Sorry I’ve been gone so long. I’ve just emerged from one of my periods of serious writer’s block, which this time extended as far as blogging and answering emails. I’ve got quite a stack to reply to! For anyone who is patient enough to still be reading after all these months, let me see if I can catch you up. It’ll probably take several posts!

This year I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which is a sort of rite of passage where people try to write an entire novel (defined as 50,000+ words) in the month of November, in hopes that it would break me out of my writer’s block. You see, for NaNoWriMo there isn’t any expectation of writing well, just of writing prolifically. This was very good for me (not to mention for my local coffee shop whose receipts must have gone way up), and the end result is the first draft of a new Pemberley Variation. I’ve given it the original and catchy title of Pemberley Variation #7. I figure since my editor is going to change my title anyway, I might as well not get attached to one.

Up until October 31, I hadn’t decided on which one of my novel ideas I should work on. The possibilities were a sequel to Bounds of Decorum (now retitled Mr. Darcy’s Obsession and coming out in October 2010), the latest Woods Hole Quartet book, a and-now-for-something-completely-different historical fantasy, and the variation I actually wrote. I ended up drawing straws for lack of a better method to choose, though I think a Pemberley Variation is probably well suited to NaNoWriMo since the characters are already pretty well set. I worked from a fragment of an idea I’d had a month or so earlier – I’ll try to post that today or tomorrow to give you an idea of the new book.

NaNoWriMo writing was quite an experience. First of all, I gave myself permission to write badly, which is necessary if you’re going to produce 1700 words a day. I plowed through with tons of dialogue tags, overused adverbs, cliches, and telling-not-showing, all the things I try to avoid when I’m trying to write something decent. When I’d get stuck on a scene, I’d ask for a random suggestion. There’s one odd scene that will probably be cut that was the result of my daughter saying “Georgiana wants a cat.” Since I couldn’t think of anything else to write, Georgiana got a cat which is otherwise completely irrelevant to the story, but I got back in the swing of the story.

More later on upcoming releases and other news!