I was over at the Regency Reflections blog talking a bit about my latest Regency knitting project, “Shell Pattern Manchettes” and also a little historical tidbit about knitting in the Regency and Georgian era.

I’m over at Suspense Sisters blog today talking a bit about the quandry I’m in over the murder and mayhem in my current Regency romance work-in-progress.

I’m currently working on two projects, one a Regency novel and another a sort-of dystopian/near future series that I’ve felt God laying on my heart to write. The problem with the dystopian is that I have too many ideas! I wanted to do the third Protection for Hire series book as the start of my near-future world, but suddenly I had six or eight new characters appear in my head, each with their own stories. I’ve been writing my ideas down as I get them, but now I feel like I’ve been dissing poor Tessa and Charles because the other stories seem more interesting to me right now. I guess I’ll continue with my plan: to write the third Protection for Hire book as planned, and table these other characters’ stories. Or maybe I’ll introduce a couple of them in Tessa and Charles’s book? It’s actually been rather interesting to subtly alter Tessa’s old story world to mesh with this new dystopian world idea that God gave to me.

I’m over on ChristiansRead.com talking about a really important message I heard yesterday that pertains to God’s message in my Regency writing, and I guess my writing in general.

For fun, I decided to knit the Regency scarf that Gerard, my hero, gives to my heroine in my Christmas short novel, The Spinster's Christmas . I can’t remember if I posted the finished scarf on my blog, including any changes I made to the pattern, so here it is. I chose A Gentleman’s Comforter from The Ladies’ Knitting and Netting Book, First Series by Miss Watts, originally published in 1837. You can download the .pdf of the Fifth Edition, with additions, which was published in 1840 . I’m pretty sure this pattern was in use in the Regency, because most patterns had been passed down by word of mouth long before they were published. So Jane Austen could have gotten this pattern from a friend or family member and used it when making a scarf for her father. :) Here’s the original pattern: I wasn't entirely certain what “coarse steel needles” and “5 skeins of fine wool yarn” mean, so I just guessed. I used US 1 needles and fingering weight wool yarn, but you could use a...

I’m over at Team Love on the Run talking a bit more about my hero, Clay, from Gone Missing . He’s a bit close to my heart for several reasons. :)

Yes, anime again. :) I’ve been watching a lot of anime lately, although this one I saw a while ago. It’s called Kyoukai no Kanata or Beyond the Boundary . I loved it so much that I bought it on iTunes . It’s a supernatural humorous romance adventure, which really just hit me in all the right places. Each character has some type of hangup, including some weird perverted ones which the show makes fun of, but which are a bit weird for my American-cultured background. But aside from that, the action and adventure is really entertaining. And the heroine’s sense of being alone, mirrored in the hero in a different way, really resonates with me because I’ve felt that way. I found this AMV video on YouTube, and it just really expresses the tragic/humorous romance of the two characters, Mirai and Akihito. It may not make sense if you haven’t seen the anime show, but it’s still a great AMV.