I got my job through the New York Times...

I hate to drink alone, otherwise I would have popped the cork on a bottle of champagne to celebrate a publishing coup; PLAY DATES was excerpted in the NY Bookshelf feature of the Sunday 5/29/05 City section of the New York Times. I have stopped dancing around the room long enough to sit down and type this. As a measure of how hard it is to crack that particular Times nut, it takes about 5 months after your book is released before there's room for you on that Sunday "Bookshelf." Better late than never, of course.

And while my head is spinning, it's worth a mention that the novel formerly known as DIRTY LINEN is now the novel formerly known as DISPARATE HOUSEWIVES. HarperCollins' house counsel just thought the title was too much of an uh-oh. So, this entertaining Upper West Side story about a shrink who holds her unorthodox therapy sessions in her apartment building's laundry room is now called SPIN DOCTOR, to be published February-ish, 2006.

BY A LADY, by universal acclaim

Well, Crown's judges have weighed in, and unanimously accepted my suggestion for retitling the-novel-formerly-known-as-SENSE AND SENSUALITY. This work of literary historical fiction will be published under the title BY A LADY (which is how Jane Austen's books were first published -- a lady scribbler being anathema in her day), with the new subtitle "Being the Adventures of An Englightened American in Jane Austen's England." Look for it to appear in trade paperback in the spring of 2006.

Meanwhile, the back cover copy for my 2006 Avon Trade release, DISPARATE HOUSEWIVES, is finally entertaining and punchy thanks to major rewrites done by my editor and me. It boggles the mind that a publisher's copy department can deliver blurbs so boring (about a really fun book!) that not even the author's mother would be interested in purchasing it. Go figure. Isn't the point of the exercise to write a back cover blurb that is so mind-grabbing that the reader can't possibly leave the book on the shelf? Sales, people. Sales!

Ego trips and slips

It's a funny thing to read stuff about yourself on the internet that you didn't put there. Not only that, your publicists and publishers didn't put it there either. Suffering from ennui and a bit of writer's block the other night, I decided to google one of my upcoming historical fiction titles (Sense and Sensuality) along with the pen name (Amanda Elyot) that I use for my historical fiction novels. Lo and behold I found a heads-up about the book on the Jane Austen blog, the Janeite bloggers being alerted to its existence by a woman who has apparently been following my career more closely than my own mother does. I'm choosing to look at this as a good thing, since I prefer to bathe myself in good karma, having learned that the alternative sucks.

Interestingly enough -- here's how things work in the arcane world of publishing, folks -- I have just learned that the SALES FORCE at Crown wasn't delirious about the title (Sense and Sensuality) and would like me to change it. As soon as I sign off on this post I will set my imagination to work. Quirkily enough I had just been having second thoughts about the title a day or two ago -- yet not enough doubt to make me change it. Now that I've been nudged out of complacency, it's time to head to plan B. I've been thinking that BY A LADY might be a good alternative, as it was the way Austen's novels were first published and is the name of the play within my novel. The novel soon-to-be-formerly-known-as Sense and Sensuality is about an anglophilic contemporary New York actress who, exiting the stage in a Greenwich Village theatre, finds herself in the Theatre Royal, Bath (then also known as the Orchard Street Theatre), in 1801, the year the Austen family moved there. Eventually our heroine meets her idol, Jane Austen. Most of Austen's dialogue in the novel are Jane's own words, culled from her novels, correspondence, and juvenilia.

Greetings!

Greetings, visitors, and welcome to THE LADY NOVELIST, Leslie Carroll's brand new blog. As time goes by, I expect to post information regarding my urban contemporary women's fiction for Avon Books, and my historical fiction for Crown, which I write under the pen name Amanda Elyot.

Please stop by and visit any time, for a quick gander at the latest news and a cyber cup of tea.

Leslie

Here I am, so you can put a face (and a bit more) with the name.