Publication!

The Chrysanthemum and the Rose (Book 8) is now available!

Buy it in paperback or on Kindle
Buy it on the Nook
Buy it on other eReader devices

From the back cover:

There is peace in Derbyshire as a new generation of the Darcy family begins, but the younger Mr. and Mrs. Darcy set their sights far away, to Japan, an island nation closed off to all but a few foreigners. There they will travel to find Georgiana Darcy’s elusive former teacher, the wandering thief Mugin, so that she can finally complete her training before settling down to married life in the English countryside.

But getting into Japan, a country hostile to Westerners and controlled by the Tokugawa shogun, won’t be easy, and finding Mu Gin will be even harder. Is the young couple up to the challenge?

In Altman’s eighth novel, we travel far abroad to the dangerous world of 19th-Century Asia, where political tensions are high and danger is very real.                  

Review Policy:

If you have reviewed most or all of my past books on Amazon, you are eligible to receive a paperback copy for review.

If you have reviewed at least one of my other books on Amazon, you are eligible to receive ab eBook copy on any format for review.

If you post a review of your own volition and give me a US postal address, I will send you a little Asian good luck charm thingy.

If any of these apply to you, contact me.

Contests:

There will be some contests. I will be giving away only one copy of the paperback (it is expensive to buy and ship because it is so large) so you should look for that. I will also be giving away prizes and numerous eBook copies, so stay tuned!

Otherwise, happy reading!

I don't know what to write in people's books

I don't even know how to use this type of pen

Yesterday I was asked to autograph a book I have a short story published in (it's coming out officially later - I'll post about that then) and I wrote, "Keep on truckin'!" Because seriously, I have no idea what to write in these things. I'm not famous enough to write nothing except my name if the person is standing in front of me. Famous authors either only put their name in or only put their name and the person's name in. I'm supposed to come up with something.

For book 1 I pretty much universally wrote, "Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy the book" or something to that effect, even though some of them were not going to read the book because they were friends or family members. I actually personalized one a little too much to give to one of Grandma's friends and my mom ended up cutting something I said (about loaning a car to someone?) right out of the page, leaving a little cut at the bottom. Then for a little while I tried, "It is a universal truth that a good author must be in want of a loyal reader" which ended up being way too long for my awful handwriting.

I'm just going to think out loud in this post about possible things to put in the book:

"Thanks for reading!"

"Keep on truckin'" (not valid if person is a trucker)

"If someone steals this book, may they be punched to death by wolves" (I actually put this in one of the books I assigned for Brandy but I misspelled wolves, which is why I need Brandy to edit everything I write in the first place)

"There's a spider on your back."

"[Insert witty comment here]"

"Thx! My handwriting is terrible."

"[Insert personal, moving comment here]"

"Catchphrase!"

"Welcome to Night Vale" (I love this show)

In other news, Book 8 is now available for Kindle and for all other eBook formats. It will be available in print when we finally get Createspace to not mess up the cover alignment, which will hopefully be this week. Then I'll do the "it's officially published" post and start doing some contests. One of them will be to win a paperback copy of the book, which is very heavy and expensive and therefore will only be open to US residents or people with a US mailing address. You probably want to enter that one. 

Motherhood

Book 8 is almost ready! The copyediting is done, most of the formatting is done, and there's just some processing over at Createspace before it can released on all formats, which will hopefully be late next week or early the following week. Remember that Book 7 is still on sale until December 15th for the Kindle, and books 1-3 are on sale for some unknown amount of time (Sourcebooks decides these things, not me) so if you don't have them on Kindle but you can't go anywhere without them you'll want to scoop them up.

The print version of Book 8 will be a little pricey. There is nothing I can do about this; Amazon has a minimum price to print the book. I will just say this: You will be getting a lot of book for your money. Lots and lots of book.

Anyway. Motherhood.

In the romance/historical romance genre that I started out in, motherhood isn't addressed a lot. Usually the story is about the man and woman meet, usually under less than perfect circumstances, and then by the end of the book they're together, or by chapter 3 if it's regular romance and they need to get to the sex before the reader gets bored. With a lot of Pride and Prejudice sequels you need to have some plot before that (or don't) because Darcy and Elizabeth are already together, but unless there's something wrong with Elizabeth's child-bearing abilities and that's the plot (I have yet to see one where the problem was on Darcy's end), they usually pop out a kid within a year and all is well. And they are perfect parents. Darcy may be cold and Elizabeth independent, but G-ddamn if they aren't the best parents ever because any other possibility would be horribly depressing to us.

In certain instances in my large cast I decided "this relationship is going to be like this" and this relationship is going to be like that" and there were occasions were I just let the text flow as the characters acted like I thought they would. In real life, there are all different kinds of parents, and in real life once kids get older their relationship with their parents cannot be described as "perfect" unless things are creepy and weird and the kid needs a life. After the kids are about age 3 you need to start seeing a push-and-pull for both the mother and the child to be real.

One of the more awkward situations I got into with my fans was that people thought Georgie (Georgiana Bingley) was not really a good parent, which is a subject that comes up a lot in Book 8, but I think it's because her relationship with her daughter is harder to understand than the typical Regency "I love my kid to bits and now that they popped out of me my whole life is dedicated to tickling them or whatever" thing you see in fiction which certainly wasn't true to life. Mothers were expected to have servants take care of their children for the first three years, even to send them to another house if the current house was crowded to be raised by a wet nurse. Hanging around babies was not a Regency rich people thing to do, but Georgie also connects to her child (and her mother) differently than the original cast in that she's not outpouring with visible affection all the time, which is how a "good mother" acts in romance fiction. Just like you don't treat your child like you would a puppy doesn't mean you don't have a deep emotional connection that is the strongest thing in your life; it was just very hard for me to express it the way I felt was true to her character. At this point in the series I was more interested than being true to characters than genre norms, which you probably figured out by the fact that they also go to Japan.

Of course I'm probably preaching to moms to know way more than I do about the subject, but oh well. ;) That's right. It's 2013 and I'm finally into smilies. I'm a late bloomer.

Historical Accounts

First of all, SALE! There's a sale on Book 7 (Young Mr. Darcy in Love) on Kindle, now going for $2.99 until December 15th in honor of the release of Book 8, so go pick it up at this low-low price before it's too late.

Moving on, I'm going to give away a small plot point for Book 8 here, but during the course of the book, the younger Darcys (Geoffrey and Georgiana) meet the shogun of Japan. This was a pretty difficult thing for foreigners to do in 1828, but it did happen occasionally. I pulled historical for that scene adn the scenes leading up to it from a real source: Charles MacFarlane's book, Japan: An Account, Geographical and Historical from the Earliest Period at Which the Islands Composing This Empire Were Known to Europeans Down to the Present Time and the Expedition Fitted Out in the United States, etc, which was published in 1852, a time in which apparently you got paid by word in the title? Anyway, it gives detailed description of European interactions with the Japanese government in the Tokugawa period, prior to Japan opening its ports to foreigners.

I noticed something interesting about the book. The original compay I found was in the City College library and dated from probably the 1920's. When I went to order the book oline, I got a new reprint with a cover like this:

Now you probably didn't notice this, but there's a blank circle at the top of the book. Here's what the original cover looked like:

Notice something there? A Swastika. Now the Swastika has a number of different meanings, most of them originating from Asia either as a symbol of the mythic Aryan race that had/has nothing to do with Hitler, or a good luck symbol which became particularly popular in Buddhism. In Buddhism (the official religion on the Tokugawa regime, even though the Emperor himself was a Shinto priest) it also represents the symbol for eternity and is often drawn on the Buddha's empty chest. 

When the book was published it was entirely harmless, even in Europe. Obviously since then it's become one of the most negatively-associated symbols on earth to Westerners, something that still baffles people in the East. Clearly, when Elibron Classics went to reprint the old edition in 2005, they decided to wipe it from the cover and hope no one noticed. The original image is actually still in the book, opposite the cover page, as it probably appeared in 1852, as that's where prints were placed. 

I'm usually against censorship, but this is a rare example of when I'm not. India is loaded with swastikas, though the Hindu swastika goes in the other direction and sometimes has dots between the lines. I remember flinching in front of my guide on my first night in New Delhi when we stopped in front of one, and him rolling his eyes with frustration. Obviously he's had a lot of customers do this. But I didn't apologize for it either.

How A Cover Comes Together

Rejected cover (with the old template on the
bottom) because of lack of color

The official cover of Book 8 (The Chrysanthemum and the Rose) isn't done yet, though I'll explain why in a minute. It's fair to say it's almost done, thanks to fans over at my Facebook group page (seriously, that is the best way to be part of the conversation, go check it out). A lot goes into the cover art, which is why so many self-published books look really crummy. People either don't know how, think they know how but actually don't know how, or don't care, which is fair if it's only an eBook. My Kindle doesn't even show the cover page - it just loads the first page of the first chapter every time. But if you're putting out a pint book, you should really put time into the cover.

First of all, I don't do the cover alone. I do most of the conceptual work but have a graphic artist put it together and give it a nice polish. It's cheaper since he's not starting from scratch, but I know I need a professional to make sure everything lines up and people are getting a quality product.

(1) Load template. The template we use is based on Sourcebook's layout for books 2 and 3. It's a good layout, with a clear title and image and has a nice all-about look. The changes will be largely cosmetic between books. Books 5-8 all have the same fonts and the same general layouts. Most of them have the same pattern on the bottom half, though we changed it for book 6 and we'll change it again for book 8 because of the Japanese theme.

(2) Find public domain image to use. There's a ton of it online dating from the Regency period. Sometimes it's actually hard to find an image that hasn't been used for another edition of Pride and Prejudice or another published fan fiction. Some people prefer static images of say, a house or trees or something, but I prefer to have a scene of characters even if they don't look exactly like the characters in my books and never well. It's also important to be consistent with what my two previous publishers have done. I see a lot of people reusing the same images because they're popular so I try to avoid those. I also need the image to be a high-quality scan and large enough to fit neatly on the cover, and the image has to work as a square. This is the most difficult part of the process. I went through 4 hours worth of Japanese images for Book 8 before settling on the one I found in the first five minutes because I am a crazy person.

(3) Color scheme selection. At this point we've used most of the basic colors that look good on books (Book 1 is green, Book 2 is blue, etc). We don't want to directly re-use any colors. At this point Dave (my graphic designer, say hi to Dave everybody!) usually picks a color based on what we can't use and also what goes well with the image we picked, which is why Book 7 is orange, a color I normally would have thought would never work.

Rejected cover (old template). Was not a square
enough picture and only featured one person.

(4) Get the trim size. This can only occur when I go to format the book, which can only happen after ALL the editing is done. I upload it to Createspace and they tell me how many pages the book is going to be. Based on that number, we can calculate the size of the image we need because we know how wide the spine is going to be. It's actually one long image - the back cover, the spine, and the front cover - that they stamp onto the cardboard material that will be wound around the book to create a cover. As of today Dave can't go forward because I haven't done this yet. There is still some editing and layout to be done. The trim size is very difficult to change so I have to know exactly how many pages the book is going to be and I can never ever change that once the cover image is created. This is why, for formatting reasons, there are sometimes empty pages at the end of the book. They're there because I did some last-minute formatting that changed the amount of pages I needed but it was too late to change the number of pages in the book because the cover was done, so I had to leave a bunch blank to get back to that exact number.

Final cover choice for the image;
The old template is still in place
because we haven't gotten around
to changing it yet.

(5) Createspace tells me something is wrong with the image, even though nothing is. Createspace likes to do this to us. We submit exactly what they say they want and they say something's wrong and then we submit the same file and say it's fine. The system is automated so I don't know what they're picking up.

(6) I order a "proof" copy, which comes and the spine image is like 1 mm wrong and Createspace says it's my problem and/or their system isn't perfect, and I fret about things I can't change for a while. So it goes.

I'm shooting for a December 15th publication date for Book 8. That is not in any way a hard date. My roommate is doing a last-minute final check on the text while I put everything into layout, finish the glossary, and try to find a way to pay my copy-editor. I hope she takes plasma or packages of Chrystal Light Lemonade. But I do hope for a mid-December publication. The eBook will almost certainly be available first because of technical things like shipping times and ordering proofs for the paperback. Watch this space for giveaways and deals coming up soon! I will discount Book 7 in the two weeks leading up to Book 8's release so people can get caught up.

In other news, I'm in Rabbinical school now, so there are additional reasons for me to be crazy these days.

Cover Art

Let me say this outright: Book 8 is the best book in the series. Some fans of it don't particularly agree with me (they are partial to 4 or 5 or 10) but I think it's the best book because I had the most fun researching it and the most fun writing it so it is the best. To me. You can decide for yourselves.

I am having an issue finding the perfect cover image, as I want a perfect cover image for this one, and because it mainly takes place in Japan I have a whole different avenue of period art open to me. You can go to the album of potential covers on the Facebook group page here to put your 2 cents in, which is bad saying because your opinion is worth more than 2 cents to me. I know you're at a slight loss because you don't know what happens in book 8, but let me just say this: Japan, fight scenes. Lots of both of those. That should start you in the right direction. And of course if you want to submit a public domain image to me as a suggestion based on what's already up, I am open to that. I am SUPER open to other people doing work for me.

There will be swag for this book. Little Japanese keychains or whatever. I haven't made the trip to Chinatown yet but whatever they are, they will be very light and easy to mail. Watch this space for ways to get some (picking the winning photo is one of them).

In Which I Emerge from Hibernation Like a Bear in Spring

Book 8 should be rolling out next month, so it's time to start posting on this thing again. Book 8 is called The Chrysanthemum and the Rose. Yes, I know that's not super spellable, but look, we're eight books in. If you're even reading this you definitely have found my Amazon page or my website or my Facebook group page and you know how to follow a link I'll be posting when it goes up on Amazon. I'm aiming for December 15th, but there have been some copyediting delays that were out of my hands, so I don't know yet.

What have I been up to:
- Finding a new literary agent for my graphic novel (found!)
- Starting Rabbinical school
- Writing other books, mostly horror

There's plenty to look forward to! Book 7 will be on sale for Kindle prior to the release of Book 8 in case you need to catch up, and there will be all kinds of contests with great prizes and rewards for loyal fans. So watch this space!