There's less than two months to go until the long-awaited release (January 26!) of my second novel, Pride/Prejudice. Depending on whom you ask, I’m supposed to fill these last nervous weeks running around like a headless chicken blogging at the top of my lungs (“generating buzz”); working modestly and dutifully at my day job while pretending nothing special is happening in my life (yeah, right); or starting my third novel (um, you do realize that between now and the New Year I have to write a detailed conference paper proposal, an article or two for the Huffington Post, a Christmas piece for Bookreporter.com, an Author Spotlight for the Friskbiskit blog, prepare a couple of other guest-blog posts just in case I get lucky, think up short, snappy and insightful answers for the HarperCollins “best of 2009” questions and, oh yes, work dutifully at my day job?)

The choice seems obvious: it’s headless chicken time!
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You know you’ve moved up a notch in the author hierarchy when your publisher tries to get blurbs for your new book. My first book was a copy-edited version of what had been a print-on-demand self-published novel. There wasn’t any point in trying to get blurbs for that. But as you’ve probably noticed (since I’m not shy about mentioning these things) my second book, Pride/Prejudice, got three really great blurbs.

Recently, I moved up yet another notch: I was asked to blurb someone else’s book!( Read more... )

I'll be reading from my forthcoming Pride/Prejudice during a Bisexual Arts Night on Wed., Oct. 28, 7:00-10:00 PM.

Location: "No Parking," 4168 Broadway (at 177th St.) NYC. $5 donation requested. Directions: A train to 175th St. or No. 1 train to 181st St.

For those of you who have read the first chapter, this will be a chance to hear a different section of the story!

Here's the terrific trailer that the gifted filmmaker and editor M. Antonio Olmos made for my forthcoming novel, Pride/Prejudice.

It's a brilliant work of movie craftsmanship, although a perfect example of why writers should not be seen or heard--only read--which is why this little film is so great. Olmos created a dynamic, innovative film with multiple takes, angles and shots, despite having such a limited subject to work with: just...me, talking about...my writing.

I think that’s where I’ve been for the past (Yikes!) four months. As you probably know, that’s Douglas Adams’s (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) clever play on the term “dark night of the soul.” It’s not as hopeless as the Slough of Despond, but more like the Bog of Blah, that overwhelming inertia that results when copy editing, proofreading and cataloging all come together in one short summer of “Huh?!? What was that? You mean that was it?” ( Read more... )

My editor at HarperCollins, Rakesh Satyal, has recently published his own debut novel, Blue Boy. Here's the link to the Amazon listing, where you can see the excellent customer reviews.

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Boy-Rakesh-Satyal/dp/0758231369/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243293590&sr=1-1

I don't know the ethics of a writer reviewing her editor's work, so for now I'll just say this: Satyal has achieved what he set out to do, as explained in his Q&A at the end of the book: write a "humorous" and "playful" account of growing up Indian (Punjabi)-American in Middle America (Cincinnati).( Read more... )

I will be reading a short (6 minutes) excerpt from my forthcoming novel, Pride / Prejudice, at Bi Lines II, a program of bisexual-themed works, at the LGBT Center, 208 13th St. (between 7th and 8th Aves.) on Saturday, May 30th, starting at 8:30 PM.

I'm scheduled for the last slot (the event ends at 11), which means all you night owls, hard-core partiers, convivial drunkards and anyone else who likes to stay out late on a Saturday, please come and hear the first public reading from this scandalous retelling of Jane Austen's classic work ;)

This is another one of those "lazy" blog posts, where I'm going to let someone else do the talking. But this is in a good cause. Hillary Rettig, "The Lifelong Activist," attended the recent conference at Princeton, "Love as the Practice of Freedom? : Romance Fiction and American Culture." Now her article is up on The Huffington Post, and it really captures the essence of the presentations, showing how romance fiction is feminist, LGBT friendly and empowering to its authors and its readers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hillary-rettig/the-eroticization-of-equa_b_201059.html

I don't know how long these articles stay up online, so please check it out while you can.

Here are a few photos of the presentations:

http://www.princeton.edu/prcw/photos/

I'm the fifth one down, a miraculous candid photo of me that doesn't look like Jerry Lewis doing a fart joke.

Sarah Frantz, romance scholar extraordinaire, is the lady in red, ninth photo down, bracketed by Beverly Jenkins above and Guy Mark Foster below.

Eric M. Selinger, co-organizer of the conference, is at the center in the second photo (the five people seated at the table), while Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, is on the far right. (Only in a photo caption would the words "far right" and "Pamela Regis" belong together.)

Slashing the Slash: or (with apologies to Mary Balogh) Slightly Bisexual: The story behind Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander

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Back on August 10, I wrote a post called "Class Warfare," about cataloging (classification) and how it relates to fiction, specifically mine. Today, with the recent debacle on Amazon fading away, this topic is suddenly relevant, and to more than just me and Phyllida.

The Amazon mess, for anybody who missed it, equated books categorized as "gay" or "lesbian" with erotica ("adult content") and temporarily stripped them of their sales ranking, making them impossible to find through subject searches. In my earlier post, I discussed how Amazon seems not to have a "Romance—bisexual" subject heading, which meant that Phyllida was lumped into the "Romance—gay" category, leading to bad feelings from some readers.( Read more... )

As many of you may have heard, Amazon.com has gone insane. They have stopped listing the sales rank for LGBT material (like Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander) because, as they explained to an author who asked why the sales ranking had disappeared from the listings for his books:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

This means that these titles often don't come up in searches at all. However, it's not really "adult" content that they're censoring: it's only, as I said, LGBT. Or, as the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books explain it: "To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies)."

Here's one interesting example: Joey Hill's novel, Nature of Desire - Natural Law, a BDSM (heterosexual) romance.
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Desire-Joey-W-Hill/dp/1419951653/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

Now, this is a terrific book, in my opinion, well written and definitely unique. But compared to Phyllida, and I would imagine most LGBT romances, the level of "adult" content is off the charts. Yet Natural Law still has a sales ranking while Phyllida and other LGBT titles do not.

So, at the Smart Bitches' sugestion, I'm posting this link to their Google Bomb for "Amazon rank" and asking readers who reject censorship to tell Amazon what you think.

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazonrank

Back in February I wrote in an entry called "Unitasking" that I had been busy working on my second novel but was now able to blog again. Then I posted nothing for a month. What up?

As it turns out, the conference I was so hoping was happening but wasn't sure, really is happening. Love as the Practice of Freedom? : Romance Fiction and American Culture is scheduled for April 23 and 24 at Princeton University. Looking at the roster of authors and scholars who will be there I am still in awe at my inclusion, and filled with gratitude. Here's the link:

http://www.princeton.edu/prcw/

The conference is free and open to the public, but you do need to register. ( Read more... )

It's official now: only the really good-looking men are bisexual.

That’s the gist of a press release about a recently discovered painting that some scholars claim is a portrait of William Shakespeare. From The New York Times of March 10: " 'This Shakespeare is handsome and glamorous, so how does this change the way we think about him?' the handout reads. 'And do the painting and provenance tell us more about his sexuality, and possibly about the person to whom the sonnets are addressed?' "

As the article in the Times explained:

"the [Shakespeare Birthplace] Trust said the portrait might open a new era in Shakespeare scholarship, giving fresh momentum, among other things, to generations of speculation as to whether the playwright, a married man with three children, was bisexual. Until now, that suggestion has hinged mostly on dedications to the Earl of Southampton that Shakespeare wrote with some of his best-loved poems and some of the sensual passages in his poems and plays, particularly his sonnets, most of which, the London scholars said, are centered on expressions of love and desire for men, not women."

Wow! All this time, ever since I first learned about the "fair" young man and "dark lady" of the sonnets, I had simply enjoyed the extra dimensions of meaning these personae gave to my reading. It wasn't really a new interpretation of the words themselves, just something interesting to bear in mind when brooding over "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action" or "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

Part of the pleasure of this kind of speculation is that it's necessarily vague. The young man and dark lady may or may not have been "real," and Shakespeare may or may not have had "sexual relationships" with them. But the possibilities were so much greater because we couldn't know for sure. All we could do was imagine. If I had any visual image of the author it was probably that standard black-and-white engraving we all see in textbooks. That bland face certainly isn't going to set the world on fire. Then there's the "Chandos portrait," named for its first documented owner. Whoever that's a picture of, at least it looks like a writer. Somewhat scruffy, with a high forehead, receding hairline with hair too long in back (to compensate?), just like Detective Andy Sipowicz as played by Dennis Franz on NYPD Blue. That little gold earring adds a welcome rakish touch.

Of course, the sonnets themselves give us some hints, although we should be wary of taking anything a writer says of himself at face value.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

(Sonnet 73)

Shakespeare died at 52, not so unusual in his time as in ours, and he probably didn't look like a miraculously preserved, Botoxed thirty-something when he passed. Still, let's not forgot this is, on some level, a love poem, a seduction. Is there a part of the author that's winking at his readers, letting us in on the way he's manipulating the sympathies of the innocent young man to whom the maudlin message is addressed?

But it honestly never occurred to me that, of course, Shakespeare couldn't have been bisexual, or even sexual at all, if he wasn't handsome or glamorous enough.

It makes me think, as it probably made everybody who read it think, of the so very different way writers are viewed now. In a debate a while ago on the "Dear Author" blog, there were some comments as to how it's better not to see a photo or know anything about an author apart from the works themselves. But good luck with that in today's publishing world. Writers who are published by a major publisher rarely have the option of not providing a photo. We are practically required to present ourselves as "handsome and glamorous." During a telephone seminar I took on self-promotion for writers (I know, I know) the only thing it turned out I was doing "right" was the headshot at the top of my website.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, always the voice of reason, explains in an opinion piece (New York Times, Editorial Notebook, March 11):

"The perennial search for a portrait of Shakespeare is really a search for an image that justifies our idea of Shakespeare, our idea of writing. We somehow want the young Shakespeare to look like Joseph Fiennes, fiery and slashing. But what if he looked like Ricky Gervais? Would the plays mean less to us? …

"From a canon as rich as his, and a documentary record as meager as his, you can infer almost anything. When it comes to privacy, Shakespeare out-Salingers Salinger and out-Pynchons Pynchon. Go looking for the man, and you will find only the person doing the looking."

It’s been so long since I posted anything that the title of this one could just as well be “Zombie Librarian Returns to the Daylight World, part 2”—but I hate to repeat myself, even when the reason is almost exactly the same as it was the first time around:

I was working on editing, or revising, or whatever you want to call it, my manuscript for my second novel. It’s actually the old-fashioned process of turning a first draft into a second. I’m still afraid to jinx things by talking about it too soon, so let’s just say that if my luck holds, another “bisexual” comedy set in 1812 or thereabouts will be hitting the bookstores early next year.( Read more... )

Probably every author has had the thought: “Some people wouldn’t recognize good writing if it jumped up and bit ‘em on the ass.”( Read more... )

I’m a native New Yorker, which means I’m a pedestrian. Not only do I not own a car, I don’t even have a driver’s license. My attitude to cars is Ratso Rizzo’s (Dustin Hoffman’s character in Midnight Cowboy): I’m walkin’ here. We don’t even think of them as drivers—just machines that must be kept in line by displays of human superiority. Don’t look at them when you’re crossing the street, popular wisdom goes, and they won’t hit you. There’s a kernel of truth in there. If the burden of avoiding a collision is shifted to the driver, he’ll make the effort, if only to save on insurance premiums. (It’s a highly risky strategy with taxis, though.)( Read more... )

OK, I confess—the title of this post is misleading. It’s the middle of August, everybody’s on vacation, absolutely nothing of interest seems to be happening (for those of us uninterested in the Olympics) so I thought I’d try something attention-grabbing.

No, I’m not writing about social or economic classes, but about classification. You probably know from an earlier post (“Zombie librarian returns to daylight world”) that I’m a librarian by profession, specifically a cataloger. While the daily grind of the job tends to boil down to tedious matters of punctuation and the correct forms of corporate names, theoretically cataloging is about “aboutness:” classifying works based on their subject.( Read more... )

The quotation/solution to last week’s acrostic puzzle in the Sunday New York Times was from Edna Ferber: “Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”--A Peculiar Treasure (Ferber’s autobiography), first published in 1938.

I used to do the acrostic. It’s so much more satisfying than a plain old crossword. When you solve it, instead of a matrix of random words, you have an author, a title and a quote; it’s like an oracle from the writing gods. But I’ve been working on my second book for so long (feels like half my life), that I’ve put aside almost every superfluous activity. These days I simply look up the solution a week later to get my belated Delphic prophecy.

This message naturally made me wonder all over again whether I’m an amateur or a "real writer." Back at the beginning of this year, I was sure I knew the answer. I even posted to this blog on that very topic (“Coming out as a writer”). All writers are familiar with this idea, that writing is hard work, that the quality of your prose is directly proportional to the amount of sweat and suffering that went into producing it. The more readable your novel, the better constructed it is and the deeper its meaning, the harder you must have labored. As Red Smith observed: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”

But things have changed. I don’t mean that writing has miraculously become easy. Just because most of us sit down at a computer instead of a typewriter hasn’t made the creative process any less challenging, although it has done wonders for editing and revision. And certainly the modern writer’s precision tools for time-wasting, the Internet and computer solitaire, are a vast improvement over the blunt instruments previous generations had to make do with: a bottle of bourbon and a pack of cards. But I digress.

No, what has changed is the peripheral stuff: the publicity, the marketing and the whole process of being a "professional." There are so many of us writers, working very hard at making a living from this marginal occupation, that some of us have become...drudges, wage slaves. Just last year, I went to Daniel Silva's book party for his tenth novel, The Secret Servant. (How did I crash this event? I happen to have spent the first twelve years of my life in the same apartment building where his wife spent hers). Daniel had the kind of bash that a writer like me can only dream of: a blow-out at his in-laws' swanky Midtown apartment, a real crush, dozens of free copies blithely signed and handed out. When it was my turn in line I asked Daniel how it was going, although I already knew the answer. "Great," he answered in glum tones. This was a tired, world-weary laborer. It's a seven-day-a-week job, you see. This party is just lost time from researching and writing the next book. When one book is extruded, another one must enter the pipeline. He can barely afford to take a bathroom break from the assembly line for fear the entire factory will shut down. Now, barely a year later, his next book, Moscow Rules, is ready to roll.

I know, I know. I should have such problems, you say. I've said it myself. But there are different kinds of ditch digging, after all. Digging to unearth a priceless archaeological relic or a fossil of a heretofore mythical extinct species is a far cry from digging the trenches for the gas lines or the highway. A treadmill is still a long walk to nowhere, even with the illusion of a computer screen showing us an enchanted forest or an unspoiled beach. Daniel Silva, along with many other successful novelists, is locked into that death march to success that has turned a creative, anarchic, "bohemian" existence into just another rat race.

Now, writing is the "fun" part. The real treadmill is the selling. Publicity and marketing are where the ditch-digging and mountain-climbing come in--literally. I was both delighted and dismayed to learn that the third person to climb The New York Times’s building last week was a self-published author, David Malone, trying to get publicity for his book, Bin Laden’s Plan (2005).

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/third-man-climbs-times-building/?scp=1&sq=third%20man%20climbs%20building&st=cse

Unlike the two previous climbers, who saw the building as an urban mountain to be conquered (because it’s there), and were aiming for the summit, made accessible by its convenient horizontal rods, Malone simply wanted to hang a banner for his book.

These days, it seems to me, a writer had better be doing it, at least on some level, because it amuses her, or else why bother? Yes, I understand what Ms. Ferber meant. There’s no question that serious writing is work, not a pleasure cruise; and finishing a book will (I hope) continue to make this childless woman feel as if I’ve gestated and delivered another beautiful baby. But why would I go through it at all if I didn’t enjoy it; if it didn’t, on some level, make me happy—even, yes, amuse me?

All I can say is, when the writing stops being amusing, I’ll be climbing the walls, too.

Like many writers, I have a day job to help me pay the rent: in my case, as a cataloger in a library that specializes in natural history. I don’t talk about it much because there’s not much interesting one can say about sitting in front of a computer all day looking stuff up. But last week, after a long leave of absence so that I could finish my second novel, I went back, and I thought I’d describe what it’s like to see my writing from the other side.( Read more... )

I had a reading at the Park Slope, Brooklyn, Barnes & Noble two weeks ago. It was the major event for me so far in my publishing odyssey.


Phyllida is what I like to call a "romantic comedy." That means there's sex in it as well as jokes. When I read for an audience, I often choose a sex scene. One reason is I'm not good at "voices." If a scene has six or seven different characters, all exchanging witty banter, listeners are going to hear just one voice: mine. It's not easy to distinguish who's saying what. In a sex scene, there are only two people (yes, it's a "bisexual" romance, but nevertheless the characters do it in twos). Plus, I figure if people are going to come all the way out to Park Slope on a weeknight, the least they deserve is a little action.( Read more... )