There is so much in the world at present that makes me sad. That fills me with rage. That reminds me of my smallness. That waves my fragility at me like a flag.
I never know whether I should write about those things here, whether it’s appropriate as a writer, and specifically as a writer of genre fiction. So as I ponder that, let me give you something that makes me happy.
In just over four weeks, Private Politics will be out. And it shows up in my preorders along with Joanna Bourne. Tee-hee.
I’m so excited about Private Politics‘ release that I’m going to give away one digital advanced reader copy–either .mobi or .epub format. We’ll keep things simple: just comment on this post and I’ll choose the winner at midnight EST next Friday, August 8. Limit one entry per person.
Remember: cuddly, beta hero. Smart, shoe-obsessed heroine. Sleazy lobbyists. Epic hugs. And the best chili dogs in the world.
(If you’re a reviewer, don’t forget it’s on NetGalley now.)
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So I numbered the entrants one to five (Kimberley, Justine, Leftcoaster, Bijal, and Emily) and the Random Number Generator spit out the number one. I’ve emailed Kimberley. And I’m so glad people are excited for the book! It’ll be out in less than a month now.
Private Politics just appeared on NetGalley!
I’m really proud of this book. It’s an opposites attract romance featuring a beta blogger hero and a socialite heroine who is going through some self reevaluation. He helps her investigate a scandal at her job and hijinks ensue. There’s corruption and money laundering, an epic hug and Mahler, and the (in my opinion) best first kiss I’ve written yet.
If you blog about or review contemporary romance and are interested in featuring or reviewing the book, doing an interview with me, running an excerpt, etc., please send me an email–author.emma.barry (at) gmail.com–and we’ll see if we can work something out. I’m limited in how many copies I can give out, but if you have a problem with your NetGalley request, or if you don’t use NetGalley, let me know.
For more information about the book, including the opening chapter, look here.
Hey there, cats and kittens! Private Politics will be out in just over a month. If you like beta heroes, lobbyists, heroines who are finding themselves, scandal, and Mahler, you should be very excited.
And you can read the first chapter just below the fold.
What follows is a random collection of jet-lag fueled thoughts meaning it’s even more random than normal. You’ve been warned.
Yesterday, Kaetrin wrote an essay on Dear Author about the problem of accumulation. She explores how the overrepresentation of certain kinds of people in romance shapes the genre by pushing writers toward certain tropes. There are by a factor of a thousand to one more dukes in romance than there were/are in real life, but if you’re writing, discoverability is a real issue–so do you choose to write the millionth duke romance or do you write a romance set in a Shaker community in antebellum America? Probably the duke.
(Aside: I desperately want to read a Shaker romance. Why are we so obsessed with the Amish? I mean, other than the fact that Shakers were celibate. And this leads to me asking for an asexual romance. Has anyone read either?)
It’s not an apolitical question. In the land of 10,000 dukes, lots of people are unrepresented or unrepresentable–and that matters in terms of who is being written out of history and for whose story seems to have subjectivity in the present. As Kate Sherwood pointed out in the comments, there’s a magnifying effect because readers and writers learn through their reading. They learn the tropes, thus making certain ideas de rigueur, but I think they also probably learn the worlds too.
Continue reading “Authenticity in Romance; or, The Land of 10,000 Dukes”
I’m happy today to participate in the cover reveal for Kat Latham‘s latest, Tempting the Player.
Yeah, the reason I signed up is a total mystery to me too.
Ahem. Somehow she gets the sexiest covers. Want to read the blurb and see some buy links? Or enter the giveaway? Follow me below the fold. Or you could just stay and stare at his…shoes.
I love words. Like a lot. I love reading them. I love writing them. I love talking to people about the words they’re writing and the words they wished they were writing and the words they might someday write. I have a number of word-related degrees and resume items. And I’m adding another: freelance editor.
If you’re interested, send me an email at author.emma.barry (at) gmail.com. Let’s talk about your words.
A vague and random series of thoughts, for which I apologize in advance.
I was emailing with someone this morning about the final book in my series about political staffers, The Easy Part, and I realized that the series is about me. It’s not about me in the sense that any of the heroines is based on me; nothing that happens in the books happened to me. But it is about my experience as an older Millennial coming to political consciousness in the late 90s.
I’ve written before about how many of my early memories are political, but I think I’ve also been working through the later stuff. What does it mean to come to political consciousness during the age of Clinton? To vote for the first time in the election of 2000? (Which is both why I always vote and why I’m deeply cynical about the process.) To fall for a candidate–either George Bush or Barack Obama–and then to watch him either fail to implement the vision he articulated during the campaign at all or to seriously compromise his values?
I don’t think Millennials are unique in this regard. Surely younger Baby Boomers who voted for the first time in the late 1960s, witnessed Vietnam and then Watergate followed by the cynical 1970s had a parallel development among other generations. But the blend of hope and cynicism in all of The Easy Part novels and the looking for personal and professional compromise that occurs in all of those books feels of this moment to me in a way that I didn’t realize until now.
I don’t mean to be pretentious about my work at all. But now that I’ve finished a series and am starting to plan another one, I can see what I’m writing about in a way I couldn’t before.
Today, Crimson Romance’s Time after Time bundle released. It includes my American Civil War-set romance Brave in Heart. And the entire bundle, ten complete books, is only 99 cents!
It’s a good set to get if you like unusual historicals. Four of the titles are set in the US, one in the Caribbean. The other five are Western European–but one of those involves Vikings!
Brave in Heart is part second-chance-at-love story and part searing war memoir, a fast-paced but true-to-period historical romance about change and forgiveness, bravery and loss, and finding the strength to act.
My complete list of reasons to read it is here, but it’s a short, angst-y, unusual historical. Also there are lots of love letters. If that’s not inducement enough, might I remind you that Brave in Heart was a top pick at Romantic Historical Lovers. It made Miss Bates cry. And lots of readers found it too steamy (say it isn’t so!).
If you’re a romance reviewer who didn’t review Brave in Heart last summer–which is to say most reviewers–and you’re interested in the book, let me know.
And if I’ve convinced you to give my book and the entire bundle a try, here are the buy links:
Amazon | B&N | Crimson | iBooks | Kobo | All Romance | Google Play | Goodreads
The publisher’s blurb and links to each of the books are after the fold.
This is a quasi-follow-up to this post–at least the part about the American literary canon. I’ve been thinking about my books’ American-ness and wanted to put that into a historical context. But I’m going to start with a digression about publishing history.
It has always been difficult to make a living as a writer. Prior to the nineteenth-century, it was all but impossible with the notable exception of Shakespeare and a handful of others who managed to obtain patrons. But these guys proved the rule: most writers were wealthy folks, almost exclusively men, who pursued writing as a hobby. They didn’t need to make money and for the most part, they didn’t.
Books themselves were expensive until new printing processes and paper manufacturing developments lowered the price in the late 19th century. The circulation figures for 17th and 18th century texts are generally small. Additionally, difficulty transporting goods meant that book markets were largely regional. But even for a given local printer, it didn’t make sense to invest a lot of money to obtain a manuscript.
Emma Barry 