Monday, August 11, 2008

Book done.

Eighteen months, 2750 citations/annotations, and 244,000 words after I began working on my manuscript in February 2007, Historical Fiction II: A Guide to the Genre is finished. It''ll be available next spring, as far as I'm aware.

If you hear a thud in the next couple of days, it's me collapsing after carting the manuscript over to UPS. I've just printed it out and am going through it page-by-page, creating the table of contents and making note of unfamiliar words for the style sheet.

Anyway, I'm feeling a little numb and disorganized, but there are a couple other things I should mention before I forget.

We're soliciting speakers for the next Historical Novel Society conference, to be held June 12-14, 2009, in Schaumburg, IL. The link goes to our proposal form. If you're already on one of the HNS email lists, you'll already know about this, but the Board wants to get the word out as widely as possible.

Vanessa from Arrow Books (UK) recently commented on an old Jean Plaidy-related post from Oct 2006, as follows, with some news you might find interesting:

Defenders of the Faith and The Scarlet Cloak (along with the Lucrezia Borgia novels Madonna of the Seven Hills and Light on Lucrezia) in June 2009. We'll also be reissuing the last six titles in the Plantagenet series in the same year.
I bought Defenders about ten years ago from an eBay seller, paying around $35. I haven't read it yet. Maybe I should have waited?

10 comments:

  1. Congratulations on finishing the book!

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  2. Thanks!

    It does help to print it out... in a couple sections I seem to have forgotten how to alphabetize.

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  3. Congratulations!!!!

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  4. Anonymous11:01 PM

    Huzzah!

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  5. Anonymous7:49 AM

    Congrats on your manuscript and thanks for the Plaidy info! Now I know which ones to wait on for my collection!

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  6. Congrats on finishing that ms. Wow!!!

    As for the JP reissues, I'm glad I haven't bought any of the old ones. Not sure how many of the new ones I'll buy, maybe just me faves. I read most of them from my library at home as a kid. I can still picture EXACTLY which shelves they were on in the adults section (I started reading from there quite young).

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  7. Thanks, all!

    I own a lot of Plaidys, mainly the ones I wasn't able to get from the library. I managed to find 1st editions of Mary Queen of France, Defenders of the Faith, etc., back before I had any idea her work would be reprinted.

    Back when I worked for the State of Michigan as a secretary, in between grad programs, I'd borrow 5 Plaidys a week and read one per day at my desk. This was pre-Internet, obviously. Most boring job I've had in my life, although I read through all of the Plantagenet Saga and Georgian Saga as well as Valerie Anand's Bridges Over Time series that year. So it was invaluable in that respect!

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  8. As a secretary, you could read at your desk?

    I'd LOVE a job like that :)

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  9. Yeah - nobody really noticed or minded, since all the work they gave me was taken care of immediately. If not for the books, I doubt I'd have lasted there very long.

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