Great news!  My new Pemberley Variation – yes, as in all-new, never before published under any title – is now available in both Kindle and paperback format.  Read it to find out what might have happened if Elizabeth had done what she should have  - since no single lady should ever receive correspondence from a single gentleman – and refused to read Mr. Darcy’s letter of explanation at Hunsford.  Be prepared for some unexpected twists as Elizabeth returns to Longbourn still believing that Mr. Wickham is to be trusted!

Be sure to stop by on December 16, 2011 for a special celebration of Jane Austen’s birthday and a giveaway!

Today is the big day. 21 writers of Austen-related fiction have been working like mad to get the new Austen Authors blog going. I’ve had the chance to get to know my fellow authors better, and I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say.

I’ll be blogging there on September 8.There are lots of giveaways, including my books, so please stop by!

Austen Authors Blog

So much is going on that I don’t even know where to start! To Conquer Mr. Darcy (formerly titled Impulse & Initiative) was released on August 2, but I still haven’t gotten around to doing a giveaway of it here because I’ve been busy working on an exciting new project which will be launched September 6. It’s something that Sharon Lathan and I dreamed up at the Romance Writers of America National Convention, an occasion which deserves a blog post of its own. It’s a group blog of authors of traditionally published Austen-related fiction, and we’ve been astonished with the enthusiastic response we’ve been getting from other writers. We’d optimistically hoped we could get 8 or so writers involved, but we’re up to almost 20 with new ones signing on every day, and even more offering to do guest posts from time to time. I’ll be doing a massive book giveaway there in September, including all my books from out-of-print to my latest release, and there will be tons of other giveaways as well. Be sure to stop by in September!

I’ve also been writing like mad. The next Pemberley Variation is almost finished, despite major efforts by Darcy, Elizabeth, and Georgiana to sidetrack the plot, not to mention the completely unplanned for steamy scene. Advice: don’t trust Jane and Georgiana if they offer to chaperone Lizzy and Darcy. Epic fail! Well, it’s true that I still don’t have the ending down, but it’s almost there. All that sidetracked me from the story I’ve been expanding at 50 Miles, but that’s next on the agenda.

Also on the books for the next couple of months are a totally revamped web site and (crossing fingers) the eventual release of the oft-delayed Morning Light, sequel to The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice. Meantime, the never-before-published Mr. Darcy’s Obsession is available for pre-order and is already garnering some great reviews, including one from Booklist that will be released next week (they were kind enough to give me a sneak peak).

Oh, yes, and I’ve been on the road all summer. I started out on July 1, managed 12 whole days at home in August, and am now off again until early September. Fortunately, there’s been lots of inspiration along the way between writers’ conferences and time in Woods Hole, and it’s been fun.

By the way, comments on this blog now have a slight publication delay, not because I want anyone to hesitate to comment but because there’s been a major problem with spam comments (part of the inspiration for the website revamp). But I do love your comments, and none of them are being censored unless they selling something.

Best,
Abigail

So, my New Year’s resolution was to be more regular about my blog posts. You now know how good I am at keeping New Year’s resolutions! Anyway….

I attended a writing workshop this morning on world-building, courtesy of the local chapter of the Romance Writers of America. I wasn’t sure how much would be applicable for me, since the worlds I write aren’t my invention: Regency England, which I try to keep historically accurate, and modern-day Woods Hole, which actually exists. But even with the most reality-based settings, writers still have to pick out which important facts about the setting and the society to highlight, which becomes world-building of a sort. It made me realize that I use different worlds even in my Pemberley Variations, which take place in the same years, same locations, and even the same characters.

In Impulse & Initiative, Regency England is a fairly light-hearted place. There aren’t any poor people except a few servants who are quite contented with their lot, nobody gets seriously ill, and I blithely ignore the harsher realities of Regency life. It’s the Victorian view of the pre-industrial Regency as an age of perfect innocence. Well, there’s innocence and then there’s innocence, as it were, but most of us have inherited that quite fallacious view that the Regency was a perfected version of the Victorian hyper-moral universe, when actually it was quite decadent and far from innocent. Mr. Darcy’s Obsession, which comes out this fall, is the story of what happens when Darcy, who believes he lives in the easy world of Impulse & Initiative, discovers he actually lives in a superficial society that builds its pleasures on the back of other people’s pain, where good birth is conidered of vastly more importance than good morals, and that he’s going to have to make some choices about whether to continue to pretend that everything is fine or to pay the price of publicly disagreeing with the status quo. Being Darcy, he of course makes the right decision, with some assistance from Elizabeth. But it’s a completely different world. The joys are different and the conflicts are different.

I’ve always thought of my Pemberley Variations as each highlighting different personality aspects of the characters created by Jane Austen. Impulse & Initiative Elizabeth is the traditional modern view of an arch and witty Elizabeth, whereas the Elizabeth in Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World is the Elizabeth who knows how to bite her tongue when the situation requires and has occasional periods of depression – all of which is described by Austen in Pride & Prejudice. It just depends on which parts you pay attention to. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that my worlds have changed as I’ve learned more about life in Regency England, the things Austen assumed her readers would know but which modern readers for the most part miss. Austen could refer in passing to Elizabeth’s periods of depression because that was a common and expected state for women then, so there was no need to dwell on it. The readers would fill in those blanks themselves. But we, as modern victims of the Victorian rewriting of Regency society, end up missing the significance of those brief references.

But none of this means that the world I built in Impulse & Initiative is in any way superior or inferior to the world of Mr. Darcy’s Obsession, because it’s all fiction. That’s sometimes a little hard to remember, especially when I get hung up in historical detail, but it’s more important for fiction to be convincing than absolutely accurate. Mr. Darcy’s Obsession takes place in a more historically accurate world, but I’ve still made it a happier place than it probably was, and it makes Darcy shine like a beacon of hope. The darker world shows the characters in brighter relief.

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 »

As promised, here’s an excerpt from the new Pemberley Variation. If you check this blog frequently, you might have read this excerpt a couple of months ago. I had posted it to my blog, then had second thoughts because I wasn’t sure I’d finish it, so I took the post down a few minutes later. Now that the first draft is actually finished, here it is again for those of you loyal enough to stick around!

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 »

This week is Austenfest at Brant Flakes, the blog of talented writer Marilyn Brant whose new novel, According to Jane, will be coming out this fall. She has interviewed several writers of Jane Austen-related books, including Syrie Jones (The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen), Kim Wilson (Tea with Jane Austen, In the Garden with Jane Austen), Laurie Viera Riegler (Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict) and me, and she’ll be posting all those interviews this week with free copies of all our books plus other prizes. I’m appearing on 6/26 and giving away copies of Pemberley by the Sea, Impulse & Initiative, and the elusive Without Reserve, which is finally available again from Amazon, Lulu, and other online booksellers. I hope you’ll stop by and join in the festivities!

I’ve been dealing with various technical issues about publication this week, including some of the residual issues from my original self-publishing. The only part that actually has to do with writing is some minor revisions to The Last Man in the World for the new edition being published this fall. 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!