I spent New Year’s Eve in a highly productive manner: finishing my final proofs for For Darkness Shows the Stars. It’s fitting that I welcomed the New Year with work, as this is going to be a very, very heavy work year. Just look at my release schedule (anthologies and collections show my contribution in parentheses):

January: The Girl Who Was on Fire: Movie Edition essay collection (“Hunger Game Theory”)
February: Brave New Love anthology (“Foundlings”)
March: Rampant audiobook, Ascendant audiobook (yes! There will be audio books! I even have covers!)
April: Zombies vs. Unicorns anthology paperback (“The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn”), unnamed secret project (hopefully I shall be able to name it soon)
May: Ascendant paperback
June: For Darkness Shows the Stars

Fall: Under My Hat: Tales From the Cauldron anthology (“Stray Magic”) ; Foretold anthology (“Burned Bright”)

There’s also another release I have been unable to find any information about. And for my overseas readers, there are a few releases I don’t have dates for yet. Like I heard on Twitter that my Brazilian publisher is putting out Tap & Gown (Rosa e Tumulo #4) “next summer”. But that’s all I know.

10 projects (AT LEAST!) out next year. Yikes. Guess that makes up for the big ol’ goose egg of 2011. (Hey, I always said last year was a “building year.”) And that’s just that I can announce yet.

And, as an added bonus, all but TWO of this year’s SIX new releases are total stand-alones:

• For Darkness Shows the Stars: a post-apocalyptic novel inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion
• “Foundlings” (in Brave New Love, ed. by Paula Guran): a short story set in a near-future America
• “Burned Bright” (in Foretold, ed. by Carrie Ryan): a contemporary short story about a girl and a cult and the end of the world
• “Stray Magic” (in Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, ed. by Jonathan Strahan):  a short story about a girl who works in an animal shelter and the unusual pet who falls under her care.

The other two include “The Hammer of Artemis”, which is set in the killer unicorniverse (it’s historical, like “Errant”) and the aforementioned unnamed secret project.

Though compared to the beginning of the year, that second half of the year is looking a little bit sparse. I’ll have to get on that.

Just Kidding.

Sorta.

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(First: Today is the last day to enter the Cassandra Clare Giveaway. I’ll be picking the winner at 5 PM Eastern).

Today marks the 236th birthday of Jane Austen. Happy birthday, Jane.

Last night, I attended a performance of a play based on Austen’s novel, Pride & Prejudice. P&P is, undoubtedly, the most popular of all the Austen works, and with good reason It is the most soundly structured and tightly plotted of all her stories. Elizabeth is the most winning of all of Austen’s heroines, especially for the modern reader, due to her strength, spunk, and sense of humor. Kate Cook, the actress who portrayed Elizabeth in the production I saw last night said of the character:

“she’s beautifully drawn and virtually impossible to get right. Plus, a mythology has risen up around her, she has become something more than she is, which makes it a bit tough to find the person in there… I find her bottomless. There’s always more to discover.”

Everyone creates their own Elizabeth from what is on the page — focusing on one thing and ignoring some other that may not fit with their Elizabethan image. Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth clashes so wildly with my mental Elizabeth that I could never really like that film. I once got into a knock-down, drag-out fight with someone who insisted that Lizzie really did only fall for Darcy for the house.

Everyone also creates their own Jane. Some like to imagine for her a thwarted love story that informs the romances in her fiction:

Others eschew the love stories in her books and claim that Jane was a social satirist, full-stop, and knowing nothing of romantic love herself, could not properly express it in fiction. To this argument they like to quote a letter that Austen once wrote to the librarian of the Prince Regent, J.S. Clarke, claiming, in part: “I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.”

Which betrays a misunderstanding in general as to what the term “romance” meant then. (Hint: it doesn’t mean what it does today.) Make no mistake: Jane Austen wrote love stories. She also wrote social satire, and stories about families. It was all of it.

In fact, novels in general then were regarded as highly suspect modes of entertainment, and people often pretended they DIDN’T like novels (ANY novels) back then, the way now that so many keep their love of romance novels or YA novels or Twilight (which is both) under wraps.

Jane’s books, when finally published (she sold one early on that didn’t make it into print) were popular with the reading public, including the aforementioned Prince Regent, who prevailed upon her to dedicate Emma to him. Sadly, she dies before her final complete novel, Persuasion, was published.

In the late 19th century, opinions on Austen’s work was divided between a readership that had an emotional and overwhelming adoration for the books (think Twihards) and one who “properly” apreciated Austen’s place in the canon. (This crap ain’t new, guys.) There began to be a noted division between Austen fans who fancied themselves admirers of the full range of Austen’s subject matter and ones who liked the books because Darcy was hawt. The division was pronounced enough that it was considered a strike against your own analysis if you spent any time appreciating the relationships in the novels.

Like I said, this crap ain’t new.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to divorce Austen’s social views from her views about love and marriage. Her books depict the lives and fortunes of a completely dependent class — women. Though Austen herself managed to make a tiny bit of money from the sale of her novels, women’s almost exclusive means of securing an income for themselves was to marry into one. The only heroine of independent fortune in the novels is Emma (Anne Elliot is supposed to have a dowry, but Sir Walter can’t be prevailed upon to cough it up.)

FWIW, here are the fortunes of Jane Austen’s heroines:

• Emma Woodhouse: 30,000 pounds (the modern equivalent of $150,000 a year)
• Anne Elliot: 10,000 pounds, officially, but she doesn’t get it.
• Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey): 3,000 pounds
• Elizabeth Bennett: 1,000 pounds (this means her mother brought 5k dowry into her marriage with Mr. Bennett)
• Elinor and Marianne Dashwood: 1,000 pounds a piece*
• Fanny Price: zip (please note that Miss Crawford has a 20,000 pound dowry, and that her aunt secured a baronet with “only seven thousand”)

For an in-depth analysis of Austenian fortunes, see this great post, which attempts to explain the way money worked in the time, complete with a lovely chart, excerpted below.)

After her father’s death, Austen, her sister Cassandra, and their mother lived on ~450 pounds a year, which is very like the 500 pounds a year the S&S girls were impoverished on.

So what does all this mean? Well, the richest of Austen’s heroines states unequivocally that she has no inducements to marry, being a woman of independent fortune and a prominent place in society (since the marriage of her sister, Emma is the “lady” of her house). And even amongst the heroines of  lower fortune, she states very clearly, over and over in her novels when her heroines refuse proposals from men who may offer them comfortable lives, that no matter what your situation, you should not marry unless you can be happy with your husband.

This parallels Austen’s own life. She was engaged once, for a day, to a man with money she’d known for a very long time. However, she realized quickly that she couldn’t be happy in that marriage, despite the financial stability it would afford her, and she broke the engagement. For Austen, “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”

For Fanny Price, that meant risking alienating her adoptive family at Mansfield Park and being sent packing home to her own impoverished relations rather than marry the immoral and licentious Henry Crawford. For Elizabeth Bennett it meant risking her family’s welfare, first by not marrying the heir to her father’s estate (though you can argue she figured she was safe with Jane and Bingley’s romance seeming assured), and then, later, by not accepting Darcy’s first proposal. (If Mrs. Bennett was going to disown Lizzie for not accepting Mr. Collins, can you imagine what she’d do if she found out her daughter was rejecting a man with $10,000 a year?). For Anne Elliott, it means not marrying Charles Musgrove even though he would have gotten her out of her father’s house and into the bosom of the Musgrove family, whom she seems to like. And then later with Mr. Elliot, Austen says that what Anne might ever have thought of Mr. Elliot (before the revelations about his true character) coudln’t really have been known, because Anne is such a one-woman man.

But affection is not necessarily the same thing as romantic love. Indeed, in S&S, one gathers that the love Marianne ends up feeling for Colonel Brandon is not necessarily a passionate and romantic one, but one of strong regard and respect. However, it is enough to make the both of them happy, and that is the point Austen is making. She also likes to create examples of happy (Admiral and Mrs. Croft, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, etc.) and unhappy (Mr. Collins and Charlotte, Maria Bertram and Mr. Rushworth, Charles and Mary Musgrove) marriages in her books to drive the point home that unless her heroines make choices based not only in comfort/fortune (which she CERTAINLY thinks is important) but ALSO in affection, they are much better off staying single.

So the fact that Jane Austen’s stories are love stories in no way diminishes from everything else they are too. The thing I love so much about Austen’s romances is they are not destructive, they are not all-encompassing. The characters build something new with their relationships, working them into the fabric of their society, growing something made of not only of romance, but also of respect. Anne tells Wentworth it’s better that they are together now rather than when they were each young and had no place in the world. If Lizzie had taken Darcy when he first proposed, he would never have become a better person, and he would always have seen her as a prize to be won, and resented her as a fortune hunter. Could Fanny really have changed Henry Crawford’s evil ways? I don’t think so.

Where were we? Right.

Happy Birthday, Jane!

______________

* There is somewhat of an argument about what these ladies are living on — if you do the math from chapter 1 of S&S, they have 10k between their mother’s 7k and the 1k each that the girls got from their late uncle. That would give them an income of the modern equivalent of 50k a year, which isn’t horribly shabby. However, a 1k dowry isn’t going to help them much, as we see from the point of view of Elizabeth. It’s not “husband catching” money — they aren’t “prey for fortune hunters,” as Mr. Bennett puts it. Also, if you’ve just seen the Ang Lee movie, they make the Dashwoods much richer, reduce the widow Dashwood much more (the girls have NO dowries at all in the film), and make Brandon a good deal richer, too.

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Now, of course, I do not have as many opportunities to chart molecules or chemical reactions (though I did manage to sneak a few of my favorites into Tap & Gown). However, in considering the whole “love triangle” situation the other day, I started to think about how it can get very complicated in some of my favorite books and… well, I may have gotten a little… involved.

Take Persuasion. So, yes, in Persuasion, there is a love triangle with Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove vs. Anne Elliot. But there’s ALSO a love triangle, later on in the book, with Anne and the Captain and Mr. Elliot. And then when you consider who Mr. Elliot ends up with…

It gets complicated. Here’s what it looks like, when all’s said and done:

(Please note: you can click to enlarge any of these, and you’ll probably have to as we go on.)

The arrows are directional to indicate the direction of the affection/romance. For instance, Mr. Elliot is into Anne, but not so much the other way around. The faded dots indicate familial relations (cf. the Elliots), and the the dashed arrows indicate supposed or rumored affections.

Which of course, are all the rage in another favorite Austen: Emma.

Emma, of course, is all about the power of suggestion and rumor when it comes to relationships.

The more I did this, the more I realized that Jane Austen was ALL about the love triangles. And though Emma and Persuasion both feature love triangles prominently in the plots, they are not driving the plots. Louisa is not the thing keeping Anne and Wentworth apart, nor is Harriet the only obstacle between Mr. Elton and Emma. Only in Sense and Sensibility do we see a story entirely incumbent on the conflict of the love triangles:

Why can’t Edward be with Elinor? Because of Lucy. Why can’t Colonel Brandon catch Marianne’s eye? Because she’s completely besotted by Willoughby. (You see how the arrows between the Colonel and Marianne are of uneven end points? That’s to indicate degree of affection.)

I love these things. I may have to make them into T-shirts or something. They’re so pretty and sciency, but you know — Jane Austen.

You guys, I had way too much fun with this. After I finished up Jane, I went a little off the rails. More tomorrow.

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I love book design. I love books where it is clear a lot of care has been taken with the design, to create something a little off the beaten path, a signature look for that book which is instantly recognizable. I’m a bit spoiled, since my first series was handled by a team at Bantam Dell for whom book design was not a lost art. My first editor had been trained up by a boss who had originally come from the design side of the publishing business. And thus, I got things like this:

And this:

And this:

And, unbelievably, even this:

I was not aware how unusual it was to have a book designed with such attention to detail, and to the various and sundry non-text objects that existed inside.

I honestly think it adds to the experience.There are those for whom design is merely a distraction — they want nothing between them and the words. They want the pages and the words themselves to disappear. These are the readers for whom the Kindle revolution and the death of book design doesn’t matter. They want to be able to change the font at will — they don’t care where page breaks occur. They aren’t interested in the idea that someone went to the trouble of choosing that font, that layout, that arrangement, to create a mood and a world for the reader.

I am not that reader. I love some good design. Some recent books where the design knocked me off my feet are:

• Want to Go Private, by Sarah Darer Littman, where the police reports and such are set off from the text and look like words on a “dark” computer screen.
• The Midnighters series, by Scott Westerfeld, in which the fractal lore symbols signifying each type of midnighters were designed by Scott and inserted in the text to show who is narrating that section. (I’ve heard some folks have even gotten tattoos of their favorite symbol.
• the little zombies and unicorns and the cartoon-style author names in Zombies vs. Unicorns. (True story: there was once a plan to print all the zombie stories on black paper, but it proved too hard to read.)
• the black “moon phase” chapter dividers in Andrea Cremer’s Nightshade. SUCH a brilliant idea.
• The ornate frames on the chapter openers of Jessica Spotswood’s upcoming Born Wicked. (Actually, that whole book has droolworthy design. The soft-touch cover! The coppery foil title! Jess wants me to give her her ARC back but I may just conveniently “lose” it.)

But design can also be divisive. (Cf. the “black pages” for ZVU.) Anything that makes the book hard to read is going to bother people, and people have different metrics for “hard to read.” For instance, I loved the idea of the “frozen” blue text in Shiver, but I heard a lot of complaints about the green and red texts of the subsequent novels hurting people’s eyes.

Design is something you lose when you read the ebook version. My “Shiver” is on Kindle. The text is kindle text.

I often wonder if my love of book design is related to my love of metafiction and metatextual interpolations (this, I am told, is the proper name for the doodads peppering my first series). The Secret Society Girl series lent itself specifically to unusual design, as it was filled with metatextual interpolations, which was a style I employed heavily in that series (lists, footnotes, emails, text messages, letters, etc) and not so much with any book since.

I have been in love with such storytelling flourishes all my reading life. From Nabokov’s footnotes to Clarissa’s “mad papers” to simple epistolary novels, I love the idea of books that are more than just books — that are little puzzles on the page — story and more than story, too.

How will such elements survive the coming ebook revolution? When you read something with footnotes on a Kindle, it requires hypertext to flip you there and back. With Secret Society Girl on Kindle, the “Hello My Name Is” sticker is transferred like a picture, but you lose the “electronic” look of the text messages and the “script” of the letters. My early-gen kindle is black and white, but I wonder if the new colored ereaders show Shiver’s text in blue. I have NO idea how they do Clarissa’s mad papers.

When you realize that Richardson was pulling this kind of stunt in the eighteenth century, before we even had a rightful understanding of what a novel was and certainly before this kind of thing was as easy as  setting up text boxes in your computer document, it’s even more impressed. Of course, he owned the printing press and so employed the poor printer he was causing this headache. Ah, Richardson, you cruel taskmaster.

(I know I talk about Clarissa a lot on this blog. I talk about Clarissa a lot in general. I love Clarissa. I don’t know a whole lot of other people who have read it, or even seen the BBC version they did with Sean Bean as Lovelace. I don’t remember anything else about it, except Sean Bean as frickin’ Lovelace, people! That is a triumph of casting. I can’t actually even picture the Lovelace who lived in my head now. All I see is Bean. Anyway, if you haven’t read it or seen it, or know anything about it — let’s just say it’s approximately 2,000 pages long, it’s completely epistolary, it’ll take over your LIFE as it did me my second semester senior year in college, and it will forever change the way you, a costume drama loving, historical romance reading, Jane Austen obsessed female individual looks at her heretofore romanticized past. In short: sucked to be a woman for most of recorded history.)

Where was I? Right, book design.

For Darkness has gorgeous book design. Guys, even the font. I drool. And I cry, too, because I know a lot of people are going to buy it as an ebook. Which is nice, I guess — any way they read it, plus I get nice royalties for ebooks — but they’re going to miss out on some of the design. The slightly unusual font. The curlicues around each page number. (Can’t have ‘em if you don’t have pages.)

You want a peek? Of course you do.

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Here are some of the most frequently asked questions:

Q: What is this book about?

A: So glad you asked:

Generations ago,  a genetic experiment gone wrong—the Reduction—decimated humanity, giving rise to a Luddite nobility who outlawed most technology.

Eighteen-year-old Luddite Elliot North has always known her place in this caste system. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family’s estate over love. But now the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists is jumpstarting the wheel of progress and threatening Luddite control; Elliot’s estate is floundering; and she’s forced to rent land to the mysterious Cloud Fleet, a group of shipbuilders that includes renowned explorer Captain Malakai Wentforth—an almost unrecognizable Kai. And while Elliott wonders if this could be their second chance, Kai seems determined to show Elliot exactly what she gave up when she abandoned him.

But Elliot soon discovers her childhood friend carries a secret—one that could change the society in which they live…or bring it to its knees. And again, she’s faced with a choice: cling to what she’s been raised to believe, or cast her lot with the only boy she’s ever loved, even if she has lost him forever.

Inspired by Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS is a breathtaking romance about opening your mind to the future and your heart to the one person you know can break it.

Q: When is it coming out?

A: June, 2012

Q: Who designed this cover?

A: The design team at Harper Children’s.

Q: Is it a series?

A: No, it’s a standalone novel. I know that’s a tad unusual in the YA world these days, and especially unusual in this brave new world of “dystopias” — yes, I’m using liberal quote marks — but I’ve done two series now and I wanted this book to stand alone, like Persuasion itself does.

Q: What was the Katy Perry video still from “E.T.” that you wanted your cover to look like?

A: Right. Yes. Totally meant to post that. Here it is:

I definitely see a resemblance, don’t you?

If you have more questions, ask away in comments!

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“Our ancestors,” Tatiana said, as the sanctuary was plunged into darkness, “took refuge here during the Wars of the Lost. Some already lived on these islands. Some came as the reach of the wars grew ever wider. But all were forced eventually underground. When the Lost realized what they’d done, that they were the last generation of healthy people, they struck out with unthinkable rage against any and all who had avoided Reduction, hoping to be the last ones, at least, left standing over a ruined world.” She blew out the final light. Above them, the miracle flickered to life.

“For years—some say more than a generation—the Luddites lived in the darkness. And then . . .” Tatiana’s voice fell silent, and they all stared up into the vertex of the cavern.

It was filled with stars. From every corner of the cavern, tiny, twinkling points of light glowed, a green so pale as to be nearly white.

“In the old stories,” said Tatiana, “a man built his followers a boat to ride out the flooding of the world. And when the flood was over, God showed him a rainbow to tell him that the worst was over. And after the wars of the Reduction were over, God showed us the stars, and we knew we could come out of the caverns and take our rightful place on the surface of the world.”

But Elliot knew the truth was more complicated than that.

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A long, long time ago (in book publishing world), in 2005, I started writing a book called “Last of the Unicorn Hunters.” This title, I was told by EVERYONE, simply would not do. Thus began a months-long search for the perfect title. Many were considered. Some were mocked. A few were mocked with love and sincere affection (such as my Ludlum-loving friend’s ardent campaign for “The Horn Identity.”) I started making a list of titles that I loved. I had recently read a book called Valiant, by Holly Black, and I loved that title. I decided I wanted my title to have the same feel as that one.

Enter Rampant.

Rampant was the first book I ever sold that retained the title I sold it with. I did not realize, back at the time, that we were entering an age of one-word titles in YA fiction. Now pretty much every YA book has a one-word title. Look at the shelves: It’s one word from here to the travel section. Shiver, Matched, Uglies, Rumors, Skinned, Ashes, Ice, Need, Hunger, Linger, Divergent, Witchlanders, MOckingjay, Hourglass, Possession, Evernight, Everneath, Unwind, Intertwined, Savvy, Grace, Graceling, Fire, Liar, Leviathan, Mastiff, Devilish… and of course, Twilight.

It was so prevalent that when we went to title Ascendant, we had a bit of a challenge on our hands. Quite simply — we were running out of appropriate words. In fact, I’d already gotten emails from other writers trapped in the “one word title” conundrum of a series, annoyed that their chosen titles were considered too close to “Rampant” to be acceptable. (I’ve also gotten that email in regards to Ascendant, and I live in fear that someone will use my chosen title for the hypothetical killer unicorn book three before I get to it.)

When I went to title my next book, a post-apocalyptic retelling of Persuasion, I had one rule: No one-word titles. It was, of course, a tad ironic, given that Persuasion is one word, and a title that fit in quite neatly with the current YA trend. It did not, however, fit very well with my vision for the book.

Again, a protracted search for titles. I paged through my dog-eared copy of Persuasion, hoping for phrases that would rock my fictional world. As I did for Rampant, I made a list of words that fit with the themes and motifs I planned to explore in my book. Up spat a lot of imagery about winter and remembrance and navigation and lantern-light and compasses and stars and engineering and Greek myths and seafaring and waiting. I came up with several titles. None were acceptable. A few found their way into the book in other guises.

Eventually, I found a poem by Carl Sandburg called “Prayers After World War” which says, in part:

Wandering oversea singer,
Singing of ashes and blood,
Child of the scars of fire,
Make us one new dream, us who forget.
Out of the storm let us have one star.

And fell in love. For this, I thought, was the world I’d created. This was a world where things had been bad — so bad that people were happy to forget the past, forget the things they’d once known, and be afraid of the dreams they’d once had. It was a story about the children of the apocalypse, who had been born into a world brought low, and dared to dream that it all could someday change, dared to explore beyond their shores, dared to “make a song for tomorrow” as it says elsewhere in the poem.

But “Out of the storm let us have one star” was WAY too long for a title. Still, I loved the idea, and I kept digging. I considered phrases I liked that were along those lines:

“Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” (Hmm: Fall Among the Stars? No, too space-opera-y.)

“I’ve loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” (Hmm, Fearful of the Night? No, wrong emotion.)

“I would rather be ashes than dust.” (Hmm… love it, but can’t think of a fitting title.)

“I love the light for it shows me the way, but I endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.” (Wait a second…)

Bingo.

For Darkness Shows the Stars was born.

I wrote a proposal and sent it on to my agent. I did not think it was a title we’d be allowed to keep, given the trend in YA titles, but I thought it was one that my editor, and hopefully the acquisitions team, would find evocative, even if marketing made us change it. I consoled myself by remembering that Persuasion was not actually a title Jane Austen had chosen herself, but rather the one her brother had put on the book after her death. She’d been calling it “The Elliots.”

(My editor later told me that she had initially doubted we’d be able to keep the title, but marketing loved it as much as we did, and here we are.)

So what does this have to do with the cover? Well, when we started talking about concepts for cover art, one of the things we knew was that with such a distinctive and distinctively evocative title that we would want to play on and play up those words as much as possible. I started collecting pictures of starscapes that reminded me of scenes in the book:

And pictures that reminded me of Elliot, because I knew the other prevailing trend on covers was pictures of girls:

(Actually, now this photo reminds me of the cove of Saundra Mitchell’s The Springsweet. Right? With the dress and the lighting and the general feel?)

So I sent these all along to my editor, and then I begged — I actually begged, and she can verify this — for an interesting font treatment, because I was busy being in love with the cover of Kami Garcia and Margie Stohl’s Caster series books. (Also: true story, their cover designer used to work for Harper, and he had once been assigned to design the cover of Rampant before he left.) And more than that, because I loved this title, and I wanted it to be an important part of the cover.

But, as with keeping the title itself, I never actually expected any of this to come to pass.

Anyway, time passed, and I finished the book, and then, one day, I was watching TV, and I saw a music video that stopped me in my tracks.

More on that tomorrow.

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Virginia, I know you’re out there. Email me.

In other news, there’s an interview with me up at Reading Underground, the teen blog of the Charleston Public Library (So excited for YALLFest, Y’ALL.) Did I mention I’ll have a For Darkness Shows the Stars ARC there?

What, you say? You want a For Darkness Shows the Stars snippet? Well, okay, since you asked very, very nicely:

Olivia’s song ended, but Donovan merely turned his music into something wilder, a more obvious dancing tune. A cheer went up from the assembled crowd. Several couples even rose from their picnic blankets to dance beneath the glowing lanterns. Kai gave his hand to Olivia to help her down from the porch steps. She tugged him toward the dancers, and after a moment, he joined her. Elliot stared down at her lap.

“Aren’t they a lovely couple?,” Andromeda said.

“Please go away.”

Okay, off to conference.

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Or at least, the one I’ve had since 2009, when I went to the Jane Austen’s letters exhibit in New York City. Before that I had a variety of others (including one with a salmon pink cover) and then for a few years, had only the one in my leather bound “complete works of Jane Austen” collection. But this one has a large, large index with all kinds of historical factoids (and a long digression that uses the dialogue to suss out exactly how incompetent the Musgrove sailor was on Wentworth’s ship, which is amusing).

I also own this Persuasion:

And another one that I can’t find the cover to online (it’s the “Annotated” Persuasion).

Harper Teen did their Twilight thing on it a few years back, complete with Twilighty title font:

But my absolute favorite is this one I just found:

How awesome is that? Because Anne would TOTALLY paint her fingernails red. That is SUCH a 1800s-daughter-of-a-baronet thing to do, you know? And the lipstick. And the cribbed-from-wicked-lovely pose.

The best part of this version — I know, better even than the fingernails — is hard to read in this picture, but allow me to share a detail shot:

Yes, that’s right. “Copyrighted material.”

Um… do they mean the picture? Is there an essay or an annotation or something in there written recently? Because they certainly can’t mean the text. Jane Austen is no longer under copyright, which, in the U.S., is defined as life of the author plus seventy-five years. That’s why there are so many bajillions of versions of Persuasion floating around. Because any publisher can put it up at any time.

Even with blood red fingernails on the cover.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the final cover of my take on Persuasion, which is written entirely by me, and so actually is under copyright. But, hey, I’m feeling magnanimous today, so how about a snippet?

For four years she’d waited for Kai to come back, too, but he never had. Nor had he ever sent word of his whereabouts. In her dreams, she liked to imagine he’d ended up like one of the admiral’s men, content and employed. With his mechanical talent, he’d have made an excellent skilled laborer. But she’d heard too many stories of the things that happened to Post runaways. She’d heard of the dangers in Post enclaves. The brothels and the workhouses, the organ trade and the people who sold their bodies for illegal experimentation.
Elliot let her hand drop and curl inward. She brushed her left fingers over the back of her right hand, touching each knuckle, tracing the path of each vein. She couldn’t bear to think of Kai like that.

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You know how they say animals feel these first? Rio didn’t even wake up.

We didn’t sustain any damage and we’re all fine, here.

A few days later, everyone started panicking about the hurricane. Where I come from, people prepare for hurricane season the same way people up north prepare for winter. It’s a given that when you hear a storm is coming, you make sure you have fresh batteries in all your flashlights, a bunch of grillable/ready-to-eat food, a full tank of gas, and a few gallons of water, just in case. The large-scale panic, I think, was entirely media-generated. Hurricanes are bad and dangerous and this one hurt a lot of people, don’t get me wrong, but the shelves empty of flashlights and batteries and red wine were a little shocking to me. Pick up some staples, and make sure you have flashlights and water. Thanks to the fact that Sailor Boy and I are part of the 9/11 Generation and we live in our nation’s capital, we’ve got a permanent “emergency cabinet” in our house (which reminds me, I need to add stuff for Queenie to my jump bag.)

Even my parents, who have lived in hurricane-central for over twenty-five years, called me to report whatever piece of yellow journalism they were hearing on the news.  We were all set — but we were lucky. Our power didn’t even go out. (Compare to July 2010, when an unnamed storm knocked out power to our house for a week.) We stayed indoors all day Saturday, and now there are little leaves and twigs all over my yard, but Sunday was gorgeous. We even took Rio for a hike in the park (the creek was running way high).

The moral of the story is, respect the weather, respect natural disaster,s be prepared, and for goodness sake, Don’t Panic.

In other news, remember when I posted these stats of For Darkness Shows the Stars? Turns out they were a little premature. No, I haven’t suddenly decided to add zombies. But I did have to do a little rejiggering of the chapters during the last round of edits. so now the chapter count stands at 43 and the unchapter count at 21. To compare: There are 26 in Ascendant and 27 in Rampant. There are 21 chapters in Under the Rose, which is the longest secret society book, and the one whose length is most comparable to FDSTS (see sidebar).

That’s a significant difference, to me. I wonder if it will feel so different to readers.I think sometimes I get overly obsessed with things like chapter breaks and chapter headings and the titles of various internal parts of my novel that readers don’t really care about. I suspect a significant number of readers never read the “confessions” — let alone the chapter titles — of the secret society books.

But of course, there are all kinds of crazy ways that I’ve learned readers read books over the years. Some read all the dialogue first and then go back and read the narrative. Some read the first few pages and then the last few pages and use that as a barometer to decide whether or not to read the book. Some buy all the books in a series and then hold off reading them until the series is complete. Some always skip the prologues, or never read the chapter titles, or refuse to read anything set in italic, or only read chapters with numbers divisible by six.

Some of these reading habits make me wonder how the reader in question can ever make sense of a novel.

Me, I’m a straight through, don’t skip a word kind of reader. I would never dream of skipping a prologue or a text block or a sex scene — the author put them there for a reason, and if I skip it, I’m missing something they designed to be part of the whole. And because I read that way, I write that way, too. I mean for all the words in my books to come in a particular order, and to be read in that order. I think you’re missing something if you don’t, but that’s the way my brain works.

There are no chapter titles in FDSTS — a first for my original novels. I felt like between the parts, and the quotes, and the unchapters — well, it was starting to get a little busy in the header arena. I don’t miss them. They were right for my other series, but simple numbers are right in this case.

Enough of that. You guys are going to be SO SICK of hearing me talk about FDSTS before the book comes out next June.

Next. June. Ugh. Kidlit publishing moves at a glacial pace, y’all. When I wrote Secret Society Girl, I turned the draft in August 31, and it came out in May of the following year. At least this isn’t as bad as Rampant, though, which had a 12 month wait time after proofs. One day, maybe I’ll be patient enough to write a book and not announce it until the ARCs come out.

Hahahahahhahahahhaha. Good one.

Yes, there will be ARCs of FDSTS. Sometime this fall, I hear.

This is what I’m doing to distract myself until then:

• reading a lot
• writing a lot

I am very excited about my new project. I am jamming it full of all kinds of things I’ve been interested in recently. Pets. Frocks. Swimming. Banter. And of course, fabulous names.

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