Inject Some Horror into a Harlequin Romance

Earlier this week, romance novelist Janet Mullany came to Lady Jane’s Salon and read an excerpt from her new novel, Jane and the Damned, which is sort of like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter except that Jane Austen isn’t hunting the Damned, she’s joined their ranks, and together they’re fighting off French invaders.

The scene she read was entertaining, so I’ll be interested to see how Mullany fares adding a paranormal twist to a modern retelling of Emma, which is the theme of a novella called “Little to Hex Her” that she’s contributed to a new anthology of supernatural-tinged, Austen-inspired stories called Bespelling Jane Austen. To celebrate its publication, Harlequin and Diesel eBook Store have launched a genre mash-up contest (watch out for the automatic audio file) where contestants take the plot summaries for novels like Whisper of Scandal and The Bride’s Bodyguard and load them up with monsters.

Each day the contest runs, Harlequin and Diesel will pick one semi-finalist to be featured on Diesel’s Facebook page; those fifteen entries will then be narrowed down to six by a jury that includes yours truly and Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books—and those six entries will be read in front of a live audience at a “mash-up meet-up” at The Brickyard (785 9th Avenue) on Thursday, October 28, which I’ll be emceeing. (The ultimate grand prize: The winner’s choice of a Kobo or Nook reader, both of which, non-coincidentally, Diesel has ebooks ready for you to purchase.) See the contest page for full details, and if you decide to come to the party, be sure to say hello!

7 October 2010 | events |

Ring the Bell, School’s Back in Session

Tonight I’ll be starting my second run as the instructor of the blogging workshop at New York University’s Center for Publishing, and I’m looking forward to it—the Center and I compared notes after last year’s classes, and we hit upon a few tweaks that I think will make it an even better experience for the students. (For one thing, we’ve switched from two six-hour sessions to six two-hour sessions.) The first night is largely an introduction to the concept of blogging and some of the highlights of its short history, for which I’m really grateful that Scott Rosenberg wrote Say Everything, a book that explains “how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters.” As I mentioned last year, Rosenberg provided “a great resource for discussing the blogosphere’s roots and identifying the stand-out characteristics of the first great blogs,” and it’s a great springboard for talking about two of the key principles I’ll be sharing with students: identifying your niche subject and refining your personal voice.

Rosenberg does a great job of making technological topics accessible to non-techie readers, and his previous book, Dreaming in Code, was probably the best effort I’d read in that vein since stumbling onto the Stephen Levy classic Hackers as a teenager—an experience which made me decide that there must be something to this whole “computer” racket and pretty much set me on the path that’s led to this point.

6 October 2010 | events |