One more before I leave, unless Harlequin manages to make me angry or at least dumbfounded again before Friday. (I'm so glad I wasn't offered the Harlequin job. They must have smelled the hate.)

This is another for the dumbfounded category: Harlequin's got a series called Virgin Brides, Arrogant Husbands. (I rather expect ...and Dysfunctional ( Read more... )

A subtitle seen in today's batch of metadata -- and not from Harlequin, mind you, or a small press, this is from a perfectly respectable major publisher:

A Novel of Texas Vampires

Two weeks is an awfully long time.

I've been offered a new job, so I will soon be considerably less angry ( Read more... )

I have weathered the worst of publishing for a year and a half now. I have slogged through Harlequin's insipid wastes of paper and megabytes, all colors of vampire fiction, blatantly unrealistic self-help, Republican Asshat Press, mind-blowingly misogynistic religious treatises, and boring nonfiction on the most obscure of historical minutiae, and ( Read more... )

Nathan Russell Smith

- was freshly borned today
- is making his parents, Myra and Jordan, very proud
- grabbed his Uncle Will's finger
- is quite possibly the single cutest living thing on the entire planet at this moment

and, best of all,
- will be my nephew in two years!

I'm gonna spoil him SO HARD.

The mystery genre has come a long way from the vaunted tradition of Conan Doyle and Christie. The paperback mass market seems to have distilled them into two distinct camps. The first is hardcore sensational thrillers with black and white covers, full of ominous shadows and the occasional splash of police tape or blood, that promise a world of ( Read more... )

Whenever I get the Haverford alumni magazine in the mail, I always look through the class notes in the back just to see if anyone I know got married or is doing anything interesting. I thought about writing in myself to announce my engagement, but then I noticed that the class notes are more or less a collection of triumphant better-than-you ( Read more... )

Although they've been kind enough to have me over for an interview, I'm still trying to think whether I could in good conscience work for Harlequin. Granted, I'd be working with the more mainstream and fantasy lines, which appear to have decent enough writing and are more or less free of snark bait as compared to their sisters in the straight-up ( Read more... )

We gave Spike up today. I left work to say goodbye and started crying as soon as I came into the hospital and saw Will. The very kind nurse assured us that he was in the best hands possible, and that he would receive the finest care, and that they would go out of their way to find him his optimal forever home, and that what we were doing was a ( Read more... )

Spike has diabetes after all. I feel like a mother who's wanted a child all her life, only to miscarry twins.