Susan, is she pregnant by that point? What if you couch her resistance as fear/sadness that her brother won't get to part of her baby's life? Or that he won't be part of her life? If she's motivated more by strong emotional connections than simply losing a more upper-class lifestyle, that would be a more sympathetic motivation, I think.

Heh. Baby Arthur Horatio is four months old at that point. And it's not her brother she's worried about. It's a set of relatives that didn't even exist in the draft of Lucy you read--an aunt, uncle, and cousins who took her in when her father died after her brother was grown but she was just 13. They're a likeable bunch--anyone would regret giving them up. When she thinks of home she thinks of them first and her brother second. And at least one of the cousins is an important and highly sympathetic secondary character. He wouldn't be on the scene for this part of the story, but he'd keep the cousins from being mere abstractions.

Could someone guilt her about a specific relative she is particularly close to?

Definitely a possibility. One of the cousins could even be visiting.

Anyway, it's not so much that she'd be thinking, "I can't do this because it'd involve giving up my upper-class lifestyle." It's more like she was brought up with the attitude that it's maybe OK to boink the Lower Orders on occasion after you've given your husband an heir and a spare (and here Anna's Great-Aunt Flora would've sighed reminiscently over the handsome and lusty gamekeeper they had back in the 1760's), but that it wouldn't have even occurred to her as a possibility to marry more than a step or two out of her class in either direction. I'm even planning to have her fantasize earlier about being able to marry Jack, but with all those fantasies either involving him as a long-lost duke's heir or her not actually being an earl's niece and baronet's sister.

And then when it does occur to her that there's absolutely nothing to prevent her from marrying him if she wants to, since she's over 21 and can make her own choices, she'll have a few understandable regrets over giving up her family before she decides to be brave and propose to him.

Susan, what about the realisation that, if she marries Jack, they'll need to go elsewhere because of the class structure of the time being what it was? Literally, distance from James and Lucy, from familiar things, from the England she came to miss while she was with the Army, as a motivation. But she can also have the realisation that, as it is, she has no place to call home.

Memememe stuff:

1. I just got an email from my editor. FFoSM made The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's Top Five Picks for January: "(IMBA) announces its January 2005 selections for Killer Books, five mysteries to die for this month. Current and past selections can be found at www.killerbooks.org." This is a huge, huge deal if you write mysteries, and happy-making.

2. Can I request a wee bit of "go, Deb!"-ness? Still Life With Devils is being seriously considered for trade paperback by a huge, huge name among editors, at a major publishing house. He asked Jenn to ask me if I'd consider a pseudonym for it, because - this is worrying me half to death - "the Bookscan numbers on the St. Martins series are a bit low, and might be a stumbling block."

Dude, I have no problem with using a pseudonym, I wouldn't want it to clash with the series anyway, but I'm damned if I know how to push the series more than I have been. I've been working my ass off to get it out there. On the sunny side, he's asked for copies of Weaver and FFoSM, so maybe....and I've asked Jenn to pitch the vampire book, as well.

Wow!

Go Deb Go!

Go Deb!!!

Go, Deb, go! Much publishing~ma to you.

t not here Lots of go-Deb-ness t /really not here

Hooray! Go Deb!!

Go Deb!

Susan, what about the realisation that, if she marries Jack, they'll need to go elsewhere because of the class structure of the time being what it was? Literally, distance from James and Lucy, from familiar things, from the England she came to miss while she was with the Army, as a motivation. But she can also have the realisation that, as it is, she has no place to call home.

That could work....

That could work....

Yep. And, again, it serves an illuminating function, as well - do it right and we, the readers, get to see Anna suddenly grow up even further by way of a single well-drawn epiphany. It's a very adult moment to realise you have no real home.

Oh, for goodness sake, go go go go, Still Life! I love that book with an unholy passion, and it needs to be in print SO BAD. Ooh! Can we help you think up a suitable pseud? Carilla Katherine McHartshade? Susannah DeVaronna? Brigihde Silvermantle?

Um?