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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
