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Katherine Grant Samples The Miss Without a Mister
Katherine Grant: This is the Historical Romance Sampler Podcast, and we have a very special episode today. I am your host, Katherine Grant, and if you're a long time listener of the show, you know that I celebrate my book releases by inviting someone from my life to come interview me instead of me interviewing someone else.
And this week, I'm celebrating The Miss Without a Mister, And I invited my copy editor, Sara Israel of Thimble Editorial, to be my interviewer. Sara and I met through our husbands, who went to college together, and we actually share March 14th, 2015, aka the most epic Pi Day ever, as our dating anniversaries.
So we are tied together in many ways. But I do want to tell you a little bit about Sara as a professional. Sara is a freelance copy editor and line editor who works on fiction, narrative nonfiction, and craft and hobby books. She discovered her craft decades ago as a wee teenager editing Harry Potter fan fiction, and later earned a copy editing certificate from UC San Diego.
She has been editing books for publishers and independent authors like me ever since. When she isn't fiddling with punctuation, Sara keeps busy with knitting, sewing, bookbinding, gardening, swing dancing, and, of course, reading a good book. Sara, thank you so much for being my interviewer today.
Sara Israel: Thanks for having me, Katherine.
Very excited to be here.
Katherine Grant: So I'm going to be top heavy right now, still talking. It's me. I'm reading today a sample, the prologue actually, from The Miss Without a Mister, which Sara just finished copy editing. I don't have it up here because I haven't yet created the paperback, but by the time the episode comes out, the book will be launching November 15th, and it will be in ebook and paperback.
So I'm excited to share it with all of you listeners. So here it is, the prologue of The Miss Without a Mister.
Summer, 1816. Caroline Preston never felt more alive than on the summer night of a Northfield Hall festival. The air as warm as an embrace, the fields wafting a sweet, heady perfume, the sun clinging in tendrils to the horizon, refusing to submit to the dark's demands. All around Caroline, people celebrated.
Dancing around the great bonfire, jumping into the cold pond with shrieks, sitting under the lilac bushes for talks that lasted as long as the evening. Caroline could burst for how happy she was, and for this whole festival to be celebrating her 16th birthday, and to be in a new linen summer dress with embroidery to make a princess jealous, and most of all, for Eddie Chow, who had returned from London for two whole weeks to celebrate with her.
Of course, his visit was not entirely about Caroline. It was one of his few holidays from his apprenticeship with a London glazier. And so he had spent most of it with his parents and two older brothers who lived in the family cottage at Northfield Hall. Still, Eddie, her best friend since before she could remember, was there for her birthday.
Caroline really could burst with joy. She had lost track of him as the sun sank lower in the sky, distracted by a toast in her honor, followed by a folk dance performed by some of the maids from the north, and then there had been honey cakes and sweet wine to drink. Now Caroline spotted Eddie by the bonfire
on a boulder a little way from the logs. Gangly and tall- he had grown so much in London, yet boasted barely any flesh on his bones- he sat with his long legs stretched ahead of him, his dark hair and eyes looking black as ink in the firelight. Even with his lips drawn down, his expression slack, the mere sight of him made Caroline's heart drum in triple.
On either side of him, fellow Northfield Hall laborers were engaged in animated conversations, but Eddie was still, silent, and staring into the fire. Caroline could almost believe he was morose, except this was her birthday, and they were in the same place again at last, and he had no reason to be sad.
Skipping over to him, she held out her hand. "Come with me." He smiled immediately, which had been the whole point. When he asked, "Where?" Caroline invented an excuse. "I have something to show you." He took her hand long enough to stand. Long enough for her whole body to leap like a flame in reaction to his touch.
Then he dropped it. They were too old to run around the estate hand in hand like eight year olds anymore. A bittersweet truth. Bitter, because Caroline wanted the freedom to touch Eddie whenever and however she wanted. Sweet, because their age brought them closer and closer to the day when she could, as his wife, do just that.
She led him away from the bonfire and the pond and the friends laughing under trees. There was a path into the woods that he might not know about, as it had been years since he had spent more than a week or two at Northfield Hall at a time. And he most likely wouldn't know the circular grove, as it had been newly created when the laborers had cleared a few trees for timber.
And even Caroline didn't know what the night sky looked like from the ground there. They moved in silence. Caroline found herself holding her breath the way she had done as a child to avoid detection when she and Eddie tried to sneak away from their minders. She glanced over her shoulder as they entered the woods, but Eddie's expression was lost to the gray night.
Out of sight of the rest of the festival, Caroline reached back and grabbed his hand. This time, his fingers intertwined with hers, and neither of them let go. There is much Caroline didn't know about Eddie these days, what it was to be an apprentice beyond the platitudes Eddie recited when she asked, what food he ate in London, whether he went to Covent Garden for the theater, or the Five Dials for card games, or even to a church for Sunday sermons.
She pushed the questions out of her mind, knowing the small details didn't matter, especially when Eddie never offered them. Caroline knew Eddie at his core, and she knew his core hadn't changed. He would always be sweet, thoughtful, and steady. "Is this what you wanted to show me?" Eddie asked when they reached the grove.
"Trees?" "Actually, I wanted to show you the absence of trees." Spreading out her arms, Caroline twirled with her head tossed back, excitement propelling her every movement. And there they were, stars. Twinkling in the sky above the oval clearing. Tugging at his hand, Caroline dropped to the ground and laid her body flat.
They had lain side by side like this dozens of times. In summers past, they had whiled away afternoons counting clouds in the sky. They had named the constellations at night with their siblings. They had shared a mattress at nap time and kept each other entertained with fairy tales when they were meant to be sleeping.
But then, they had been children. Now, Caroline's mouth went dry from noticing Eddie's muscular arm against hers. She could measure the distance between their hips in yearning inches. She could smell his warm skin and the soft scent of ginger beer on his breath. She could hardly see the stars in the sky anymore.
A question leapt from her heart. "Have you fallen in love with anyone in London?" Eddie turned onto his side. Suddenly, he loomed over her, his nose only a breath or two away from hers. His lips were close enough, too, that even in the dark, she could see them clearly.
"What kind of question is that?" "An interrogatory one. Not rhetorical. I should like an answer, please. Have you fallen in love with anyone in London? And if so, with whom, and is she prettier than me?" "No, I have not fallen in love with anyone in London." Tentatively, Eddie reached out and removed a curl of hair from Caroline's forehead.
She hadn't noticed it until he touched her. Now, even her hair felt alive with desire. Eddie looked at her with soft, mysterious eyes. "No, there is no one prettier than you." Caroline found she could reply with nothing more than, "Good." "And you?" His voice was gentle as opposed to her playful brusqueness. "Have you fallen in love with anyone while I have been in London?"
"No." He didn't have a curl of hair on his face, but she reached out anyway and cupped his cheek. "And there is none prettier than you either." Neither of them smiled at her joke. To tell the truth, Caroline had never felt so overwhelmed by her own body. Her breath and heart were out of her control, and instead of rational thoughts, she seemed able to comprehend only the feel of Eddie's warm cheek beneath her fingertips.
"Well," she said, because she knew she had something clever to say somewhere in her mind. "Then our agreement still stands." "Agreement?" Eddie's thumb brushed down the sweep of her jaw. She hoped he asked because he was in a daze, like she was, and not because he had forgotten. "To marry." They had first made the pact at the age of eleven, after her sister Ellen's wedding, when they both supposed they would have to marry at some point.
And as they wouldn't like it to be to anyone, It might as well be to each other. A year later on the morning that Eddie was sent to his first apprenticeship in Reading, they had sealed the agreement with a kiss, a tentative kiss that hadn't felt like much of anything, a kiss that nevertheless. Caroline had never forgotten.
"To marry each other," Eddie said slowly. On her skin, his fingers stilled. "Yes." There was probably more to say. Caroline didn't have the patience for it anymore. She had wanted only to hear that Eddie remained hers. She plunged forward, a little too eagerly, their lips mashed together, and their front teeth clanged.
She would have been embarrassed, except it was Eddie, and her body was on fire, and all they had to do was adjust their necks and their hold on each other, and then the kiss was perfect. Eddie was perfect. The night was perfect. Later, Caroline would wonder why they had not pushed further. She would wonder why they had not taken advantage of being alone on the ground to explore each other fully and to claim their love entirely.
But that was when she was lonesome. When she was no longer anchored by Eddie's lips on her mouth and his ankles locking against hers. For now, she was 16, and love did not need to be proved, and she had Eddie all to herself. They kissed until they might not be able to do anything for the rest of their lives but kiss.
Then, somehow, they extricated themselves. Eddie, always the one to save them from the worst trouble, removed himself first, though he clung to her hand as if she alone could pull him from dangerous waters. They lay panting at the stars for a while longer. At last, they returned to the festival hand in hand.
And when no one said anything, Caroline decided their love was preordained. It wasn't until much later that she realized Eddie's early return to London. The very next morning had nothing to do with a letter from his master. and everything to do with that perfect kiss. And only much, much later did she understand if anything was preordained, it was not her marriage to Eddie Chow.
Sara Israel: That ending is so ominous.
Katherine Grant: You'll have to read on to chapter one to find out what happens.
Thank you for listening. We're going to take a quick break for our sponsors and then Sara gets to ask me any of the questions that she's always wanted to ask me.
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Sara Israel: So kind of coming after that ending I feel like There's a really nice kind of interplay in this book between that magical carefree feeling of childhood and then hard reality.
And I think in, in general in your books, like a lot of the drama is emotional tension between the characters. And that's definitely true in this book too, but Caroline and Eddie take a lot of risks and they face like a lot of real physical threats in this book in a way that felt
kind of unique. There's horse theft, and there's the threat of highwaymen and starvation, and there's like a sketchy boat ride. So as I was reading, I felt this undercurrent of like physical danger in this book that felt really threatening. And in the end, the only danger that's realized is almost the breakdown of their relationship, but I wondered, as you were writing, if you considered having any of those physical threats kind of come to pass and what prompted you to include that sort of background in the story and how it, how it affected their love story?
Katherine Grant: Hmm. Interesting. The physical threats, I think, come from two places. One is, unlike many romances, where the story is, the couple meets, and then the first half is about them falling in love somehow, and then the second half is really like, what's gonna prevent them from being together. This one, Is the entire book is what is going to prevent them from being together.
And so it had to be a lot of external things because they were so confident in their love from the get go. So there are some non physical external things that keep them apart, but I think because they love each other so much for them to really be kept apart, the stakes of those external factors has to keep increasing.
And then also a lot of the book is about Caroline from a position of privilege, learning viscerally what that privilege is. And the Regency British society was very dangerous. And if you didn't have money or status, like you probably were going to have physical threats including hunger, including robberies and stuff.
As to why none of it came to fruition, I think maybe I didn't think about that. I mean, I think in general, I'm not that interested in traumatizing my characters or exploring the aftermath of trauma on the page. In this dance of, escapist fiction and something that's enjoyable that's kind of a line that I haven't been that interested in crossing yet.
Sara Israel: Yeah. Yeah. I enjoyed that it didn't cross that line. But it, it felt like this sort of interesting dance with danger. And I think, you know, aside from, from those like physical threats, Caroline and Eddie both feel like kind of like very vulnerable characters and maybe it's because they're both the babies of their families and they're both kind of dealing with anxiety throughout the whole book and they're like trying to make this plan but they're pretty bad at it, you know, they're very inexperienced but it was kind of an interesting, feeling
that I had.
Katherine Grant: I was intimidated writing them because I knew they had to be young at their story because they have to be young in order for the family to try to stop them from being together, which was the story I knew I wanted to tell. And was intimidated writing a 20 year old that was convincing and like convincing myself that 20 year olds could actually be in love with the person that they should be together and they're not babies and it wouldn't be better for them to break up.
And so I think that's part of like the planning part where they're doing it really poorly, but they like are just throwing themselves into it. That was kind of like me trying to get in touch with like, okay, you think you know everything. So you're going to make this decision, and then what happens?
Sara Israel: Yeah,
yeah. Yeah, and I like that they're not always right you know, but they still kind of work through it. One of the big questions of this, the Preston series is power and who has power and self determination and lifting others up.
And you've given each of the Preston siblings their own individual struggles, but this was kind of the first time that felt like the characters were both so disempowered. And, you know, Eddie is dealing with issues of class and race, and he's also in a profession that he didn't choose.
So he's kind of like, he's feel like he's totally disempowered in his whole life. And Caroline ostensibly has more power being from this wealthy family and a lot of privilege, but she also is financially dependent and so like in a way she can't choose anything about her life. And I felt like they were both kind of at the mercy of others and circumstance.
The question of power felt central to this book in a different way from some of the others. And I wonder if you could talk about like what you were thinking about power and like who has power as you were writing this one.
Katherine Grant: Yeah, that's interesting. I think of the I haven't thought about it from the lens of power.
I think about it from the lens of privilege and how the whole Prestons I have wanted to explore, what does it mean to know that you have privilege and to want to do something about that. But then also sometimes to not know that you have privilege. And so, from the very beginning when I conceptualized this series, I knew that
lord Preston, who has done so many things progressively throughout his life, such as turning Northfield Hall into the egalitarian estate that it is, this was his blind spot being confronted. He wants to protect Caroline from what he sees as an unnatural alliance. He doesn't think that she could be happy in a non privileged life which he perceives that if she married down in class and possibly he might have some racism in there.
He can't imagine that she would be happy and so he wants to protect her from something that he doesn't think is good for her.
And Caroline doesn't see it that way at all because she has been raised by him to see the world in a different way. And so when I wrote her, I thought of her as having a lot of privilege, but not having experience. And so she had to learn a lot about what it meant. Like she knew that she had privilege, but she didn't know really the consequences of that.
But you're right. She also is lacking a very big privilege in the regency world, which is being a man. So she is young. She's younger than 21. So she can't marry without her parents permission. And she is a woman who has been trained to be, I mean, her, her father doesn't want her necessarily to be a wife, but he has trained her to be a member of the high society.
And so she doesn't have skills that would help her survive as a woman earning money. Yeah. And then Eddie, he doesn't have a lot of privileges. And so the question with him is how much does he resent that? How much does he say that's my lot? How much does he want to change that? Does he see it as something systemic or something that's just individual to him?
Those were the kinds of questions that I was asking.
Sara Israel: Yeah. Yeah. It's really nice to kind of watch them each like grappling with that throughout the story. Caroline, especially in the beginning, read as very young and a little bit immature and in, like, a relatable and forgivable way, and, you know, but it's really nice to kind of watch her arc as she thinks through these things, and and Eddie, I also kind of enjoyed watching him sort of flip back and forth between pushing these issues out of his mind and then he can't actually push it out of his mind. He keeps kind of coming up against this reality and yeah, I liked, I, I really liked that, that arc.
I want to ask you a bit about family in this story. It's sort of bittersweet as we're coming toward the end of this series when we've spent a lot of time with each of the characters. And I found that the family relationships in this book really kind of deepen the emotions of the whole story.
And there's this central conflict in the story that you have referred to between Caroline and Lord Preston. Her father is trying to protect her from this marriage that he thinks is going to make her unhappy. And we were talking as you were writing this book, and I know you were kind of struggling
with writing Lord Preston because you've already established him as this, you know, very loving and thoughtful and caring person. And so this book was kind of felt like a departure in a way. So can you talk about how it felt to write, to write him as sort of the villain in the story?
Katherine Grant: Well, I knew all along since before I started writing the series that he was going to have this moment.
Because part of it is what does it mean to live a progressive life? And I think from generation to generation, we have different ideas because we grow because of what the previous generation did. So I knew this was going to be a confrontation of him with his principles versus his children's principles.
However, I was really nervous. I guess I am still a little nervous that readers won't be along for that ride. Since I've always known that, I have planted a few seeds throughout the series, but I also was like, don't show your hand. So mostly he has been this character who is a very understanding, liberal minded, welcoming, loving father.
I do think if you go back, specifically in Viscount Without Virtue, there are some moments where he's failing, and I'm going to explore that more, hopefully, in the next book, but yeah, I feel that in this book, we're not in his head, we are only in Caroline's head, and so, and Eddie's head, and so the conflict between Caroline and her father, We can only experience as she experiences it and with her bewilderment and her surprise at this turn of who her father is.
I think I really wanted to explore that because the whole series is about trying to live progressively and being aware of your privileges and you're never going to know all of your privileges and you're never going to have perfect empathy and you're never going to always respond correctly.
And so I really wanted to have that on the page.
Sara Israel: Yeah, and I mean, he's sort of right in some ways that, you know, Caroline she is going to struggle with the life that she could have with Eddie and I like, I like that it wasn't like a super cut and dry, like a parent is wrong.
Katherine Grant: Well, it was interesting because in the Baron without blame, which establishes the whole series, Lord Preston and Caroline's mother get married against her father's will. And so then that comes back in this book that there are a fair number of like little moments that echo specifically the Baron without blame. And yeah, I think as opposed to the Baron without blame, where that father is just like this villain. Lord Preston, I never wanted to be a complete villain and he's not, but he also is taking up the role of the traditional villain in a romance novel of standing between them.
Yeah. And you're right. He is right in many ways. There's a traditional arc of the romance genre where the couple is refusing to be together and everyone's like just be together and they're refusing to be together for reasons and then like by the end they're together. I feel like I got 75 percent through writing this and I was like, Oh, I see what I did.
I know why this is so hard because actually this is the reverse of that. Everyone saying, you shouldn't be together, and the couple's like, we should totally be together. But it's actually like, no, like, maybe you shouldn't be together. So then I just hope that I was convincing in the end that they should.
Sara Israel: I think you pulled it off. That's funny. I recently became a parent, so I was particularly interested in, in the parenting choices in this book. You have Lord Preston on one hand, kind of trying to protect Caroline in one way, but then you also have the Chows trying to protect Eddie in a different way.
They both kind of mess up. And I don't know, obviously my kid is still a baby, but it made me sort of think about how we try to control people's lives the people we love in order to stop them from getting hurt and how we can't really do that. So yeah, like a true portrait of parenthood.
Katherine Grant: Oh, good. Thank you.
Well, like shows are interesting going back to power because they are. They have power over Eddie, but they don't have as much power as he perceives them to have, and their choices are constrained.
Sara Israel: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, kind of on that note I know you've talked about, like, family love, versus romantic love before on this podcast, but but it was really striking in this book that it's, you know, it's not just Eddie and Caroline's central love story, but it's also their relationship with their parents and their siblings and, and like the relationship of these two families that have lived side by side for so many years.
And there's also an animal love story.
Eddie has a pet dog Linnie, and she's kind of like an object of affection and jealousy. So can you talk about the different kinds of love in this book and where your thoughts were as you were writing these different relationships?
Katherine Grant: Yeah. I'll start with the dogs. That's easiest. I wanted to challenge myself and have an animal as a supporting character.
Because that's something that a lot of romance novels do and I hadn't done and I was like, okay, I'll try it. And I think it turned out to be very useful. The challenge with adding any relationship other than the romance relationship is it still needs a satisfying arc, but it cannot detract from the romance and it can't take up more space than the romance.
So every time I add something else in, it's like, okay, but what about the romance? So yeah, Linnie, the dog got tied in to the romance and was, you instrumental to some parts of it. Writing the family relationships, obviously I knew that that was going to be really important to this story.
I wanted to get the siblings in as much as possible because they are also part of the equation and we know them and love them, both the Preston siblings and also the Chow siblings, we've gotten to know through the Northfield Hall novellas. Yeah, so I think it was really important to know how Caroline and Eddie would each turn to their siblings and what they might expect and then how they might be surprised or disappointed by their siblings.
A question that I had as I was writing it is how important is it to Caroline and Eddie ultimately to have the support of their family in order to be happy? Like if all the siblings were like, yeah, no, this is bad idea. And if they were completely disowned, would they really be able to be happy? Just the two of them in some cottage in a valley somewhere?
Yeah.
Sara Israel: Yeah,
Katherine Grant: I think that's a question they have to reckon with.
Sara Israel: Yeah, yeah, I found the sibling scenes really... I don't know, they made me well up a lot. It's like the scenes where Caroline and all her family are talking together and trying to kind of reconcile what's happening. We've just spent so much time with the whole family that it feels really
Katherine Grant: Well, and the siblings each had their own interactions with Lord Preston in their novels.
Some of them a little bit more than others. But I tried to use that also as a way to help understand what was going on with Lord Preston. And I think anytime that a sibling is opening up to especially the younger sibling about something that Ellen's book took place when Caroline was 11, so she had no idea that Ellen was crying in London over something her father did.
And it's not that they like completely revisit that but I think that helped deepen the sibling relationship as they were dealing with this father crisis. For sure.
Sara Israel: Yeah. Speaking of Ellen I was thinking about the last book, The Countess Without Conviction, as I was reading this one. I think you've been exploring the theme of maturing love in several of your recent books.
So Ellen and Max, you revisit their love story and then Nate and Amy, that's another kind of. Yeah. maturing love story. So I was wondering if there's something that speaks to you about this kind of love story where the characters already love each other and they have to kind of understand themselves and each other better.
Katherine Grant: Certainly it speaks to me. I don't know if I can explain why other than that, you know, as I said, we both share a dating anniversary of March 14th, 2015. So, you know, now it's almost 10 years. Yeah. We've been with our significant others. I think part of it is like, you know, getting inspiration from real life and observing myself and wanting to explore that on the page.
I think I find it more interesting conflict wise because like a couple meeting for the first time and then having to get through whatever external circumstances are keeping them apart is a great novel, but it doesn't always really make them confront the issues that will actually come up again and again.
I think it's really interesting to me to explore what is it that we can learn about ourselves and change about ourselves by being in a long term relationship or knowing someone for a long time?
Sara Israel: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I think when I was younger, I was definitely drawn more to those, you know, like, new romance stories. And now, as I get older and, you know, have been in this relationship for a long time, these, these stories are really compelling. It's like, You know, what do we do with this relationship that already exists?
Sara Israel: I want to switch gears a little bit. So I'm going to ask you some questions about writing craft.
Katherine Grant: Okay!
Sara Israel: So there's, there's an image that appears a couple of times in this book that I found really poignant. So Eddie is a glazier and he's, throughout the book, he's, getting work cleaning windows. And there are a couple of scenes where he and Caroline, like, find each other on opposite sides of a window.
And it's this really, like, lovely metaphor for all the things that are keeping them apart, and they're seeing each other, but can't quite meet. But I was thinking about this, and I think in all your books, you write metaphors based on your character's professions and interests. So like Ellen, there's a lot of language about woodcraft and for Nate, there was a lot of naval language.
And so it was making me wonder what it's like to write using these different professions as like a lens for how your characters experience the world and how that helps you frame a story.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. I don't feel that metaphor or metaphoric imagery comes naturally to me, so it's, Part of the way that I'm supporting myself is by like, okay what do they do?
How is that going to inform the way they see the world? I can use that. So when I was reviewing what could Eddie be, I decided to make him a glazier because it had a lot of window metaphors. And I could understand that better than like, if he was like a goldsmith or something.
So I think part of it is, Just when you're developing a character or developing a world through a character's eyes, there's the lexicon of what words would they be using? How would they be understanding the world? So it's part of character building.
It also helps me inform. So like, when I was writing scenes here, if I was reaching, like, where is a metaphor? I do start going, okay, well, not any metaphor. Is there a window metaphor? Or a glass metaphor I can use here? And that starts by, okay, I want him to be a glazier. I'm going to research what is a glazier.
What did they do and what would they be seeing? How would they be doing it? I'm not a very crafty person, so I do feel a little bit of imposter syndrome about it, but the carpentry, You were very helpful because you are a crafty person. So I know when Oliver and Samantha had their carpentry tool, you were like, well, how about this instead?
You definitely helped. But Yeah, I, so I, I do a lot of research to try to find out what would their tools be, what would their language be, what would the parameters of their job be, and then I try to use that to inform how they talk about the world and how they see the world. Glaziers interesting because they were actually called plumber and Glaziers.
But not because there were pipes. Because plumb comes from the Latin term for lead, and they were installing windows into lead, and they did all sorts of lead work. But I decided not to use the word plumber in this novel because it sounded distracting.
Sara Israel: That actually leads very nicely into my next question, which is something you and I talk about a lot
is historical language and kind of choosing between what's a, like, a historically correct word or phrase versus what will be like a smooth reading experience for, for a modern reader. So, when you're writing, how do you make choices about what will give your readers, like, the flavor and the feeling of Regency England versus when to stick with something more modern?
Katherine Grant: Yeah, I'm not trying to write imitation Jane Austen, where you pick it up and you're like, This was clearly written in the 19th century! But I do try to use, again, words that would be in the character's lexicon. So that's kind of like my logic that I apply to it. A great example is something that I just got from you for a copy edit, where Mrs.
Chow wipes her fingers on the tablecloth. And you were like, that sounds like not something she would do because she's very fastidious. But in Regency England, they used the tablecloth as napkins. They didn't have separate napkins. And ultimately I decided It's distracting to the reader. The scene is about something completely different, and I was just trying to show that she was being fastidious. And so I decided to just say she wiped her fingers, and the reader can fill in the blanks with however they think she wiped her fingers. So I do try to think about like, rather than be a stickler for, this is how it happened historically, stay historically accurate while making it easy for the modern reader to just go along.
Sara Israel: Yeah. It's a hard thing to do because like, the research is really fun, I think, and like when you, when you kind of have, you know, you have a word, it's really hard to, to be like, well, you know, okay, I like this, but is it really going to be helpful?
There's words like like nice is a word that I know is used one way in Jane Austen books, in fact, to mean fastidious. But, your average reader is just going to read the word nice and understand it the way that we understand it today.
And like, you know, sometimes my first editing instinct is to say, oh, do you really want to use the word nice? And then it's like, that's not going to distract people, you know, that's not, that's not worth it. So my last question, since I'm one of your editors, I have to ask what it's like for you when you get an edited draft back. What does it feel like when you're putting that draft in front of somebody?
Katherine Grant: Panic. No matter what stage, when I'm sending it, there's this fear of, oh, I hope they like it. Oh, it's probably terrible. I can't believe I just sent that. I should have rewritten it entirely. And then receiving it, there's always this like, fear of opening it, but also I really want to open it. Like normally I, especially with my developmental edits, I have this pattern of like, I will get them back like early in the morning or I'm on vacation or I'm somewhere that's not my computer.
And I'm like, okay, well, I'm not going to open the attachments. I'm just going to say, yes, I received these. And then I opened the attachments and I read the whole thing on my phone, which is not like the best, like way to absorb it. And yeah, but I think, you know, I was trained as a fiction writer in a creative writing degree at the university that was workshop based.
And so the rules of workshop, generally, are you show up and you're not allowed to speak about your work. You just receive the feedback. You can't rebut. You just receive it and then you go and do revisions or whatever. So I still have that attitude when I'm receiving feedback where I'm just like, okay, I have to hear it and I don't have to agree with it.
I don't have to take it, but I can't argue, you know,
Sara Israel: That's really hard to do.
Katherine Grant: I generally am like, okay, got to check my feelings at the door and open this up and see what happens.
And always. My panic is a completely unjustified panic, like it's never like, Oh no, I can't deal with this.
Sara Israel: Yeah, it's scary. We started off talking about vulnerability and talk about, talk about being vulnerable.
Katherine Grant: Yes, but I so appreciate all the work that you editors do and you're always very kind
and thoughtful, and you leave me nice messages in the lines too, like the last line you said, this made me cry, and that was nice.
Sara Israel: It's easy when, when I'm editing to get into this groove of just like, you know, I see a, I see something to fix here.
Katherine Grant: Mistake, mistake, mistake.
Sara Israel: I have a question here. Not "mistake, mistake" but you know, let's think about this one. Yeah. And yeah, sometimes I have to slow myself down and, and I mean, because as, as I'm reading, I'm having positive reactions the whole time as well, sometimes I have to remind myself to, to put this down because , I want you to, to know what works too,
Katherine Grant: which I appreciate that.
Sara Israel: So that is all my questions, except that I have some bonus, would you rather a game.
Katherine Grant: Nice, you know, I love a game.
Sara Israel: Yeah, for sure so I was thinking about, A little bit about this book as I wrote these
would you rather questions. So my first one is, would you rather travel the entire length of England and Scotland in a stagecoach with a group of strangers or sail across the Atlantic in Regency era accommodations?
Katherine Grant: Oh boy! Alright, alright. Sailing across the Atlantic. The Atlantic in Regency era accommodations means a sailing ship, and maybe you get a lucky cabin, and it's probably, I think they were down to like six weeks, but it was a while.
Stagecoach across is less than six weeks, probably just as cramped as a ship. I'm gonna go with stagecoach.
Sara Israel: Good answer.
I'm on team stagecoach too.
Would you rather be a lady from the upper classes who marries a tradesman, or be born into a lower class life and marry someone in service?
Katherine Grant: In service, you mean like a servant sort of thing?
Sara Israel: A servant, yeah.
Katherine Grant: Good question. I think it's hard to be the lady stepping down in life because all of a sudden you have to like do your dishes and stuff.
But you still have family connections. I think I'd rather be a lady who marries a tradesman for love.
Sara Israel: Yes. Caroline's
justified.
Katherine Grant: Yes, exactly.
Sara Israel: All right. And finally, would you rather live in middle class rooms in London in 1820 or live in a manor house in the countryside?
Katherine Grant: Hmm. I think I'd rather live in a manor house in the countryside. I'm a little worried I'd get bored because I am a city person. I live in New York City.
Sara Israel: I know you're a New Yorker.
Katherine Grant: But I think in a manor house, like, I'd read a lot of books and I'd have this whole staff taking care of me. Whereas the middle class rooms, like, I'd probably only have, like, one or two servants who come in to, like, do some cleaning and then, like, I'm on my own.
I'm gonna stick with manor house.
Sara Israel: All right. I like it.
Sounds like the life to me.
Katherine Grant: Well, thank you, Sara. This has been so fun. I love your questions. Thank you. I know you are editor at Thimble Editorial. If our listeners are looking for line or copy edits, where should they find you?
Sara Israel: Yeah, you can go to thimbleeditorial. com to learn more about what I do and email me at Sara at thimbleeditorial.
com and hope to talk to you guys.
Yeah, thank you.
Katherine Grant: Sara is an amazing line and copy editor. I really do depend on your edits. I don't need, I don't send my books out to the advanced readers before copy edits anymore because you always bring very important feedback that helps me get it just right. And I wouldn't want the readers to have their hands on what, what you read.
That's it for this week. Check out the show notes where I put links for my guests, myself, and the podcast. Until next week, happy reading.