Category: announcement

Book sale!

Exciting news!!! My agent and I just sold my next book, Sweet Disorder, to Anne Scott at Samhain!

Phoebe Sparks, writer of Improving Tales for children, has vowed never to marry again unless she’s sure it won’t turn into a bickering, resentful mess like her first marriage. The Honorable Nick Dymond has vowed never to get involved in his family’s politicking. But Nick’s mother couldn’t care less about their vows. Nick has moped long enough about his curtailed army career and new limp, and any local resident who marries Phoebe will be legally entitled to a vote in her small town’s upcoming Parliamentary election. So Nick’s mother packs him off to the country with strict instructions to marry Phoebe off to the first local supporter of their political party he can find. When disaster strikes Phoebe’s teenage sister, Phoebe is forced to consider selling her vote—and her hand—but as election intrigue grows darker, she has to admit that what she really wants is Nick.

Yay! I really love this book and I can’t wait to share it with everyone. (No release date yet, but it looks like it will be out sometime in early 2014.)

More details coming soon!

(If you haven’t been on the site before/in a while, my blog was hacked last fall and we’ve just got it up and running again. I’ve got lots of weird historical facts saved up so watch this space for that and a new contest!)

Making someone a cake is an incredibly intimate thing

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've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly

First, exciting news: A Lily Among Thorns is now available for pre-order at Amazon! The Kindle version doesn’t seem to be up yet, but I’ll let you know when it is.

—–

I went and saw the new Jane Eyre movie with a couple of friends last night. Has anyone else seen it yet? I cannot recommend it enough. You know that movie that plays in your head when you read a book? It felt like they were filming directly from that. But then at the same time, it felt like I was reading the book for the first time, experiencing it in a whole new way and seeing things about it I never saw before.

And they captured exactly the right feeling between Jane and Mr. Rochester: that they’re both kind of weird and intense and don’t really tell each other very much, but they still somehow have this intense emotional connection.

I also love the lighting in the movie. You don’t often get a sense in period films of just how dark it could be when flame was the only way of lighting a house. But in this movie, at nighttime, it was dark. Completely dark. The way that they filmed light and dark and fire, the way they filmed certain scenes like it was a horror movie (which it is, really, the Gothic novel is proto-horror, but you don’t always see that in adaptations) added so perfectly to the sense of isolation and the menace of the unknown and hidden that is so important to the book.

Plus, the costumes were great. Sometimes I wish someone would do a Jane Eyre adaptation in Regency clothes, because that is when the book is set, but it’s such a Victorian novel that I understand why they don’t.

What’s your favorite movie adaptation of a book? If you have a least favorite movie adaptation, I’d love to hear about that too!

Exciting news!

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!

Announcements, and some links

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 on Javert 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!

New short story!

An exclusive short story set in the In for a Penny world has just been posted to my website! I may have stupidly put a mild spoiler for the book in the title, so I’m not going to tell you what it is (look, I know I could have changed it, but I like it), but I will tell you that it’s about Percy and Louisa, because Jenni Simmons wanted to see more of them and that’s the idea that clicked with me.

Thanks so much to everyone who entered the contest! You all had awesome ideas and if I had infinite free time I’d write them all. I’ll be doing something similar with A Lily Among Thorns eventually, so you’ll have another chance!

Important Update

News for this weekend:

1. This is the big one: some of you have probably already heard this, but the news was released on Friday that Dorchester, my publisher, is making major changes. Don’t completely trust the article, though: my understanding is that they are shifting to a focus on e-books and trade paperbacks (the larger format you see literary fiction in), but that while the transition is happening, they will be doing e-books first with the paperback following 6-8 months later.

What I believe this means for A Lily Among Thorns is that the e-book will be available in January as scheduled but the trade paperback won’t be released until June. I will let you know as soon as I have more definite information–my poor editor has a lot on her plate right now so it may be a few days!

2. Since I am apparently going to be an e-author, I finally gave in and signed up for Twitter and Facebook! My twitter is here:

And my facebook is here:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001428227685

Friend me and I will friend you back? Or, er, “follow” you, as the kids say on Twitter. Also, okay, this is embarrassing as I am technically a Young Person (well, I’m 28), but I find myself utterly mystified by Facebook. Any insights you have into what I am supposed to do with it would be much appreciated!

Breaking news!

I know two posts in one day is a bit much (my eventual goal is one a week) but something important has happened! My wonderful editor Leah Hultenschmidt sent me a copy of my book so I could see it while waiting for my author copies!!!!!

Yes, I really did have to use that many exclamation points. And now, pictures! In my excitement I am vaguely reminiscent of a lemur, but hey, I like lemurs.

Book! (Note my awesome lobster sheets.)

The copyright page!

About the Author! That’s me!

Life is good.

EVERYTHING'S COMING UP ROSES!

“Rose Lerner’s LILY AMONG THORNS, in which a young woman innkeeper who has worked hard to bury her past finds herself facing the man who long ago helped her escape her life as a prostitute and is now turning to her for her help; she believes the biggest threat to her independence are the sparks that fly between them until disaster threatens and she finds they must work together to fight for their freedom and their lives, to Leah Hultenschmidt at Dorchester, for publication in January 2011, by Kevan Lyon at Marsal Lyon Literary Agency (World).”

This was in Publisher’s Marketplace yesterday! Yes! I sold another book!

Pretty much all the details I have so far are in that announcement–I just got the call from Kevan on Tuesday and I think I might have burst her eardrum screaming into the phone–but I’ll keep you posted!

::chair-dances::