Shelf Awareness and more

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage at Shelf Awareness: 
"Powerfully moving"

I'm grateful to Shannon McKenna Schmidt for a wonderful article, "Handselling Favorite: Nancy Olson's Novel Choice," about how Nancy Olson of Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh has championed A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. (And yes, I am infinitely grateful to Nancy and her exuberant love for good books.) The article "to the trade" is here. An article in Shelf Awareness can help with sub-rights interest and queries--and, indeed, already has. Thank you, Shannon and Nancy...

Recommending an illuminating post: "The Tyranny of Suspense"

Go here for a wonderful blog post about why spoilers are not an issue, why literature is not about suspense, and how literature has been derailed from its ancient purposes. And since D. G. Myers says that spoilers don't spoil, here's the wonderful closure: Fear and pity are compliments to human freedom, to the possibility of change and variation in human stories; suspense and anxiety are the taxes paid by an impoverished culture of reading to the literary tyrant that occupies the throne once held by tragedy. I found this post especially interesting because one of my upcoming novels uses a very well-known life as a template. Everybody who knows anything about that life knows that it ended with a bullet in the brain. There's a spoiler for you!

More on artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Thaliad

Still following the progress of Clive's wondrous work on Thaliad (forthcoming epic poem in blank verse, Phoenicia Publishing)? Here's a back jacket and back cover image for you! I like those uncanny green windows; every epic needs some glow from the supernatural world.