that it’s easier for prospective readers to find me?  Or maybe it has to do with some of my Twitter network being based overseas?  Or maybe the Regency historical market is stronger in the UK than the US, even if the US reads more romance overall?  Hard to say.  But interesting, even if it’s just a coincidence.  Fact is, the numbers I’m talking about are small enough that even a stray sale or two can skew the statistics, so take all of these trend reports with a grain of salt…I do.

The main thing is, response continues positive if not overwhelming, and that is enough.  This is a long-tail game, and I maintain my belief that as long as what I’m writing is quality, it will be read.

Have you read one of my stories?  Let me know what you thought!  You can comment below, of course, or leave me a review on your blog, or Amazon, or Smashwords, or Goodreads, or Twitter…on the bathroom wall at your favorite dive…grateful for it all!

Hero of the Week: The Painted Woman Blog

Or, Why I Love the Internet

I will start by answering that tease:  I love the internet because it makes authors of us all.

I don’t mean this in a snarky way.  I’m being completely serious. The internet is the world’s greatest publisher, and the greatest platform for crowdsourcing information in human history. All it requires is one person with a passion for some strange, random niche, and the rest of the world can access in a matter of minutes or hours what that person spent days or weeks or years researching.

Most of us are not researchers, in that we are not happy digging through material that may or may not contain the information we need on the vague hope that it will.  Especially for my Generation Google, that is a disgusting waste of time.  Sure, you might learn a few interesting facts along the way, but are they really worth those lost three hours when you could have found what you needed in three minutes on the web?

Most people who blog on very narrow topics share a few things they intentionally set out to find, but vastly more things they just stumbled across along the way. What makes the internet awesome is that it gives people a place to share those snippets instead of shrugging and moving on to the information they were really after. And what makes the internet even more wonderful is that it’s free for the rest of us to find that information–free, in a financial sense, yes, but more importantly free in a more abstract sense, in that the information available is no longer limited by what the gatekeeping institutions of publishers and editors and librarians and archivists judged to be important.  It doesn’t matter if some literatus thinks the information or perspective is worthwhile to publish just for posterity, or likely enough to attract an audience to be profitable to publish; what matters now is if someone, somewhere, was engaged enough by the information to write a few sentences or paragraphs about it. 

Also, of course, the wonderful specificity with which the information can now be searched removes one of the other great inhibitors of free information.  Information now can be parsed quite narrowly with a discerning data matrix so that you find exactly and only what you were looking for.

The specific case that has me thinking about this is my Grand Friday story, which I have rapidly realized will take at least a few brush strokes of research on:

• clothing
• accessories
• modes of travel and times involved
• luggage
• automobiles
• cocktails
• southwestern England (climate and geography)
• art deco houses (decor more than architecture but perhaps architecture, too)
• names

The autos are a simple Google search, the names a US Census Bureau/baby name book search, modes of travel and times from Wikipedia, cocktails from a cocktail revival movement website. 

The luggage, accessories, and clothing I snagged in one place, a fabulous (and sadly, seemingly defunct) blog about life and glamour in the 1930s, The Painted Woman.  There are enough posts and enough words on the site to make a short book, at least, but the writers never got paid for it, never had to worry about whether the topic had a broad enough appeal to be “worth” publishing, never had to see their research consigned to the dusty university library shelves never to be unearthed again because the closest Library of Congress could bring anyone needing the information to their book was “History: America: 1930s: Travel” and “Fashion: History: 1930s.”  Compare those to the Google algorithm search terms of ”popular luggage brands in the 1930s” and “what went in a handbag in the 1930s.”

Oh, and the sources the blog references? They link to them, and I can follow the immediate gratification trail to the Metropolitan Museum website for their exhibit of exquisite evening gowns from the era, or the British Museum’s collection of jeweled cigarette and powder cases, and when I’m done perusing those side topics, I can go back to the first site and keep reading.  Or I can save the other pages for when I’m done with the first, depending on how much my ADD is acting up, but what I don’t have to do is leave my seat and go find another book and then physically thumb through it to find the information I need, which may or may not be in more depth in that volume than it is in the one which credited it as a source. With the internet, if the source cited is not yielding anything new, it is a matter of minutes wasted to discover that instead of hours.

I know scholars and professors and researchers will blather about the “unreliability” of information on the internet, but the fact is that most people out there writing about the topics too esoteric to exist in traditionally published books are knowledgable about their topic.  Why there should be an assumption that more people would take the time to talk about something they don’t know well, than something they do, is beyond me.  If you’re spending your time researching a time period becuase you love it, are fascinated by it, secretly wish you’d been born into it, and want to share what you’re learning with someone else who might feel the same way, why would you share misinformation?  You wouldn’t, at least not intentionally, and if you do and find out where you went wrong then you correct it with an open mea culpa.  You share the things you learn, and you share your sources–the 1930s Girls About Town frequently use old dress pattern books and advertisements in their posts–and help make the topic as accessible and transparent as possible to those who are coming to your site, reading your hard work, and benefitting from your passion…which was the entire reason you decided to start the website about it in the first place.

I love that I can find websites like that which have a singular focus and can provide me exactly what I need to know. I do not mind researching or reading widely on a topic if I can see that I’m getting exactly the knowledge I need and other useful knowledge I didn’t even know I needed but can tell that I do need upon seeing it; I have read almost the entire archive of that site, and it took me several hours of fairly intense focus to do it. So when I say I’m not a researcher what I mean is, I don’t have the patience to read 500 pages to distill the useful 50–but I will gladly and attentively read those 50 someone else distilled for me.  I can and will spend hours reading on a topic…but only if I’m finding what I need. What I cannot and will not do is spend hours reading and have only a small fraction of them be useful.

So, Internet, I love you.  Forget all your elitist haters; they’re just mad because you have stripped away their relevance. And 1930s Girls About Town–thank you for your blog.  It was amazing while it lasted, and I, for one, have both enjoyed and been enlightened by your words and your research. My story will be stronger for it, and you enabled me to continue its tight publication schedule because you gave me in one night everything I needed to know to move forward.