When I Grow Up I Wanna Be On TV!

It was like old home week the other night, watching Chris in another Masonic Magical Mystery Hour on the History network, this one being about the supposed treasure buried on Oak Island. (Curse of Oak Island Drilling Down: Founding Fathers S7/E6)

I thought that Chris looked both adorable and intelligent; Chris kept saying how good Akram Elias was.  Neither one of us really enjoys seeing ourselves on television.  In my case, I have gone to war each and every time with the video DP, all of them determined to drench me with enough light to illuminate a football stadium.  It’s always the same battle cry – “Will you please pull back?”  It gets me nowhere.  On one of them, Chris stood behind the camera and checked to make certain they weren’t getting a surgical close-up of my nose hair.  So the little bastard did what they all do; he fixed it in post, doing a cheesy optical zoom that put the camera right back up my nostrils where he clearly felt it belonged, my round, over-lit face glowing like the rising harvest moon.    

In any case, the days of tracking Chris' illness by the way he looked in various shows are now past.  I thought he looked glowingly plump and healthy, and about thirty-two years old. 

As for the unexplainable presence of William Shatner, I can take it, I guess.  He’s obviously signed himself into indentured servitude with History (you’re still not supposed to add “Channel”) where he has another show called The UnXplained.  Am I spelling that right?  They’re obviously going to use him as Spook Host in a bevy of crossover stuff, including this Season Seven episode of Curse of Oak Island.  (Season Seven?)  Shatner isn’t as bad an actor as people say.  Calling him a lousy actor, for awhile there, was this huge national bromide, a cliché as worn as “Wanna buy a duck?”  But he can be good, especially when he’s got a director to sit on him and knock some of the hot air out of him.  When Shatner went head to head with Stanley Kramer, the result was his subtle and easygoing performance in Judgment at Nuremberg.  He’s so laid back you hardly recognize him. 

Podcast Interview: 'Meet, Act & Part'

My first podcast interview in connection with Heart's Blood just went live tonight! 

My husband Chris Hodapp and I have a previous following from our non-fiction books in the For Dummies series, and we've appeared together over the years in several TV programs, too. So it caused a surprising amount of interest in that audience when I announced I had a new historical romance novel coming out, even though it is far removed from the world of secret societies, the Masons or conspiracy theories.

The hosts of the Meet, Act & Part podcast — Bill Hosler, Greg Knott and Darin Lahners — sat down with Chris and I on Sunday night for about an hour to talk about Heart's Blood, Salem and its exciting seafaring past, the Barbary pirates, Freemasonry, world travel, Egyptian ruins, and a whole lot more! After four decades of marriage and fifteen years of both of us writing, I'm afraid when you get us talking together, one thing leads to another. 

Give it a listen: Meet, Act & Part - Episode 11.

Georgette Heyer & the Mystery of the Dictionary

I have a mystery.

It began in 2017 with my discovery at a Scottish bookseller's of a rebound volume of Pierce Egan's 1823 revision of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published at the tail end of the Regency period. The book itself was filled with handwritten notes and additions made by an unknown owner, and they were clearly the work of an author or a Regency period language enthusiast.

The rebinding dated to about 1925, giving a possible time period for the notes. But when I saw the picture the bookseller posted, I thought I recognized the handwriting. I'd seen it in a biography of Georgette Heyer, whose delightful, slang-filled Regency romances invented a new genre.

I purchased the book, and reading it, I found even stronger connections - the added words and phrases corresponded to singular ones I'd found in Heyer's novels. At this time, she would have been in her twenties, and had already had several books published, though she had yet to publish Regency Buck, her first Regency. The time period dovetailed beautifully. For anyone writing a book that featured Regency slang, Grose would be an essential tool, while the meticulous additions in this dictionary aligned with all I knew of Heyer's careful research.

I've spent a lot of time comparing Heyer's handwriting and the labels on her research materials to what I saw in the dictionary. Much of it wasn't a perfect match.

But I felt that a lot of it clearly was.

Heyer loved the work of Pierce Egan. His popular book, Life in London, filled with his sporty, Runyonesque slang, was one of Georgette Heyer's treasured possessions. But its bookend, Egan's version of the Grose slang dictionary, wasn't mentioned, though it was and is an indispensable reference for slang of the Georgian and Regency period. When Heyer died, no version of Grose in any edition was in the inventory of her library. The more I researched, the more often the same question kept rattling in my brain.

Had I discovered Georgette Heyer's earliest personal slang dictionary with her own private additions? The answer is a resounding... maybe.

Read on and see...