by Roseanna White | Feb 27, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
My totally awesome fashion book sadly doesn’t have much on men for the 1860s, so I’ve been trolling the internet while writing Circle of Spies. And you know what I’ve found? That the variety of fashions for men in 1865 gives me some awesome freedom. =)
My first choice was in figuring out what kind of hat my hero wears. I know this seems small, but his opening scene is him getting off the train and waiting for the villain to arrive, and he’s all brooding and silent and stuff, and I didn’t to visualize him just so. So what hat did he wear? Top hat? Bowler? Straw boater thingy? Just look at these choices!
I decided that Slade Osborne wears a bowler. I at first had him in a top hat, but…nope. Just can’t do it. He’s a bowler man, for sure and certain.
Men’s coats came in a variety of lengths and styles too, with differing collar widths. Sometimes gents would only button the top button of their coat, so as to show off their waistcoat (vest). Cravats had some variation too. Notice in the picture below the man is wearing trousers, shirt, vest, frock coat, and over coat. The outermost coat would come off inside, leaving frock coat on.
Slade wears a knee-length frock coat, quite fashionable, but only because someone else commissioned his clothes for him. I kind of wonder what he would have chosen for himself… 😉
Then, goodness, I had to decide on facial hair! I’ve never really had many heroines with facial hair at all (except for Xerxes, who had a full beard because, well, he did, LOL. Historically, that is. But for Slade, the image of Collin Ferrell I’d based him on featured a goatee. So in my mind, that’s what he had. In trying to ascertain if this was time-accurate, I looked up the word–check. Fine for the time. But did that mean it was popular? Well, what I love about 1865 is that there are pictures everywhere! I just opened one of my books on Baltimore during the Civil War, found a photo of a huge group of men, and studied their moustaches and beards, LOL. And, yep, I found several goatees!
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| Not that this is precisely a goatee, but I’m looking online now instead of in my book, LOL |
So there we have it. Slade Osborne wears a bowler, a knee-length frock coat, carries a pocket watch, has a goatee. But my favorite part about him is his demeanor. Where Bennet in
Ring of Secrets is a social bumbler who far prefers his chemistry laboratory…where Thad in
Whispers from the Shadows is amiable, personable, and adventurous, with a keen intuition about what people most need…well, Slade is brooding, silent, and has learned firsthand the price of betrayal. But oh, the things he can say with his mouth firmly shut! Yep, he’s a fun one. =)
by Roseanna White | Feb 25, 2013 | Word of the Week
Virus is another word that really surprised me. I guess because I know that viruses are so itsy-bitsy they require a high-powered microscope to see them…I just assumed they were a modern realization. And hence a modern word.
Um, no.
Virus has been around since the late 1300s as a word, its original meaning being “venomous substance.” It’s in fact straight from the Latin virus that means “poisonous liquid.” So, okay…really old meaning. But that’s not what a virus is today exactly, right? So how about the modern meaning?
Even that surprised me! It’s from 1728. If someone had asked me, I would have guessed sometime in the 1800s at the earliest. But nope. 1728. Obviously “computer virus” didn’t come around until the 20th century though. 😉 And viral is from 1948.
Now let’s pray everyone can stay immune to all those nasty viruses floating around out there this time of year!
by Roseanna White | Feb 21, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
My computer is going blind. Which is to say, its video card is failing. It’s annoying on a good day–it won’t play video, crashes any time flash comes up–and kinda terrifying on a bad day when the screen just blinks out and then doesn’t recover quite as it should.
I still think of this thing as “my new laptop.” But really it’s four years old, which is about the life expectancy of a computer these days (let’s not get into why…). And as I sit here and contemplate getting a new one, I remember a conversation I had with my best friend five years ago. She was getting a new desktop computer, and while she was happy, she was also sorry to let her old one go. Because, she said, she thought that would be the computer she was using when she got published.
I’d never paused to think about the machines that might be tied to certain periods in my life, but it came back to me yesterday while I stared at my crazy-big-looking, wonky screen. And thought to think back on what I’d been through with this one.
I had a laptop in college, but it went kaput shortly after Rowyn was born, so just about five years ago. I wanted to get another right away, but finances didn’t permit. So I used an ancient, wheezing desktop for my projects then. That’s where I wrote a contemporary romance I pitched to Summerside, another contemporary romance that I thought would be a fun followup to it with another house. Yeah…both of those are just sitting in my Completed MSS folder now.
Then I finally got the laptop I wanted in the summer of 2009. Right before the ACFW conference. I picked based on battery life, and man was I impressed! I didn’t have to plug the thing in at all while I was away. Then I came home and got down to work on another historical, also destined to sit on the my harddrive for a while. Then, then I wrote
Jewel of Persia on this lovely little Acer. I carried it around with me, writing in every room of the house, often making a desk of the end table in my living room. From there, I went to
Love Finds You in Annapolis, Maryland. Which lead to
Ring of Secrets.
Yeah–this is the computer I used to write these books that got me published. This is the computer that will be forever tied to my big break, to those thrill-inducing emails. The computer that has seen born and has saved for me the first books of mine to really get into readers’ hands.
Sniff, sniff. I love this little laptop!
So while this isn’t exactly a post that waxes philosophical on things of faith, it seemed appropriate to take a minute to be thankful for this gift. It’s just a computer. Just a collection of parts that can fail and get sick and find any number of ways to infuriate us daily. But it’s also a little machine that has made my life easier. That has seen me through a lot of manuscripts, a lot of dreams, a lot of disappointments. I’ve cried with it and laughed with it and learned how to work around its quirks. And I’m going to miss it when it’s gone.
~*~
I’m a guest again today on the
Borrowed Book, where I’m talking about a day in my life–don’t miss your chance to enter to win a signed copy of
Ring of Secrets (one just for the commenters there) and also get more entries into my
Box of Secrets giveaway!
by Roseanna White | Feb 20, 2013 | Uncategorized
We have some winner! From the giveaway for Susie Finkbeiner’s Paint Chips and a necklace from her store, that is. =) First, the book goes too…
Annette {This Simple Home}!
And the jewelry of her choice goes to…
Leila (http://leliaroseforeman.blogspot.com/)
I’ll be contacting you both. Remember, one week to claim the prize!
by Roseanna White | Feb 20, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
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| Camden Station in 1865 |
One of the interesting tidbits I’ve learned as I’m researching Circle of Spies (the official name of Culper Ring Series, Book 3!!!!) has to do with Baltimore and the trains.
Now, Baltimore was a fairly important railroading town, as one might be able to guess from the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s name, LOL. There were several major lines running through the city. And yet, you wouldn’t hear those locomotives if you were in the city during the Civil War era–oh no. They were considered noise pollution (not that that was the name for that at the time), and running a train through the city proper was against the law.
Kinda interesting, then, since the lines had to go straight through Baltimore to get to, say, Washington D.C.
So there were two major stations. There was the President Street Station that came into Baltimore on one side of town, and the
Camden Station on the opposite side, heading to D.C. In order to get to one from another, passengers either had to debark, take a coach through the city, and catch a different train, or else the cars had to be decoupled from the locomotive, hitched to horses one by one, and pulled through the town to the other station, where a new engine would be coupled up.
Inconvenient for travelers, to be sure, though I suppose the residents appreciated it, LOL. But what I find interesting is how many times this was used for nefarious purposes! This process was around what the first attempt to kidnap or kill Abraham Lincoln was based, when he was on his way to Washington for his Inauguration. And when the war was just heating up and Union soldiers were en route to D.C., Confederate sympathizers dumped sane, bricks, and other debris on the tracks between the two stations to prevent the cars from being pulled along by the horses.
The fun little tidbits I just love learning. =)
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.