Quarantinechef: Chocolate chip chewies

If you follow me on Instagram (why don’t you follow me on Instagram? @sarawrites), you’ve seen my efforts to stay well-fed during quarantine. Today’s recipe: my grandma’s famous, delicious, entirely binge-worthy chocolate chip chewies.

The best part about this recipe: it’s a bar cookie, which means you don’t have to drop 60+ cookies onto sheets, bake the sheets 1-2 at a time, and wait forever. Mix it up, bake for ~18min, and you’re good to go.

The other best part about this recipe: it’s so addictive that you would swear there’s cocaine or something in it. My gram had some tricks up her sleeve, but I don’t think cocaine was one of them.

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INGREDIENTS:

- 1 c white sugar
- 1 c brown sugar
- 2/3 c butter, softened
- 3 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1.5 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 2 c flour (I use gluten free)
- 1 12oz package chocolate chips (I use Ghirardelli)

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INSTRUCTIONS:

Step 0: preheat oven to 375

Step 1: cream together 1 c white sugar, 1 c brown sugar, and 2/3 c butter. I use a hand mixer for this, then use a spoon to make sure I’ve creamed all the little bits of brown sugar.

Step 2: add 3 eggs, 1 tsp vanilla, and 1.5 tsp salt. Mix to combine.

Step 3: Add 1 tsp baking powder and 2c flour. I usually add my flour in 1/2c increments to make it easier to mix in.

Step 4: fold in chocolate chips

Step 5: grease a baking sheet (I use butter but you can use nonstick spray) and spread the batter evenly across the sheet.

Step 6: bake for 15-20min at 375 (I almost always bake approx 18mins, until the top is brown but not burned)

Step 7: let cool for a few minutes, then cut and enjoy!

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PRODUCTION NOTES:

• Leave a comment after you realize that you can’t stop yourself from eating an entire row just to ‘even out the pan’

• These freeze super well - let cool, cut into whatever size you want, and bag them up. This enables you to have a cookie any time without the compulsion to ‘even out the pan’ and eat the whole gd batch in one go

• In Colorado, this expands a bit at altitude. Use a slightly bigger cookie sheet or put a sheet/foil under it to prevent it from dripping over the edge. I haven’t bothered to adjust the recipe for altitude - the taste is still perfect

• Gluten free flour is basically indistinguishable from regular flour in this recipe. I use the Cup 4 Cup flour (French Laundry’s gf flour) and don’t have to tweak anything else

DUKE OF THORNS sneak peek!

I'm excited to announce that Duke of Thorns (Heiress Games #1) is coming in the next two weeks. This book features Gavin, the Duke of Thorington, who starred as the villain in The Earl Who Played With Fire. He meets his match in Miss Callista Briarley, one of the last heiresses of a scandalous family who is about to create an entirely new scandal of her own. I'll post buy links as soon as they are available, but to whet your appetite, you can read the first chapter below. Enjoy! And I can't wait to share the rest of the story with you in the next couple of weeks!

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Somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean - February 1813

She was going to die.

And when Callista Briarley found her watery grave, as her father had six years earlier, she would deserve it.

The rasp of blade against bone drew her attention as soon as she entered the officers’ dining room, new and horrifying enough to bring it to the fore over the firing of twenty-four pounders and hoarse, shouted orders from the deck above. Callie swallowed.

Briarleys always died pursuing something stupid. Callie should have known this voyage would kill her.

Captain Jacobs had assured her it would be an easy victory, a matter of minutes. The merchant ship they were trying to capture was outmanned and outgunned. But he hadn’t anticipated the appearance of a British warship. That’s when he had ordered her below, sending his cognac with her. As though she was cargo, and not the ship’s owner.

It was her fault the man was here. It was her fault they were all here. If she survived the battle, she would have to fix it.

She waited until the surgeon had finished, not wanting to distract him with her presence. Callie’s maid, Mrs. Jennings, and two cabin boys held the injured sailor down in case he awoke before the butchering ended. She swallowed again as the saw slid through the last bit of flesh. The surgeon grunted as he caught the arm, then handed it to the cook’s mate, casually, like it was a shank of lamb instead of a man’s limb.

She took a breath and joined her maid at the head of the table. “How can I help?” she asked.

“You shouldn’t see this, miss,” Mrs. Jennings said.

“No one should. But since I am here, I may as well do something.”

The surgeon ran a knife through the flame of the lamp, heating it until it was red hot. She forced herself to watch as he pressed it against the stump of the man’s arm. She didn’t bring a handkerchief to her nose as the smell of burning flesh overwhelmed her. The sailor stayed blessedly unconscious, but Callie watched it all, bearing witness.

She had agreed to let her men become privateers. Captain Jacobs’s persuasive nature, so like her father’s, had convinced her.

But this…

The sizzling stopped. The cannonfire continued.

The surgeon ordered one of the cabin boys to swab and sand the floor in preparation for more patients. The cook’s mate and the other cabin boy carried the sailor off to a berth. Callie waited until they were gone, then started to pace again.

“Don’t even think of going above, Callista Briarley,” Mrs. Jennings warned.

Her lady’s maid, who had been her nursemaid as a child, knew her too well. “I want to do something,” Callie said.

“You have to learn someday that you cannot fix everything,” Mrs. Jennings said. “This is something you cannot fix.”

Callie stared at her for a moment. Mrs. Jennings somehow looked serene, even with blood splattered over the apron she’d quite sensibly donned before assisting the surgeon. Her hair had greyed a bit since she’d left England with the Briarleys nearly twenty years earlier, and she’d added at least two stone of weight to her short, formerly slender frame. But she was just as imperturbable as always.

Callie, by contrast, was perturbed. Very perturbed. And she was sure she looked wild enough to give her emotions away.

“I will fix it,” Callie said. “I will fix all of it.”

“You can’t very well fix that poor man’s arm,” Mrs. Jennings said gently. “Nor can you decide whether we drown. You’d do much better for yourself if you had a bit of whisky and waited for this to be over.”

Sometimes Callie hated how well Mrs. Jennings knew her.

“Captain Jacobs gave me cognac,” she said, trying to lighten the mood. “I don’t think I have the stomach for cognac and whisky both.”

“I’m sure you would if you tried. You can stomach more than a lady should.”

“Are you encouraging my hoydenish ways now?” Callie asked. “If I’d known a sea battle was all it took, I would have done this years ago.”

“Hoydens are more useful in sea battles than ladies are,” Mrs. Jennings said frankly. “Drink your cognac, and we can discuss your manners in the morning.”

Callie smiled. But she didn’t take her maid’s advice. She paced instead, waiting.

It felt like an eternity, but it must have been only another five or ten minutes before she heard a most welcome sound. The shouting above turned, in an instant, from battle cries to celebration. And Callie realized the guns had stopped.

She rushed out of the cabin and scrambled up the ladder-like stairs before Mrs. Jennings could remind her to behave herself. The deck teemed with men — most of whom appeared to be whole — and was partially shrouded with fallen sails. She looked instinctively to the mast. Her colors still flew.

She whooped — a scream of vicious, victorious joy that a woman wasn’t supposed to feel, let alone give voice to. If she were gentler, more ladylike, she would have immediately thought of the loss of life and limb, of the brutality of men and their warlike ways. She probably should have fainted, or at least pretended to.

But despite all her misgivings, she still liked to win. And the fact that her men had won — and against the British in the bargain — gave her swift, sharp delight. If she’d remembered her hat, she would have tossed it in the air.

She would put a stop to their privateering. But she understood the appeal of victory.

Captain Jacobs was too observant to miss the moment when her voice joined the din. “Ahoy, Miss Briarley,” he shouted from his post near the wheel. “I give you His Majesty’s Adamant.”

He gestured grandly toward the ship next to them. It had suffered more than her own Nero, which was a rather stunning fact. Nero was a sloop, designed more for speed than direct assault, and had been refitted for battle only a few months earlier. Adamant had been purpose-built for combat, but had somehow been outgunned despite its superior strength.

Some of her men had boarded Adamant and were herding the British sailors below decks. She watched the proceedings for a few moments, her pleasure slowly cooling. By taking a British frigate in his first engagement of the cruise, Captain Jacobs would be more convinced than ever that privateering was their destiny.

She picked her way over the ropes and rigging to join him near the wheel. “You must be pleased with yourself, Captain Jacobs,” she said as soon as she could talk without shouting.

The captain laughed. “Cognac settled your nerves, did it? Always knew you’d come around. I told you this would be over within minutes. Nero can prevail against all but the worst enemies.”

Even though he had just won a great victory, Callie privately doubted that Nero was as good as he boasted. Nero had started as a merchantman, part of the fleet her father, Lord Tiberius Briarley, had won at a card table in Jamaica in ’05. The man he’d won it from had shot himself as soon as he’d sobered up and realized what he’d lost. Lord Tiberius had relocated with alacrity to Baltimore, taking Callie but leaving her mother’s grave behind.

She’d never quite forgiven him for that. Not that it mattered. Tiberius did what Tiberius wished to do.

And when he had wished to seek out a new fortune in the Orient in ’07, Callie had stayed behind in Baltimore. She’d left enough homes behind. At seventeen, she was more interested in refurnishing the Baltimore house than she was in smuggling opium.

At eighteen, when she got word that he’d gone down with his ship, her desire for a home only grew.

But homes required money. And the only money she had was tied up in Tiberius Shipping. In the last five years, Callie had grown it into a thriving business, with Captain Jacobs ostensibly at its head. His wife had chaperoned her, rather ineffectually, and they had both let her have her way with the enterprise. Between Callie’s business sense and the captain’s knowledge of the ships under their command, Tiberius Shipping had become a significant part of Baltimore’s maritime economy.

The war, though, had changed everything. And with the embargoes against American commerce in Europe and the British blockade descending around Baltimore, there was more money to be made from privateering than from commerce.

Provided, of course, that one didn’t think too closely about the danger of such endeavors.

She wished Jacobs would have confined himself to their agreement, looking only for easy targets. “It’s a shame you had to shift your efforts to the frigate instead of taking the merchant prize,” Callie said.

Captain Jacobs grinned. He was in his early forties and had spent nearly his whole life at sea, adding deep grooves to the corners of his eyes and a dark tan that Callie might match if she kept forgetting her hat. But for all the discipline and difficulty of life on the water, the captain still had a sense of humor.

“I didn’t say I failed to take it,” Jacobs said. “I merely forgot to present it to you.”

He gestured starboard. At a distance of nearly half a league, the merchantman should have been able to escape them while they dealt with Adamant. But she had been completely unmasted and now floated, helpless, waiting for capture.

Callie held out her hand for Jacobs’ eyeglass. She brought the ship into focus and saw men standing, rather glumly, along the rails, watching Nero for their next maneuver.

“How did you take them both?” she asked.

“That ship, Crescendo, must have the worst luck. She could have escaped when Adamant arrived — we’d only exchanged two or three volleys, suffering no injuries ourselves, but we had to turn all our efforts to Adamant. But the fools didn’t take their opportunity. And then Adamant, in one of the worst displays of gunnery I’ve ever had the privilege to witness, overshot us completely with their first round and took Crescendo’s mast clean off. If the captain isn’t courtmartialed for it, the British have gone soft.”

“And where is the captain of Adamant?” Callie asked.

“Surrendering his sword to my first mate, if he knows what’s good for him,” Jacobs said. “My first mate will take Adamant to Havana for the prize court to distribute, if it’s not too damaged to sail. And we’ll continue there as well, either towing Crescendo or sinking it if we need to set a faster pace. Once we’re all safely arrived there, you can buy passage on to England as you planned.”

They were still a week out from Havana, with any number of hostile British ships between them and their destination. Callie looked across to Adamant again, using Jacobs’ eyeglass this time. As he’d said, the British captain was surrendering his sword, looking deeply chagrined. He had a smudge of soot across his cheek that looked utterly out of place with his crisp officer’s coat and sharp, patrician features. Whatever he was saying to the first mate looked like it was meant to be a threat, but the first mate just laughed it off and tucked the sword under his arm before gesturing the captain toward the hold.

Adamant’s captain looked over at Nero. She dropped the eyeglass. Seeing the man’s face in such close relief didn’t bring her pleasure. But at thirty yards, the set of his shoulders made his anger obvious. He shaded his eyes to look at Captain Jacobs, as though memorizing whatever he could of the man who had beat him. Then his gaze swept over her, contemptuous. He’d already dismissed her.

She handed the eyeglass back to Captain Jacobs. “You’ve made yourself an enemy there,” she said as the British captain went down into the hold of the ship he’d lost. “I’m sure he expected to be given his sword back after the surrender ritual.”

“Cowards don’t deserve their swords,” Jacobs said. There was no humor in his voice as he said it. “He disabled Crescendo and struck his own colors well before they were at the point of going under. He won’t be on the seas enough to trouble me if that’s the best he can offer.”

“I’m beginning to reconsider our arrangement,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to court such dangers.”

Jacobs laughed. “That ship has sailed, if you’ll pardon the joke. If you want to tell the crew they’re to stop earning prizes when they’ve just succeeded, you’ll need more than me at your back. And I won’t be there — I’ll be leading the mutiny against you.”

He still sounded jovial. Nothing would prick his mood that day. But there was steel in his voice.

And she couldn’t do anything about it. Not when the men would listen to their captain instead of their owner.

He continued as though he hadn’t threatened her. “You should go below again, Miss Briarley. You’ll grow cold up here once the excitement wears away. No need for your services until we assess the value of Crescendo’s cargo, and that will have to wait until we set ourselves to rights. We’ll find you a pretty bauble in their hold. You’ll feel better about all of this when you see your share of the prize.”

She didn’t obey immediately. But he didn’t expect her to. He just left her standing where she was, rooted to the deck.

The unfairness of it all held her pinned. She nibbled on her thumbnail, a habit she returned to when she forgot her gloves. Capturing merchant ships and striking her own blow against the British had seemed like a decent enough plan. The American government was willing to grant privateering licenses to supplement its inadequate navy, and it felt like half the ship owners in Baltimore had become privateers since the war had begun. Jacobs was happier than she’d ever seen him, putting his old battle skills from the British Navy into better use. He’d never been much for business. He’d been content enough letting her manage the sales and manifests while he sailed his own ship and acted as a figurehead.

But when she’d agreed to his plan to turn her ships into privateers — naïvely, she could now admit — she had thought they would only take commercial vessels. She hadn’t expected to go up against the very British Navy that her captain and half her crew had deserted from over the years. Not that she had any pity for the Navy — if they insisted on mistreating their sailors so dramatically, they deserved to lose them.

The Navy wouldn’t see it that way, though. If they captured her British-born sailors, they would immediately press them back into service. They needed warm bodies to fight Napoleon, and their brutal discipline would force obedience. They would imprison the Americans, letting them languish in horrid conditions while waiting for a prisoner exchange.

And, she supposed, there was a possibility she could be imprisoned as well. Even more unlikely, since no one in the Navy would believe a woman capable of running a privateering enterprise. And she was technically British, not American. But that wouldn’t make it easier for her to sleep at night.

Callie sighed. She went below, reluctantly. It felt cruelly unfair to leave the victory to the men while she hid in the shadows, pursuing a more clandestine strategy. But she would follow through with her plan.

When she reached her cabin, Mrs. Jennings was there. “Did you fix everything?” her maid asked.

“You are not setting a good example for my tongue,” Callie said. “Don’t you always say sarcasm is unbecoming?”

Mrs. Jennings smiled. “You may pretend it wasn’t sarcasm if you’d like to answer the question.”

“Then, as a matter of fact, I did fix everything. Not the poor man’s arm, of course. But Captain Jacobs took two ships. We aren’t in danger of drowning. And I’ve decided to wear my hat and gloves for the rest of the voyage.”

Her maid looked more shocked by the last statement than the first. “Have you taken ill, Miss Briarley?”

“No,” Callie said. She smoothed a finger over her ragged thumbnail. “But I have the Briarley name to think of.”

“You have never cared for the Briarley name.”

“Of course I haven’t. But if I’m to become the Briarley heiress, I must maintain appearances.”

Mrs. Jennings’s mouth dropped open. “I thought you weren’t going to accept. You said we were going to England to wait out the war.”

Callie had refused every offer to return to England after her father had drowned on his final, quixotic voyage. Lord Tiberius Briarley had been a conniving charlatan — but he had also been the youngest son of the Earl of Maidenstone. Her grandfather had insisted, repeatedly, that she move to England, but she had declined. Her father often lied, but his hatred of his father had seemed genuine.

She should have refused the most recent invitation as well. The old man was dead now, leaving terms that seemed purpose-built to make her and her only remaining female cousins fight over Maidenstone Abbey and the rest of the estate. The man her grandfather had left in charge of settling this farce — Ferguson, the Duke of Rothwell and her closest male relation on her grandmother’s side — had invited her to a summer house party at Maidenstone.

It wasn’t a party, though. It was a matchmaking opportunity, with a single goal in mind — whichever girl made the best match, according to Ferguson’s judgment, would inherit the estate.

It was ludicrous.

She had very nearly turned it down. She didn’t want a husband. From what she’d seen, husbands were only good for kissing and making babies. If she married, the man would want her to keep his house and follow his lead until he buried her.

She’d far rather run a shipping company and sacrifice the kissing, if it meant she could follow her own lead.

But with the war escalating, she’d felt she had no other choice. She wasn’t wanted in Baltimore, either. Her father had never bothered to become an American, and some factions in the republic’s government wanted to see British citizens like her removed from major ports like Baltimore, no matter her allegiances.

Callie saw the writing on the wall. Captain Jacobs wouldn’t bow to her command, not when he had bloodlust and prizes dancing through his dreams. The American government could order her removed from the coast at any moment, costing her the comfortable, if lonely, life she’d built in Baltimore. She thought she could bribe the authorities to let her stay, but if she could not, the alternative was untenable.

She had nowhere to go.

Callie didn’t give a fig for the Briarley legacy, or for Maidenstone Abbey. But the idea of winning it, of having something permanent…

She liked the sound of that. Even if it meant marrying someone she didn’t particularly care for. This business with Captain Jacobs had reminded her, cruelly, of her place. She couldn’t rely on a friendly business agreement to control her company, or her life. She needed a husband, preferably one who could be trained — one who would let her use his name for her own ends. If she became a widow, even better.

She was already a privateer. She may as well become a mercenary. It was a good plan, if she ignored the morality of it — and what marriage to an unloved stranger might mean.

Callie pulled on her gloves like they were gauntlets. “Find me a hat, Mrs. Jennings. I must find the most easily managed husband in England. And I must look the part of a lady if I’m to do it.”

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Do you want to be notified the moment Duke of Thorns is available for purchase? Please sign up for my newsletter and I'll send you an email as soon as the book is released!

The Earl Who Played With Fire release and giveaway

I'm so thrilled to announce that the fourth book in the Muses of Mayfair series, The Earl Who Played With Fire, is out now! You can buy it on Amazon, B&N, Google Play, Kobo, or Apple. To celebrate, I'm giving away several giftcards - see the Rafflecopter below. And I'm also making a special offer to those of you who read the book early - if you buy The Earl Who Played With Fire before December 17, you can receive an exclusive extra epilogue!

To claim your special gift:

• Buy The Earl Who Played With Fire from any retailer before December 17
• Forward your receipt (either the email or a picture of your receipt) to giveaways@sararamsey.com (please black out any sensitive information - I don't want your credit card number!)
• Check your email on December 21 for the extra epilogue

Thanks for your support, and I hope you enjoy Prudence's story!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Coming this month...The Earl Who Played With Fire

I've been woefully absent on the blog of late, since I've been putting the finishing touches on Prudence's book. But I'm thrilled to say that The Earl Who Played With Fire is coming this month! Exact date tbd depending on how the final formatting goes and how long it takes the retailers to put it up, but it should be available before Thanksgiving. I'm so excited to share Prudence's story with you. Stay tuned over the next few weeks here, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on my newsletter - I've got some fun giveaways planned, as well as teaser chapters coming soon. And you'll want to be the first to know what book is coming after Prudence's, so watch for FAQs and other announcements.

If you want to get the giveaway party started early, you can leave a comment on the guest blog post I did at Timeless Quills. Or, you can enter for one of ten paperback copies on Goodreads. Check back for more giveaways this weekend!

And finally, here's the back cover copy to whet your appetite:

A woman courting ruin...

No one would suspect prim, proper Prudence Etchingham of lusting after her best friend’s brother. Nor would anyone guess that she’s responsible for dozens of the best forgeries in London’s antiquities markets. But if her love for Alex is doomed to fail, she must raise enough money to escape the marriage mart. She just needs one last, daring forgery to set herself up for life…

A man evading disaster...

Alex Staunton, the rich Earl of Salford, lives a charmed existence. No one knows that he’s dangerously attracted to his sister’s best friend. Nor has he revealed that he suffers from an ancient curse -- one that has given him everything, but prevents him from marrying the woman of his dreams. But when an enemy from his past takes an unseemly interest in Prudence’s future, Alex must find a way to break the curse...or risk losing her forever.

A love they’re destined for…

Every seductive encounter brings them closer together -- but their secret, smoldering desires will inevitably burn them. And when Prudence’s illicit forgery collides with Alex’s desperate search, more than their hearts are at stake. Can they break Alex’s curse and save Prudence from her unwanted suitor? Or will their love become a weapon that will destroy them both?

Cover Vote/Giveaway: The Earl Who Played With Fire

My next book, The Earl Who Played With Fire, is coming in a few short months! The writing is progressing as planned, and Prudence is currently giving a certain earl some hell on their way to their happily ever after :) In the meantime, though, I could use your help with a critical component: the cover! Please check out the three options and then use the Rafflecopter below to vote for your favorite. As a thank-you for helping me out, I'm giving away a few cool prizes (listed below the covers). But first, you want to see Prudence and Alex, right? The only difference is the color of the font...

I'm eager to hear what you think! And as a thank you, the prizes are:

1) First place gets a tote bag that says "She is too fond of books and it has addled her brain" + a $20 gift card to your favorite book store + an advance copy of The Earl Who Played With Fire (when available - likely September/October)

2) Second place gets $10 gift card to your favorite book store + an advance copy of The Earl Who Played With Fire (when available - likely September/October)

3) Three third-places each get an advance copy of The Earl Who Played With Fire (when available - likely September/October)

The sweepstakes is open to US residents 18 and over - sorry, international friends, I have no desire to get sued :( Thanks for your help! And now, vote here:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Marquess Who Loved Me has arrived!

The Marquess Who Loved Me is out now! The third book in the Muses of Mayfair series stars Ellie Claiborne, the widowed Marchioness of Folkestone, and the man she loved and spurned ten years earlier. You can read the first two chapters here, or go straight to your favorite online bookseller:

- Buy the Kindle version - Buy the Nook version - Buy the Apple iBookstore version - Buy the Google Play version - Buy the AllRomance version - Buy the paperback version

The fourth book in the Muses of Mayfair series will be The Earl Who Played With Fire, and will star Miss Prudence Etchingham. Look for it by the end of 2013; I’ll have a more specific timeframe in the next two or three months.

Thanks so much for your support, and I hope you enjoy The Marquess Who Loved Me!

THE MARQUESS WHO LOVED ME Cover Vote!

The release date for THE MARQUESS WHO LOVED ME is tantalizing close! I know the promo material said that it would be out in Fall 2012, but I'm a newbie and made the mistake of thinking I could write a book in three months. Silly. But it's in final production now...and one of the remaining tasks is choosing a cover! I'm running a Rafflecopter giveaway until 11:59pm EST Tuesday, January 29, linked on my homepage. However, Rafflecopter has been wonky. So, if you can't get Rafflecopter to work, or if you want another chance to enter, leave a comment on this post saying whether you prefer the red cover, the blue cover, or you like both equally. I'll draw TWO winners straight from this comment section using random.org and will post the winner on Wednesday, January 30. The other five giveaways will still go to Rafflecopter entrants, so try again sometime if you aren't able to get it to work on your first attempt.

Good luck! If you want to read a draft of the first two chapters (subject to minor change), click here. And here are the covers again for reference:

Teenage boys sometimes have the most shocking lack of sensitivity...

I'm researching the East India Company for my latest book (The Marquess Who Loved Me, coming soon, I swear), and I'm stumbling across all sorts of fascinating anecdotes and snippets of travel letters. Consider this gem, from a biography of John Palmer of Calcutta. Before John Palmer became the wealthiest English merchant in Calcutta, he was a 15-year-old boy in the Navy. Here's a snippet from a letter he wrote to his mother after seeing action:

I was in the third action, which I assure you was remarkably severe, I was stationed on the quarter deck, which place was one continued scene of slaughter, not having less than ten men killed or wounded; I fortunately escaped unhurt. I say fortunately for I was of some service that day.

Way to make your mum feel better, John Palmer!

By the way, Palmer's rise to greatness was swift, but he had a penchant for fathering children (his wife, rumored to be an Anglo-Indian, was five months pregnant when they married and went on to have more than a dozen kids), a dangerous combo of innate generosity and bad character judgment, and an extreme willingness to take in houseguests (for example, a penniless orphan was sent to him from England, looking for a husband, and she lived with them at least four years with no success even in the sausage fest that was British society in Calcutta - there must be a story there). In 1830, his bad decisions and horde of mooching children caught up with him, and his downfall caused a Lehman Brothers-esque domino collapse of the Calcutta financial houses. If only he had been nicer to his mother...karma's a b*tch.

[source: THE RICHEST EAST INDIA MERCHANT: JOHN PALMER OF CALCUTTA, 1767-1836, by Anthony Webster. I checked my copy out from Stanford Library, but you can find it on Amazon here. It's probably not worth $80 unless you're hardcore into the East India Company, but if you can find it in a library, it makes for some interesting insight into the financial companies and private traders that operated despite the EIC's 'monopoly' even before 1813]

Five-ish Thoughts on...RomCon Day 1

I'm being a v. bad conference attendee and am holed up in my room...more on that in a moment. But without further ado, here's my brief recap of RomCon Day 1! 1) Teresa Medeiros is a great keynote speaker. She's warm, friendly, seems genuine, and knows how to move an audience. I cried at the end of her speech, and while I don't exactly have a heart made of stone, it's not super easy to get me to cry in public - so congrats (?) on that. She opened the conference with some remarks on why she writes romance, which she read in adverse circumstances since she'd set her room service tray on her reading glasses the night before! Luckily the hotel had some reading glasses in lost and found that they let her steal, so she was able to talk. And she ended with the story of how her father stuck by her mother (and her, when she was a baby) when her mom was diagnosed as bipolar many years ago, and how even though she now has dementia he still sees her as the beautiful girl he married - now do you see why I started to cry?

2) Readers rock my world. I participated in speed dating this afternoon, which meant that readers came around to my table and we had 90 seconds to talk about books (theoretically my books, although I also asked what they were reading, what they liked, etc.). It's pretty awesome to meet other avid romance readers and to see their energy and excitement for books - given the recent studies on how readers tend to develop more empathy than average people, it's no wonder that meeting other avid readers always makes me light up with hope and enthusiasm.

3) The Fudge Ladies vendor at this conference is DANGEROUS. I sampled some of her stuff and promptly bought three bags. I'll foist some of it off on the friend I'm staying with Sunday night as a gift, but I'm sure I won't resist gorging myself on the rest of it. If you're at RomCon or ever make it to Denver, definitely look for them!

4) Elizabeth Hoyt and Julia Quinn are both rockstars (obvi). I went to the hotel restaurant to have lunch and ran into my friend/fellow San Francisco RWA chapter mate Isobel Carr, who invited me to join her and her friend...who turned out to be none other than Elizabeth Hoyt, a fantabulous historical romance writer on whom I have a gigantic crush. I managed to subdue my inner fangirl squeeing, and getting to know her over lunch was lovely - she's funny and gracious in person, which is always nice to discover about one of your favorite authors.

And at the end of author speed dating, I got to spend ten minutes or so with Julia Quinn, which rocked my world since I've been a diehard fan ever since the Bridgertons (but then, who hasn't?). Oddly enough, I shared a garage with her sister last year, so we had a bit of a random connection. She's also smart and fun and totally down to earth, and very, very eager to meet readers - I'm really in awe of how she connects with people. So, meeting her and Elizabeth Hoyt were definitely my highlights for the day!

5) As for lowlights...I'm tens of thousands of words behind where I intended to be on Muses #3 (Ellie's story), since I took almost a month off in May due to some family medical issues. I'm also somewhat shy at conferences (which makes no sense to anyone, given how very not-shy I am with my friends), and so those factors combined into a perfect storm that made me decide to hang out in my room and write tonight. I didn't get as far along as I had hoped, but at least I made some progress.

Are any of you shy conference-goers? What do you do to overcome it? I'm totally fine in person (see: not making a fool of myself with the readers at the speed dating or JQ/Elizabeth Hoyt), but gearing up to walk out of my room is sometimes daunting. That feels vaguely like oversharing, but writers are a somewhat introverted bunch, so I don't think this revelation is all that shocking :)

More fun awaits tomorrow, including some Highland Games and something called the Chocolate Mangasm - stay tuned!