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Alive and Thinking in Cyberspace: Pam's take on just about everything
And also of some of the origins of my own fiction.
Because my relatively recent fascination with the ancient world (indulged to the fullest in my just-posted History Hoyden’s discussion of Stacy Schiff’s magnificent Cleopatra biography) is the product of the loving research I did in order to understand the Regency classical scholar Jasper Hedges, in my very-soon-to-be re-released-in-mass-market, RITA-winning (just saying) The Edge of Impropriety.
Of Imp
ropriety, I mean.
Which is to say that my 2009-RITA-winning novel of eros, esthetics, and empire will be on the bookstore shelves in its svelte new mass-market edition this May 3rd and available for preorder now (click here for links for online ordering — and here to read an excerpt).
And hey, if you see it early on a shelf somewhere, do drop me an email… because yes, it’s just as exciting this time as it was the first time.
My old friend Jeff Weinstein’s wonderful blog post about the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire last week moved me to write about it, too, perhaps more from the p.o.v. of a historical romance writer.
And about a lot of other stuff that’s important to me at http://historyhoydens.blogspot.com/2011/04/give-us-bread-but-give-us-roses.html
Hope you’ll come check it out. It’s even got a soundtrack.
No kidding, Gary Trudeau’s got my number in today’s wonderful strip… at
http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2011/03/27/
If you feel any rapport with my sensibility (and if you don’t I can’t imagine how you got here — certainly not on the strength of my self-promotional skills) you’ll want to read it immediately, once again at http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2011/03/27/
(anybody out there love Leo and Alex as much as I do?)
“Right after reading it,” Jennie says in her wonderfully positive DearAuthor review of Janet Mullany’s Mr. Bishop and the Actress I thought it was an A- (perhaps because my natural inclination is to think a straight A read requires more angst).”
But, she continues, since a few weeks later the book has still stayed with her (no small thing, I should imagine, for a reviewer who must have to gorge herself on enormous, highly sweetened servings of romance fiction just to stay current) — and since “just thinking about” Mullany’s hero and heroine Harry and Sophie still makes her smile, “an A it is.”
As well it should be, in recognition of the art and the heart of this love story between two servants in a genre (Regency romance) that usually limits itself to the teeny tiny ton-y tip of the social iceberg that called itself the Polite World.
“Nothing for kings,” as the Sondheim lyric from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum has it, “nothing for crowns/ bring on the lovers, liars, and clowns.” You can get the whole song in this Youtube clip — and I’m delighted to suggest that you do so, because I think Sondheim’s bawdy neo-Roman vaudeville that goes up and down the social scale like a slide trombone is exactly the right context for Janet’s wicked comic skills.
Here (as large numbers of English people were in the 18th and 19th centuries) our lovers are servants. In this case upper servants: Harry (whose parents run a mildly seedy London hotel) just been hired as Viscount Shadderly’s steward, or right-hand-man around the estate. While the ex-actress and recently dumped courtesan Sophie barely and not quite honestly manages to slip into the Shadderly household in sort of governess position.
A household, I should point out, in Sondheim’s words, where there’s “nothing polite.” If you’ve ever felt impatient with the kind of romance-novel imagination that supposes in a past life you yourself would have been received without question at Almack’s, you need to visit Janet’s world.
The boggy country estate where Lord and very pregnant Lady Shad (from the earlier novel Improper Relations) live with their outspoken adolescent wards and sweet, mostly unwashed, pair of little boys is a haven of cheerful if not quite hygienic chaos. Quite the most appealing Regency setting I’ve yet encountered, it reads like a hilarious extended send-off of a rapturous romance novel epilogue. After honest Harry imposes a little order and shrewd, decent Sophie injects a bit of style, I’d move in in a New York minute.
As might you, if you have any interest at all in the endlessly inventive ways that middling people like you and me make life livable and even romantic, told in a wise, delicious, take-no-prisoners comic voice.
And especially because you just might win autographed copies of both Improper Relations and Mr. Bishop and the Actress, just by entering my new contest.
Along with Linda’s reply to my contest question about why booklovers are such sexy people, Cheryl from New Jersey contends that it’s because we’re open to “varied thoughts, opinions, and beliefs,” while Anais from Nice, France suggests that (as we fall in love with those we have something in common with), booklovers will of course find other booklovers sexy and hot.
Hmmm… can both ways of looking at it be true, I wonder? Somehow I feel that they are…
… while also definitely agreeing with Susan from Kansas, who says we booklovers tend to feel deeply, and with Amanda from New Jersey, who muses that “because they know how to express their sensuality without the feeling of rejection because these books prove to us that love is out there if you take the chance.”
How nice to consider that romance fiction might help us become braver and more erotically adventurous. I’m honored to think I might have had that effect on a reader or two — and that my vocation dovetails with that of my husband, who was a bookseller all his life. Because as Jeanne from Rhode Island says, “booksellers are sexy because they know just which author to suggest to fill your inner needs. They also have the love of books to support not only established authors but promote new authors both of which enrich our lives.”
Which sort of brings together the new and the familiar, doesn’t it? The selves we recognize and the selves we grow toward and reach out to love — or as Sue from Vancouver put it — in another variation on the book of love theme — there’s something wonderful about seeing ourselves in “the main role” (heroine or hero) in a story.
Something wonderful, meaningful, new and old. And sexy.
Thanks so much to these readers and the many others who responded. And do stop by this Friday for a new contest.
Congratulations to Linda, from Fontana, CA, for winning my just-finished contest, where I asked entrants to tell me briefly, in their own words, why booklovers are such sexy people.
I picked Linda randomly (such being the rules of my contest page), but her entry was certainly striking: It’s “because,” she said, “we know everything from the book of love,” an answer that spans centuries of great thoughts from the classical philosophers to brilliant R&B cut of my youth, Who Wrote the Book of Love?
I’ll be posting other similarly striking responses through this week, while I prepare the next contest — which I’ll put up this Friday.
But right now I gotta go, to put Linda’s prize in the mail: two lovely bookloving romance novels the brilliant Miranda Neville, one by me, and a little excellent chocolate, to make the experience that much sweeter.
Just one more day for the passionate bibliophiles among you to enter my current contest and win autographed copies of two of Mirand
a Neville’s smart and sexy historical romances – The Wild Marquis and The Dangerous Viscount, both of which take place among a community of Regency book collectors, and both of 
which I loved and recommend most heartily to… well, exactly to the sort of dreamy, romantic, very readerly reader who likes my stuff, which is, after all, why you’re visiting this site in the first place, isn’t it?
Not only that, but the winner will also get an autographed copy of my story of love and sex among booklovers, set in France before the Revolution, The Bookseller’s Daughter. Oh, and some chocolate, too.
My contest is easy and fun — this time you don’t even have to read an excerpt (though of course you can, if you want to). Just tell me, briefly, in your own words, why booklovers are such sexy people. And then (yes, it gets better!) double your chances to win by visiting Miranda’s lovely site and entering her twin contest.
But you’ll have to hurry. Because both contests end at the stroke of midnight, tomorrow, February 22nd.
I write, I sometimes say, because I can’t dance.
Whatever wonderful bodily in-sync-ness, with the world, with a lover, with oneself that the best dancers have… I most emphatically do not have, except when it comes to words and sounds and sentences.
That’s where I can dance, and (in the mysterious ways of desire) that’s what makes me love what I can’t do even more passionately. Which is what makes me want to share this movie dance valentine with you today.
From the not-very-good 1958 movie version of the great musical Damn Yankees, the witty, sublimely sexy dance duet by Gwen Verdon and her husband and choreographer Bob Fosse — occasioned, with utter narrative clutziness, when some nonentity played by Fosse unaccountably wanders onto the screen to do this “Who’s Got the Pain When They Do the Mambo” routine with the movie’s female lead, Lola, played by Verdon.
Maybe Tab Hunter, the male lead, was originally supposed to be in the routine, but just couldn’t carry it off. Who knows? Fosse’s performance isn’t credited — but though his being there makes no plot sense it makes every kind of erotic sense, this routine being so much sexier and so much more about how beautiful Verdon really was than any of the other more stereotypical postures Lola assumes through the rest of the movie.
They dance so gorgeously, so seamlessly, so knowingly together here that I’m even moved by Fosse’s thin voice and thinning hair (the reason, in case you wondered his choreography does such great things with hats).
But then, at this point in my life I’m especially moved by reminders of the passing of time and the ephemerality of life. Not to speak of the spectacle of longtime spouses showing their mutual appreciation through art and creativity.
And yes, it was Michael who introduced me to this video clip, which you should check out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIiZuAVZH4w”
And happy Valentine’s day, to Michael and especially to all those creative spouses out there.
…for anyone who’s ever contemplated giving up on a novel:
Even if you insisted on finishing your novel, what for? Novels sit unpublished, or published but unsold, or sold but unread, or read but unreread, lonely on shelves and in drawers and under the legs of wobbly tables. They are like seashells on the beach. Not enough people marvel over them. They pick them up and put them down. Even your friends and associates will never appreciate your novel the way you want them to. In fact, there are likely just a handful of readers out in the world who are perfect for your book, who will take it to heart and feel its mighty ripples throughout their lives, and you will likely never meet them, at least under the proper circumstances. So who cares? Think of that secret favorite book of yours – not the one you tell people you like best, but that book so good that you refuse to share it with people because they’d never understand it. Perhaps it’s not even a whole book, just a tiny portion that you’ll never forget as long as you live. Nobody knows you feel this way about that tiny portion of literature, so what does it matter? The author of that small bright thing, that treasured whisper deep in your heart, never should have bothered.
Of course not. Not.
From Lemony Snicket’s Pep Talk, on the National Novel Writing Month website. Read the whole wonderful thing here (with special thanks to Molly Weatherfield‘s readers Bob and Reese, each of whom who took the trouble to write to me this week, and made me understand once more just how true and beautiful what Lemony has to say is).
