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For the sake of completeness, there is also the unpublished POD book The Rule of Reason = Alternative version of Impulse & Initiative which is only available at lulu.com.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

After posting last night, I dug through my old emails to find the new title for From Lambton to Longbourn. The most recent is What Would Mr. Darcy Do?, and it's scheduled to come out in Spring 2011. In the meantime, I've been making some adjustments to it.

From Lambton to Longbourn was my first Austen-related story, and I wrote it for an audience that knew Pride & Prejudice well. As a result, I could get away with starting the story mid-way through the scene at the Lambton Inn with a long quotation from P&P and no explanation whatsoever, and still count on my readers to know where they were and what was happening. It isn't exactly conducive to convincing someone that they want to read the book! So I've gone back and written a new preliminary scene and thought I'd share it with you. Hopefully it provides a better introduction to the book.

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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, Darcy and Elizabeth were having this shy but touching conversation while sitting on a riverbank and talking about how the water flows to the sea, and suddenly Darcy starts whispering in my ear.

“Only a gentleman would master temptation.” Elizabeth did not know what else to say, and it seemed that neither did he, for the silence between them grew long. Finally she said archly, “I am glad, I suppose, to know that I was enough to tempt you.”

He half-turned toward her, leaning on one hand, his voice low. “You can have no idea how you tempt me. You tempt me every day with the thought of your laughter, and every night with the thought of touching you. You tempt me with your every smile, your glance, the way you bite your lip when you are concentrating, by the sparkle in your eye when someone challenges you, the way you tilt your head when you are about to tease, by your sweetness when you try to protect someone’s feelings. I remember watching you walk past me at Netherfield, and aching to take you into my arms. I remember listening to you play and sing, and thinking you the most fascinating creature I had ever met. I remember how you cared for your sister when she was ill, and how I wished you would care for me in the same way. I remember how your hair glinted in the candlelight at the Netherfield ball, and how I longed to touch it, to take the pins out and watch it tumble around your shoulders. I see the pulse in your neck, and I ache to press my lips to it. I dream of your eyes sparkling for me, your hands reaching for me, your lips against mine. Oh, yes, Elizabeth, you tempt me. Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, waking or sleeping, you tempt me almost beyond reason.” His eyes were dark, his voice almost a whisper by the time he finished, but she heard every word of it.

Elizabeth felt suddenly unable to breathe. A new heat flowed through her, and it was as if his lips had indeed branded her neck, his eyes had indeed claimed her for his. She felt aware of her body as she never had before, aching for him to come even closer, yet at the same time fearing it. She could feel the tension radiating from him, and his scent of leather and fresh soap made her dizzy. She was glad she was sitting; had they still been standing, she doubted her legs would have held her. As it was, she felt as if she might melt and run into the river. How could she possibly reply? She touched her tongue to her dry lips.

“Dearest, loveliest Elizabeth,” he breathed, his words a caress in themselves.

Whew! That Darcy is something else. Now I just need to figure out how to get them out of the big hole they've just dug themselves into....

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.