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Author Archives: Janet Mullany

It’s the Baltimore Book Festival, hon

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Baltimore is a strange, quirky sort of city. It’s the birthplace of Betsy Bonaparte who married Napoleon’s brother Jerome. Napoleon was not amused. Poor Betsy never got a crack at being a European bigwig though her extremely French ooh la la fashion sense appalled the fashionable set of Washington. I blogged about it here.

Baltimore brought us the Star Spangled Banner (which I blogged about very recently), Edgar Allen Poe, John Waters, the endearment hon (pronounced in the very odd regional accent), The Wire, and many other strange and wonderful things. And every year it brings the Baltimore Book Festival and I’ll be talking and reading there tomorrow on the Maryland Romance Writers’ Stage. It’s a huge three-day event which takes place in the Mount Vernon district. Lots and lots of books, beer, writers, kids’ activities, readings, food, and many good things.

I’ll be on panels talking about vamps, erotic romance, and keeping the history in historical fiction. We have some terrific guests including local writers like Stephanie Draven, Laura Kaye, and Christie Kelley. My out of town friend Miranda Neville will be there with me tomorrow and my other buddy Pam Rosenthal will talk on Saturday evening. We’ll all read from our books which you’ll be able to buy on the spot courtesy of Ukazoo Books (Baltimore is also rich in indy book stores).

There will also be drawings and giveaways and a bunch of us who are talking about vampires on Friday are doing a gift basket that has various treasures packed into a True Blood lunch bag (I think it would put me off my lunch, but there you go)–books, chocolate, jewelry, and one of my Austen mugs. I hate being involved in chocolate-heavy events. I just know I’m going to absent mindedly eat it.

So if you’re in spitting distance of Charm City, please visit the Baltimore Book Festival. You’ll have a lot of fun.

If you had to plan a book festival, who would you invite?

 

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Nothing says hot romance….

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like a water buffalo!

This is a plea for help on my current blog tour which so far is a little too quiet and well-behaved. I’m publicizing Hidden Paradise and doing good by pledging $1 per comment to Heifer International, up to $250 which is the “price” of a water buffalo. I mean, what’s not to love? Big horns. Big snuffly nose. Cud chewing. You don’t get nearly enough cud chewing by heroes, let me tell you. Can you name a book where the hero chews his cud in a ruminating sort of way? I can’t.

You can also win some backlist books, so it’s a win-win all round. Here’s the full schedule, thanks to Goddess Fish.

Here are today’s posts at United By Books and Rachel Leigh Romance.

Please help me spread the word and check out my guest posts where there are excerpts and fascinating details of my life.

Thanks! And right now I’m off to JASNA on a bus and I hope I’ll have some pics to post next week. T

Posted in Giveaways | 1 Reply

JASNA in Brooklyn–Money, Sex & Power

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Last weekend I was in Brooklyn for the JASNA-AGM which is also a conference at which several hundred people get together and talk about Jane Austen. Weird? Absolutely. Some of us dress up for the ball on Saturday night. Some of us dress up all the time in different outfits and some of us cross-dress. There were also a few real men there too. The New York Times took some terrific pics which are much better than mine, so take a look here. As you can see we had a grand parade outside at night led by a fife and drum duo and there weren’t many people around but we enjoyed ourselves anyway.

Our plenary speaker was the amazing Cornell West who said (something like) philosophers seek the flame but Jane Austen is the fire. There were lots of great speakers including Anna Quindlen and William Deresiewicz, whose book A Jane Austen Education I’ve been longing to read and now own (signed!).

I was there as one of a subpanel of writers for a panel on publishing where we admired Penguin’s beautiful new Austen editions collaborating with graphic artists. There were shopping opportunities for books thanks to the very cool Jane Austen Books and here’s some of my loot–a fab pair of earrings and a tin of tea that was the official invite to next year’s JASNA in Minneapolis, based on Pride & Prejudice.

More pics–the view from my hotel window and a view from the Brooklyn Bridge–I played hooky to take a walk on Saturday afternoon in glorious weather. I liked Brooklyn a lot–some lovely buildings and lots of energy and nice friendly people.

I also got the chance to catch up with some of the Austen authors I know–here are Ann Herendeen, Karen Doornebos, and Cindy Jones, and here’s a great one of Ann in her gorgeous Regency finery. Sadly I didn’t get a pic of Karen in her pirate outfit. (Yes, there is an Austen connection, or so she said.)

Tomorrow I’m off again, this time to the New Jersey Put Your Heart in a Book Conference in Iselin, NJ, and if you’re in the neighborhood please stop by and meet me at the booksigning on Sat. afternoon. And please also stop by online and make me buy a waterbuffalo–my blog tour is ending soon and there is absolutely nothing to stop you signing at every single stop; in fact, please do. For every comment made I’m donating $1 to Heifer International up to $250, the price of a waterbuffalo. The whole schedule is here and today I’m visiting Carrie Ann Ryan and Kacey’s Connections.

So what have you been up to recently? Dressed up as a Regency lady or a pirate? Drunk much tea? Visited a wonderful neighborhood that was new to you?

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Autumn is here!

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In my area autumn began a month or so ago when the big oak tree outside my house began to drop acorns which ping continually on the roof and on our car and crunch underfoot. Not much in the way of tree color changes, since it hasn’t got cold enough, but there’s the occasional flash of color from an exposed maple, although not many leaves have fallen yet. The great autumn sock migration has begun, escaping from the washer/dryer so that of five pairs I now have five single socks that don’t match. Why is this? Must I declare sock amnesty and let them creep shamefacedly home, no questions asked?

What does fall mean to you? Start of a new episode, a semester, the beginning of holiday preparations? What’s it like where you live?

Here are a couple of favorite autumn poems. What are yours?

Ode to the West Wind by Shelley

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave,until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!   read more

 

Ode to Autumn by Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.   read more

And from the sublime to the supremely self promotional, you can win a copy of Jane and the Damned or Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion at Dark Jane Austen.

 

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Inglorious October 25

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Good morning/afternoon everyone. I’m recycling a blog post from October 25, 2007 today, the anniversary of two major battles, neither of which have anything to do with the Regency period.

In 1415, Henry V won the Battle of Agincourt, one of the attempts by England to get a foothold in France (and am I the only person who prefers the Olivier version over the Branagh film?).


And in 1854, thanks to bungled orders, political infighting among officers, and the famed stiff upper lip, the Charge of the Light Brigade took place, when the 13th Hussars charged directly into enemy guns during the Crimean War. As a French general commented, “C’est magnifique mais ce ne pas la guerre.” (Roughly translated as: it’s magnificent, but not war. Well, it sounds better in French.)

I’d hazard a guess that we remember these events by the two poets who immortalized them rather by the history. Here’s an excerpt from the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech by Shakespeare:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Tennyson, another master of the soundbite, immortalized the Charge of the Light Brigade, a peom that, if you are an English person of a certain age, you had drummed into you at school, or at least the more quotable bits of it:

Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

I wonder if we would remember these two events–the English tried for a couple more centuries to claim bits of France, but failed; and the famous Charge was a tactical blunder of monumental stupidity–if it weren’t for the poets.

And a reminder that the contest to win one of my books about Jane Austen as a vampire is still open at Dark Jane Austen. Now I must go and write. What are you up to today?

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