he fabulous Brenda Novak runs an annual auction to raise money for juvenile diabetes. It’s a fantastic event, in which you can both get some great items and help out with a wonderful cause.

This year, the 2008 Golden Heart Finalists have gotten together to offer three separate auctions:

This is the perfect way to give your manuscript a test-run before the real Golden Heart competition. Just like in the real competition, five people will read a maximum of 55 pages of your manuscript plus synopsis. Just like in the real competition, you will receive a single numeric score somewhere between 1 and 9 from each judge–the exact score they would have given your manuscript if they judged it in the Golden Heart.

But unlike the real competition, they’ll also give you comments and criticism. They’ll try to help you identify your strengths and shore up your weaknesses. They’ll justify the score they give you, and explain how you can improve on it for the real thing. They’ll tell you where you’re losing points, and what you can do to maximize your chances. The critique won’t be for the faint of heart–but it will be for those who want to give the Golden Heart their best shot possible.

The three auctions have three different flavors: historical, contemporary, and suspense/paranormal/romantic elements. So if you’re interested in the Golden Heart for next year, you should definitely bid on these auctions–you’ll get five critiques from people who have both judged the Golden Heart and managed to final already.

I should mention that yours truly is one of the critiquers for the historical category. And one other thing–whatever the total is for the three auctions, I will match the donation to Juvenile Diabetes. Yup, you read that right. Right now, the auctions are sitting at 27, 18, and 9, so if the auction ended now, I’d write a check for $54 to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. I’m hoping the amounts will go up significantly! The only caveat I will add is that if the total goes over $1000–and wouldn’t that be lovely?–I may have to write two separate checks, with the balance being paid in August.

But there you have it: Three auctions. Fifteen Golden Heart finalists. And every dollar you spend gets matched. What more could you want?

o, this is not a post about writing–at least not directly.  It’s a post about my mother.  Mrs. Milan, if you will.  My mother is in town.  During this time, she talked to someone I work with, and when that person asked her what she did, she shrugged her shoulders and hunkered down and said in a quiet voice, “Oh, nothing significant.”

Gah!  I prodded her in the shoulder, and then told the person that she was writing a series of books for parents of very young children, based on her experiences both as a schoolteacher and as a mother.  She has a research agenda and as a schoolroom teacher her methods were overwhelmingly successful.  She has a unique ability to get into someone’s head and understand why they’re not learning–what little thing it is that they can’t quite get.  And then she figures out how to communicate it.  This, she says, is “nothing significant.”  And when I questioned (okay, when I bullied) her about her word choice later, she said that little things like teaching kids and books for parents just don’t seem all that important.

Gah.  It made me think of how many times we women tend to downplay the feminine side of things we do.  I know I used to.

Friend: What are you reading?

Me, hiding cover of romance: Oh, nothing.

It wasn’t until I got rabid that I started telling people that I read romances.  That I started realizing how hiding this part of myself told people it was okay to belittle romances, and by extension, okay to tell women that their desires–stability, family, friends, love–were not as important as gunshot wounds and war zones.  That the best things in life were just not that significant.

So, tell me:  What have you learned to stand up for?  Is there anything you wish you had the guts to say?

heck this out:

The Wet Noodle Posse–they would be the Golden Heart finalists from 2003–are not only posting Golden Heart advice all month, they’re also giving critiques away to commenters.

And if the commenter mentions being referred, they’ll give a critique to the person who referred them.  Pretty cool, isn’t it?

  made a brief place-holder webpage after FanLit. It’s been sitting there for a while, not doing anything, and basically disconnected from this blog. And as the months have passed–and I’ve clarified my voice, and the style of story that I like to tell, that webpage has seemed increasingly divorced from what I write. It was . . . too pink, and too paisley, and far too easy for me (and you) to forget.

So I’ve spent a little time trying to fix the site. I’ve updated the website. I’ve tried to make the graphics a better “fit” with what I’m writing–a little more complex, Victorian era, with an overlying dash of grunge-modernity. And the blog has now been integrated into the website itself. There was really no reason to do this except–hey, why not procrastinate?

I haven’t been able to test the site on Internet Explorer yet–oiks!–so if someone who uses it could please tell me how it looks? There will probably be a few more tweaks as time goes on.

t’s been hashed and rehashed so many times that I don’t want to directly discuss it. But you know what I mean. In romance novels, the hero can start out conniving and cruel. He can plot to seduce the heroine and ruin her. He can be the most cold-hearted selfish bastard on earth, and as long as he learns his lesson, we sigh happily at the end of the book. He can screw a different woman every night, but so long as he stops once he meets her, we sigh happily.
But let the heroine raise her voice once to her father and she’s a disrespectful bitch. Let her have so much as kissed another man, and she’s a slut.

It’s a double standard. I don’t want to get into the why and wherefore of it all. What I do want to do is mention something I learned a while back that seems to be connected. Several years ago, I was talking to a prosecutor. She wasn’t just a prosecutor; she specialized in prosecuting rapes. She was the one who would talk to the women and help them be able to accuse their rapist in a courtroom in front of at least a dozen other people.

As I’m sure you know, who those dozen people are mattered a great deal. Picking a jury is vitally important; when a crime comes down to he said-she said, as rapes very often do, the prosecutor wants to pick jurors who will most sympathize with the victims. Naively, I would have thought that would mean you’d pick jurors who were most like the victim–women. But she said that almost universally, women were the worst jurists in rape cases. They were least likely to believe the victims who testified, and most likely to think that she deserved or asked for the assault. The best jurists were usually men who had daughters or granddaughters about the victim’s age.

So what do you think about this? Do women act as our own worst enemies? And is the double standard in romance just more evidence of this fact?

here are a couple of so-called rules that exist in romance novels, all of which can be broken. But there are some things that I suspect looked like rules ten or twenty years ago, but which we might scratch our heads about now, or even roll our eyes when the execution is too ridiculous.

For instance, I’m suspecting it used to be a rule that the girl had to be a virgin. Unless she was a widow, and then–MAYBE–fifty percent chance, she was a virgin. It also used to be a rule, I think, that the girl had to resist the idea of sex as much as the man pursued it with single-minded zeal. But I think the new generation of readers is breaking those rules to bits. I don’t have a problem with sex, and I don’t have a problem with virgins, but I have to roll my eyes at the convolutions that used to crop up to keep those rules inviolate.
Now I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s another romance trope that’s going by the wayside. You know what I’m talking about: the hero and heroine hate each other on the surface; they’ve spent well over a hundred pages fighting; but that rage boils up into physical attraction and then they can’t keep their hands off each other (or he kisses her to punish her or prove his dominance) and next thing you know, he’s lifting her skirts and bam–he plunges inside and she has the first orgasm of her life. Even though we’re all reading it and thinking–no WAY. If she were that sensitive, wouldn’t she have noticed it before when she touched herself? And who is that sensitive? Seconds? Really? They were just yelling at each other half a minute ago! There’s only one conclusion: The hero has a magic schlong. Everywhere it touches, orgasms burst forth. (This is not to be confused with the other romance trope, the glittery hooha, which I suspect is going nowhere).

So I was thinking about the last two debuts that I read (see previous post), and I realized that although both books had a sensuality level that was burning hot, neither one featured a hero with a magic schlong. Sex–good sex–takes work and an emotional connection. The sex isn’t always good in both those books, and that fact makes both books stronger. In a way, that made the sex that was good even hotter, because it felt more real. And they aren’t the only ones–Eloisa James writes heroines who don’t always have orgasms with their heroes, and I’m sure she’s not alone.

So what do you think? Trend or aberration? Is the magic schlong going by the wayside? How do you feel about magic schlongs–in your fiction reading and writing, of course; we’ll leave the TMI for Tessa on Tuesday.

  read historical romance debuts, of course. In part it’s research–what’s selling, and why? But in part it’s just good plain fun. There are very few debut novels that are absolutely perfect (off the top of my head, I can think of only twothree “first novels” that I would describe as absolute perfection–Watership Down, by Richard Adams, Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart, and The Chosen, by Chaim Potok). But this month I’ve been delighted to read two that are pretty darned close–and yet nothing at all alike!

The first book I read was an ARC of Private Arrangements, by Sherry Thomas. These were floating around Nationals. I started reading it in the hall after Chris Journal kindly gave me a copy; I then walked to my room (still reading) and sat on my bed. And then I read, and read, and read. Sherry Thomas is a gorgeous writer. Every moment when I was reading, I felt as if I were in a gorgeously-decorated classical house. Everywhere I looked there was something beautiful and unexpected. And there were parts that were absolutely heart-wrenching. It was definitely a powerful, emotional read.
The second book I picked up was To Tempt a Scotsman by Victoria Dahl. It was out in my Borders early. This book was cleverly witty without being self-conscious. The characters seemed like people I could have met just off the street, and I liked them both almost instantly. I found myself turning the pages faster and faster, with a smile on my face.

Neither of these books were perfect, but they both had something perfect about them: The author’s voice. In each case, the voice was atmospheric. In Sherry Thomas’s case, the voice was clever and classically beautiful, cool as a mountain stream. In Victoria Dahl’s case, it was warm and witty, soft, like a favorite blanket. In both cases, I ended the book with a sigh and a smile. What more could you ask?
What debuts have you read recently? What’s struck you about them?

  don’t have a dog in this race. At this point, I am (very optimistically) hoping that when my book is finished and revised and polished, that I will one day be able to sell it–or another book–to a New York publishing house. I’m personally not interested in epublishing at this point for a number of reasons. Maybe that will change once I have a couple hundred rejections under my belt.

That doesn’t mean that I look down on epublishing and epublications; of course I don’t. I’ve read wonderful e-books, and plan to read more of them. And I think that the future of romance–the future of all mass-market publication–is in epublishing. Any publisher who can’t pick up that baton will miss out, eventually.
Which is why I’m so baffled by the recent Board decision. Truth be told, I don’t understand it. The recent Board decision, if you haven’t seen it, contains the following definition:

A Subsidy Publisher or Vanity Publisher means any publisher that publishes books in which the author participates in the cost of production or distribution in any manner, including publisher assessment of a fee or other costs for editing and/or distribution. This definition includes . . . publishers whose primary means of offering books for sale is through a publisher-generated Web site.

Okay. Much of the definition (the parts I’ve excised) I’m perfectly fine with. I don’t understand two things, though. First, I don’t understand why offering books through a publisher-generated website means that the “author participates in the cost of production or distribution in any manner.”

Second, and more importantly, I don’t understand why RWA’s main argument from the AGM (from all reports) is to stand behind a definition given by a lawyer. That just flat doesn’t make sense. Lawyers serve clients; not the reverse. If RWA said to its lawyer, “I’m sorry, we don’t think that Samhain is a subsidy publisher, and we don’t think we’d serve our membership by a definition that included them,” well, I think that the lawyer would be obligated to redefine the term so as to leave out Samhain–or Ellora’s Cave–or any of the other e-publishers that do legitimate business. I mean, let’s face the facts here. This is a legal document we’re talking about. And as in all legal documents, parties are perfectly able to define terms when the “standard” definition ceases to work. That’s why if you pull out your insurance contract, the first words you’ll see will be definitions of “incidents” and “parties” and so forth.
All this makes me wonder: What the heck was RWA thinking? Why would they hide their decision–undoubtedly made by them, since they must have at least voted to adopt the definition, if not helped craft it themselves–behind the attorney that they hired? I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, and so I’m sure that the Board adopted the definition either with reasons that they haven’t shared, or unthinkingly, rather than as a plot against epublishers. I’m just another person throwing my hat in, but all I can say is that I’m very, very confused.

  spent most of the day sleeping, trying to catch up on what I missed these last few days. I never wanted to go to bed; there were always great people there, great conversations to have, new people to meet. There were too many highlights to list. There were the free books. And the chance to meet so many FanLitters. There was Lisa Kleypas’s keynote speech (I cried when I heard about Vern). And then there were the free books. There were late nights spent practicing pitches (and grinning gleefully because I didn’t have to do one of my own, which transformed into confused frowns as I stupidly tried to pitch the book I hadn’t yet rewritten in the way I had thought about rewriting, which of course was an unholy mess). And the late nights spent talking about works in progress, plot holes that had cropped up, and coming up with Actual Solutions to (some) of them. There were late nights spent just talking, and nights spent in the bar. There were the chances to meet fantastic authors (too many to mention, but Eloisa James, Julia Quinn, Julie Anne Long, and Anna Campbell are standouts). And then there were the free books.

And you know what else? It was shocking how, in a conference with thousands of women, you could introduce yourself to one person and keep running into her again and again. By the end of it all, I was recognizing people everywhere I turned.

I can’t wait for San Francisco! I hope to see more of you there!  And maybe by then, those of you who were pitching will have little pink “first sale” tags to sport.  I’m sure some of you will.

‘ve mentioned before that this is something like a vacation for me. As in, I don’t have to work. I decided to take advantage of this not-working time by doing something even more fun. In this case, that means: Going to London.

So far, I’ve hit up Fortnum & Mason’s and Hatchard’s (they’re right next door to each other), two shops where my characters might have visited. I’ve visited Hyde Park and gone boating on the Serpentine. My characters might well have done those things as well. I’ve had scones and clotted cream and tea (in the US, scones are typically quick breads: raised with baking powder or baking soda. Of course, my novel is set in 1840, and bicarbonate of soda was only just beginning to make a splash then. So I try to get the scones here that are yeast-raised, because those are closer to period).
The trip isn’t long enough to do all the things I want to do. I want to visit the town where my hero grew up and spend days sitting in a coffee shop, listening to people talk, so that I can get a feel for the local accent. I want to visit Cambridge, and maybe go to Brighton. I also want to go to Scotland and Ireland. But the truth of the matter is that there is no way to visit the England my characters lived in. I am, ostensibly, doing “research”–but how much research can I really do?

London is considerably cleaner now than it was in those days. Coal is a heating method of the past today, and tomorrow–literally tomorrow–they’re going to ban smoking in bars and restaurants. Streets are paved and regularly cleaned. Horses make guest appearances on Rotten Row in Hyde Park, but they’re generally a vehicle of the past. Not all the changes have been good: I was ejected from Hyde Park yesterday as they investigated a bomb scare. Even in the social unrest that accompanied the 1840s, the potential for significant loss of life was never so grave.

Nonetheless, I’d still rather live now than in the 1840s. I suspect there are very few people who would go back in time–not even to the times where they would be waited on hand and foot. So what is it that we find so compelling about that historical period? Is it escapism? Is it an attempt to live in the past? Or is it something else entirely?

If you dig historical romance, why do you think it is that you like it? And where would you most like to go to perform your “research”?