I, along with many readers, have been frustrated with the challenges caused by the title changes of my books. Some readers have accidentally purchased a second copy of the same book under a different title, and are understandably annoyed. Unfortunately, I have no control over the name changes, which are determined by my publisher, so the only thing I can do is to keep repeating the information about the title changes in hopes that more people will know about it. In that spirit, here's the current summary:

The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice = Pemberley by the Sea
To Conquer Mr. Darcy (August 2010) = Impulse & Initiative
Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World = The Last Man in the World
What Would Mr. Darcy Do? (spring 2011) = From Lambton to Longbourn

For the sake of completeness, there is also the unpublished POD book The Rule of Reason = Alternative version of Impulse & Initiative which is only available at lulu.com. Without Reserve and By Force of Instinct will eventually be released with new titles, but I don't yet know what they are.

There's a Facebook group Pride & Prejudice Fanfiction Fans which has a running discussion thread about the title changes for lot of different writers. It's worth checking before you buy. I also announce title changes at the Pemberley Variations Facebook fan page and on my own Facebook page, and I happily accept friend requests from readers!

Again, I'm sorry for the confusion about titles. I just wish I had some way to let everyone know!

So, my New Year's resolution was to be more regular about my blog posts. You now know how good I am at keeping New Year's resolutions! Anyway....

I attended a writing workshop this morning on world-building, courtesy of the local chapter of the Romance Writers of America. I wasn’t sure how much would be applicable for me, since the worlds I write aren’t my invention: Regency England, which I try to keep historically accurate, and modern-day Woods Hole, which actually exists. But even with the most reality-based settings, writers still have to pick out which important facts about the setting and the society to highlight, which becomes world-building of a sort. It made me realize that I use different worlds even in my Pemberley Variations, which take place in the same years, same locations, and even the same characters.

In Impulse & Initiative, Regency England is a fairly light-hearted place. There aren’t any poor people except a few servants who are quite contented with their lot, nobody gets seriously ill, and I blithely ignore the harsher realities of Regency life. It’s the Victorian view of the pre-industrial Regency as an age of perfect innocence. Well, there’s innocence and then there’s innocence, as it were, but most of us have inherited that quite fallacious view that the Regency was a perfected version of the Victorian hyper-moral universe, when actually it was quite decadent and far from innocent. Mr. Darcy’s Obsession, which comes out this fall, is the story of what happens when Darcy, who believes he lives in the easy world of Impulse & Initiative, discovers he actually lives in a superficial society that builds its pleasures on the back of other people’s pain, where good birth is conidered of vastly more importance than good morals, and that he’s going to have to make some choices about whether to continue to pretend that everything is fine or to pay the price of publicly disagreeing with the status quo. Being Darcy, he of course makes the right decision, with some assistance from Elizabeth. But it’s a completely different world. The joys are different and the conflicts are different.

I’ve always thought of my Pemberley Variations as each highlighting different personality aspects of the characters created by Jane Austen. Impulse & Initiative Elizabeth is the traditional modern view of an arch and witty Elizabeth, whereas the Elizabeth in Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World is the Elizabeth who knows how to bite her tongue when the situation requires and has occasional periods of depression – all of which is described by Austen in Pride & Prejudice. It just depends on which parts you pay attention to. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that my worlds have changed as I’ve learned more about life in Regency England, the things Austen assumed her readers would know but which modern readers for the most part miss. Austen could refer in passing to Elizabeth’s periods of depression because that was a common and expected state for women then, so there was no need to dwell on it. The readers would fill in those blanks themselves. But we, as modern victims of the Victorian rewriting of Regency society, end up missing the significance of those brief references.

But none of this means that the world I built in Impulse & Initiative is in any way superior or inferior to the world of Mr. Darcy’s Obsession, because it’s all fiction. That’s sometimes a little hard to remember, especially when I get hung up in historical detail, but it’s more important for fiction to be convincing than absolutely accurate. Mr. Darcy’s Obsession takes place in a more historically accurate world, but I’ve still made it a happier place than it probably was, and it makes Darcy shine like a beacon of hope. The darker world shows the characters in brighter relief.

I've been so busy guest blogging and doing interviews on the virtual tour for the release of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World (at bookstores now!) that I've been neglecting this blog. But here are some links to the blogs I'm visiting:

~~Savvy Verse and Wit review and interview (and a lovely review it is!)

~~Interview at The Book Tree

~~Guest post at The Burton Review about how I choose scenes for my variations

~~Guest blog at Love Romance Passion about finding new aspects of the characters of Elizabeth and Darcy to explore

Tomorrow I'll be blogging at Fresh Fiction about my life, writing process and routine. I'll have another round of these each week this month. I don't think I've done so much non-fiction writing since college, but it's been fun. Thanks to all the bloggers who have hosted me!

Today I received my first copies of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World and was about to write about that, but then I got distracted by some old photographs of Russia in 1909-1912. In color. Not tinted. They were taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii with a color separation technique he invented using glass plates. The colors had long since leached out, but modern computer graphics wizards figured out a way to restore them. Voila - color photographs of pre-revolutionary Russia. Very cool, I thought, but I expected them to look like the usual tinted daguerrotypes. They didn't. It's very disconcerting. They look just like modern color photographs of a different time, but my brain tells me that can't be true. Russia in 1909 was in black and white - we all know that.

I'll show you a few examples, though to really appreciate them I suggest you go to the Library of Congress exhibit web site where you can click on the images to see full-size versions. Here's the photographer himself:
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The spa at Ekaternin Springs, probably not much different from what Elizabeth Bennet would have seen a hundred years earlier:

Lots of people have obsessed over anachronistic details in the 1995 TV adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, one of which is that Darcy's second proposal takes place in front of a cornfield whose straight rows show it was planted by modern machinery. I thought of that when I saw this picture of agricultural fields in Samarkand. No straight lines need apply!

These pictures make me feel profoundly disoriented. I expect photographs of different eras to be either blurry black and white but authentic, or sanitized color modern recreations where everything is seen through the filter of present-day styles and expectations. You can tell a regency-set film from the 1980s from one in 2005 because they each appeal to ideas of beauty common then.

It makes me think about my own mental images of Regency life. I've taught myself to imagine the smells, the dirt, the poverty of the era, but this makes me realize that I'm still imposing a movie type of sensibility over my own images. I can't subtract all my own expectations from it. Imagine Charlotte Lucas missing some of her teeth - not at all unlikely - but in my mental images everyone has all their teeth. After looking at these pictures, I've decided to try to create a regency color photograph in my mind. It makes me wonder about a lot of my regency writing.

I’ve been putting off writing a post, hoping that I’d have some news to report soon, and finally I do. I met with my editor ten days ago, and on Monday she filled me in on her grand scheme for my books. The big news is that she is buying Bounds of Decorum. It’s going to be a busy year for me, according to her. She’s scheduled Pemberley by the Sea and Impulse & Initiative to come out in mass market editions next spring, probably under different titles. Meantime, Bounds of Decorum will come out in trade paper in Fall 2010 along with a bookstore release of From Lambton to Longbourn, followed by By Force of Instinct and Without Reserve in Spring of 2011. By then, she hinted delicately, she expects me to have a new book for her. She hasn’t read Morning Light yet, so no news on that front. I have to finish copyedits for Last Man in the World this week, then I go straight into revisions for Bounds of Decorum and From Lambton to Longbourn.

So what’s next on the actual writing front? I’ve started plotting out a sequel to Bounds of Decorum which will follow the romantic adventures of Mary and Georgiana, with appearances by Mr & Mrs Darcy, Aunt Augusta, Charlie, the evil Earl, and two new original characters. Mary and Georgiana serve as natural foils for each other, and they each find love where they don’t expect it.

I’ve been stymied in the Woods Hole Quartet for a while. I have two books half-written, both with substantial flaws, but I had to get away from them for long enough to discover what the flaws were. In the first, Uncharted Waters, I tried to write a different kind of female protagonist, and it didn’t work. What kind of different? She wasn’t sassy, basically, and she ended up being a bit depressing, and her happy ending was largely about things other people did for her than what she accomplished for herself. A perfectly valid character, but not one I can write well, as it turns out. After trying to find ways to adjust the character, I finally realized I need to scrap her entirely and rebuild from scratch.

I’ve blogged about the other new modern before. I really like the story, but it suffers from boring characters. My characters in other books all had jobs they felt passionate about, not something practical to put bread on the table, which is where these two were. Now I have them each developing some new interests and friendships, and I’ll see if that helps. Although set on Cape Cod, I’d intended it to be separate from the Woods Hole Quartet, but the Woods Hole characters seem to keep showing up anyway. Maybe the quartet will have to become a quintet. As for the final book, it’s purely in my head at this point.

I think that should keep me busy for quite some time. Stay tuned for information about an online Austenfest with interviews and free book giveaways!