The Good-Bi Girl

If you enjoyed Phyllida...

2009-11-30T07:08:02Z

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!

However, in the interest of retaining a few friends, I thought I’d do something less obnoxious, and praise another author’s work. Most of us have experienced those surreal recommendations from Amazon and Netflix (my favorite was Netflix’s kind thought that since I’d given Monty Python’s Life of Brian five stars, I’d naturally not want to miss Jackass 2). But these are computer generated, much like those algorithms that brought us last Easter’s “LGBT content = porn” equation on Amazon. This recommendation, by contrast, is from a human being, a woman I met at the Jane Austen Society book group, who read Phyllida and liked it, and who therefore thought I’d like Sarah Caudwell. She was right.

Probably most of you educated and intelligent readers have long since discovered Ms. Caudwell and the four brilliant, witty mysteries she had time to write before her early death from cancer. But if not, you’re in for a treat. Read them in order. The first is called Thus Was Adonis Murdered (1981), followed by The Shortest Way to Hades (1985), The Sirens Sang of Murder (1989) and The Sybil in Her Grave (2000).

Comparisons are odorous, as Shakespeare told us, and comparing my own efforts with those of a master, a conveniently dead one, no doubt reeks of hubris, or something equally putrid. But so what? Hold your nose and enjoy a good read—or four. I’m not saying I’m as good as Caudwell, only that what is good in my writing is even better in hers. Language, style and, above all, that ever so slightly skewed reality of comedy. It’s not as far removed as fantasy; it’s just not quite a photographic representation either.

Caudwell’s world is that of Oxford-educated (with one louche, slang-speaking Cantabrigian) barristers in Lincoln’s Inn, specialists in tax law, during the “present” of 1980 (Adonis) through 1999. It’s a world that has something of P.G. Wodehouse, of Rumpole of the Bailey, of Noel Coward and perhaps Oscar Wilde. The crime/mystery element, although well-constructed, is less important than the style. The stories are told primarily through letters and telexes (what Wikipedia calls “distancing devices”); the sex of the narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar, is never revealed; and the conversation is elaborate, ironic and full of literary allusions. Like all great comic writers, Caudwell creates her own signature mood and self-contained universe.

This is a world in which women share strategies for getting beautiful young men into bed:

“one should make no admission, in the early stages, of the true nature of one’s objectives, but should instead profess a deep admiration for their fine souls and splendid intellects … if I could get the lovely creature into conversation, I must make no comment on the excellence of his profile and complexion but should apply myself to showing a sympathetic interest in his hopes, dreams and aspirations.”

and announce success by quoting Lovelace, the rapist villain of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: “The deed is done—Clarissa lives.”

In Adonis, the fact that the young man in question appears to be involved in a serious same-sex relationship does not deter our heroine from her pursuit (she takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis), nor, ultimately, does it inhibit his enthusiastic capitulation.

I confess to having read only the first book so far. I’m trying to prolong my pleasure, to stretch out my enjoyment of this finite four-book series, instead of devouring it all over one long, debauched Thanksgiving weekend. But I don’t hesitate to recommend them all. Like Jane Austen’s six published novels, with the Juvenilia and fragments, each work is made all the more valuable because of its rarity. Whatever faults may lie in Caudwell’s other novels, I look forward to discovering even greater pleasures, and wish you the same.

Blurbs, Subjects and Great Lakes fishes

2009-11-01T07:57:52Z

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! I mean, how cool is that!?! Now the way this works, the editor tries to find authors who write similar types of books to blurb each other, although naturally, if they can get a bestselling author or someone really famous, they’ll stretch the meaning of “similar” quite a bit. Unfortunately for me, I’m not a bestseller, or even remotely famous, so you have to figure my work and this author’s work are very much alike. Or are they?

Here’s the book: The Lunatic the Lover and the Poet, by Merlyn A. Hermes (real name, parents were hippies). http://www.myrlinahermes.com/
My editor (and hers) described it as a bisexual version of Hamlet—to which my response was, naturally, “You mean Hamlet isn’t already a bisexual story?” But I digress. And of course, a normal person would be worrying about things like: What if I hate the book? or what if I can’t think of a clever blurb? But not me. I was just so thrilled to be asked.

As it turned out, I loved the book, and I wrote a blurb, although I think, looking at it now, I probably used too many ten-dollar words when I should have stuck to the simple, unfussy “page turner,” “couldn’t put it down,” “laugh-out-loud funny”—all of which are true, but I wanted to say something more specific to the particular book. And this book was very, very particular.

Is it a “bisexual version of Hamlet?” Well, sort of. Is there, as Ms. Hermes’s website promises, a “bisexual love triangle” and “bed tricks”? Definitely the former, but as to the latter—now we’re getting in a little too deep for me. What’s a “trick” and what’s just messing around? All I can say for sure is that Ms. Hermes knows her Shakespeare backwards and forwards, and she has a lot of fun with it here. Her book doesn’t just postulate a gay Hamlet; it throws the sonnets, references to the major plays, and the whole, glorious, slew of dingbat “who really wrote Shakespeare” theories into one big mish-mash of wordplay, famous lines and comic situations, leaves the lid off, turns the blender on to frappe and--oops! It’s a little like Shakespeare in Love but with less “Shakespeare” the man and more Shakespeare, the Complete Works, as told to Horatio by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Fortunately the Dark Lady of the sonnets has the last word.

So, why was I asked to blurb this book? Probably because they couldn’t get Tom Stoppard. But seriously, folks, does this mean Ms. Hermes’s book is a “bisexual historical romance”? Hardly. It means that I was lucky enough to get published for real because my editor liked my style of comedy that he also sees in Ms. Hermes’s work. And yes, there is that bisexual thing...

And it left me with one more profound thought about my day job. Yeah, that “classification” stuff again. This time it’s a little more mature, I hope, than my last puerile effort. You see, most of the works we classify don’t really fit under just one subject heading. Yes, we get the easy ones occasionally, the work that’s about this one species of spider or snake. But most of it is open to interpretation, or rather, it’s about a bunch of things, or something that can’t be neatly encapsulated by a one- or two-word heading like “Paleontology” or “Evolution (Biology).”

There’s nothing wrong with assigning more than one subject heading to a work. Most works get at least three, and with online catalogs, no longer limited by what will fit on an index card, many works get as many as twelve. The problem is, a book can only occupy one place on the shelves. Multiple subject headings are fine, but one of them has to be the “primary” SH, the one that comes closest to defining the book’s topic and determines its location. Similar-sounding subjects aren’t always contiguous. A work that’s about, for example, government environmental policy for, and sustainable management of, protected areas can theoretically go in four places: GE170 (environmental policy); HD75.6 (sustainable development); QH75 (conservation of natural resources); or S944.5.P78 (protected areas).

One of the hardest works I ever had to classify was “Application of a dichotomous key to the classification of sea lamprey marks on Great Lakes fish,” a “Miscellaneous publication” from 2006 of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. I know what you’re thinking: a real page-turner, laugh-out-loud funny, couldn’t put it down, etc. File it under Fishes—Great Lakes, and be done with it. In fact, that was the way it was classified by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission itself. But my job is to determine what’s most useful to the scientists and curators of this museum in NYC. This work isn’t simply about fishes in the Great Lakes (QL626.5). Another choice is: Fishes—Wounds and injuries. Yes, that’s an actual subject heading, but it wouldn’t limit the call number by type of fish, and the title shows that it’s about sea lampreys (eels). A third, better choice, was under the biological class for those lampreys (QL638.2) that are making the marks (i.e., biting) on those Great Lakes fish. But that doesn’t quite get it, either. So where did I put it? In SH177.L3, which is specifically about the pests and predators (SH177) that affect fishes, and specifically, lampreys (.L3). But of course, I included all those other subject headings in the record.

OK, but how does this relate to me and blurbs and that “bisexual-Hamlet” book? Only in the sense that my work, and Ms. Hermes’s, can be thought of as hard-to-classify items that require multiple subject headings. I’ve said before that most non-genre fiction isn’t classified and isn’t assigned much in the way of subject headings from a national cataloging agency like the Library of Congress. And even though I’ve received some recognition from the romance community, Phyllida wasn’t published by HarperCollins as “romance” and wasn’t shelved in the Romance section of bookstores. Fiction is almost always treated differently than nonfiction. In our natural history museum library, with almost all nonfiction, we solve the difficult cases by throwing a lot of subject headings at them and trying to pick the best one for the shelf location, the call number. But with fiction, libraries and bookstores are happier going with alphabetical-by-author and hoping that reviews, word of mouth and maybe the title will gives readers the clues they need to identify the books that appeal to them.

So if you think a wonderful mélange of Shakespeare’s work, especially Hamlet and the sonnets, with a bisexual m/m/f love triangle, wordplay, and an especially clever take on what it means to be writer in the deepest sense sounds like your cup of tea—but you really don’t want to read a “bisexual historical romance”—then don’t let the fact that I’ve blurbed it put you off. It’s only the third or fourth subject heading here. But if you like my style of comedy, you might very well like The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet, because that’s the reason Ms. Hermes and I are being published at all, and on the same release date—the comic style. It’s our primary subject heading, if you will, or as you like it, or much ado about nothing, or th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame…oh, for pity’s sake will you shut up? Good night, sweet prince…

Reading on Wednesday, Oct. 28

2009-10-20T21:31:50Z

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!

Trailer for PRIDE/PREJUDICE

2009-10-11T01:36:00Z

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.

The Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

2009-09-27T07:12:11Z

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?”

And yet all sorts of really good things happened. The first of which was: I got a great cover design for my new novel, Pride/Prejudice. Check it out on my website home page: http://www.annherendeen.com

Next, HarperCollins produced an ARC, an advance reading copy. Even as the final copy-editing-proofreading-correction process is still going on, this early version is sent out to other authors who will, ideally, read it and give me blurbs. And yes, I got blurbs! Check them out on the “Books and Reviews” page of my website.

So why the Bog of Blah? I think it really was that deadly combination of copy editing, proofreading and cataloging. Even at the best of times, cataloging is 90% anal-retentive, passive-aggressive, rule-bound, nitpicking tedium, and 10% interesting classification questions. Most of the time it’s 99.9% nits. Being published also has its unavoidable and necessary lousy moments.

Cataloging is what I do to pay the rent. Writing is what I do for pleasure. It’s when the Day Job and the Creative Escape both involve fine-combing bloodsucking creepy-crawlies out of one’s hair that Despond appears on the horizon. If I were one of those two or three fortunate people who can earn a living writing fiction I’d probably welcome this once-a-novel louse-feast of the publishing process. As one of the editors at the recent Brooklyn Book Festival panel on “Authors as Editors” said, editing is a chance to use your “math brain” for a change. But when you already spend a significant part of your time every week grooming the other chimps, you really wish that, on your days off, you’d get to lie back and let someone else run their fingers through your fur.

At any rate, it’s over. Pride/Prejudice is moving inexorably toward its apotheosis as a published work. Meanwhile, the lice of cataloging are busy laying their eggs for tomorrow’s nitpicking. And I thought I’d share with you a selection of the pleasurable 10%, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the sophomoric.

First the genuine pleasures. Once in a great while I get to catalog something new. Not a book that’s so new (and usually, stupefyingly dull) that it hasn’t been cataloged before, but a subject that has only just been discovered. In other words, I catalog the printed work that discusses a discovery in the classification of zoology—taxonomy. Here’s a recent example: Anomaloglossus confusus, a new Ecuadorian frog formerly masquerading as ‘Colostethus’ chocoensis (Dendrobatoidea, Aromobatidae). OK, I admit that sounds pretty stupefying. But the point of it, what made it so much fun for me to work on, was that the authors had found this frog and decided that it was not, in fact a member of the known family of Dendrobatidae (poison dart frogs) but one of a whole new family, Aromobatidae. The authors got to name it, because they discovered it. When I was cataloging this monograph, looking up the new family name online, I was proud to see that the second author, Taran Grant, a scientist at the museum where I work, is now formally associated with this new taxonomic name.

Natural history is full of fascinating terms, and new species are being discovered all the time: there are side-necked turtles, whip scorpions and goblin spiders. There are dinosaurs who died in infancy (perinatal), leaving their little baby fossils to be unearthed eons later and analyzed for clues about their evolution: The perinate skull of Byronosaurus (Troodontidae) with observations on the cranial ontogeny of paravian theropods. There are “troglobitic” beetles and “troglomorphic” scorpions and even human “troglodytes”—cave dwellers all. (Cave fishes are referred to as “hypogean.”) Even this reluctant nitpicker has a certain soft spot for lice: the very first item I cataloged was: Sucking lice (Insecta, Anoplura) from indigenous Sulawesi rodents. And yes, if you’re wondering, there are lice that don’t suck. They’re called “chewing lice:” scientific term, Mallophaga.

Well, that’s about as cerebral as it gets. Most of the other pleasures are silly stuff, the kind of things that four-year-olds find hilarious, as do catalogers who’ve spent eight hours checking for missing semicolons and puzzling over whether a book is the proceedings of a named conference and is therefore entered under the name of the conference, or whether it’s just selected papers from an unnamed conference and requires a title main entry instead, or is perhaps simply a work of primary authorship and should have the main entry under the author, whose name is, naturally, John Smith…. Or, to quote from the 1958 version of The Fly: “Help me!”

For an example of a silly thing that’s also scientific, there’s the hemipenis, the generative organ of male squamates (lizards and snakes). Biologists find the hemipenis very useful in classification, as is evident in one of the all-time greatest titles in our library’s collection: The hemipenis of Philodryas Günther : a correction ‪(‬Serpentes, Colubridae‪)‬. Hemepenes (plural) come in pairs, and, according to Wikipedia, “Only one is used at a time, and some evidence indicates males alternate use between copulations … Often the hemipenis bears spines or hooks, in order to anchor the male within the female. Some species even have forked hemipenes (each hemipenis has two tips).” Oh, crikey!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemipenis

At the end of the day, it just comes down to puerile, jackass-level humor. Like people’s interesting names. As someone with a weird last name of my own, I assure you I’m laughing with these people, not at them:

One group of names would make a terrific Regency romance:
Cyprian Broodbank is our tall, dark and … brooding hero, with a secret sorrow. I think he ought to be at least a baronet—Sir Cyprian Broodbank;

Antony J. Puddephatt and Richard J. Puddephatt. Hmm. Perhaps comic characters, like the Bates mother and daughter in Emma?

N. W. Rakestraw, initials only, so much scope for the imagination. He’s the anti-hero, the … rakish, of course, dashing and good-for-nothing scoundrel who entices our heroine (or hero, depending on just how bisexual this story is) but is ultimately rejected. Unless, of course, Sir Cyprian can tame Rakestraw and they live happily ever after. And what if Rakestraw is a woman? Why not a rakish heroine? I see a Georgian-era romp…

Then there are these individual, beautiful, wonderful finds:

Richard W. Blob, one of the editors of Amniote paleobiology : perspectives on the evolution of mammals, birds, and reptiles;

Boris L. Blotto, one of the authors of The amphibian tree of life;

George Robert Crotch (entomologist, specialist in beetles);

Silvester Diggles (ornithologist);

Finally, when a book on “deep drilling” includes authors named Fuchs and Suk; and when the title Radioactive dating has an author named Wänke—it’s time to go home.

If you want to look up any of these title or names I’ve mentioned, here’s the link to our public-access online catalog (OPAC): http://libcat.amnh.org/

Blue Boy, by Rakesh Satyal

2009-05-25T23:54:44Z

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).

Blue Boy is what is often called a "coming of age" story, about a boy's recognition and acceptance of his homosexuality. But this book, like the best of these, is so much more than that. Everyone who knows Satyal or works with him uses the same word to describe him: "brilliant," and this characterization is what distinguishes Blue Boy from so many similar stories. Satyal's voice is witty, sharp, somewhat cruel—the marks of a, dare I say it? —very masculine style.

While the author's focus on his Indian heritage and his "differences" from the other children give the book a unique flavor, it's important to stress, as other reviewers have said, that the story's appeal is universal. A middle-aged, white-bread, New York woman, I was drawn in and captivated from the beginning, made just uncomfortable enough by the acerbic humor, the critical but affectionate look at Punjabi culture and the minutely observed descriptions of people's physical appearance to know I was reading the work of a master.

Satyal will be reading at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble (Broadway at 66th St.) on Tuesday, May 26, at 7:30 (sorry for short notice).

Reading at Bi Lines II

2009-05-25T23:50:27Z

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 ;)

Article on Princeton conference

2009-05-12T05:45:53Z

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.)

Conference presentation

2009-04-26T20:45:48Z

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

{I thanked Eric Selinger and Bill Gleason for including me, a one-novel author (with another coming out in January), among all these scholars and bestselling multi-book authors; Michelle Buonfiglio of Romance B(u)y the Book, for supporting Phyllida from the beginning, giving me several guest-blog spots, and for turning Eric on to it. Without her I would not be here; Pamela Regis for giving me so much free publicity [she showed the cover in her presentation and has changed her definition of a romance novel because of Phyllida]; and the two Sarahs: Sarah Frantz of Teach Me Tonight and Dear Author; and Sarah Wendell (SB Sarah) of the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog. Both Sarahs have supported and enjoyed Phyllida, and SB Sarah wrote a wonderfully witty and hilarious review when it was first self-published.}

{I have sometimes described Phyllida as an m/m/f or "bisexual" Regency romance and I wonder how this fits into the conference's theme of American culture. The Regency romance is the most "English" of historical romance forms. Americans have always written "English" forms of literature, and I am American, and that makes my book part of American culture.}

When I set out to write Phyllida, I was lucky in the way that only unpublished first-time authors can be. I had nothing to lose, nothing to prove, and only myself to please. And that's where Phyllida came from: it was the story I wanted to read, to please myself, because it seemed to me that no one had yet told my story. I mean that in the literal way—my book that I wrote—and also in the autobiographical sense. It's said that every novelist's first book is autobiographical, and Phyllida is no exception. I often call it my fantasy autobiography.

***Please don't take offense at my use of terms like escapism or fantasy. I think all good writing is escapist in the best sense: it takes us out of ourselves, our lives, our very consciousness. You don't have to be trying to escape anything bad to enjoy the transporting feeling of entering another universe created by a talented writer. Similarly, fantasy, as I see it, can simply be what a recent post on the RomanceScholar listserve called "epic." It's fiction squared or perhaps cubed, raised to a higher power. Done well, it creates an obviously "false" world that reveals underlying and deeper truths.

The specific story that became Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander was inspired both by my reading of historical romance and by the relatively recent development called “slash fiction.” And there's a third parent too–-you see, I just can't get away from these threesomes: comedy. My writing voice is inevitably humorous. The best I can hope for is to write good comedy. I chose the Regency romance because it is usually lighthearted and droll. It suits my voice, the way Gilda in Rigoletto is a better role for a coloratura soprano than Carmen.

The biggest misconception I've seen about Phyllida is that it's the product of "good intentions." That I deliberately set out to write a sympathetic portrayal of a neglected, poorly understood and despised group—bisexuals. Let me say clearly for the record: I never had good intentions. I had only the most selfish of motives: to write my ideal romance. The characters are not meant to be "typical" bisexuals—I don't believe there is such a thing—and any transgressive behavior on their part was not meant to be "typical" of bisexual men now or at any time in the past. Their only "typicality" was to be archetypal Regency romance characters.

Now, what is slash fiction? It began with the original “Star Trek” TV show. Written almost entirely by women and for a female readership, slash takes an existing work and writes new storylines for some of the characters featuring same-sex relationships, usually man-on-man. The first slash stories were passed around surreptitiously at “Star Trek” conventions, woman to woman, a literally underground or at least under the table feminist take on the hammy, macho space opera. These stories, therefore, were simply the logical outgrowth of all that homoerotic subtext in "Star Trek," providing women viewers with what we most wanted to see: an explicit sexual relationship, so clearly implied in the show, between Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock. The term “slash” does not refer to cutting, but to the typographical symbol, that character usually found on the lower right of the keyboard. The slash was used to indicate which characters had the same-sex relationship. Those first Kirk-Spock stories would be marked as K / S.

Since that time, slash has become so popular that it has merged in ways I don’t completely understand with “fanfiction:” online unpublished stories written by fans of TV shows, books, movies, etc. Slash- and fan- are almost identical forms of –fiction and the terms are almost interchangeable. There is, of course, f/f slash, the prototype being stories based on “Xena, Warrior Princess.” It's always same-sex, because who needs more hetero love stories? There are slashes of just about any well-known and beloved story you can think of, including Georgette Heyer’s, even some based on </i>These Old Shades</i>, with the Duke of Avon and his friend Hugh Davenant enjoying the same-sex relationship. There's even, inevitably, a slash title, "Regency Fuck." [A play on a well-known work of Heyer's, The Regency Buck.]

What is the appeal of slash for women? “Forbidden fruit.” There’s even an online slash magazine called “Forbidden Fruitzine.” It’s frequently pointed out that the bulk of the audience for “Queer as Folk” was women. There’s been a long history of denial of women’s interest in the male body and male sexuality apart from a particular woman’s (barely) acceptable interest in a particular man’s relationship with her. Until recently, women couldn’t go to gay bars the way we do now. But just as in the past, when "ladies" weren’t supposed to know anything about sex or men, that didn't mean they weren't interested, and aroused.

But as m/m romances and slash are being written by women for women, there's one aspect of them that doesn’t appeal to me: it’s all “look but don’t touch.” Here are women writing about men having sex with each other, for the delectation of women readers, but all the main characters are men and the women never get any of that action. Now, I love reading about two sexy men falling in love and making love. But I can't write such a story. I may not always “identify” with the heroine in a romance novel, but I do like having a female point of view. As someone from the RomanceScholar listserve put it a while ago: "Where am I? (in this story?) Where is she?"

In many ways my training for this writing was my reading. Two specific influences were Mary Renault and Marion Zimmer Bradley and her sword-and-sorcery world of Darkover. In Renault's work I encountered the gay or bisexual hero for the first time: the honorable, masculine warriors of The Last of the Wine, and the idealized Alexander the Great of Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy. Zimmer Bradley was one of the first fantasy authors to feature a bisexual male character. Not some sort of wishy-washy, "am I gay or straight" tormented soul, but a sexy, tall, dark, dangerous swordsman. He was openly attracted to young men, but admitted to having the occasional moment of “impulse”—attraction, even marriage, to a woman. Oh, be still my heart! Years later, when it finally occurred to me that I could write fiction after all, I had my subject: The bisexual husband.

We're told to write what we know, and apart from my reading I knew very little. In my college years and after I hung out with the gay crowd, and I learned that men are more like each other than they are like women. That gay men, bisexual men and straight men are all from Mars. I don’t mean men and women are different species or that we can’t communicate—that’s the whole fun of romance novels, learning how. It’s just that I see a fundamental difference between men’s experience of being “in love” and having a relationship, and women's experience.

So the one thing I knew for sure was that I was going to write a Regency romance with a bisexual hero. What I was doing here is not technically slash. Slash takes a particular story: "Star Trek" episodes, These Old Shades, and particular characters, Kirk and Spock, Avon and Hugh Davenant, and writes new storylines that involve a same-sex relationship. But in Phyllida I slashed a genre, not a specific story or set of characters. And then, I slashed the slash. I introduced the hero as gay from the beginning, and showed him in love with a man and attracted to men—that's the first slash. But then I slashed again, writing a heroine back into this all-male paradise.

There are many elements of the Regency romance that seem to work well with slash. For one thing, the Regency comic romance isn't exactly a realistic depiction of the past. Is any comedy totally realistic? In a way, it was almost a disappointment to discover what a well-documented gay subculture existed at the time, because it meant my epic fantasy comedy was going to have to come down to earth occasionally.

Another element of the Regency romance I particularly liked was that alpha male hero. I wanted to give my heroine (me) what all romance heroines deserve: The man who's out of her league—in fact, he's playing for the other team! A Mr. Darcy or a Mr. Rochester. He had to be confident, maybe a bit of a swaggerer, which is why the coming-out story has no appeal for me as a writer. This man has long-ago taken his sexuality in stride and moved on. And here, again, the upper-class society of the typical Regency romance--that "disordered" or "corrupt" society that Pamela Regis discusses--works equally well whether the hero is straight or gay. In this world of wealthy and idle young men, gambling, drinking and dissipation are the preferred occupations, the idea of falling in love with a woman is despised as unlikely and demeaning, and marriage is a burden to be avoided at all costs.

***The traditional Regency hero often has a preference for a certain type of woman. Over the course of the story, he is surprised to find himself falling in love with a very different sort of woman. Again, gay or straight didn’t matter that much in this setting. I imagined my hero having a taste for big blondes. The fact that, in Phyllida, these were hunky blond men didn’t really change anything. There was still the fun of showing my hero discovering his growing love for his petite, "undistinguished brunette" of a wife. There was also the fun of contrasting the "love at first sight" story of the hero with his boyfriend—the sort of love that men tend to have—with the gradual, developing-over-time love with his wife that is the stuff of hetero romance.

It's when we get to the ending(s), the happily-ever-after(s), that the problems with my slashed Regency became apparent. Most romances end with the hero choosing a monogamous relationship. But here, whether my hero chose the man or the woman, neither option was going to work. If he chooses the woman, that's simply unbelievable and so politically incorrect. It's also unappealing to me as author and surrogate heroine. I like him gay, I wrote him gay, and I want him to go one having that exciting same-sex sex that turns me on just thinking about it.

But if he chooses the man over the woman: I think Lucy Ricardo on "I Love Lucy" said it best: "Waaaaaahhhhhhh." After I went to all this trouble writing the woman back into the slashed m/m story, he can't reject me! I mean, who's writing this story anyway? And this is the inspiration for my idea of the husband who gets to have it both ways, and the genesis of what Eric called a "fractal" novel that has it both ways in so many areas.

This also explains those various other "bisexual" marriages that populate the novel. In imagining what a double-slashed bisexual Regency romance would be, I had weighed a number of options, even started three or four novels left unfinished. They weren't "wrong," but they weren't "my" story in the autobiographical sense. So I didn't completely abandon them but used them in this novel as other examples of bisexual marriage. There's no "typical" bisexual, and there are many ways of making a ménage: this was a selection. I also admit to the opinion that every man—perhaps every woman as well—would have it both ways if he could, and to encouraging my characters to go for it as I wrote. I like to think of Ann Herendeen's fictional world as one in which all the women are handsome and all the men bisexual…

To quote from a New York Times article: [Sunday Styles section of March 15, 2009, "The Pleasure Principle," about One Taste, a San Francisco retreat that offers "orgasmic meditation" focusing on women's sexuality:]

" 'In our culture, women have been conditioned to have closed sexuality and open feelings, and men to have open sexuality and closed feelings. There's this whole area of resistance and shame.' "

This is a perfect encapsulation of the mission of the contemporary historical romance. We are writing love stories now, many of them sexual or erotic, about the past. But we bring a modern perspective on love and sex to what was so often "closed" and "shameful." Just as Georgette Heyer brought a 1920s or 30s sensibility to her depiction of the Regency, so I used the similarity between the 18th-century gay subculture and the 1970s of my youth to give a new perspective to the historical romance.

Especially in the area of women's sexuality, we can look at things in a more open way, acknowledging that, whether they were supposed to or not, whether they could show them or not, women have always had sexual desires. If I, a twenty-first century woman, find something arousing about a sexy man; if I enjoy the sight of him embracing another sexy man, chances are a woman in the past, even a lady, might have experienced such feelings too. If she could not admit it, I can. And my role as her spokeswoman, perhaps my duty, is to give her feelings voice, to practice the freedom for her that she could not enjoy then.

Finally, romance novels are congenial to the idea that people, men and women, can fall in love outside of their usual comfort zone or preferred type. In today's world, where men's sexuality is often defined purely at the biological level, where sexual orientation is said to be hard-wired, romance novels allow for the possibilities of love in all its messy, emotional and psychological ambiguity. We can, in fact, sometimes do, choose love with our hearts and our minds as well as with our lower body parts.

***Paragraphs marked were omitted in talk for time constraints

{Sections in curly brackets are last-minute additions to the prepared version in response to other presentations and/or because of my perception that they were now necessary.}

[Sections in straight brackets are explanations for readers now that I did not actually speak at the conference].

Class Warfare 2--The Empire Strikes Back

2009-04-20T00:09:09Z

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.

What is often misunderstood in discussions of classification and cataloging is the role of the cataloger. As an article in today's "Ideas and Trends" column in The New York Times says:

"It wasn’t the first time that a technological failure or an addled algorithm has spurred accusations of political or social bias. Nor is it likely to be the last. Cataloging by its very nature is an act involving human judgment, and as such has been a source of controversy at least since the Dewey Decimal System of the 19th century. Today, the Internet is built on complex algorithms that categorize things and that are inevitably imperfect."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/weekinreview/19rich.html

Now, I'm not saying this lets Amazon off the hook—quite the opposite. But I am saying that outsiders (non librarians) don't realize that the individual library cataloger doesn't get to make up the categories. A comment on my Aug. 10 post compared me to Linnaeus, the famous Swedish taxonomist of the 18th century who developed the system, much modified but still in use today, by which all zoology, from protozoa to primates, is arranged. And in the interest of honesty I had to explain that no, I don't create the categories in my work. For each book, I simply try to find the best fit among existing subject headings.

I work in a science library, which makes things a little easier than working with Everything in the Universe, like in a general public library—or Amazon. But in any library, there is what is called "controlled vocabulary," the subject headings that must be applied consistently to avoid chaos. Subject headings vary between classification schemes. The Library of Congress headings are not the same as the Sears list, for example. But any library that uses the LC subject headings (LCSH) will use the same headings for the same topics or things.

If you're looking for books on Coleoptera, the LCSH subject heading is the common term, Beetles. Type in Coleoptera for a subject search, and the catalog gives you the "See" reference, telling you that in the catalog, "Coleoptera" is not used, and to look under "Beetles" instead. Now that catalogs are online, you don't have to sigh, slam the C drawer shut, pull out the B drawer and start all over again. You just click on the hyperlink.

Does this dampen catalogers' creativity? Undoubtedly. But what's the alternative? Chaos. As "The Public Editor" column put it (NY Times again), writing on style manuals and usage conventions (which is part of the cataloger's work as well):

"Many Times readers do get offended and irate over style issues … and the complaints often involve an accusation that the newspaper is being disrespectful.… Each case illustrates the challenge of maintaining a consistent style in a changing world, where some people read political motives into simple usage conventions, where words once thought acceptable become objectionable, and where other words once objectionable become part of everyday language. A newspaper has to have rules, the linguistic equivalent of driving on the right side of the road and stopping at red lights, to avoid chaos for readers."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/opinion/19pubed.html

Working in a science library does save me from a lot of this kind of complaint. I have yet to get any irate letters from beetles. But in this age of increasing recognition of animal cognition, I expect any day to hear from a chimpanzee annoyed that her proper (Linnaean) scientific name, Pan troglodytes, isn't a subject heading, but instead directs users to the common "Chimpanzees."

It's when we get to human beings that things get rough. The subject heading "African-Americans" has gone through any number of variations over the years, as the acceptable terms changed. One interesting example is "American Indians," still in use and resistant to the more politically correct "Native Americans." For one thing, many of the people in question prefer the "Indians" heading. But it leads to bizarre spin-off headings like "Indian art." No, that's not art from India the country. If you want that you must search under "East India."

And then, as I mentioned before, there's the untamed wilderness of fiction. As I said, most libraries and bookstores don't classify literary fiction, and even the genre fiction is given very broad categories, like Romance and Sci-fi. These aren't subject headings in the way that Chimpanzees or Beetles are. LC doesn't even use these genre terms for the works of fiction themselves, but only for nonfiction works discussing them (in catalogers' terms, books that are about romances or sci-fi). For example, the Library of Congress record for Phyllida used only the one LC heading, "Bisexuals—Fiction." Not "Romance," and not even the specific phrase heading, "Bisexuality in marriage."

Readers on Amazon can assign their own "tags" to books that don't seem to fit well within Amazon's controlled vocabulary. Of the idiosyncratic tags given to Phyllida, my personal favorite is "all gay guys love Phyllida." I realize this was probably meant derisively, but there's something sweet about it. And it does recognize that the book's main character gets along quite well with the gay and bisexual men in the story. Part of her appeal is that she likes them as they are and has no interest in changing them.

But as a subject heading, "all gay guys love Phyllida" doesn't work. A good subject heading has to be potentially applicable to more than one book and to works of other authors. Even if I write a sequel, chances are it won't focus on Phyllida alone or discuss "all gay guys" and their "love" for her. If I am motivated enough to write a whole series about Phyllida, she might conceivably get her own heading: Carrington, Phyllida (fictional character). But that would be the extent of the editorializing.

Cataloging by human beings takes a lot of time and thought, and few libraries allow as much as we'd like. We catalogers have to make decisions based on the cover or jacket copy, the table of contents and an introduction—and even that is pushing it. Most catalogers have quotas. They have to catalog an absurdly high number of books per week, and can't actually read them, any more than the typical librarian's job involves sitting at a circulation desk reading everything in the library while typing catalog cards.

Yes, catalogers make mistakes, but people programming computers make worse ones, especially when applied hastily over enormous databases of diverse material and with ulterior motives. A good cataloging scheme has a broad range of well-defined categories and subject headings, like LC's. By contrast, Amazon's "Internet … algorithms that categorize things … are inevitably imperfect." In a library, staffed by human beings, a book that is a bisexual love story would not have to be crammed into the awkward fit of "gay romance;" and the children's classic Heather Has Two Mommies would not be marked as containing "adult content."

None of this excuses Amazon's latest idiocy. It was a programmer tinkering with an "algorithm," no doubt at the behest of the management, if not Jeff Bezos himself, who made the original "ham-fisted error." What this incident does point up is, in the Internet age, when many people think libraries and the faceless, sexless drudges who work in them are unnecessary, just how much we need them.

Libraries and librarians don't censor. We recognize the existence of nuance, like bisexual, alongside gay and lesbian. We understand the difference between fiction and nonfiction, between pornography and romance, between genuine adult content and children's books. And if you want to find a gay romance novel, we don't ask why, or check your ID, or say, "Sorry, we don't approve of books like that and we're not going to help you find the ones that might have inadvertently slipped through the acquisitions process." We say, "Well, the romance novels are over there, but they're not classified. Here's a reading list compiled by librarians, and you can check the catalog to see if we own them. And have you read…"

Amazon Rank

2009-04-12T23:19:06Z

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

Love as the Practice of Freedom? : or Phyllida Goes to Princeton

2009-03-27T23:34:20Z

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.

Of course, not everyone invited was able to come, and the panels have been reconfigured. I was originally on the panel called "The Sweetest Taboos: Romance and Sexuality," but am now on "Memory and Desire: Romance, History, and Literary Tradition." I still have the same 15 minutes to speak in this crowded schedule, and really have only one topic: how and why Phyllida follows the traditional format of the Regency romance novel while introducing perhaps the most taboo subject of all: female desire for--and attainment of--the forbidden.

Before I knew the conference was on track, I had been planning to post comments on things that had been on my mind while writing my novel, like Jane Austen's heroines' desperate need, clearly a reflection of their brilliant creator's situation, for men who are capable of carrying on an intelligent conversation. But now I have to work on my 15 minutes of fame. As most of you know, the shorter something is, the harder it is to write. So in my unitasking way, I'll be back in my cave, laboring over my little speech, forced out at intervals to catalog the odd book or e-journal.

Handsome and Glamorous

2009-03-15T07:17:00Z

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."

Unitasking

2009-02-16T00:40:20Z

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.

I’ve been told that rather than beating up on myself for not being able to focus on two things at once, much less multitasking, I should just accept the way I work. So I have. I work on one thing at a time. I’m a unitasker. For the last couple of months I was working on my novel. Now I’m ready to blog, to say hello to the world and find out what’s going on with you Earthlings. But I have so many ideas roiling my brain I can’t even settle on one thing to make a reasonable length blog post. See, I’m already close to the limit of what people want to read and I haven’t even said anything yet.

I’ll never be a Twitterer, that’s for sure!

What I’m doing now is taking the easy way out. I’ll start with “politics,” and let two other people do the talking for me. Then, over the next few days or weeks, I’ll slowly release all the pent-up thoughts that were pushed aside while I concentrated on my writing. One warning: I’ve never developed the knack that other writers have of adopting the “Aw, shucks, it’s no big deal, just some little thing I tossed off in between a full-time job, motherhood, blogging and teaching” attitude about their books.

Fu- I mean, forget that. I’m thrilled with my new novel and I think it rocks! It’s going to make some people really, really angry and it’s going to, I hope, make a lot of other people laugh and talk about it and…well, you get the idea. What I’m leading up to is, my other posts are going to be, in some way, about my writing. Yes, that’s solipsistic. I can’t help it. It’s what I’ve been putting all my energy, mental and physical, into over these past months.

Obviously, if what I have to say bores you, don’t read my blogs. Or go ahead and tell me what I can do with myself, or what you’d like to do to me. It’ll be good preparation for what I’ll face next year, when, as Catherine Morland tells Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor in Northanger Abbey, “something very shocking indeed will soon come out... it is to be more horrible than anything we have met with yet.”

OK, on to politics. Not “current events.” I’m a novelist. Who cares what I think about the news? No, what I’m talking about is gay or queer politics. Even though I write fiction, some reactions to my work surprise me with the vehemence of their political interpretations. My work is very personal. It’s about what I like, what interests me, and it isn’t meant to make a statement, or an argument. But more than ever, we’re living in the age of “the personal is political.” Just writing positively about a husband (or two or three) who gets to “have it both ways” seems like a very loud “political” statement, maybe more like a slap in the face to some people.

So…if you want to know my opinions on certain topics, the best I can do is point to two gay men whose outlook I (usually) agree with. As a woman, I sometimes get the sense that I’m “not supposed to” have opinions on these subjects, or at least not these particular opinions. But here are two men who identify as gay and they can say it for me, loud and proud.

The first is Mark Simpson: http://www.marksimpson.com/

Mark had me back in 2006 with, “Maybe it’s because some of my best shags are bisexual men, but I’m beginning to get a bit teed off with this drive to make male bisexuality disappear, either into statistics smaller than a micro-penis or obscured behind a flurry of girl-on-girl action.”

“I hate to break it to you guys,” he continues, “but most of the evidence, historical, anthropological and sexological, suggests that if anything, male ‘bisexuality’ … is much more common than the female variety. After all, entire civilizations such as Ancient (and according to many accounts, Modern) Greece have been based on it. Not to mention public schools, the Royal Navy and Hollywood.”

Stop me before I repost the entire thing. Here’s the link:
http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2006/04/26/curiouser-and-curiouser-the-strange-disappearance-of-male-bisexuality/

The best way for me to express my feelings for Mark is to say that if I were married, I’d want Mark to be my husband’s boyfriend.

My other political “voice” is Peter Tatchell. He’s a self-described “human rights activist” with a wide range of concerns, which means that in this context I’m only talking about his modern, sophisticated and evolved views on subjects like the genetics of sexual orientation and gay men who love women.

http://www.petertatchell.net/

Tatchell doesn’t have individual links to his articles, which is a pity, as he’s so…multifaceted. All I can do is mention some titles.

From the home page, choose the Queer Theory heading from the list on the left. In the first article, “Sexing the Future,” Tatchell argues that in the future, more people will be having same-sex sex, but fewer will identify as gay.

“…human sexuality is much more complex, diverse and blurred than the traditional simplistic binary image of hetero and homo, so loved by straight moralists and - more significantly – by many lesbians and gay men … the present forms of homosexuality and heterosexuality are unlikely to remain the same in perpetuity … Gay identity is largely the product of anti-gay repression. It is a self-defence mechanism against homophobia … But if one sexuality is not privileged over another, defining oneself as gay (or straight) will cease to be necessary and have no social relevance or significance … Homosexuality as a separate, exclusive orientation and identity will begin to fade (as will its mirror opposite, heterosexuality), as we evolve into a sexually enlightened and accepting society. The vast majority of people will be open to the possibility of both opposite-sex and same-sex desires. They won't feel the need to label themselves (or others) as gay or straight because, in a non-homophobic culture, no one will care who loves who.”

In “Not Glad to be Gay?” Tatchell chides the intolerant gays who claim that gay men who love women are “betraying” the cause.

Back to the Index: under the “Gay Gene” heading, Tatchell has several articles whose titles are self-explanatory.

Finally, I’ll just say again: these are opinions. They’re not things I can prove and they’re not intended to change people’s behavior (as if!) But if people want to know where I stand, it’s here.

Good Writing Bites

2008-12-08T02:29:59Z

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

This cliché came to mind as I looked over my meager store of reader reviews on Amazon and the extremes of variation among them. Now, we all know tastes differ: what reads like elegant prose to one person will seem stilted to another; an incisive treatment of an important theme to this reader will go down like stale cotton candy to that one. It’s a natural reaction, when we haven’t enjoyed something, to call it “bad writing,” and sometimes it is; but sometimes the more honest response is simply, “I didn’t like it.” Some reviews are so odd that the author can’t help but wonder if the reviewer even read her book at all, or if perhaps there was some other agenda, an ass-biting incident that didn’t end happily.

Jane Austen was clearly familiar with this emotion. True to her tough character, one who “dearly loves a laugh,” she collected readers’ reactions, good and bad, to two of her novels, Mansfield Park and Emma. Just as on Amazon, these are amateur reviews. (There were no published reviews of M.P.) Austen kept the ridiculous letters as well as the praise, like the one from a Mrs. Augusta Bramson who “owned that she thought S. & S. and P. & P. downright nonsense, but expected to like M.P. better, & having finished the 1st vol., flattered herself she had got through the worst.” For Emma, Austen saved letters from a neighbor who found it “too natural to be interesting;” from a Mrs. Dickson who “liked it the less for there being a Mr. & Mrs. Dixon in it;” and the comment from an acquaintance who “did not like it so well as the others, in fact if she had not known the author could hardly have gotten through it.” There’s even a letter from someone who says he “Read only the first and last chapters because he had heard it was not interesting.”

Bringing up The Divine Miss A. will inevitably lead some people to ask: If it’s genuinely good writing, should it be biting anyone on the ass at all? Well, I think the answer is Yes. Even the rare case of good writing that also manages to be “charming” and “life-affirming,” as The Plain Dealer describes Alexander McCall Smith’s The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, has sunk its teeth into some readers’ posteriors. “Main character achieves all her good results from lying, hates dogs…” says one reviewer, giving it just one star. “BOR-ing” and “Disappointing, a bit condescending” are the headlines on a couple of two-star reviews. My guess is, if you’ve read all of Austen and never once had the sensation of her sharp little teeth nibbling at your rear end, you haven’t really read her work.

Most truly good writing is good precisely because it does jump up when you’re not expecting it and sinks its teeth into your derrière. If that’s not what you’re looking for, or if the author’s persona just isn’t your type, it can feel like a violation. Good writing tends to make the reader think. And sometimes we just don’t want to do that. We want to curl up with something comfortable, something that confirms all our dearly-held beliefs and doesn’t challenge our assumptions. That’s not wrong; I’ve felt that myself many times, and it’s led me to choose genre fiction. In fact, I imagine the books that receive uniformly good reviews are those competent, workmanlike genre novels that don’t take any risks.

But a book doesn’t have to be “literary” fiction to be well written, to be a thought-inducing, even challenging work of art. And it’s the writer who provokes a range of reactions who is more likely to be creating some ass-biting, taboo-breaking great stuff.

Which leads me, finally, to the reason for this essay: I have been invited to be a panelist (speaker) at an interdisciplinary academic conference on the romance novel to be held at Princeton University this coming April. The title of the two-day conference is “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” from an essay in bell hooks’s (she doesn’t use upper case) 1994 collection, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations , and the panel I’m on is called “The Sweetest Taboos.”

I’ve held onto this fabulous piece of news for months now, not wanting to be the first one to boast. I’d like to put a link in here to the full schedule, but there isn’t one yet… But since I haven’t posted for months, I decided to break the silence, let my readers know I’m still alive—and besides, it makes a cheerful Christmas message.

All I can say now is that I am extremely honored to be chosen. I’m certainly the low (wo)man on this totem pole. Along with ms. hooks herself, the participants include nonfiction writers like Stephanie Coontz, who wrote the fabulous Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage
http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228700888&sr=1-2

and Pamela Regis, who wrote the definitive history of the romance novel

http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Romance-Novel/dp/0812215222/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228700992&sr=1-1

as well as a number of well-known romance novelists like Jennifer Crusie
http://www.jennycrusie.com/

and Mary Bly aka Eloisa James.

http://www.eloisajames.com/

The other author on my “Taboos” panel is Joey Hill, author of some bestselling BDSM romances like Natural Law.

http://www.storywitch.com/

And it’s made me wonder what, exactly, is so taboo about my work? The ménage? The “bisexual” hero? Or something else? Well, that will be revealed at the conference. I’m still editing my second book, another project I’m not at liberty to talk about, and I haven’t yet had a chance to work on the paper I will present. But it’s clear that at least one of the reasons I was chosen is that Phyllida tends to bite readers on the ass. Many readers are into that, and it’s all good. A few have complained that my heroine is not a proper Regency miss, their outraged tones implying they felt a little…compromised by the experience. I suspect, despite her preference for gothic fiction, Phyllida may be a good writer, like me.

Rules of the Road

2008-09-02T00:22:53Z

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.)

Back in my college days, I fell in love with a friend when he slammed his hand down hard on the hood of a car stranded in the crosswalk, probably some deluded New Jersey driver who thought he could make a turn on a red light. We passed the car—Bam!—and shared a complicit smile. Like a peacock unfurling its tail or an antlered buck running off the competition, he had flaunted his manhood for my womanly admiration and declared his intention to fight for me, all without interrupting our conversation.

But something weird happens on those rare occasions when I get inside a vehicle: taking a cab from the airport, perhaps, or enjoying a visit from an out-of-town friend. All of sudden I want to mow down those jaywalkers, those morons who step off the curb in mid-block and dart out between cars, those maddening shopping-cart laden slowpokes who start crossing Broadway as the light is blinking red. As for those solid phalanxes of midtown office workers who just take over the entire crosswalk regardless of the lights, I want to plow through them like a Sherman tank barreling toward Berlin in April 1945.

I think of this odd transformation because of having been a reader most of my life and only more recently becoming a writer. There’s that same antagonism of purpose. Readers want happy endings, “role model” characters, and simple, clear plots neatly resolved on the last page. Follow the rules of the road and obey the traffic signals. Writers want…who knows what those maniacs want? We want to make U-turns, run through stop signs, do 100 mph in a school zone. We want to write all the stuff that’s in our head that may not make sense, certainly won’t make readers happy and perhaps shouldn’t even be written down.

Take Maria McCann’s brilliant novel As Meat Loves Salt, set during the English Civil Wars of the mid-17th century and featuring a doomed same-sex love story. The narrator, Jacob Cullen, is a psychopath; I knew from the first paragraph, maybe the first sentence, that he had done bad things and would do a lot more by the end of this long novel. I felt sick to my stomach the entire time I was reading this book, trapped inside this horrible man’s head. But I read it. I read it straight through, then started in again from the beginning, because it’s the kind of story you don’t really get the first time. Then I let a couple of weeks go by and read it a third time. So, yes, I loved it as a writer and I loved it and hated it, both, as a reader. McCann has said in interviews that she deliberately created a monster for her narrator and was surprised when some readers actually liked him. Well, not this reader. But the language, the storytelling, and, most of all, the way she imagined and recreated a whole world of three hundred and fifty years ago, brought it to life and made me feel as if I were living it myself—I was, and still am, in awe. That is art. That is writing.

But I couldn’t read books like this all the time, even assuming there were a lot of them out there. As a reader I need to escape into unthreatening situations with lovable characters. I need genre fiction, the mysteries and romances that give me the simple pleasures I crave. And as a writer? Well, all I’ve published so far is one work of genre fiction, but it was exactly what I wanted to write, and not quite like the others. A “bisexual” Regency romance novel? I didn’t run any red lights, but I may have scared the bejesus out of a pedestrian or two. And with my second novel, a “bisexual” version of a beloved literary classic, I may end up getting a ticket, perhaps even lose my license for a while. Because now that I’ve experienced life behind the wheel, there’s no going back to the speed limit and one-way streets.

Of course, we’re not all crazy New Yorkers. There are many types of readers and writers, just as there are sensible drivers and timid pedestrians. There are novelists who actually prefer research to writing (Jean Auel of The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels comes to mind, a memory of a long-ago interview) and writers who just want to make stuff up. There are readers who crave historical details, who pounce on every error of word or fact, and readers who just want a good story. There are writers who want to write tragic stories about flawed individuals and writers who want to put basically good characters through manageable challenges and reward them with a happy ending. There are readers who will embrace a monster like Jacob Cullen as a kindred spirit, others who, like me and McCann herself, will run away if they see him coming down the street.

Perhaps some invisible system keeps us all in line, like the hormones that regulate pregnancy. If the baby were to grow unchecked, it would drain the mother of nutrients and become too big for childbirth. But if the mother’s body had its way, this foreign object inside her womb would be kept to a safe size, ending up stunted and damaged. Somehow the right chemical balance prevails most of the time and a healthy infant is born in nine months. Maybe something like that goes on between readers and writers. Readers find writers that please them and slam the hoods of those that don’t; writers learn what they can get away with or take the chance of getting towed.

Or maybe there are no traffic signals or rules of the road. Maybe we find what we’re looking for like molecules bouncing up against each other in Brownian motion.

Maybe it’s simply about Once Upon a Time…

Here's a link to a Borders interview with Maria McCann:

http://www.bordersstores.com/features/feature.jsp?file=mccannmaria

Class warfare

2008-08-11T02:50:08Z

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.

Another confession: this will be, like all my posts, a discussion centering on my one published book. I can’t even genuinely apologize, because the fact is that’s all I have to talk about. My job, as you can see, does not make for fascinating reading; I live alone, not so much as a cat; and what I do with my free time is write (that’s the official version). So if I’m going to blog at all, and publishers strongly encourage their authors to do so, then all I can come up with is another angle to the Phyllida story. This time around, it’s Phyllida’s subject matter or category: as catalogers would say, its “class.”

Libraries and bookstores don’t shelve fiction by subject. Most of us are familiar with having to browse through the “fiction and literature” section arranged alphabetically by author’s last name. Awkward as this can be, can you think of a better system? Imagine trying to figure out the subject of Dave Eggers’s What is the What? if all you know is the title (“What”?) But this doesn’t mean works of fiction aren’t assigned subject headings. It’s just that these categories aren’t useful for arranging books physically on the shelves in what are called, so evocatively, “bricks and mortar” stores and libraries. There are usually the broad genre divisions for romance novels, sci-fi and mysteries, but that’s as deep as it goes, and a good thing too.

Online, of course, it’s a little different. If you find a book you like, and you want to see others like it, Amazon, for example, allows you to “look for similar items by category” and “by subject.” And here’s where things get complicated, at least for Phyllida. The Library of Congress, charged with cataloging every book published in the United States, has a wonderfully inclusive and thorough system. Phyllida’s one LC subject heading is Bisexuals—Fiction. But on Amazon, the system is more, as we say, “binary.” Amazon’s first category for Phyllida is Gay & Lesbian—Literature & Fiction—Fiction—Romance—Gay. As the lyrics to “Accentuate the Positive” warn us, “don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.” Since clearly there’s no Lesbian romance in Phyllida, and since it’s also been given Historical and Romance—Regency categories, no harm done, right?

I’m not so sure. At the height of Phyllida’s popularity, shortly after it went on sale, it was no. 2 in that Romance—Gay category. I joked then along the lines of, “Oh, man, will those readers be mad when they find out the title character is a woman.” As you see, I had fallen into an absurd error: assuming that the people who were buying the book were synonymous with the book’s assigned subject; that they were gay men looking for exclusively gay male romance. I certainly didn’t assume from the fact that Phyllida had a slightly lower but still respectable ranking in the Regency category that the buyers were miraculously preserved two-hundred-year-olds. The rankings say nothing about the readers, but only where a book’s sales rank in relationship to other books given the same subject headings.

Still, is there perhaps some validity to my worry? That is, do these broad subject headings create confusion, even resentment when a book doesn’t quite fit the Procrustean bed into which it’s been forced? If you look at the “tags” that readers have assigned to Phyllida, you’ll see that the most popular ones are things like “romantic comedy,” “bisexual romance” and “regency”--all more or less accurate and expected--then down to “trashy” (Hmm…is this good or bad, given the well-known Smart Bitches blog) and “bad porn” (Is it “bad” if you weren’t trying to write porn in the first place—or is that the definition of “bad porn”?) If you click to see all tags, the next to last is “gayness is fixable” (Who knew it was broken?)

This saddens me. Apart from whether this reader “misinterpreted” the story, it tells me that using “Gay” as part of the subject heading may lead to false expectations. If you buy a book thinking you’re getting a gay romance, and the story turns out instead to be a variation on the marriage-of-convenience plot of a Regency romance in which a primarily same-sex oriented man falls in love with his wife—well, that could strike you as funny, disgusting, amusingly different, or, as here, threatening and offensive.

Yes, a potential reader could check out some of the descriptive text and reviews. But many readers don’t, perhaps because they don’t trust them to be “objective.” An assigned subject heading by a supposedly neutral party, the Library of Congress, say, or Amazon, seems a safer guide. But if the system isn’t fine-tuned, you get reactions like this.

On the other hand, and to close on a happy note, I want to state here, for the record, that I have come to embrace the Romance category wholeheartedly, unashamedly and proudly for Phyllida. I admit to having vacillated many times on whether to use the word “romance.” One reason was that a love story involving three people might not fit everyone’s definition of a romance. Just as the Gay subject heading seemed misleading, so did I worry about Romance. While it seemed to me that any love story with a happy ending could be called a “romance novel” in the modern sense, there were times when I felt that “romantic comedy” was a more accurate description.

Here’s what changed my mind: Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, c2003). This is a brilliant and necessary work of scholarship, and I hope to write more about it in later posts, and why I am reading it at this particular moment. For now, I will merely say that Ms. Regis writes a clear and comprehensive definition of the romance novel, listing its eight “essential elements,” without which a work is not a romance novel, and three “accidental elements” that a romance may include but aren’t necessary.

Although, as I say in my note at the end of Phyllida that the book “began life as a Regency romance,” I had little confidence when I finished writing it that I had actually managed to produce one. But when I went over Ms. Regis’s list, I found that Phyllida contains all eight essential elements and two of the three options, and that they’re easy to identify in the story. Don’t know how I managed it, but I did. I guess all that romance-novel reading paid off, and that we can, in fact, learn from experience.

Amateurs climbing the walls

2008-07-15T20:01:23Z

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.

Zombie Librarian Returns to the Daylight World

2008-06-29T02:10:20Z

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.

My job goes like this: every week the library gets new books. The first thing I do is check the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) WorldCat database for a record for each book. Thousands of libraries all over the world have joined together (OCLC) to share their records online (WorldCat). When a member library acquires a book, rather than having to catalog it (create a new bibliographic record) from scratch, we can look it up in WorldCat and use the master record. Modified to reflect our individual library’s system, these records are added into our online catalog so that users can identify books of interest and find them on the shelves.

The records tell many things about a book: obvious ones like title, author, publisher and number of pages; more specialized info like the ISBN (International Standard Book Number, useful for ordering if the title and author are difficult), subject headings and the call number; and stuff that only a librarian will care about, but can mess you up if they’re wrong and you’re trying to find a book. Things like whether the book is part of a series, and the correct form of any “corporate bodies” involved in producing the book, (examples: World Wildlife Fund; the University of Tokyo’s natural history museum, which turns out to be Tōkyō Daigaku. Sōgō Kenkyū Shiryōkan).

While I was out writing my second book, staying up until 4 in the morning and sleeping till noon, my first book, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, had her debut and has been on the market for several weeks. After I had looked up all of this week’s new books, I figured I’d look up Phyllida, just for the fun of it. No, the library where I work isn’t going to buy it: it’s a natural history collection. As a coworker pointed out, “you should have written a dinosaur or two into the story.” It costs something like 64 cents for each search on OCLC, but hey, I thought, after promotional postcards at $95 for 250 and Authors Guild membership at $90, I’ll reimburse them.

This is what I found: Phyllida has been purchased by 222 libraries across the country. Compared to some of our more obscure titles, with one or two other holdings if we’re lucky, this sounds like a bestseller! (It’s actually at the level of “not bad” for fiction).

I have an Authority Record for my name. What this means is that, should I write more books and be careless enough to have my name appear in different ways on the different books (Ann W. Herendeen, A. W. Herendeen), or start using a pseudonym (Phyllida Carrington?) all of my works will be listed under the “authorized form” of my name, so that searchers can find them. The authority record is also useful should another Ann Herendeen start writing and publishing. This person will need to provide a middle initial or a year of birth to distinguish her works from mine. Obviously, with a name like mine, this sounds like much ado about very little, but authority records are invaluable when you’re cataloging a book by J. Smith (84 different authors with a total of 198 works, just in my library’s catalog).

Authority records are established mainly by the Library of Congress and are hyperlinked in a bibliographic record. Seeing that clickable underline made me feel as if I’d really arrived.

Most fun of all, I have a Library of Congress call number: PS3608.E735 P59 2008. Whew! Why is it so huge? Simply because there are so many American authors writing fiction in the 21st century. (That’s the PS3600+ part.) We’re grouped by last name, and the first letter of the last name is incorporated into the number, putting all the Hs into PS3608. (H is the 8th letter of the alphabet—3608.) The next part, E735, is based on the “Cutter table” (named for the guy who thought it up). It’s just like the keypad on a phone, where letters are assigned a number from 1-9. E is the second letter of my name and 735 reflects where Herendeen fits in with all the other He… authors alphabetically. It makes sure that in a large collection I’ll be shelved after Heredia and before Herndon. Finally, the title (Phyllida …) is reflected in the last part of the number, P59, and the year of publication, 2008.

I’m thinking about having it made into a gold-plated charm that I can wear on a necklace. How’s that for a conversation killer?

Well, none of this is a substitute for becoming a bestselling author (not likely), winning the Nobel Prize (not until they create a category for high class trash) or having my work made into a blockbuster movie (Clive Owen, Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson—are you reading this?) But as a zombie librarian returning to the daylight world, it sure felt good.

Reading aloud from Phyllida

2008-05-30T04:15:50Z

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.

I read a scene from early in the story, after my hero and heroine, Andrew and Phyllida, have been married for one day. This is their third sexual encounter, and the first time Phyllida enjoyed it. The scene takes fifteen minutes to read aloud, including the sex scene itself and the two characters' respective reactions to it. Andrew, who's primarily same-sex oriented, is surprised by his strong desire for his wife but has no concept of the kind of foreplay a woman needs; Phyllida, who was a virgin just two days ago, doesn't understand why she responds to Andrew's supercilious manner and forceful lovemaking. Afterward, Andrew is amazed that sex with a woman can be so satisfying, whereas Phyllida tries to make sense of deriving physical pleasure from what she feels is rape.

I practiced at home, reading the scene aloud and timing it. But reading in a public space in front of an audience was a very different experience. The scene sounded much more graphic here, and it was ironic that I was standing directly in front of the Religion section, with a whole shelf of Bibles behind me. At the end of the reading and the questions and discussion, the store coordinator and the HarperCollins publicist joked with me about "breaking barriers" at B&N.

But it was the audience that made this event a success. I had hoped for a larger turnout. Most of the people were coworkers, friends and neighbors, along with two lovely ladies I met that night, fans of the book. It may have been a small audience, but it was an active, engaged one. As Spencer Tracy's coach says of Katherine Hepburn's athlete in the movie Pat and Mike: "Not much meat on those bones, but what's there is cherce."

The most probing questions had to do with my choice of subject--the bisexual husband--and style of writing. I have always said that I wanted to write entertaining, popular fiction that is well written--what my mother, who valued more serious works, called "high class trash." After a discussion of the concept of "slash" fiction, I joked that perhaps what I write could be called "high class slash."

Finally, two old friends who had supported Phyllida from its earliest days as a POD (print-on-demand) book asked if I thought I was limiting the book's audience, and myself as a writer, with this kind of story. It's true, I said, that some people are turned off by the idea of a man who gets to "have it both ways" and of a wife happy in her marriage to this man. But when I thought about it, I knew I was privileged to be writing exactly what I wanted, not tailoring my ideas, my characters or my plots to the demands of the marketplace.

I left that night with the same feeling I had at Phyllida's book party a month ago: that I have been blessed. Perhaps those Bibles had a message for me after all.

To everybody who has read Phyllida and enjoyed it, and especially to all of you have written to tell me so: Thank you for giving me the ultimate affirmation.

Reading at the Park Slope Barnes and Noble May 15, 7PM

2008-05-13T06:10:17Z

I'll be reading from my bisexual historical romantic comedy, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, this Thursday, May 15, at the Park Slope (Brooklyn) Barnes and Noble, 267 Seventh Avenue (at 6th St.) at 7 PM.

Anyone in the Brooklyn area, I'd love to see you. Take the F train to the Seventh Avenue stop, which lets you out at 9th St., and walk three blocks north.

Featured in OUT Magazine

2008-05-06T06:03:35Z

Phyllida is listed in the no. 1 (top) position in OUT Magazine's June/July issue "Hot List: Literature" feature on "Summer Reads."

My hero, Andrew (a total top), would be proud.

Thanks to all my well-wishers

2008-04-29T19:32:55Z

I have received a large number of good wishes from people congratulating me on being published and I want to say a big Thank You, with hugs and kisses, to all of you. Your support means more to me than I can say.

If I have sometimes played down the bisexual or non-monogamous aspects of my story, it is because I am trying so hard to be a writer, not a "bisexual writer" or a "romance writer." Now I can say what I worked so hard to be able to say: I am a writer who has written a "bisexual romance" and who hopes to write more bisexual, historical romantic comedy. The comedy may be the biggest challenge of all, to myself and my readers.

Thank you, all of you, for being there.

Publication eve

2008-04-28T23:34:22Z

My "debut novel" (how's that for making me feel eighteen again?), Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, is being released tomorrow. In this age of the life lived online, I have this nagging feeling there's something I'm supposed to say, something I should do to mark this momentous (to me) occasion. How can I expect potential readers to notice me and, more important, seek out my book, if I just sit quietly and let the moment pass?

I'm old enough to remember a very different time, not that long ago, when a serious author tried to be anonymous, sometimes literally. An author photo? Absurd! What could it possibly matter what a writer looks like? Even a short bio seemed, somehow, unseemly. It's the work that matters, the writing. The author isn't the point of this endeavor; the book is.

Sometimes anonymity or a pseudonym are essential. Think of the original Flashman, written by George MacDonald Fraser and first published in 1969. I've heard that some early readers genuinely believed this darkly satirical work to be the memoir of a cad, coward and blackguard who lived through every major British campaign from the Afghan wars of the 1840s to the Boer War. Fraser wouldn't have helped his cause if he'd tried to make more of a splash than his antiheroic creation.

And of course, many women writers of the past simply couldn't be published under their own (feminine) names. Currer Bell is Charlotte Bronte's now-familiar male alter ego, and Jane Austen and Frances Burney published their first works anonymously.

But we live in strange times. Readership for traditional novels is down. Everybody and her sister is blogging, writing, posting, making videos. New authors are supposed to publicize themselves; it's practically a required clause in the contract. Even a big publisher like HarperCollins can't work miracles for every new, unknown author. So: Get the word out! Send email blasts! Don't have a MySpace page? What are you, crazy? Update your website for crying out loud! And blog! blog! blog!

The one danger in all this is that the diligent publicist/writer will alienate just about everyone after the fifth or sixth blast. I received a wonderful "reply" to one of my blog posts announcing yet another good review: "At this very moment," one exasperated reader wrote, "I think I'd particularly enjoy a romance [like Phyllida] ... But I certainly wouldn't read it if I knew you wrote it."

Well, there's the rub. I did write it. I wrote the book and I wrote the blog and the website content and the emails and...

What can I say except: I've loved every minute of it. I wrote what I wanted to write, what gave me great pleasure, what I wanted to read. Tomorrow--in a few hours--it will be on sale in bookstores for everyone to read. I hope that some of you will find in this humorous, romantic story of the spirited, beautiful authoress, her glamorous bisexual husband and his honorable gay boyfriend the same joy I had in creating it.

Interview on Frank DeCaro Show on Monday April 28 at 1:15 PM

2008-04-22T23:18:31Z

I'm being interviewed on the Frank DeCaro Show on Sirius OutQ Radio (pay radio), Channel 109, on Monday, April 28, at 1:15 PM (afternoon).

I will, of course, be talking about my bisexual historical romantic comedy, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, which is being released on Tuesday the 29th.

According to the Sirius listings, the show is "a bi-coastal brunch every weekday when pop culture funnyman Frank DeCaro, a dyed-in-the-salon New Yorker, and Doria Biddle, the Kevin Bacon of lesbian LosAngeles, dish show biz dirt." It should be a lot of fun.