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For the sake of completeness, there is also the unpublished POD book The Rule of Reason = Alternative version of Impulse & Initiative which is only available at lulu.com.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!

I'm so hopeless! When I read all your wonderful comments, it made me want to give you all copies of my book, so I decided to pull three names out of the hat instead of two. Congratulations, Susan, Evangeline, and Alice for winning autographed copies of The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice. For the rest of you lovely commenters, I have a consolation prize of an unpublished Pemberley Variation short story that I'll be happy to e-mail to you. I even have a consolation prize for peope who didn't comment - tomorrow I'm going to post the newly revised and lengthened first chapter of the book formerly known as From Lambton to Longbourn, and I'd tell you what title it's going to be published under in Spring 2011 except they've already changed it three times and I can't keep up.

I'll try to get the short stories out tomorrow as well. Susan, Evangeline, and Alice, please email me your addresses and I'll mail out your copies! There'll be another giveaway in a couple of months for To Conquer Mr. Darcy. Thanks for taking part!

The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice (the mass market release of Pemberley by the Sea under a new title*) has reached the bookstores! It's a modern tale based on Pride & Prejudice set in the seaside village of Woods Hole, with a marine biologist as the heroine. It's been garnering good reviews, including one at Austenesque Reviews. I'm celebrating by raffling off two autographed copies to lucky readers. If you'd like to be entered in the drawing, leave a comment on this post. If you post a link to the contest on your own blog, Facebook, or Twitter, that gives you an additional entry. I'll draw the names on May 17.

Meantime, I'm going through the galleys for To Conquer Mr. Darcy (formerly Impulse & Initiative), and I've set a goal for finishing revisions to the newest Pemberley Variation by the end of May. Stay tuned for excerpts!

*My publisher is on a re-titling binge with Jane Austen-related fiction (mine and many other authors as well). It's beyond the author's control, but no writer wants you to buy their book under false pretenses. I strongly suggest checking book descriptions before buying new books to avoid paying money for something you've already read.

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.

This week is Austenfest at Brant Flakes, the blog of talented writer Marilyn Brant whose new novel, According to Jane, will be coming out this fall. She has interviewed several writers of Jane Austen-related books, including Syrie Jones (The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen), Kim Wilson (Tea with Jane Austen, In the Garden with Jane Austen), Laurie Viera Riegler (Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict) and me, and she'll be posting all those interviews this week with free copies of all our books plus other prizes. I'm appearing on 6/26 and giving away copies of Pemberley by the Sea, Impulse & Initiative, and the elusive Without Reserve, which is finally available again from Amazon, Lulu, and other online booksellers. I hope you'll stop by and join in the festivities!