My first foreign rights sale, the first year I was published, was to Norway. I was fascinated. Norway? It was also my first magazine sale. The largest woman’s magazine there runs condensed versions of novels, and they chose By Arrangement.

I remember receiving my author copies of that magazine. They had taken my novel, of over 100,000 words, and condensed it to about 15,000! Who knew I had so much fluff in the book.  Since it was in Norwegian, I could not read it either, to see just what they had done. Probably for the best. I did figure out, from the names and how they showed up, that they probably took one thread of the story, sliced it out, and used that. So the result was a lot different from the book.

Since then I have sold whole books to Norway, and 12 other countries. Sometimes I receive author copies, and sometimes I don’t. In every case I have seen, they used different covers from my American books. I thought I would share some with you, just for fun.

Some of these publishers do use American covers, just not mine. I think that sometimes the rights to old covers are licensed in batches to some foreign publishers. Then they mix them around. I figured this out when one of my books was published in another country with a cover that looked familiar to me. Sure enough, it had been used on another author’s book here in the U.S. about five years earlier.

Some foreign publishers are big on the clinches. This is true of my books published in Norway, the Netherlands, and Germany. Others used to be, but have moved to other types. My French books used to use clinches, but my recent edition of Lessons of Desire (seen at the top left) is not of that type at all.

I recently received a Portuguese edition of Secrets of Surrender (center left here  <—) that I love. Not only the cover, but the whole book. It is trade sized, maybe bigger, and beautifully produced.  The Turkish edition of The Sins of Lord Easterbrook (the one with the fan down there), also trade size, is another gorgeous, very high quality book.

The Japanese version of Lord of Sin is another favorite of mine. The whole format is different from any of the others. Different size, sort of small and squarish and compact. I think it is a lovely design. The Polish cover down below (the red dress)  is also interesting and different. No head, but no body either. The dress is on a dress form, which gives it an almost surreal look.

You can probably figure out that they often change the titles. My Italian publisher always asks for permission. Not all of them do.

One of the interesting covers is down on the bottom right. It is for the Czech translation of The Sinner, from my Seducer series. It is very similar in layout and components to the covers my publisher designed for that series.It even has the same swirly flourishes. Except—they changed the guy’s face in the upper right. Their guys look more . . . . “manly.” Tougher. It is an interesting window into marketers’ ideas of male beauty, and how that differs by culture.

If you saw covers similar to the non clinch ones here, would you know they were romances? 

What do you think of these different approaches?  Which do you like best?

Where do you stand on the clinch cover question? Are they fun, or embarrassing? Do they help you identify books as romances when you browse?

If you had the job of designing romance covers, what would your covers look like?

(By the way, that upper right cover is Polish, and on a trade paperback. All of my Polish editions have those vignettes, or still lifes. No people.)

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I went to Disney World this summer for a few days after the RWA conference. I had not been in a very long time. Half a lifetime, in fact. Much was as I remembered it, but it took me a while to get in the spirit. The thing is, in order to really enjoy Disney World, you have to become a little kid again.

So I did, more than I thought I would. I insisted on doing rides that I knew would make me sick now, and let myself be mesmerized by the 3D stuff in some of the shows.  But what fascinated me were all the adults I saw who really turned back into little kids completely. They were really into it. They wore their Mickey ears all day. They talked to each other like Donald Duck. They clamored to be photographed with the characters walking around. They were as happy as any child in the park, but many of them were not with kids, aside from themselves.

This got me thinking about the parts of me that are still a kid. There are ways I have never given up that side of me. There are expectations I have and routines I require that are still those from my childhood.

I still expect Christmas to be magical, and am still a little deflated when it is over, for example. Just like a little kid. If there is a good snow I want that sled ride, even if it will take a crane now to get me up at the bottom of the hill. And, right now, this very day, I am going through all the end of summer/beginning of school mixed emotions that I had as a child. Part of me is frantic that freedom is slipping away, and part of me is relieved to be getting back to a “normal” routine and new experiences.

I suspect that my careers drew me in part because the kid in me saw a chance to stay alive. I still have a school year in my day job, and every year I live that calendar of activities and vacations we knew as children. And as a writer, I not only have a job that is a series of beginnings and ends instead of one long seamless stretch, but I also get to indulge my imagination—-just like a little kid.

What makes you feel like a little kid again? Do you insist on doing certain things certain ways so that you will feel like one?  

Is there someone with whom you can happily regress back to childhood?

 Can you still talk like Donald Duck?

****I am giving away an ARC to Sinful in Satin, my forthcoming book (9/28/2010) to one poster today

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My mother was a Queen of Practicality. She was amazing at stretching a dollar, and a shrewd bargain hunter. She could also see a scam coming a mile away, and she dismissed most modern marketing techniques with the words “It’s nothing but a racket.”

In particular she loathed hidden costs that companies locked you into once you bought something. Barbie dolls? It was a racket because once you bought the doll, your kid kept bugging you for more expensive outfits and accessories. Home printers? It was a racket because they sold you a cheap printer, then soaked you on the expensive ink.

Having been raised by her, I am sensitive to these things too. I avoid the rackets, although they are so common now that it is hard to do so totally. Still, I am very conscious of hidden costs. I like to know what I am getting into when I buy something, and make it a point to find out in advance.

Most of the time.

This year I bought something and missed the hidden costs regarding both time and money. And I am paying for it now. Boy, am I paying.

See, I had my front yard totally relandscaped this spring. It was sort of an impulse (note that word impulse. Queens of Practicality don’t buy on impulse.). The landscape architect dazzled me with photographs and drive throughs of neighborhoods displaying his talent. Images of gracious living surrounded by well composed gardens turned my head. I signed right up.

A week later, the neighbors thought HGTV had descended. One day there were tired, outdated foundation plantings. Two days later, after twenty workers swarmed my property and trucks full of greenery deposited their wares, I had something out of magazine. It was as gorgeous as I had hoped. I was tickled to death. I even convinced myself  the value of my house had risen overnight by as much as the landscaping cost.

Before the landscape designer left, he gave a few instructions. For the first season, we had to water the new plants to establish them. Okay,that made sense. Three minutes a day on the big ones, he said. About 90 seconds a day on the small ones, and 30 seconds on the perennials. These details floated to my ear while I grinned over my Curb Appeal Makeover. Sure, fine, no big deal, 90 seconds, whatever.

That night, I watered the plants. See those numbers up there? Welllll, we have a lot of new plants. Multiply the recommended watering time by the newbies and we are facing a nightly chore that takes over two and a half hours if done right. And, no, we can’t use sprinklers. Do you know how long you have to sprinkle to give a plant the same water as holding a hose on it directly for three minutes? Not to mention the cost of all this water is so huge (another hidden cost) that I hardly want to waste more by using a sprinkler.

Within a week we were dreading the end of dinner and the start of watering slavery. We began praying for rain, so we would get a respite. This is the only summer in my life when I would be glad for thunderstorms every single day. Instead we have had heat wave after heat wave, and the storms go north or south of us. We listen to the distant thunder while we stand in the twilight, holding our hoses.

The landscaping is still real pretty and all. I’m sure I will love it  bunches in the seasons to come. And should I sell the house, which I don’t plan to do, I’ll get get back a lot of the initial investment. But the hidden costs in time and money—- somewhere in heaven my mother is shaking her finger at me.

Are you a Queen of Practicality? Do you take pride in how you can stretch a dollar and bargain hunt? Any tips to share?

Have you ever made a big impulse purchase, or do you take your time and research it all?

Any rackets out there in the marketplace that bug you?

Any rain where you live this summer? Want to send some to me?

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I’ve been traveling again. This summer has been filled with trips, with one still to come. Most have been for work or family obligations, but last week I returned from the trip that qualifies as my summer vacation.

DH and I went to the Baltic Sea and visited several cities there. Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, and Copenhagen were among them. Last fall we stumbled upon a cruise line practically giving away cruises. They advertised two for one, airfare included, and a huge credit to cover on-board purchases and excursions. It was one of those rare cases when it was too good to be true, but was still true. The only time we have ever scored a better deal was when, as a young married couple, we went to Paris on an Airfrance package where they all but paid us to come over.

Since the dear sons would not join us, it was an even better bargain. The only fly in the ointment was that none of the cities were on my list of places that I really wanted to visit. In fact, DH had suggested a similar tour a few years ago and my response was “you go if you want to.”  But I don’t mind visiting places that are not on the list if it is relatively cheap. So I had no real expectations about the cities themselves but figured it was a great way not to cook for a while.

Rarely have I visited places so unprepared and ignorant of what I would find. As a result, I was surprised a lot. Delighted by discoveries.

Stockholm is a beautiful city, with parks and a charming old town section. Helsinki looks like I could live there even when it is dark all winter. St. Petersburg is dripping in history and 18th century palaces. Even the little port of Warnemunde, Germany surprised me. It is a seaside town much like you find on the Jersey shore, only much more adorable and picturesque, with flowers growing all over cottages and a mile long beach.   And everywhere, there were canals.  More in some cities (Stockholm and St. Petersburg) and fewer in others, but even little Warnemunde had one.

The trip was much more interesting than I expected, but the experience was not perfect. For one thing, we sailed into a heat wave that would not quit (yep, over there too). These northern cities do not expect weather like that, and have spotty air-conditioning, especially in the museums. I sweated my way through more palaces than I can count. It was a minor inconvenience, however, for ten days of surprises.

Do you have a list of places you want to visit? What cities or places are at the top of it?

Have you ever visited a place and been surprised to like it much more than you had expected?

      Anyone who posts will be entered in a drawing for a signed ARC of my Sept. 28 release, Sinful in Satin.

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This weekend I will be going to Washington to attend the American Library Association’s national conference. I’ll be on a panel there about romance novels, and I was told to prepare a twelve minute speech. I am still not sure what I will say. Not because I can’t think of anything to say. I have lots to say, but most of it does not pertain to the panel topic. So you get to hear it here.

All across the country, state and local budgets are in trouble, and among the services taking hits—in some places, big hits—are the libraries. It isn’t just a matter of cutting the library budgets by ten or even twenty percent. In some cases libraries are closing, or losing a large percentage of their funding. In many locations libaries are being deemed unessential services. That means they aren’t really necessary. They are a nice extra, to be supported only when a community is flush.

This distresses me at a very personal, emotional level. See, when I was growing up, we did not have money to buy books. It was not even an option. So we went to the library for our books. I was five when I got my first library card. My father went on a regular basis, and he took us with him, and this was just part of the routine of our lives. We didn’t use the library for study sessions or hanging out. We used the library for reading, and for getting books to take home to read.

When I went away to college, the library became my refuge the first year. The rest of the campus was strange and full of new people. But put me in a library, any library, and I am right at home again. It was in college that libraries instilled in me an interest and fascination with research, with the seredipitous discoveries that come from browsing the stacks. In graduate school those stacks only got bigger, longer, richer.

I have since been in libraries all over the world. Grand old world ones so beautiful you are stunned. Small, dusty ones you suspect are fire traps. I love them all. I love them not only for the role they have played in my life, but for what they stand for.

The culture of the world is in its libraries. In this country, for my entire life, anyone could get a public library card, and anyone with that card had access to the ideas, achievements, and histories that define who we are. Public libraries are among the most democratic of institutions in this country. They are places of learning, of betterment, of boot-strapping. Furthermore, a democracy cannot thrive without the free flow of information and knowledge, and that is what public libraries are all about.

I never thought I’d see the day when all this might change. When governors faced with a budget in crisis would just lop off the libraries. When the necessity of libraries would no longer be a given. Maybe people are assuming that it can all be found on the net now. Well, it can’t. And also there are a lot of families like mine when I was a child. If we could not afford to buy books then, what are the odds that today we would be able to afford the technology and isp fees to be on the web?

None of this can go in my speech this weekend. I would be preaching to the choir, for one thing. But stories about libraries, and what they mean to readers, in their memories and current lives, can be part of my speech. So:

Do you have a local library? Do you use it? Would it matter to you if it closed?

Do you have a memory about libraries from when you were a child? A more recent story?

If you could tell libarians anything at all, what would it be? Any suggestions or complaints? (Speaking of complaints, does your library own and catalogue romances?)

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They say that you don’t appreciate where you live until you leave. I can vouch for that. Travel gives me a new perspective on what I take for granted. Normally I find myself counting my blessings while I am gone, and am glad to get back.

But the word appreciate does not mean there are only positive assessments. The truth is that some of the things I take for granted don’t measure up when compared to what is out there in the big world. 

I experienced both sides of appreciate recently. I had to drive to my sister’s house. She lives in Virginia, and I had forgotten how humid it could get there. So much more humid than southwestern Pennsylvannia, where I live. And the traffic around D.C.! I go there all the time, but never get used to that. We never have those kinds of traffic jams near Pittsburgh. I also appreciated little things when I visited her too, like how where I live we usually park our cars in our driveways and garages, not on the street. I don’t know why we do this, but it is pretty typical around here and makes it much easier to drive in neighborhoods.

On the other hand, a road trip always proves that PA has the worst roads in the eastern United States, as far as I am concerned. Even our highways are a mess. I am not talking about the hills on the interstate— Nature put them there so we can’t be blamed for them, and besides, at least they aren’t boring. I’m not even talking about how there is no divider on the highway except a concrete barrier. Hey, our toll road was the first leg of the interstate to be built, before highway designers figured grassy strips into things. No, I am griping about the actual roads. The surfaces. They are chewed up, patched up, roughed up disasters.

We are told the weather does this. Except when I cross into Ohio or New York or Maryland, their roads are much better. Ohio’s weather is a lot like ours. Ohio is only an hour away. Even West Virginia, also an hour away, has better roads than we do. So it isn’t just the weather.

I figure our roads are so bad because they are not being built right to start. I suspect the contracts are being given to someone’s wife’s brother’s uncle or something. There is a lot of that kind of thing going on where I live too, see. Sometimes I visit areas where that is not so common, or at least not so blatant.

The other area where I can’t help but notice we don’t measure up is in stores and restaurants. It seems chains of any kind come here last, and sometimes not at all. I think maybe all those hills have something to do with that. Flat land for developing is long gone, so any building requires serious site preparation. Whatever the reason, it feels a little peculiar to have to travel to visit chain outlets that everyone else spends money in all the time.  There are all kinds of well known casual chain restaurants that I only get to sample by travelling, and for years I bought most of my clothes while on trips.

I’m not really complaining, mind you. (Okay, I am about the roads. They really do suck.) The Pittsburgh region has a lot going for it. It is beautiful and green, and has great cultural resources, top medical facilities, and top national sports teams (no Pirates jokes, okay?). It stacks up pretty well, all in all. Sometimes I don’t appreciate how much until I leave.

What do you appreciate most about where you live? What doesn’t stack up?

(Pittsburgh skyline photo by derek.cashman)

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Like many readers, I have two vocabularies. There is the one I speak with and there is the much larger one I employ when I read. There are many words in the latter vocabulary that I don’t know how to pronounce. They are sight words, not spoken words for me.

In some cases, I have never even thought about how they are pronounced. In other cases, I have attached mental pronunciations on them that suit my reading purposes. Every now and then, however, I will hear one of these words spoken for the first time and be a little startled at how they sound. Wow, so that is how that is pronounced!

This happened with the word heinous. It may sound odd to you, but I had never heard that word spoken until the opening voice over of Law and Order SVU, where the crimes are described as heinous. If I had thought about it, which I had not, I would have known how to pronounce it. I was educated by nuns who drilled phonetical spelling, and heinous fits the “i before e, except after c, or if pronounced like a, as in weigh.”

Segue is an interesting word for me because it existed in both my vocabularies, but as separate words. I’m not kidding. I was well along in years before I realized that my reading vocabulary seg-you and my spoken seg-way, which meant the same thing in my head, were actually the same word. Son of a gun. Hey, I read segue and my brain still says seg-you.

Then there are common words that I always thought I pronounced correctly, but something happens to make me wonder. Take the word often. All of my life I pronounced it aw-fuhn. For a few years now, however, I hear of-ten a lot, with the “t.” I began to think that I had been pronouncing this word wrong for decades. This bothered me enough that I looked it up, and it turns out often has an interesting history. Seems it used to be pronounced with the “t” back in the 17th century. Then educated people dropped the “t” and it was considered uneducated to pronounce the “t”. Recently pronouncing the “t” has gained popularity again and exists side-by-side with my way of doing it. (of-uhn is also acceptable.)

Things like that can make me wonder if I pronounce anything correctly. So can the way words are spoken in advertisements. We used to have a department store and everyone called in Koff-mans. Then the store had a T.V. ad in which an European sounding woman pronounced it Kawf-mans. Since Kaufmanns was paying her, did that mean that was how they thought their name should be pronounced? The store was named after a family, but heck if I know how they pronounced their own name.

Currently there is a T.V. ad for Jaguars (the cars, which I love by the way). The voice overs pronounce it Jag-u-ar.   I had to look this up too.  Turns out my pronunciation is fine—Jag-wahr. Jag-u-ar is the British way of saying it (but maybe not for all Brits? The dictionary implied not. Maybe a goddess from across the pond will clarify in the comments.)

A lot of pronunciations are like that—different regionally or nationally. When there are multiple options, it is bad form to try and impose our choice. I had a teacher in grade school who insisted we all pronounce again as uh-geyn instead of uh-gen. When I was very young and living in the Philadelphia area, I was taught to pronounce water as wood-er. I have friends from that region who still pronounce it that way.

Were you ever surprised when you learned how a word was supposed to be pronounced?

Do you have any words that are in your reading vocabulary, but not in your speaking one?

Are there distinctive pronunciations of some words in the area where you live?

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