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.