I find I am in good company.

I shall let #hackattack2012 pass without mention.

More exciting: The Heroine’s Bookshelf is a Bookperk featured deal! For a limited time, you can get the book in an exclusive package along with Jane Eyre and The Flight of Gemma Hardy for just $15. Check it out, and tell a friend—I couldn’t be in better company.

I'm as giddy as Diana after a few glasses of raspberry cordial!

At long last (or is it long?), the paperback of The Heroine’s Bookshelf has been published in paperback by Harper Perennial!  What does this mean for you (aside from a chance to buy stocking stuffers for the many bookish women in your life)? Why, giveaways, of course!

• Buried In Print is doing a fun giveaway of the book at her blog
• I’m honored to be participating in both #indiethursday and #fridayreads this week…chances to tweet with fellow book lovers, support indie book stores, and win a copy of my book!
• Bitch Magazine is running a contest on Friday
• AnneofGreenGables.com is gracious enough to host a daily trivia question and giveaway on their Facebook page…

…and that’s just the beginning! 

Prizes are currently being shipped to the winners of the Their Eyes Were Watching God readalong…my love of malls was exposed in my author interview with the Vail Daily…and there’s a lot more to come.

If this sound exhausting, it is. And it isn’t, because all of you are so supportive and awesome. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

As you may know, the paperback of The Heroine’s Bookshelf will be released by Harper Perennial on November 15, putting the book in some pretty illustrious company, including that of Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance writer who gave us Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Aside from Colette, it’s the book that’s least known by readers I’ve encountered, and it’s a quick, lush read that grapples with issues of religion, love, and coming home.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: The Readalong will take place on three consecutive Mondays starting November 28. The schedule is as follows: 

November 28: Chapters 1-6

December 5: Chapters 7-13

December 12: Chapters 14-20

Click to download a badge for your blog!

Best of all, Harper Perennial has generously offered to give away copies of Their Eyes Were Watching God to ten lucky readers before the readalong, and they’ll be providing some great Zora-related prizes during the readalong itself!

All you have to do to enter is comment below with your name and why you’re participating in the readalong.

As a fun bonus, if you tweet, blog, or Facebook post about the readalong, just drop me an email with a link to your post to have another entry thrown in the pile. You’ll increase your chance of winning and we’ll increase the chance of having another great readalong! 

Entries will close on Monday, November 14 to give Harper time to mail books to the winners.

Want to share on your blog? Click the small image for blog-ready badges to share!

So…who’s with me?

I’ve been incredibly fortunate with Harper, who took the time to ask me my thoughts about the original cover and made sure to get it right. 

The paperback is in the capable hands of Harper Perennial, which is known for their paperback editions of new and young fiction and non-fiction authors and their nail-it-every-dang-time editions of classic novels (including some that are featured in The Heroine’s Bookshelf). 

When my editor told me the paperback division wanted to take a stab at a new cover, I sucked in a deep breath.  But I love the first cover!  Uncertainty!  Strife!  But when the cover you see here was presented to me, I was overcome by not just relief, but a giddy feeling.  The paperback cover feels fresh, thrilling, and plenty booky.  Bonus:  it has gorgeous fonts AND a blurb from the fascinating and wonderful Wendy McClure, whose The Wilder Life is a can’t-miss for Laura Ingalls Wilder fans and those who want to know more about the Little House books. 

So…here it is! I hope you like it.  And I hope you’ll be around on November 15 to celebrate the paperback release. 

Click to enlarge.

Happy Monday!  Ish.  I do have happy news to report…The Heroine’s Bookshelf just got a Brazilian book deal! The book will be translated into Portuguese and sold as a trade paperback and ebook by Casa da Palavra within the next year or so.  Whoever would have thought that my little book would be available in Italian, Korean, and now Portuguese…? 

Other things of note: 

The Great Gone With the Wind Readalong presses on.  If you haven’t had a chance to participate in our Part 1 discussion yet, you can do so here. 

On a GWTW note, I was devastated to hear that How We Do Run On: A GWTW Scrapbook is closing down shop.  They’ve been ardent supporters of the blog and the book and their blog on the history and mastery of Gone With the Wind is truly one of the best on any topic I’ve ever encountered. 

Lest you think this blog is now all Gone With the Wind, all the time, I have another ending to report:  the ending of Bitch Magazine’s YA book club with a great discussion of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  I’m so thankful to Ashley at Bitch and my co-conspirators for making it a truly memorable and challenging project, and I encourage anyone who’s into feminist critiques of pop culture to check out Bitch and consider subscribing to the magazine.  

Finally, I’m really sad about the closing of Borders stores nationwide.  I’ve read lots of smack-talk about big-box stores over the last several weeks, and while I love my indie book store (huge shouts to Boulder Book Store, one of my favorite places on earth!), I think there’s room for more than one kind of retailer in the bookish landscape.  No matter what your opinion on Borders, I think we can all agree that its passing means big things for the publishing industry, the bookselling business, and the 11,000 or so passionate, bookish employees who now find themselves out of work.  So if you’re planning on attending one of those big liquidation sales, remember that Borders’ passing means a lot more than just a huge discount on your favorite book.  This concludes my random semi-rant

Notes from my first edit of The Heroine's Bookshelf. It was bad, people.

There are lots of things I never anticipated when I hit “send” on the manuscript I named and renamed silly things like “Fabulosity Squared” and “All-Around Documentness” just so I could get. through. writing.  Enough to fill another book entirely.

A three-event week, for example, mere days before the six-month anniversary of The Heroine’s Bookshelf.*

An amazing invitation that I’ll talk about later.  A really personally satisfying rights offer that will be disclosed in its good time.

Imagine my surprise when yesterday I was congratulated by one, two, then three other authors at the Englewood Public Library’s annual Meet The Faces Behind the Books Fair.  I was clueless, but gracious.  And then confused, but not for too long.

You see, the congratulations of my much savvier colleagues were followed by confirmation that The Heroine’s Bookshelf is one of three finalists for the non-fiction category of the Colorado Book Award!**

*jaw drops*
*blink*

I didn’t write my book for recognition.  I wrote it as a thank-you to the books that helped me get through life for so long and that still bolster my mood and my confidence on down days.  I wrote it because I couldn’t find the book I longed to read on my own shelf.

Recognition?  That’s a bunch of sprinkles on top of the cherry that’s already on top.  Completely unexpected…entirely satisfying.  On June 24, I’ll be in Aspen feeling nervous and excited for my own chance at recognition and the other nominees.  Until then, I’ll work on getting this jaw closed.

*which anniversary is tomorrow, and shall be celebrated apace!
**as announced on their Facebook page this Friday

However. Exciting things are afoot! Things like…
…being asked to be part of the first-ever Bitch Magazine YA Book Club. I’m asking the questions for the first reader-selected book: Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce. Join the discussion here!

…thinking about the 156th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s death. I’m knee-deep in Elizabeth Gaskell’s excellent (and excellently biased) biography of her friend, and loving every minute of it. A recent screening of the new Jane Eyre movie didn’t hurt either, and though I still mourn nobody portraying Bertha Rochester the way I imagine her and the apparent confusion about what “plain” could mean, I enjoyed it thoroughly. How did you commemorate Charlotte day?

…discovering new literary heroines, like Mildred Pierce and Miss Amy Balcourt of The Pink Carnation

…working on literary heroines of my own as I think about my next move.

April will be a fun month on this blog…I’m going to have a guest blogger and a fun celebration of The Heroine’s Bookshelf‘s six-month anniversary. Stay tuned!

Example:  News that my book was featured on both Vogue Italia (as “Obsession of the Day” – I’ve linked to the English version) and Elle Italy‘s websites and that La biblioteca delle donne, the Italian translation of The Heroine’s Bookshelf, was released by Orme in Italy and timed to coincide with International Women’s Day!

It was the first news I’d had of the Italian edition since the rights sold and my first glimpse of the awesome cover (click to enlarge), so you can imagine my excitement.

Those who know me well know that I’ve had a long-term obsession with fashion magazines…for better or for worse.  Suffice it to say that I am gushing, swooning, dying of fabulousness.  Dying.

Speak Italian?  Ready to be tickled by phrases like “la Blakemore” and “Da Rossella O’Hara”?  Here ya go:

• Fascinating slideshow on Elle Italy’s site, which features other books about women.  Great cover art, if I do say so myself.
• La Goccia
• Donna Moderna
• The first pages of the book in Italian [pdf, per 10 Righe dai libri]
• Tutto Libri’s women’s edition (scroll to page 3):

Tuttolibri n. 1755 (05-03-2011)

If you’ve read The Heroine’s Bookshelf, you’ll know that I come from San Diego, CA. I never felt self-conscious about my speaking voice until I started my first year at Smith College in Massachusetts (I shall leave out the period of time I lived in Germany, which was another kind of speaking anxiety altogether). When I got to Smith, I didn’t just hear a bunch of new accents…I realized I had one, and that it had a kind of class/intelligence implication to some of my schoolmates and teachers. I started to feel really nervous about the sound of my own voice, even though I’ve always been a big talker.

A decade later, I’m a bit more accepting of my voice. I’ve worked hard to eliminate “like” from anything but casual conversation. Cue many opportunities to speak. From book clubs to conferences to groups of interested parties (I just did a really fun workshop at the Boulder Writers Meetup and am thrilled to have been invited to speak to the Denver/Boulder Jane Austen Society tomorrow) to interviews (this just in from Blackstone Audio…a conversation with the narrator of my book, Tavia Gilbert), I am called upon not only to say something, but to have something to say. And I find that I really like it.

In a way, this is all about layers, self-confidence, and security. Speaking to a group is just as thrilling, terrifying and instructive as writing, and I always learn something about myself along the way. Something else I’ve learned, though, not only from a career of counseling and training clients, is that effective speaking is also about listening, so don’t be surprised if I ask you some questions during my talks.

I guess I never realized that I might have something interesting to say!

Favorite book moment of the week:

Literary challenge of the week:  Fear.  Yup…same old same old.  The cursor on the blank screen.  A half-baked idea itching to be refined and expressed.  My mantra:  I’m the only one who can do the work in front of me, and I have much support and many opportunities on the horizon.  After all, the scarier a piece of work is, the more deserving it is of my attention…right?  Right?  Besides, what better practice for The Glamour of Writing (Not): Romance and Writing In Spite of It All at the Boulder Writers Meetup? 

Review/testament of the week:  Tiffany says “I love love pink puffy heart love this book.”  Cue loving expression on my face.*

Current favorite “customers who bought this item also bought” pairing on Amazon: Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life, by Pamela Smith Hill.  Amazing.

This time ten years ago: I was rocking out as the lead singer of an indie rock band in Hollywood.  I am serious.  Oh, how things have changed…

Current personal heroine: Carlina White, the young woman who just found her birth parents after being abducted in a hospital when she was 19 days old.  Not only did she have the guts to doubt the lies she had been told about her life, but she found the courage and perseverance to actually act on those doubts.  23 years later, she’s been reunited with her parents and, I hope, will begin to tackle the task of reconstructing her life and self with the fortitude she showed in questioning her own identity.

*Wonder what the heck she’s talking about? Go to your local indie bookstore or buy The Heroine’s Bookshelf online and let me know what you think!