I Need To Get On the Rewriting Classics Train

My favorite new deal from Publishers Marketplace for this week is:

Janet Mullany's THE IMMORTAL JANE AUSTEN, a humorous novel about Jane Austen in Regency England who joins the vampire resistance in Bath when England is invaded by French forces, to May Chen at Harper, in a nice deal, in a two-book deal, by Lucienne Diver of The Knight Agency (world).

WTF? What is it with Jane Austen being rewritten in a variety of ridiculous ways? I need to get on this bandwagon; it's just too bad that by the time I finish a book for this trend, the trend will already be dead. I suppose that means I should focus on submitting AN INCONVENIENT MARRIAGE, rather than developing a version of Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE in which he explores the horrors of the meatpacking industry and discovers that all meatpackers are, in fact, syphilitic zombies intent on infecting the American population in an effort to upgrade from their filthy tenement apartments.

Actually, given the state of the market, that idea may have promise...

Walking On Broken Glass

After a variety of strange and ridiculous things today, I needed a break -- and I got it, in the form of the video for Annie Lennox's "Walking on Broken Glass." It has everything I require in a good time: Hugh Laurie, costumes, absurd lyrics, and melodramatic sentiments. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GBn-BpkNsA

I have nothing new to report, but I shall write tomorrow! In the interest of getting to the writing faster, it's time for bed.

See: Quitting, Not

I'm feeling pretty happy on the motivation front right now. Rewrites for AN INCONVENIENT MARRIAGE are going both well and quickly, and I'm looking forward to getting back to Madeleine and Ferguson's story soon (in my head I'm calling it AN INCONVENIENT TITLE because a) I don't have a title, and b) Ferguson doesn't want his).

But, it never hurts to hear a little extra motivation from someone who's been through it all before. Check out this blog post about persevering through thousands (gasp) of rejections. Happily I'm nowhere near the thousand (or even hundred) rejection mark yet, but I intend to keep going even if I reach that point.

Now it's back to the writing -- enjoy the rest of your weekend!

I Dreamed a Dream

Watch this chick from "Britain's Got Talent" -- absolutely amazing performance, and it sends tingles up my spine to watch her dream coming true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

(sorry, they disabled embedding)

Social Networking == Quicksand

With the exciting news that AN INCONVENIENT MARRIAGE finaled in the RWA Golden Heart contest, I feel like I need to be building out my web presence in anticipation of the day when I sell my novel (or the day when I realize I'm never going to sell my novel and need some e-friends to cry to). In my quest to efficiently tackle the online space, I set up a new Sara Ramsey Facebook account and decided to dedicate more time to blogging here. I've been on Facebook for around twenty-four hours, but thanks to some support from my personal friends and the addition of quite a few of my fellow finalists, I've built up a not-too-shabby friend list. I'm looking forward to branching out more into the publishing world as I start to build out content, but I feel like this is a good start.

However, social networking is such a time sink that I wonder if I would be better off spending the time writing. In addition to Facebook and the blog, I also started a Twitter account today (you can follow me @ramseyromance -- linked to in the sidebar on this page). I've stayed away from Twitter, believing it to be yet another plague in the multitude of procrastination-enabling addictions that litter the web. With my blogs, my website, my email, my Google Reader, and the fact that I work for a tech company and spend ten hours a day online there, I'm already online enough -- Twitter seemed like the last straw. But I signed up today because it's all the rage, and I need to go where the potential readers are. Whether I'll stick with Twitter remains to be seen (the pressure to come up with something witty in 140 characters is intense, particularly since I'm used to writing 140 lines), but I do feel like there's some happy medium between the amount of time I spent getting things set up today and the practically nonexistent social networking that I do in my personal life.

What do you think about Twitter? Is it the Facebook-killer, or a flash in the pan?

Madeleine's Theme Song

I don't necessarily have a fully-applicable playlist when I write (for instance, I've been listening to Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand That Feeds" recently, which has little to do with romance -- although come to think of it, perhaps it does relate to Ferguson's relationship with his father!). But, this lovely song really puts me in the mood to write about Madeleine. Regina Spektor's voice is gorgeous, the music video is captivating, and the sentiment behind "Fidelity" matches up well to Madeleine's approach to life before she met Ferguson.



What do you think? Do you associate characters in books with any particular songs?

I Can't Wait For This Book!

My tastes are clearly too obviously terrible. One of my friends sent me an email this week saying, "Dude this book just screams Sara."















Despite any embarrassment I may feel at encouraging the debasement of one of the classics of English literature, I'm still going to order it. I do love me some zombies, as evidenced by the fact that I own both THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE and the movie SHAUN OF THE DEAD (in which, coincidentally, a high school classmate's husband played a zombie who was taken out by a well-thrown record).

Which terrible books are you looking forward to?

eBook Readers - Resistance is Futile

From the NEW YORK TIMES today: "Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold"

And you can hear the tortured screams of bibliophiles everywhere. Personally, I'm holding off on getting a Kindle or any other ebook reader -- while I love the feel of hot new technology in my grasping hands, I feel that it's prudent to wait for the product to improve (and to clear out the 70+ TBR books on my shelves before adding a device that will make my TBR woes worse).

However, while I will always have a soft place in my heart for printed books, and while I will likely want to have them in copious amounts even if I start using a reader as my primary content provider, ebook readers are the way of the future. I think at some point in the future, we will all just have a handheld screen with us that serves as our television, our movie theatre, our stereo, our library, and our online lifeline. If you read sci-fi, you may also see it as a grim, new-world-order harbinger of the days when our global overlords will use it to provide an endless stream of propaganda, but I'll take my chances.

And really, is this that much different than the advent of the printing press? I would bet you a copy of my yet-to-be-published book that when the Gutenberg Bible first arrived, there were legions of monks who were (piously, quietly) up in arms about the death of the hand-printing industry, with all the same concerns about quality, look-and-feel, and relative cost as we're hearing from the publishing industry today. And yet what ended up happening was a revolution in terms of availability of information to the masses, information that would change the world. Ebook readers offer the same promise -- give kids excellent stories on the same screen that currently provides them with movies, and you might see a reading rebirth that no one could have predicted when musty old paper volumes were the only path to readership.

What do you think? Are you rushing out to buy a reader, or are you holding out until the last page is ripped from your hands?

Apparently I'm Destroying My Life...

Check out this article in TIME magazine: "Are Romantic Movies Bad For You?"

My favorite quote: "'Idealism has a role to play — it can convince us that no matter how misshapen, decrepit, or dull we are, there is someone out there for us.'" I love that a fellow at the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy implied that romantic comedies were good for the misshapen, decrepit and dull. That really just makes me want to go out and salve my wounds with half a dozen viewings of LOVE ACTUALLY.

Really, I do want to watch LOVE ACTUALLY now. Sadly, it's in my apartment in California, and I'm in my parents' house in Iowa for the holidays. But I think it's one of my favorite romantic comedies ever, possibly because the characters are mostly absurd and some of the stories end on a melancholy note. Or possibly because some of the characters seem "misshapen, decrepit, and dull" themselves, which trumps the ridiculous machinations of some of the impossibly-perfect heroes and heroines in general boilerplate romcoms.

I fully intend to keep destroying my ability to form real relationships by reading romance over the holidays. What are you reading and/or watching?