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Monthly Archives: May 2008

Diane Report:

Number of pages written since past rant of two weeks ago: I have no idea
Daily average: I have no idea
Daily goal: totally not met
Number of pages to go: 139
New Daily Goal: 20 pages
New Deadline: June 16 (I broke down and asked for 2 more weeks)

Megan’s talk of organizing bookshelves got me to wishing for time to organize mine. I’m still in crazy mode of writing (see above) which automatically increases my desire to organize my bookshelves. I believe the urge will pass as soon as the book is turned in.

Speaking of bookshelves, I was in my local Borders Express recently and again got burned up. They shelve the Romance novels against the side wall, floor to ceiling. This makes it impossible for a woman of average height (me) to reach or even see the top shelves, and nearly as difficult to reach what is on the bottom. There is a stool nearby to climb on to reach the top shelf but even I am wary of falling. It is far easier to confine my search to books within easy reach.

This means, of course, that authors such as Gaelen Foley and Elizabeth Hoyt were unreachable and thus were less likely to sell.

When I first encountered this new shelving, the cashiers told me it was a corporate decision. Whoever made the decision certainly did not think it through that it was possibly not a good idea to make the best-selling genre hard to reach, especially when women are the most likely purchasers and most likely to be too short to reach the top shelves. “You can ask a cashier to help,” I was told, but when was the last time you saw cashiers wandering around the bookstore waiting to climb up on a stool for you? And would you be likely to ask them to browse the shelves for you? What’s more, some romance readers like to browse with a little more privacy, not out in plain view so everyone in the store can see you are looking at books with “man-titty” covers (as Janet would call them).

I can see it all now…the stores will sell fewer romance novels and will thereby convince the corporate decision-makers that romance novels are not selling as well as they used to. Then they will decrease the shelf space for romance novels and order fewer of them, thereby making the sales go down even more.

When I first saw this I asked the cashiers for a phone number to call to complain. They gave me a corporate number, they said, but it was a wrong phone number. This time I didn’t bother to ask because the unhappy-looking cashier who waited on me had been reading “Resumes for Dummies” and I supposed he didn’t want to hear me rant about romance novels.

Has anyone else encountered shelving like this? What do you think is most conducive to selling romance novels?
And (totally self-serving question) does shelving Harlequin Historicals in with the other Harlequin series books make it easier to find them or more difficult?

On this Memorial Day take a moment from your fun and remember all soldiers who dedicated their lives to their country — like my father!)


This week seems to have been All About Love in my world! Love of all sorts. Love of the start of summer, of warm weather, sundresses, cookouts, hammocks, concerts in the park. Love of Starbucks Green Tea Frappucino, and re-reading old favorites (like I Capture the Castle and Middlemarch).

Love of weddings! My baby brother was married off last week to a woman who is kind, thoughtful, smart, and pretty, and their wedding was a joyful occasion. Laid-back and relaxed (after months of stressful planning, of course!), with lots of music, good food, and margaritas. Now I fear she is stuck with him, and the rest of us McCabes, forever! (I will post pictures next week…)

Love of a new perfume. Among the samples I ordered after reading Perfumes: The Guide was Guerlain’s Apres L’Ondee. It was described as having the delicate, tender scent of a garden after a rainstorm, and it does! It’s delicious, and actually smells good on me (a rarity). Love at first smell. Sadly, my new love us elusive. It’s no longer imported into the US, so when I go to Europe this fall I am tracking it down.

And love of writing! In the course of researching my latest Bath-set WIP, I found out you can actually get married at the Pump Room. How much fun would that be?? (As long as you didn’t make the guests toast with the water…)

You can also get married at the Brighton Pavilion. While I would wear a white muslin dress at the Pump Room, maybe with a little veiled bonnet, at the Pavilion I would go with something grander. Lace and velvet with a train, and a big tiara!

Or there is Hever Castle, family home of Anne Boleyn. The grand Tudor hall is available only in the winter months, so I can picture a white satin 1530s gown, with fur-lined sleeves and a pearl and crystal trim.

And last but not least, you can make a run for Gretna Green! Yes, you can actually elope (well, elope after considerable paperwork) over the border to an all-inclusive wedding chapel. I think they even have an anvil. Not sure what I would wear for this one, but it sure looks like fun!

What are you in love with this week? Which of these wedding choices would you go with?

Okay, so I freely admit to being a little compulsive when it comes to certain things: I won’t start reading a book unless I have a bookmark in hand. And it can’t be just any bookmark; the bookmark has to suit the book, using my own idiosyncratic categorization system (IOW, mystery bookmarks do not get put with mysteries; it’s far more complicated than that).

So I know it’s a little nutty to be so obsessive about the way the books are organized, but I am, and they are. I spent some time a few weeks ago getting *my* books in order. My father-in-law, a former contractor, built me a bookshelf specially for my paperbacks, and he accommodated my heinous habit of double-stacking. I had thrown the books in there when I first got the shelf, and only now have gotten to organize it the way I wanted to.

But now? Now is BLISS!

I’m posting pictures, which is really about as exciting as seeing stills of someone singing, but IT’S WHAT I’M BLOGGING ABOUT, PEOPLE! Which might say something about how exciting this topic is also, but I digress.

So I organized these pbs not alphabetically, but in a more Frampton-specific fashion: Friends (Myretta Robens, Carolyn Jewel, Tracy MacNish, Meljean Brook, Colleen Gleason) are at eye-level with Loretta Chase (an annual dinner friend) and Eloisa James (a ‘gave me a blurb, says hi at conferences’ friend). The Riskies‘ books are, of course, mixed in there also but that darn Jane Lockwood had to come out in trade pb, which screwed me up a little. I know there are more friends up there, but that is off the top of my head. As everything is.

Anne Stuart‘s books are both back and front because I think I must have about sixty of them, and I am KEEPING them ALL!

Books I want to read are in front, keepers are in the back. Collections are always together–Lee Child, Bernard Cornwell, Mary Balogh–regardless of whether I’ve read them all or just some.

And the reward? Every time I look at my bookcase, it feels like a little piece of zen is unleashed in my heart. I cannot overstate just how delightful and amazing it is to have space for the books, and that they are put away just the way I like them (the last pic is of non-romance, since I have a sizeable noir bleeding into gritty mystery collection, too).

Do you organize your books? How do you do it? Do you think about it a lot, or just have “R” and “TBR” piles?

Megan

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First off, some news. The Rules of Gentility won the 2008 HOLT Award for Best Romantic Comedy, woohoo! I have a lovely silver wotsit that I think would look cool on the xmas tree.

Next is that I have sold a novella for an anthology tentatively titled Bespelling Jane, paranormal takes on Jane Austen, with the following Big Girls: Mary Balogh, Susan Krinard, and Colleen Gleason! All I know at the moment is that it will be published by Harlequin sometime in the future, and mine is a contemporary take on Emma. Since I haven’t written it yet, I can’t tell you a whole lot more…

Here are some pics of my visit to England a couple of weeks ago, me with my brother Martin, my nephew Tom and his lovely girlfriend Sam, at a pub overlooking the Avon Gorge and Brunel’s famous Clifton suspension bridge.

And I wondered what everyone was reading these days. I’ve just read two superb books. Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin is about a female forensic doctor, set in twelfth century England. Yes, it sounds unlikely but it’s so well done I had very few come on! moments. (Sorry, I still don’t believe that there was a Body Farm in Sicily using pig carcasses when most of the doctors were Jewish.) It’s beautifully written, and the dialogue is amazing–the characters don’t speak in pseudo-medieval talk, but Franklin captures both a believable local dialect and the speech of churchmen and crusaders.

The other one is Saturday by Ian McEwan (who wrote Atonement), about one day–on the eve of the Iraq invasion–in the life of a surgeon and his family. His son is a blues musician and his daughter Daisy a poet, and I liked this passage, which defines the achievement of this wonderful book:

But is there a lifetime’s satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it’s one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a Spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel.

What have you read and enjoyed recently?

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