I, along with many readers, have been frustrated with the challenges caused by the title changes of my books. Some readers have accidentally purchased a second copy of the same book under a different title, and are understandably annoyed. Unfortunately, I have no control over the name changes, which are determined by my publisher, so the only thing I can do is to keep repeating the information about the title changes in hopes that more people will know about it. In that spirit, here’s the current summary:

The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice = Pemberley by the Sea
To Conquer Mr. Darcy (August 2010) = Impulse & Initiative
Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World = The Last Man in the World
What Would Mr. Darcy Do? (spring 2011) = From Lambton to Longbourn

For the sake of completeness, there is also the unpublished POD book The Rule of Reason = Alternative version of Impulse & Initiative which is only available at lulu.com. Without Reserve and By Force of Instinct will eventually be released with new titles, but I don’t yet know what they are.

There’s a Facebook group Pride & Prejudice Fanfiction Fans which has a running discussion thread about the title changes for lot of different writers. It’s worth checking before you buy. I also announce title changes at the Pemberley Variations Facebook fan page and on my own Facebook page, and I happily accept friend requests from readers!

Again, I’m sorry for the confusion about titles. I just wish I had some way to let everyone know!

I’m so hopeless! When I read all your wonderful comments, it made me want to give you all copies of my book, so I decided to pull three names out of the hat instead of two. Congratulations, Susan, Evangeline, and Alice for winning autographed copies of The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice. For the rest of you lovely commenters, I have a consolation prize of an unpublished Pemberley Variation short story that I’ll be happy to e-mail to you. I even have a consolation prize for peope who didn’t comment – tomorrow I’m going to post the newly revised and lengthened first chapter of the book formerly known as From Lambton to Longbourn, and I’d tell you what title it’s going to be published under in Spring 2011 except they’ve already changed it three times and I can’t keep up.

I’ll try to get the short stories out tomorrow as well. Susan, Evangeline, and Alice, please email me your addresses and I’ll mail out your copies! There’ll be another giveaway in a couple of months for To Conquer Mr. Darcy. Thanks for taking part!

The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice (the mass market release of Pemberley by the Sea under a new title*) has reached the bookstores! It’s a modern tale based on Pride & Prejudice set in the seaside village of Woods Hole, with a marine biologist as the heroine. It’s been garnering good reviews, including one at Austenesque Reviews. I’m celebrating by raffling off two autographed copies to lucky readers. If you’d like to be entered in the drawing, leave a comment on this post. If you post a link to the contest on your own blog, Facebook, or Twitter, that gives you an additional entry. I’ll draw the names on May 17.

Meantime, I’m going through the galleys for To Conquer Mr. Darcy (formerly Impulse & Initiative), and I’ve set a goal for finishing revisions to the newest Pemberley Variation by the end of May. Stay tuned for excerpts!

*My publisher is on a re-titling binge with Jane Austen-related fiction (mine and many other authors as well). It’s beyond the author’s control, but no writer wants you to buy their book under false pretenses. I strongly suggest checking book descriptions before buying new books to avoid paying money for something you’ve already read.

I’ve been so busy guest blogging and doing interviews on the virtual tour for the release of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World (at bookstores now!) that I’ve been neglecting this blog. But here are some links to the blogs I’m visiting:

~~Savvy Verse and Wit review and interview (and a lovely review it is!)

~~Interview at The Book Tree

~~Guest post at The Burton Review about how I choose scenes for my variations

~~Guest blog at Love Romance Passion about finding new aspects of the characters of Elizabeth and Darcy to explore

Tomorrow I’ll be blogging at Fresh Fiction about my life, writing process and routine. I’ll have another round of these each week this month. I don’t think I’ve done so much non-fiction writing since college, but it’s been fun. Thanks to all the bloggers who have hosted me!

Today I received my first copies of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World and was about to write about that, but then I got distracted by some old photographs of Russia in 1909-1912. In color. Not tinted. They were taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii with a color separation technique he invented using glass plates. The colors had long since leached out, but modern computer graphics wizards figured out a way to restore them. Voila – color photographs of pre-revolutionary Russia. Very cool, I thought, but I expected them to look like the usual tinted daguerrotypes. They didn’t. It’s very disconcerting. They look just like modern color photographs of a different time, but my brain tells me that can’t be true. Russia in 1909 was in black and white – we all know that.

I’ll show you a few examples, though to really appreciate them I suggest you go to the Library of Congress exhibit web site where you can click on the images to see full-size versions. Here’s the photographer himself:
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The spa at Ekaternin Springs, probably not much different from what Elizabeth Bennet would have seen a hundred years earlier:

Lots of people have obsessed over anachronistic details in the 1995 TV adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, one of which is that Darcy’s second proposal takes place in front of a cornfield whose straight rows show it was planted by modern machinery. I thought of that when I saw this picture of agricultural fields in Samarkand. No straight lines need apply!

These pictures make me feel profoundly disoriented. I expect photographs of different eras to be either blurry black and white but authentic, or sanitized color modern recreations where everything is seen through the filter of present-day styles and expectations. You can tell a regency-set film from the 1980s from one in 2005 because they each appeal to ideas of beauty common then.

It makes me think about my own mental images of Regency life. I’ve taught myself to imagine the smells, the dirt, the poverty of the era, but this makes me realize that I’m still imposing a movie type of sensibility over my own images. I can’t subtract all my own expectations from it. Imagine Charlotte Lucas missing some of her teeth – not at all unlikely – but in my mental images everyone has all their teeth. After looking at these pictures, I’ve decided to try to create a regency color photograph in my mind. It makes me wonder about a lot of my regency writing.

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 »

I came out of the writer’s closet a couple of months ago. You see, for a long time I kept my writing secret from everyone outside of my family, and even they weren’t allowed to read it. After a couple of years, when I had to explain why I was going to writing conferences, I told a couple of close friends, or more accurately I muttered something vague about writing romantic fanfiction, and they very kindly didn’t laugh at me. I didn’t even tell people in my real life when I self-published my books. Meantime, thousands of complete strangers I’d met on-line knew all about this important part of my life. 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 »

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!

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 »