Contest Winners

The winners of the Book 8 contest are Michelle Woods and Mary Anne. Please check your emails for a message from me to claim your prize!

And yes, there were two winners. There were so many entries that I decided to pony up a second copy.

Watch this blog for upcoming eBook giveaways!

Habitual Writers

First off, this is your last chance to enter the contest to win a paperback copy of Book 8! Go here to sign up and do it before January 20th!

Second, the offer to get a goodie in the mail if you post a review on Amazon is still open, and will continue to be open. So send me an email with your snail mail address if you posted a review, no matter what you said in the review, or how long or short it was, and I will send you some Asian charm and maybe a bookmark.

Third, if you are in New York City on February 9th, there is a Book 8 launch party at Madras Mahal, a kosher Indian restaurant in Manhattan. I am doing it there because (a) it is fairly inexpensive (b) I want to eat there in general. So the Facebook group page and RSVP if you are interested. Bring a book if you want it signed, or tell me if you want a free copy of any of the books I wrote as Marsha Warner, because I have about 25 of each lying around my apartment and I need to get rid of them.

Authorial Intent

Writers have ticks. Hopefully not literal ticks. Check your legs after you come inside from playing in the woods, guys! No, the kind of ticks we don't see but show up in our writing. Because so many people have looked at my work, I've become aware of some of mine, though there's very little I can do to stop them. For example, I have a tendency to think faster than I write, so I'll put in a word that is supposed to appear in a sentence later and it won't get flagged because it's spelled correctly, and Brandy will have to call me up and say, "When you wrote soup, you meant boat, right?" I am also partial to characters meandering about, something my friend Alex picked up on my very first novel, The Adventures of Joey, which I wrote when I was in third grade and my handwriting was arguably slightly better than it is now. I'm more interested in characters than the arc of a plot, which is a problem for me, and I'm given to slow starts.

Recently I've been doing research on two books that are a series and part of the Amazon Kindle Worlds program, Amazon's premiere site for published fan fiction. They have certain properties and you can write fan fiction about those properties and they will sell it as an eBook. My agent recommended it to me as a source of easy publication and I picked a series that looked like it would be relatively easy to write for, Blake Crouch's Wayward Pines series. In the last few weeks I've been re-reading both books, underlining every important character, place name, location, and important statistic, then recording them all in a handy word file. (Somewhere towards the end of my series, I finally learned to start keeping track of characters, but mostly because I was spurned on by Brandy) What I've discovered is ticks Crouch probably isn't aware of - his partiality to M and B names (out of about 30 characters there are 7 M-names), his inconsistencies with the date of certain events (they alternately take place in August or October, depending on the scene), and various minor mistakes in the timeline, mostly due to him not going back to book 1 a lot when he was writing book 2. Also, almost every store exists on "the corner of Main and [Some Avenue]." I'm not actually bashing the author here - these are very easily mistakes to make when you're caught up in the suspense of writing a thriller and trying to keep the reader on the edge of their seats. These decisions don't seem like a big deal at the time. If anything, you're trying to minimize these decisions and get back to describing the various guns the protagonist uses, a common thriller trope. Are there 800 or 600 people in Wayward Pines? You're writing something and you spit out a number that sounds good, then you move on to get the next scene done and maybe you completely forget you used that number. When it comes up later, you've forgotten it or you don't want to look it up because editing sucks. That's what copyeditors are supposed to be for, but publishers today are cutting way back on copyediting.

Yes, I actually wrote this book.

I was once at a panel at Worldcon and an author (I think it was Richard Sawyer) was lamenting that some fan had written him to say he'd changed the color of a character's eyes, describing them as blue in one chapter and green in a much later chapter. "Is this really important? Seriously," he said, which I thought was reasonable. Of course, I write in historical fiction, where I get hit for much worse things than that, or I used to in the first couple books before people either gave up on the series or decided to just go with the flow. (Also my research got better) But when you're writing fanfic for pay, it's actually very important that you have all these things right about the original content, so it's frustrating when there's mistakes. I remember when I was writing the second Greek book (Best Frenemies) I was called out because I'd mentioned that someone's bedspread was a floral print, which it wasn't, and I had to go rewatch two episodes and figured out that they'd actually changed the sets around between seasons of the show even though only 8 hours had passed in the narrative (the new season picked up the morning after the finale of the previous season), but clearly no one told the set designer that this was important and she changed the comforter and sheets of said person's bed. I corrected my mistake and moved along, but man, what a crazy contract job that was. If you ever think that those crummy tie-in books to TV shows and movies are not written by authors who work hard for their paycheck, you're wrong. The books may not be classics of literature but hey, we do what we're paid to do, and we're given very little time to do it (I turned over the second book in 3 weeks). If offered, I would take one of these contract jobs again. I hated doing it, but the money was good, and I'm a working writer. I have to be realistic. 

Win a Paperback Copy of Book 8!

A tengu.This will make more
 sense when you read the book

Contest! Win a paperback copy of The Chrysanthemum and the Rose by entering before January 20th.

What is it?
- it's a book
- it's big
- it's thick
- it's 748 pages
- it will be signed by the author

I'm not giving too many of these away - and by that I mean any - because they're expensive to obtain and ship, so this is your chance!

How to Enter:
(1) Have a US postal address.
(2) Leave your name and CONTACT INFORMATION in a comment to this post.

How Not to Enter:
(1) Do nothing.
(2) Reply to this post without entering your contact email and assume that because you are signed into blogger I magically know your email address.
(3) Be a member of my family with more disposable income then me. Don't be a cheapskate.

Want an eBook? That contest is coming soon!

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.