HelenKay Dimon

My first ever stack of cover flats arrived in the mail today. All 75 of them. What an amazing thing. Seeing my name on the cover of a book and holding it in my hand, well, it feels even better than I imagined it would.

While I can’t imagine it right now, there could come a time in the future when these firsts don’t mean as much as they do now. So, in celebration of the moment, I made a vow to hold on to this excitement. To remember the shock of The Call and the tiny punch of adrenalin that hits me whenever my editor says yes to a new idea. To remember the seemingly permanent smile on my face when I saw my first cover copy and when I opened that envelope last night and held the real thing.

Parts of this business suck - the waiting, the rejection, the insecurity. All those. But the good stuff is pretty damn good.

The New York Times has named the 100 Notable Books Of The Year. Uh-huh, page through that list and see how many you’ve read. Notice all the nonfiction choices. Kind of makes me wonder why people keep saying nonfiction is dead. Looks like it’s alive and kicking at the NYT.

Somehow the NYT missed two compelling books when putting this list together. I am, of course, talking about the competing works of Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton. According to Entertainment Weekly, Hilton’s book Your Heiress Diary has the following stellar quote: “One of my heroes is Barbie.” Not to be outdone, Richie’s book The Truth About Diamonds includes this: “I always thought Lanny was nice to a San Andreas fault.”

Wow. What were the NYT editors thinking in skipping these two.

Everyone has reading pet peeves. Those things that make your head spin. For example, I want to scream every single time I see the word “sinewy” in a romance novel. Don’t know why. It’s a legitimate word. Just bugs the hell out of me. In this article, the reader issue is repetitive word use. My favorite example is:

Another phrase I’ve noticed popping up in romance novels is the ‘over-stuffed armchair’. To be honest, I’m not even sure what an over-stuffed armchair looks like. Is a chair like this so bad that polyester filling oozes from its insides? Do customers have a right to complain if they have purchased an ‘over-stuffed armchair’?

Some of this may blend into voice. Using the same syntax and same sentence structures sound more like style to me, but the point is the same - the stuff we write over and over again annoys readers. As a reader, I do notice repetitive word use. It tends to break the rhythm and drag me out of the story. Knowing this as a reader, I still make the mistake as a writer. I have a tendency to start sentences with “Problem was…” or something similar. I have the perfect solution for this issue: my cp. Yeah, in the great “Do I Need A Critique Partner” debate, I’d put this in the pro column. Like the readers who will go after her, she notices the stuff I don’t - all the character eye rolling and the shrugging. Not sure about the armchair thing, but now I’ll be looking for it.

Over the last year RWA (Romance Writers of America) came under scrutiny for some of the - let’s just say it - dumbass choices the Board made concerning book covers and the definition of romance. Stuff the organization should not have touched, in my view, because it’s an organization designed to serve and support it’s members, not to look for ways to alienate them. Most people blamed the then-President of RWA - something that was easy to do since she tended to make rather strange comments in what seemed (I hope) to be a unilateral fashion.

The Year Of Acting And Talking Without Thinking ended with controversial Saturday night award festivities at the yearly conference in Reno. I attended the conference but can’t comment on the ceremony because, well, I was off gambling with my hubby. Figured this was my one and only time in Reno, so I may as well lose some money there as a sort of donation to the good people of Nevada.

The 2005 mess offended many long-time members, including the Queen Mother member, Nora Roberts. Some talked about not renewing memberships. Others wrote nasty grams on blogs and elsewhere. Seems to me people are free to take whatever they want from the 2005 RWA debacle. Leave if you want, Stay if you want. For me RWA has been a source of inspiration in the sense that while trying to get published, each year I would lose steam, then the conference would roll around and I’d get a much-needed kick in the butt and push forward again. And, of course, when the conference ventured to cool places like Chicago (my first conference) and NYC, it served as a handy excuse for writing-related trips.

RWA throws around a lot of statistics. This one from Publishers Weekly is the most telling:

While Romance Writers of America boasts 9,500 members, only about 1,600 of them have published books.

I don’t know if that’s how other writing groups (mystery, science fiction, etc.) work or not. RWA may be alone in catering - mostly - to unpublished writers. But, it does offer some hope for those wanting to break in:

The conference offers editors and agents a chance to showcase themselves and to check out the talent. But it’s no free-for-all. “The casual writer probably doesn’t get to talk to me,” says Harlequin/ HQN executive editor Tracy Farrell. Still, there are occasional Hollywood-and-Vine type discoveries at the conference. Pam Spengler-Jaffee, director of publicity for paperbacks at Avon/Morrow, recalls that two years ago at the RWA conference during a panel on ethnic chick lit “an author raised her hand and said, ‘I’ve got this romance and I’ve been hearing it’s too Latino or not Latino enough. Do you have any advice?’ The Avon editor on the panel said, ‘Yes, send it to me.’ That author was Mary Castillo, who’s now one of our rising stars.”

Shauna Summers, now a senior editor at Bantam, first met author Tina St. John in a group appointment at an RWA conference before acquiring her historical romances for Ballantine/Ivy, but Summers cautions, “It’s not about meeting me. It’s about the quality of the material.” She didn’t recall having met St. John until after the writer was under contract. And agent Steven Axelrod at the Axelrod Agency met his current client LaVyrle Spencer at an RWA conference. The organization promotes professionalism, he says, and “creates an orderly playing field” among the writers.

Bet Tina St. John and Mary Castillo think RWA has something to offer. My guess is those cases prove the exception, not the rule. But, really, who the hell cares. A chance is a chance. When you’re looking to get published, you reach for whatever reasonable opportunity is out there.

[UPDATE: Lee Goldberg has a take on this story today, too.]

Chick lit means different things to different people. One group is of the designer clothes, city gals and Sex In the City mindset. Others fall into the way of thinking that goes: Look, more shallow crap wrapped in pink cotton candy-looking covers.

Apparently there’s another school of thought in chick lit land. According to this article the new chick in town is the religious chick. I haven’t read any, but just know that there is a subgenre out there that marries chick lit and inspirational romance.

What makes chick lit Christian? More than anything else, it’s the heroines’ cardinal rule. “Everything in a secular book is in a Christian book, just in a different order,” said Judy Baer, author of “The Whitney Chronicles,” a popular example of the form. “In secular books characters meet, have sex, then try and be friends. In Christian books, they meet, become friends, get married, then have sex.”

Just because the books have been liberated from religious book stores, however, does not mean that anything goes. Bridget Jones counts “units” of alcohol consumption, profanity and sexual conquests like an unholy trinity. Christian heroines generally don’t drink or curse. They may, however, be born again or have had premarital sex. Many also admit to feelings of desire.

Learn something new every single day. The more chicks the merrier.

When I think of Jay McInerney, I think of Bright Lights, Big City. And it will always be so. His new book aims to change that. McInerney describes his upcoming release The Good Life as a love story.

I should add straight up that it’s a story of illicit love, of two characters in midlife, both of whom are married, albeit unhappily, and both of whom have children.

So, we have infidelity and a midlife crisis. Sounds like a guy’s view of romance to me.

As part of McInerney’s newfound love of romance literature, he named the Twelve Best Literary Novels of Love:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
2. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
3. Emma by Jane Austen
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
6. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
10. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
11. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
12. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Interesting list. I’m struck by how many of these novels - novels many of us view as some of the greatest love stories of all time - have very unhappy endings. Adds new meaning to suffering for love.

Walter Mosley made an appearance in The Washington Post Book World on Sunday in the form of an article instead of a book review. He talked about how, when he started writing, well-established writers gave him two pieces of advice: keep politics out of fiction and remember poetry is an inaccessible form of writing. In other words, stay away from both.

Mosley disagrees. He says:

The advice I was given by all those well-meaning people made sense if my goals as a writer were to develop a large audience and make great gobs of money. There are many writers who have those goals.

But the truth is: If you want to make money, go into real estate. The most successful writer’s income is nothing compared to the wealth of a modern-day land baron. One office building in Soho could buy the careers of at half-a-dozen successful writers.

The acquisition of wealth should not be our primary goal. nor should greater and greater numbers of readers. The foremost goal on our minds should be to create a story that is true to its own world view.

Words, sentence, paragraphs - these are our basic tools and ultimate means of gratification. Metaphors, similes, rhyme and meter, symbols and line-breaks, even the elusive epiphany - these are the instruments of a writer’s success. And of a poet’s.

I’m a huge Mosely fan. Have been for a long time. His words flow in the article as they do in his books - smooth and natural, with a subtle cadence that hypnotizes. He’s gifted. But, I have to wonder if this is the kind of statement that’s easy for a writer of his stature to make and difficult for others to sell. He’s experienced financial success and critical acclaim for his work. Maybe it’s “easy” for him to talk about the need to write for something other than money because he’s earned a substantial living from his writing.

His points about the role of a writer go like this:

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink. If writing was always only a good adventure with a teary or cherry ending, books would not be worth the effort to read or to write.

It comes down to this: Writing novels requires an obsession with our truths. Those truths are not put into novels for witnesses but for co-conspirators. The good novelist knows that Truth is always accompanied by its silent partner: Guilt. She knows that our humanity makes us responsible for events that transpire in this world. She knows, too, that we’re not willing to accept the blame. We don’t see our culpability even though it’s our dollars being spent, our God we prefer above all others, our own image in that silvered mirror that becomes our standard for beauty and innocence. The novelist has the potential to shine light on these blind sides. But, she must do it deftly, with a sharp beam. Blindside a reader, and you forfeit everything.

Publishers Lunch included this book sale announcement on Saturday:

Kayla Perrin’s GETTING EVEN, in which three women plot delicious revenge on the men who have betrayed them — a younger generation’s “First Wives Club” with more sex and no plastic surgery, to Susan Pezzack at Harlequin’s Spice, for publication in May 2006, by Helen Breitwieser at Cornerstone Literary (world). hb@cornerstoneliterary.com

Perrin has sold a lot of books, so that’s not where I’m going with this. My only point is that this one is to Harlequin Spice. I heard about this Line when Harlequin first announced the plan but haven’t heard much since. I’m thinking this is the first book sale announcement I’ve seen, at least in some time, for Spice. I’ve seen several sales for Kensington’s new erotica imprint and a few for Berkley Heat. Spice seemed to fall off the radar. Sounds as if it’s up and running for 2006.

I usually prefer B&N to Amazon. Not anymore. Amazon is now my favorite book-selling venue ever. See, Amazon actually has the book cover up and includes my name as one of the authors.

Now, there’s still something freaky going on. You search for me on Amazon and and you get,well, nothing. Nothing. But, for some reason, if you search for Lori Foster, then look at what she has coming up, then go through a few more steps - I’m right there. Don’t even ask how I figured it out. Suffice to say I’m now convinced I need medication.

The rank (as of this minute) is 45,377. You get 33 reward points for ordering. I have no idea what that means but go pre-order your 40 copies. Now. If you don’t the rank probably will drop to 300,000-ish. Do your part to keep the number respectable.

Ever buy a book because you thought an author’s backstory was that interesting? It happens to me now and then. The most recent was Krya Davis. The fact I liked her book’s cover blurb didn’t hurt either.

Yesterday I stumbled across a book I might not normally pick up and buy. Then I googled the author. Now I want to meet her. Her name is Cupcake Brown - yes, that’s her real name. You’ve probably heard of her. Somehow I missed out on her story. She is an author, lawyer and former 11 year-old prostitute. Her story is amazing. One of those that makes me wonder why I spend half my day whining. Her book is A Piece Of Cake and it comes out in February. Publishers Weekly describes it as this:

Cupcake Brown (that’s her real name) was 11 in 1976 when her mother died. Custody of Brown and her brother was given to a stranger—their birth father—who only wanted their social security checks. He then left them with an abusive foster mother who encouraged her nephew to rape Brown repeatedly. Brown got better and better at running away. A prostitute taught her to drink, smoke marijuana and charge for sex. Her next foster father traded her LSD and cocaine for oral sex. Eventually she went to live with a great-aunt in South Central L.A., where she joined a gang. Almost 16, having barely survived a shooting, she decided to quit gangbanging. Drugs were her new best friends. A boyfriend taught her to freebase, but then there was crack, which was easier. Before long she was a “trash-can junkie,” taking anything and everything. It wasn’t until she woke up behind a Dumpster one morning, half-dressed and more than half-dead, that she admitted she needed help. Brown conveys this all in gritty detail, and her struggle to come clean and develop her potential—she’s now an attorney with a leading California firm and a motivational speaker—ends her story on a high note. Booksellers, watch out—Cupcake’s gonna sell like hotcakes. (On sale Feb. 28)

Oprah praised her, but I missed it. She’s involved in finding shelter and assistance for teenage prostitutes. She has very impressive legal credentials.

Kind of feel left out that I hadn’t heard of her before, but am happy I have now.