Rose Lerner's Blog

Archive for the ‘announcement’ Category

Guys, A Lily Among Thorns is up on Kindle! Also NOOK! (Probably lots of other places too…I’ll be linking to lots of different sellers and formats over the next few days. Remember, you can read the first chapter here!)

I moved this week! My new apartment is still filled with boxes but I can already tell I’m going to be very happy here.

I hired movers, which I’ve never done before. It was an interesting experience–I never thought about it before, but movers get a really unique insight into people’s lives. At one point, I was saying that I didn’t know where to put the leaf from the dining room table, and one of the movers said, “The most common place to hide a leaf is under the bed.” I had no idea! Then I mentioned that I wasn’t sure yet how we were going to lay out the furniture in our living room. The mover told me, “Well, the most common layout I see for this living room…” I was fascinated.

Then my roommate and I were watching Ace of Cakes, and Duff said, “Making a cake for someone is incredibly intimate thing. It’s like taking their joy and making it into a tangible object.” I’d never thought about it like that before. But isn’t it beautiful?

People often relate to the world in really job-specific ways. It’s something I love to play with while writing–after all, half the fun of fiction is experiencing the world from inside someone else’s head. It can be difficult to capture because of course, I only have experience doing my own job.

It’s something that’s especially relevant to A Lily among Thorns, because my hero and heroine are both from quasi-upper-class backgrounds, and have both chosen to be tradespeople: my hero is a chemist who works for his uncle’s tailoring shop, and my heroine is an innkeeper. And they see themselves as defined by those things in opposition to a lot of the people they knew growing up. I worked hard to make that a part of their characterization.

Which is all leading into my exciting announcement that my workshop, “Making Your Hero(ine)’s Job Work for You,” has been accepted by the Emerald City Writers Conference! You should all register for the conference (when registration opens) and come! It’s going to be super fun. I had an absolute blast giving my sex scenes workshop last year and I know this will be just as awesome.

I won Best Debut Author in the AAR Annual Readers Poll! They asked me for a reaction, and I don’t think I can say it better than I did there:

I’m so thrilled and proud to be chosen by AAR readers, especially in a year with so many fantastic debuts! [No, but really. I'm trying not to be annoyingly self-deprecating, but when I look at some of the debuts from this year, it's hard for me to believe that this actually happened.] Like most romance authors, I’m a reader too, and one of my favorite things about the romance genre is how it functions as a community. AAR is in a class by itself when it comes to fostering that and keeping it going. I can’t even express how huge an honor it is that so many of you liked my book. Thank you to everyone who voted (even if it wasn’t for me)!

Seriously, guys, the wonderful reception that In for a Penny has found has been beyond anything I expected. Thank you all so much for everything.

Also, I’m sorry the blog has been a bit slow recently. To tide you over until actual content appears (and I do have some planned, I’ve been researching and found some great stories and quotes I want to share with you all), here are a couple of links:

1) A blog post by Kat Latham about the ways I convey accents and class differences in language use in In for a Penny. This is something I thought about a lot while writing the book, so I was thrilled when Kat e-mailed me to say she wanted to make this post, and she has a ton of really smart stuff to say. I really recommend both this and her earlier posts on writing accents to anyone who’s thinking about writing a character with distinctive speech patterns.

2) Kate Beaton writes a Doctor Who comic without ever having watched Doctor Who. Amazingly, she hits the nail right on the head. With bonus Wellington!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I am so, so grateful for all of you, you don’t even know.

I have a small announcement to make that I know some of you will find disappointing. The release date for my e-book, A Lily Among Thorns, has been moved to March 2011. I don’t know yet when it will be released as a trade paperback–the schedule is still in flux, I think–but my best guess is sometime next fall.

All of this reshuffling is so that Dorchester can do the absolute best job possible with all the releases they have coming up, so please be patient!

I have put the first chapter of Lily up on my site for those of you who are curious, but if four months is too long for you to be in suspense, don’t read it yet!

And now for a few fun links:

A hilarious series of Kate Beaton comics on Dracula and vampirism as Bram Stoker’s metaphor for sexually empowered women.
Kate Beaton onJavert from Les Mis.
Via Susanna Fraser’s blog, a great blog post on learning about critique from Tim Gunn. As Susanna points out, the tips apply to writing as well as fashion design.

Have a great weekend, everyone!