Any Weird Thing Back to Blog
Update: Margaret’s winner is…Krystean! Congrats!
My last Deadly Valentine guest (where has the time gone?!) is the fabulous Margaret Rowe. Margaret writes sexy historical romances that you don’t want to miss. Margaret, thank you for joining me and indulging in some Valentine’s fun!
***
Thanks so much to Cynthia for including me in her Deadly Valentine line-up! As Margaret Rowe, I don’t write romantic suspense, although I have had a few bodies turn up here and there in my erotic historicals that I carefully step over. My next release, Any Wicked Thing, has no dead people, but there was potential. You see, my hero and heroine like to fight each other. With swords. Yes, I’ve got a fencing heroine, Frederica Wells, who is fearsome and feisty. Smart, too, a medieval scholar. She writes history books and lives in a crumbling castle with a deliciously decadent duke and is one of my favorite heroines to date. And the hero Sebastian? Yum, if I do say so myself.
I worked in a library while I wrote the book. One of the things I found most difficult about the job was the yearly weeding process—we removed books from the collection that were outdated, years-untouched or sometimes downright disgusting with mold, mildew and other unsavory ingredients. But imagine my delight when Castello’s The Theory and Practice of Fencing was destined for the discard pile. I had an arrangement with the head librarian to take what interested me before it went to Book Heaven, so I’ve wound up with some great old volumes. While they make me sneeze and itch, they’ve been invaluable for research, and have shown me how much books have changed. I’ve got a copy of A School History of England, c. 1904 that I know would put school kids in a coma if they were reading it today.
I discovered lots of interesting things as I wrote AWT. The weirdest? During a siege in France, some enterprising fellows decided to enter the castle through the garderobe. That’s right, basically they climbed up a smelly sewer pipe. Yikes, talk about determination. Yes, I surrender. Now will you please take a bath?
For my last Margaret Rowe book, Tempting Eden (no relation to Cynthia, LOL), I discovered women shaved off their eyebrows and glued on mouse skin. Yikes again.
I’ve got a copy of Any Wicked Thing (Berkley Heat, March 2011) for one commenter who tells me the strangest fact they’ve come across in their reading. For excerpts, please visit my website and that of my alter ego Maggie Robinson. Thanks so much, and party on!
Tweet It
The most recent odd thing, to me anyway, was that a man can identify a woman that he had had sex before by having sex with her again. My boyfriend assured me that it was true. I still have my doubts.
Regarding mold on old books, I was told that putting the offending book in the freezer will kill the mold. Have you tried that? Did it work?
That is an interesting fact….lol!!!
And, that is also an interesting tip, infinitieh.
I’m afraid nothing comes to mind about odd things I’ve found in books.
Valerie
in Germany
Good Sunday morning, Valerie & infinitieh! Cynthia, thanks so much for having me here today. I’m in Boston for the weekend with my daughters–we’ve had a Girls Gone Wicked weekend with hair appointments and shopping.I’ll be on the road for a while this afternoon, but will check in again when I get home.:)
Hi, Maggie/Margaret! Thanks for blogging with me. 🙂 I’m looking forward to reading No Wicked Thing! On a side note, my husband was a competitive fencer years ago, and we traveled around to all the different competitions. was never very good at fencing (didn’t want to follow the rules) so I salute your characters!!
Oh, I wish I’d known that. I hope I didn’t make too many fencing mistakes! Thanks so much for having me today!
Good morning Cynthia and Margaret.
Wow.. I am still cringing from the mouse skin.
One of the strangest things I have learned from reading was why the sound of running water changes when hot water is turned on. Hot water is subtstantially less dense than cold water causing a difference in the frequency of the natural vibration when the water is flowing. The best time to check this out is when the water in the pipes is cool for a considerable distance from the faucet.
Chris, now I’m going to be listening when I run my bath! Yes, the mouse skin creeped me out too.What people do for “beauty!”
I don’t have any strange facts but wanted to say how grossed out I was about climbing up the sewer pipe – YUCK!
I know, isn’t it the grossest thing? I wonder how long they waited outside before they decided it was a good idea to invade the castle that way.I would not have made a good medieval soldier, I’m afraid. 🙂
I can’t think of any weird or interesting facts but can I just say eww to dead mouse eyebrows. Yuck. I can’t wait to read this book. It looks so good.
Thanks, Danielle. I can’t wait for it to come out. 2 more weeks!
I can think of two interesting, yet disgusting, things I’ve learned while reading. One is the practice of “bleeding” people who were very ill and had high fevers. The second is women’s hair, circa the 1700’s in those tall, architectural looking hair styles. They weren’t just wigs but they also used grease or tallow and even candle wax to glue things like feathers into the hairstyles and keep them intact.
Oh, the bleeding. What a crazy thing, getting those “bad humours” out. And those wigs? When you think what was going on underneath them–lice, etc., it makes me so glad I live in this century.
I can’t remember anything specific but I do know my reading helped me in school (long ago)with pulling up odd facts.
Dinah, I love to come across odd stuff when I read. If I ever go on Jeopardy, I’ll have a lot of useless facts at my disposal!
Here is a weird fact/theory that I learned in one of my classical culture classes in University. Helen of Troy was born in Sparta. Sparta was the only place in Greece that allowed their women to excercise. Strong moms = strong babies/future warriors. Greek women were soft & round while Spartan women were lean and muscular. For men in ancient Greece nothing was more beautiful than an adolescent boy (creepy I know). If that is the case, then it can be theorized that Helen of Troy was considered the most beautiful woman in the world because she had the figure of a 13 year-old boy! Who knows if the theory is correct but it sure would be funny if it’s true!
Ha! Yes, it was “natural” for the Greeks to keep a young boy around for fun. And how I wish I could see Helen—what was all the fuss about? Standards of beauty change so radically over the centuries.
That bit about the mouse skin is a tad gross! As for learning things in my reading… I know there is a whole mess in my head, but trying to remember something to share has me drawing a blank… probably come to me later!
Colleen, I find it takes me quite a while nowadays to retrieve knowledge from the vault upstairs, LOL.
Mona Lisa has no eyebrows! I learned that from a guidebook.
I know–people shaved off their hairlines, eyebrows, used lead paint and arsenic beauty treatments (and died from them).Scary when all they wanted was to be pretty!
Sounds like an awesome book- Love the cover.
A strange fact I read recently was that Abe Lincoln’s son, Robert, fell on some train tracks and was rescued by Edwin Booth- the famous actor and brother of John Wilkes Booth who later killed Abe Lincoln.
Jillian, I’ve never heard that. And isn’t that one of the weirder facts ever?
One of the oddest things I came across in a book was when the main character grossed out his girl by telling her the a cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off and then it dies from starvation!
I think it was in a motel scene with cockroaches running around that she wnted him to kill.
Oh, yuck. I used to live in NYC where no matter how immaculately I kept my apartment, I shared it with those wretched little bugs. Coackroaches will outlive us all, I think.
I always thought the powdered wig wearing thing was pretty bad – but I think ‘mouse skin’ trumps that. I read that back in the day with powdered wigs that women would actually pluck out and in some cases actually shave their heads to accommodate those ugly things – the colors didn’t even resemble real hair colors. I never understood why they would want to be encumbered with the extra load not to mention balancing it. I could understand if you didn’t have hair – or was this just a way to keep from having to wash another part of their body…hmmmm
I think it’s so strange that now people (i.e., me) color their hair to get rid of the white & gray, and back in the day you HAD to be white-haired to be fashionable. No thank you!
It’s not a strange fact, but I found out while reading some Georgian era historicals that patches were worn as fake beauty marks and more often to cover pockmarks and other blemishes.
Jane, I’ve read this too. And people coated their face with lead paint to cover up their scars…and got sick/died from it. I hope make-up is safer now!
I can’t think of a single odd fact; I’m sure I’ve come across some when reading but they are not coming to mind.
It’s not so much an odd fact but just in general how women were truly property in “the olden days”. I’ve read books where the husband could have the wife committed on a whim, where the wife would not be able to see her children if she they separated – all because the husband had so much power. Our romance heroes would never do such a heinous thing of course but it was a scary time if you weren’t the heroine of a romance novel I think!
Diane, unless I write something down, it usually doesn’t stick.:)
Kaetrin, I’ve had to do a lot of research on marriage laws in the nineteenth century. Even if a husband was the worst person in the world, his children belonged to him—mothers were very rarely given custody if they separated. And forget divorce–it was nearly impossible, and a woman almost never initiated it. We are enormously fortunate, have come a long way, baby…but still have further to go!
Happy Valentine’s Day, Cynthia and everyone! Thanks for letting me share a slice of Any Wicked Thing with you all.:)