Sorry I’ve been gone so long. I’ve just emerged from one of my periods of serious writer’s block, which this time extended as far as blogging and answering emails. I’ve got quite a stack to reply to! For anyone who is patient enough to still be reading after all these months, let me see if I can catch you up. It’ll probably take several posts! Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I attended the Romance Writers of America conference in Washington, DC, which was quite an experience, more than I can cover in one blog post. As usual, the workshop sessions I planned to attend were okay, and the sessions I ended up in at the spur of the moment even though they didn’t sound interesting were great. I guess I’m not the only one who has trouble coming up with good titles!

One workshop that really struck me was on intellectual property. I’ve been interested in the topic for a long time because Jane Austen related fiction is in a peculiar spot as regards intellectual rights and plagiarism. If Pride & Prejudice had been written after 1923, it wouldn’t be in the public domain, and I couldn’t use Austen’s characters and especially not her scenes and words in any of my stories. Since it was written long before 1923, Pride & Prejudice, like all Jane Austen’s writings, is in the public domain, which means anybody can copy, sell, or do anything they please with them. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on the opening scenes of the sequel to Bounds of Decorum (title TBA). It’s the first time I’ve written the opening to a Regency-based novel without using a Pride & Prejudice character, so it feels very different. The main characters in this are Mary, Georgiana, and new characters Thomas and James, who are brothers. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry to have disappeared for so long! I’ve been busy with final edits of Bounds of Decorum, and I think it’s stronger than it was before. Meantime, Morning Light is in my agent’s hands. And today I got a copy of the cover artwork for the formerly-named Last Man in the World. It’ll be available in bookstores this autumn.

I’ll be back with a longer post soon!

In From Lambton to Longbourn, Darcy and Elizabeth banter about practicing the virtues of self-control and charity. When it comes to each other, they’re both better at charity than self-control. That passage keeps coming back to me lately because I’ve been thinking a lot about self-discipline – specifically how to make myself sit down and write. I feel better when I write, but I’m having trouble finding the motivation and perseverence to actually do it. I think I’d better go back to setting concrete public goals, which has sometimes worked in the past. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been putting off writing a post, hoping that I’d have some news to report soon, and finally I do. I met with my editor ten days ago, and on Monday she filled me in on her grand scheme for my books. The big news is that she is buying Bounds of Decorum. It’s going to be a busy year for me, according to her. She’s scheduled Pemberley by the Sea and Impulse & Initiative to come out in mass market editions next spring, probably under different titles. Meantime, Bounds of Decorum will come out in trade paper in Fall 2010 along with a bookstore release of From Lambton to Longbourn, followed by By Force of Instinct and Without Reserve in Spring of 2011. By then, she hinted delicately, she expects me to have a new book for her. She hasn’t read Morning Light yet, so no news on that front. I have to finish copyedits for Last Man in the World this week, then I go straight into revisions for Bounds of Decorum and From Lambton to Longbourn.

So what’s next on the actual writing front? I’ve started plotting out a sequel to Bounds of Decorum which will follow the romantic adventures of Mary and Georgiana, with appearances by Mr & Mrs Darcy, Aunt Augusta, Charlie, the evil Earl, and two new original characters. Mary and Georgiana serve as natural foils for each other, and they each find love where they don’t expect it.

I’ve been stymied in the Woods Hole Quartet for a while. I have two books half-written, both with substantial flaws, but I had to get away from them for long enough to discover what the flaws were. In the first, Uncharted Waters, I tried to write a different kind of female protagonist, and it didn’t work. What kind of different? She wasn’t sassy, basically, and she ended up being a bit depressing, and her happy ending was largely about things other people did for her than what she accomplished for herself. A perfectly valid character, but not one I can write well, as it turns out. After trying to find ways to adjust the character, I finally realized I need to scrap her entirely and rebuild from scratch.

I’ve blogged about the other new modern before. I really like the story, but it suffers from boring characters. My characters in other books all had jobs they felt passionate about, not something practical to put bread on the table, which is where these two were. Now I have them each developing some new interests and friendships, and I’ll see if that helps. Although set on Cape Cod, I’d intended it to be separate from the Woods Hole Quartet, but the Woods Hole characters seem to keep showing up anyway. Maybe the quartet will have to become a quintet. As for the final book, it’s purely in my head at this point.

I think that should keep me busy for quite some time. Stay tuned for information about an online Austenfest with interviews and free book giveaways!

Just when I was ready to give up hope and settle for something second-rate, the last scene of Bounds of Decorum finally crystalized for me. I’ve been fighting with it for months, and no matter what I did, it seemed anticlimactic. I needed a conversation between Elizabeth and Darcy after their wedding, and I tried doing it outside the church (insufficiently private) at the wedding breakfast (unintelligible due to interruptions) and on the carriage ride to London (boring, boring, boring! I wouldn’t want to spend time with those people!). The tone was always slightly off, too, not enough humor and happiness to balance the serious elements.
Read the rest of this entry »

The good news is that I actually opened the Bounds of Decorum file and have been thinking about what to do with it. The bad news is that I’m not actually writing it. I had to turn in the manuscript for The Last Man in the World (soon to be renamed Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World, not by my choice), and I also polished up my short story “A Whiff of Darkness” (now renamed “A Brighter Future”) which is now posted at 50 Miles. It’s enough to make a person think about issues of titling a story. Read the rest of this entry »

My muse dropped by briefly, took one look at the scenes I posted a few days ago and sniffed. So today I have a rewritten version of the scene with Charlie, plus another new scene which may or may not stay around. I needed a break from the long series of scenes of X talks to Y in Meryton – it gets dull after a while. We’re a lull in the action at the moment. I struggle with stepping back from a plot to see what its problem is – or rather I can usually see what the problem is, but my muse is notoriously uncooperative with my attempts to fix anything based on an intellectual decision. It’s writing from the gut or not at all. But at least I got something this time, and I’m happier with the Charlie scene now. Read the rest of this entry »

Uh, oh. I seem to have been outed. Either somebody posted a link to this blog somewhere, or there was a sudden influx of curious people to the experimental AI blog. In any case, to new readers, welcome! I’d tell you all about what I’m doing with this blog… if I happened to know myself, but I don’t. I’m experimenting with this and that. It’s a general writing blog, and while I’ll probably post snippets here, it won’t be a story-posting blog. At some point I may do that as well. The snippets are a way to deal with my difficulties writing when I’m not posting anything (yes, I know, this makes it hard since I also have trouble writing when I am posting something, but I’ve never claimed to be consistent!). My goal is to make it to the end of my current three projects (Bounds of Decorum, Morning Light, and a nameless short story) so I can take on something new. Read the rest of this entry »