St. George’s Hall, Windsor

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We use this room in The Royal We, and it’s one of my absolute favorites at Windsor Castle, made even dreamier because of this state dinner. The best bit is that all the crests on the ceiling belong to the Garter Knights, and are numbered so you can look up to whom it belongs. If someone is disgraced, the crest is covered or removed, but the number remains so that their ignominy is preserved. In other words, TAKE THAT, jerks.

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Mug Shots: My Obsession With Commemorative Royal Mugs

So, I love royal swag. I LOVE it. When I was a little girl, I had the Chuck and Diana paper dolls  and it’s only gotten worse from there. When Heather and I were in England in January researching The Royal We, we both bought so much stuff that we literally had to pack additional bags home. You are welcome, British tourist industry! We have NO SELF CONTROL. I bought a Buckingham Palace soap dish, people. (In fairness, who could resist having a soap dish from Buckingham Palace? Not me.) Anyway, this has all culminated over the past few years into my collecting Royal Mugs. The rules for my collection are very specific. Although I appreciate both extremely beautiful and super cheesy mugs, they have to commemorate something or, as far as I am concerned, they do not count.So far, I have one mug for every day of the week. I have been putting them on my Instagram, but then I decided that I need these things chronicled for posterity.

(Click on each picture if you want more steaming-hot mug info SEE WHAT I DID THERE.)

This mug commemorates William and Kate’s engagement and I LOVE IT. Heather bought it for me for Christmas and it is probably my favorite of my mugs, although really that’s like asking me which of my children is my favorite. Perhaps salient note: I have no actual children.

This is not vintage, but it is the official tankard commemorating the Queen’s coronation. I got it at Buckingham Palace.

This mug commemorates the birth of Prince George: aren’t the cupids subtle? Heather brought this back for me from a trip she took to England with her family because she’s the best and also because I think I commanded that she bring me back some mugs or else.

She ALSO brought me back this mug commemorating Prince George’s birth.

This one I bought for myself on Etsy, where people who collect royal commemorative mugs spend all their money. It celebrates Charles’s investiture in 1969 as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle and I’m pretty sure the beautiful gold trim will one day give me blood poisoning.

This was the official Diamond Jubilee china. I bought one of these for myself and for myself in a frenzied Christmas late-night online shopping spree.

And this one is also a delight. My friend Eliza brought it back to me from a trip to England purposely because it is such a hilariously poor rendering of the Queen.

Very Subtle, Windsor

This is my favorite photo from January’s jaunt to Windsor Castle. There’s something extremely Monty Python about how precisely the light is shooting out of the cloud — like, every time I see it, I hotly anticipate a cartoon Redeemer to pop up and shout counsel at King Arthur. Henry VIII, tossed in a tomb at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, would have approved. In fact, maybe he orchestrated it. He did love drama.

The Royal We Research Trip: A Sneak Peek

Heather and I went to England for a week at the start of 2014 on a research trip for The Royal We, our new book. Here’s the Publisher’s Weekly blurb about it, in case you missed it:

Creators of GoFugYourself.com Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan’s first adult novel THE ROYAL WE, about a young American woman who spends a semester abroad in England and falls in love with the man of her dreams — who happens to be the future King of England, a tale loosely inspired by the real-life courtship and marriage of Kate Middleton and Prince William.

We’re super-excited about the book, and we thought you might enjoy seeing some of the pictures I took on the trip. The book takes place (in part) at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace and Oxford and London — that’s vague enough not to be spoiler-y, I think! — and we had a fabulous time kicking around England getting eyes on the places we’ll be writing about. We would have stayed even longer if we hadn’t needed to get back to cover the Golden Globes; it was really inspirational.

Click on each photo to read about what we saw, did, and might be writing about!

We spent a day at Windsor, which is where the Queen spends a lot of her time. While we were there, we got to take a special tour of the kitchens — which have been in use since the middle ages, and which boasts a still-in-use stove dating from Victoria’s reign. Unfortunately, they don’t allow photos inside. It was very fancy. You can imagine.

Buttresses! I just want to work the word “buttress” into essentially everything I write. This is St George’s Chapel, which a variety of Interesting Historical Figures are buried, including old Henry VIII, with Jane Seymour, AKA the Wife Who Died Before He Needed To Get Rid of Her. Ah, true love.

Speaking of, here’s Henry’s portrait — rather familiar looking, no? — hanging in the dining hall at Christ Church in Oxford. This is the dining hall on which the one at Hogwarts is based, but it does NOT have an enchanted ceiling.

Here we all, all bundled up for Oxford in January. You can tell how beautiful the building is, though.

It’s hard not to feel inspired thinking about going to school at a place as beautiful as this.

This is the nave of Christ Church Cathedral.

This greets you basically just as you exit the train at Windsor. There is NOT a scene in our book where anyone sits for a portrait on the side of a phone booth. Not yet, anyway.

Not that this isn’t inspiring.

A trip to London obviously isn’t complete unless you spend at least an hour and way too many pounds loitering in the Harrods food hall. LOOK AT ALL THIS CHOCOLATE.

We had TWO champagne teas, including this one at Sketch. It was delicious. Why don’t we get to eat tiny sandwiches every day?

But the most noteworthy part of Sketch are its bathrooms — you may remember them from a noteworthy episode of Real Housewives of NY. They are pods. You get your own personal pod in which to pee. Honestly, I kind of loved it. The pods are so private!

Heather and I also go to go on a tour of Buckingham Palace — no pics there, either. You’ll have to read the book to hear all about it, but suffice to say, it’s FANCY. At the end of the tour, they lead you out of this gate — the front gate — and it’s very exciting. We were the last two to leave and were escorted out alone. I’m sure all the tourists standing outside were wondering who we were.

Because it’s not a slideshow if there isn’t sexy Idris Elba involved. This is from an exhibit at the National Gallery, where we popped by to see the portrait of William and Harry (delightful) and the more questionable one of Kate, which was (surely temporarily) NOWHERE TO BE SEEN.

We also popped by Kensington Palace to say hi to Prince George.

Call it “research materials.”

Ah, London. You’re the best. We can’t wait to come back.

Kensington Palace

I’m working on a portion of The Royal We that is set at Kensington Palace. It’s crazy to think you can get so close to the place where TWO future kings currently live (even if their apartments are slightly off to the side). George is going to grow up seeing a LOT of Frisbee matches being played on the public gardens that are essentially his front lawn. I hope he puts on a lot of wigs and sneaks out to play in them.

Oh Snap

Apparently the takeaway from this is that I make a LOT of mistakes.

Just the other day I was thinking fondly of my previous Gateway, which I finally replaced because I had — through excessive typing, presumably — rubbed the letter decals off several of the keys, and even CARVED PIECES OUT OF some of them just from whacking them with my ring finger, which is the only one that really ever grows a nail of any significant length. Jessica and I really abuse our computers. We’re on them five days a week, for ages, typing countless words — I wish the cosmos would add it up for me, because I’m curious — for the blog and for NY Mag and for our beloved books. The keyboards take a beating. (And take pieces of our lunches. Seriously, the crumb graveyard under this thing could probably bread a chicken.)

So of course, the second I note to myself how nicely this Gateway has held up to this rampant abuse, the Backspace key went ahead and snapped off. And won’t snap back on. I’ve tried just pushing the little button, but I miss it. I’ve tried balancing it on there, but nine times out of ten I have to hit it several times just to get a deletion to register. So I’m doing some work-arounds until my dad’s computer, which I’m inheriting, arrives to me via UPS. I’ve decided this is a sign from my father from the Great Beyond (there have been a few): His computer, a red Dell, has a strip of red leather on it, and everyone decided I should get it because, and I quote, “A Fug Girl really should have a red-leather laptop.” A sentiment my father used to tease me with all the time. So really, the death of my Backspace key was really just Dad making sure that I hastened the arrival of the fancy Dell.

Good thing it broke the day AFTER we turned in our second draft of Messy.

Those Poor Trees

For the longest time, Spoiled existed for us in our heads and on Microsoft Word — page after white page, sometimes single-spaced, eventually double-spaced, Times New Roman 12-point font. (Confession: I am a nerd, and therefore in order to like what I’m typing, I have to like the font in which I’m typing. So I’d click around and write in different ones, although I always came back to Times New Roman. I was a font adulteress, and it was my cuckolded typeface, probably aware of my actions but willing to ignore them as long as I came home to it at night.)

We had a hard time imagining how Spoiled would look once it was, you know, real. it’s our first book, so the transition from a digital document to a tangible one felt so foreign to us. How many Word pages equal one book page? What would the font be? How would it feel to see the words we knew so well, almost to the point of fatigue, printed and spaced and aligned differently than we’d ever seen them before?

Then we got the official copy-edited proofs, tied up neatly by two rubber bands, printed on single-sided pages. More than 300 of them — and in the end, it worked out to be roughly 1-to-1 in terms of Word pages to book pages, which I didn’t expect. A Word page seems to much more vast and glaring and hard to fill. The book pages seem compact, pert, efficient. Like a SmartCar, but less dopey-looking.

And faster. Some days, proofing this thing felt infinite, as if scrolling down every page was a workout for my mouse finger. I can’t count the number of times we read, re-read, noodled, and tinkered with chapter one. Since it’s by definition the first one, it always got us at our freshest, our most committed, and also our most finicky. That poor chapter. Its life was a very twisty Big Brother episode. Just as the words finally got comfortable sitting next to each other, we’d evict one of them and replace it with a new contestant.

Seeing everything printed out felt big, and not just because the stack was the size of at least one full ream of paper. No, it just made Spoiled’s existence that much less theoretical. The font is crisp, clean, pretty. The style of the chapter headings evokes Gossip Girl a bit (which makes sense; we share a publisher). My name, and Jess’s, are right there on the paper cover. Holding the actual hardback book in my hands is going to be pretty emotional — we poured a lot of ourselves into this, our first novel — but this messy doorstop holds a special place in my heart as being the first time I really felt like, wow, this thing we’ve been typing, these 81,000 words we wrote in six months… they will be read. And I smiled.

Right before I got nauseated. Because, oh my God, they will be read.