When you think Harlequin, do you think science fiction, fantasy, and mystery?

Me neither.

But Harlequin Books is launching a new imprint this fall targeted at the young adult market. The imprint, called Harlequin Teen, will publish novels in several genres, including science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. Read more here.

I’m so pleased to introduce to you Samantha Wilde, who is a mother, writer, minister and yoga teacher – and the author of This Little Mommy Stayed Home: A Novel. Not only does it have a great cover, it also comes with endorsements from two of my favorite people/writers: Karen Karbo and Elinor Lipman.

About the book
Joy McGuire who has gone from being skinny and able to speak in complete sentences to someone who hasn’t changed her sweatpants in weeks. But now with a new baby to care for, she feels like a woman on the brink and as she scrambles to recapture the person she used to be she takes another look at the woman she is: a stay-at-home mom in love with her son, if a bit addled about everything else.

About the author
Sam says, “I wrote the book because I couldn’t not write it. I took my lap top to my bed during my son’s naps and wrote and wrote. I wrote the book I wanted to read. The book takes a hard look at the effects of new motherhood on a woman and on a marriage through the eyes of one stressed but insightful woman. It’s a story that will keep mothers going when they think they can’t go any further.”

Samantha Wilde is the mother of two born in under two years. A graduate of Concord Academy, Smith College, Yale Divinity School and The New Seminary, she lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and children. She is the daughter of novelist Nancy Thayer. When she’s not mothering her toddler and baby, she writes, teaches yoga, and moonlights as a minister. Although she never sleeps, she’s never once been tempted to give her children away to the highest bidder (well, almost never). She’s currently using nap times to write her second novel for Bantam Dell. You can visit her at wildemama.blogspot.com

I asked, Samantha Answered
A. What's the scariest thing that's ever happened to you? Bonus question: have you used it, in any way, in a book?
S. Can I say childbirth? Because if I do, then I can say that I HAVE used it in THIS LITTLE MOMMY STAYED HOME. Truthfully, 32 hours of unmedicated labor was pretty scary especially when I started thinking everyone was crazy and no baby was going to come out.

A. Mystery writers often give their characters an unreasoning fear - and then make them face it. Do you have any phobias, like fear of spiders or enclosed spaces?
S. You don't have room for all my phobias! I'm like a phobia collector. I can't stand planes or small places and I don't much like boats and trains and other modes of transportation. The othey day I even got afraid of the car wash (what if the big cleaning flaps break the window and strangle me?). See, I could make a mystery writer! Maybe.

A. Do you have a favorite mystery book, author, or movie?
S. I used to read and watch many more mysteries but since my children have come into the world, I'm so tender-hearted and so post partumly anxious, I can barely read the newspaper.

A. At its heart, every story is a mystery. It asks why someone acts the way they did - or maybe what will happen next. What question does your book ask?
S. What becomes of the woman when she becomes a mom? Maybe, that's it. Or what becomes of a marriage when a baby comes in. Maybe? The mystery is the pull of maternal love, how strong it is despite how arduous caring for a small child can be. Transformation, big life changes, like having a baby, are filled with mystery, because they sweep us up, and we have no say. They happen to us to a certain extent. And then we become something else.

A. Is there a mystery in life that you are still trying to figure out?
S. I think all of life is a bit of a mystery. Love is certainly one of the biggest for me--why we love who we love, how it happens and doesn't, and how powerful it is. The natural world awes me with its own world of mysteries. I planted peas this year, and somehow, though I am a terrible gardener, they came up.

I LOVED this story in the Boston Globe.

"The story of the book club, now in its 10th month, is a tale of ordinary city life upended. It began with a stunningly unlikely friendship, between two men from different worlds: Peter Resnik, a high-powered lawyer on his way to work, and Rob, a homeless man guarding a friend’s shopping cart on Boston Common. Through months of daily conversations, that began with jokes and sports talk and gradually delved deeper, they found a common interest: literature. And when they saw the bridge that they had built, they recognized its potential for others."

You can read more here.

A book publicist at a large house has a blog filled with a variety of helpful tips, some for other publicity folks, some for authors. A recent one looks at the pros and cons of different levels of web presence.

You can read it here.

JA Konrath (who doubles as the Energizer Bunny) provides the answer here.

"I would have said anything to make it stop," says Erich Muller, a rightwing Chicago shockjock known as "Mancow" who had argued that waterboarding was far from torture. On his show, he said, "They cut off our heads. We put water on their faces." He recently agreed to be waterboarded to prove that it was totally harmless. He was laughing right until it started.

He lasted all of six seconds.

When he spoke again, he said it was torture. He told Keith Olbermann, "I was willing to prove, and ready to prove, that this was a joke, and I was wrong. It was horrific. It was instantaneous. And look, I felt the effects for two days."

Olbermann donated $10,000 to a support group for veterans in return for Muller going through with the waterboarding.

See for yourself http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/26/olbermann-mancow-intervie_n_207963.html

I have published with five houses, but Thomas Nelson is the one that continues to surprise and impress me. I’ve never met their CEO, Michael Hyatt, but he has 32,000 folks following his Twitter account. You can read more about how and why he Twitters in a thought-provoking interview here.

Seriously. Everything! Darcy Pattison has thoughtfully collected the longest list of links you ever saw. You can read (and click through) here.

Salon takes a look at more bad author behavior, including this: "In 2004, Stanley Crouch responded to a chance encounter with Dale Peck (who'd written unfavorably of Crouch's "Don't the Moon Look Lonesome" years earlier) at a New York City restaurant as an opportunity to slap him in the face. Twice."

Read more here.

Frass.

A contributor to a textbook got the following email from the publisher: “"Congratulations and thank you for your contribution to Clinical Psychology. Now that the book is published, we need your help to get some 5 star reviews posted to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble to help support and promote it. As you know, these online reviews are extremely persuasive when customers are considering a purchase. For your time, we would like to compensate you with a copy of the book under review as well as a $25 Amazon gift card. If you have colleagues or students who would be willing to post positive reviews, please feel free to forward this e-mail to them to participate. We share the common goal of wanting Clinical Psychology to sell and succeed. The tactics defined above have proven to dramatically increase exposure and boost sales. I hope we can work together to make a strong and profitable impact through our online bookselling channels."

Read more about it here.

According to Galleycat, Alice Hoffman is not the only cheesed-off author who struck back:

"According to the LA Times, author Alain de Botton left an angry message in the comments section of Caleb Crain's blog after a harsh review in the NY Times Book Review last week. The author argued that the review would wreck The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work's U.S. sales.

Here's an excerpt from the scathing comment: "it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon--so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review.""

Maybe it's a good thing there weren't any blogs or Twitter when an LA Times reviewer said my first book made her "homicidal." And that was one of the nicer things she said about it.
"

It's on John Green's blog, and it talks about advances and royalties. While I don't his basic premise is ever going to fly (the way I read it, it's that a lower advance and higher royalty rate - higher than is paid now - would make more sense than a higher advance and the current royalty structure) - there are a lot of fascinating comments from other authors and even a couple of editors.

I even commented twice and used the word "ass"! (not directed at anyone)

You can read it here.

Marion Winik – who has written six memoirs – talks about the issues they raise in the LA Times. “I, on the other hand, trashed an unnamed ex-boyfriend of my sister's for being a hypocrite, I did not praise his good looks -- not that he had any. I certainly didn't expect him to get back together with my sister, marry her and start recommending my book to his friends and clients. Finally, one of them urged him to read what his wife's sister had written about him.”

Read more here.

Who wouldn't want to Twitter? Share what's happening with you right as it happens!

Maybe authors should think twice, though. At least about saying what they really think. Like it might be a bad idea to call a book reviewer a "moron," and then Tweet her phone number and email address and encourage outraged fans to contact her. As Alice Hoffman did for a reviewer at the Boston Globe.

Read more here.

From Publisher's Lunch:
Children's: Young Adult
Another book in Alyson Noel's NYT bestselling THE IMMORTALS series and a new middle grade series spin-off that will feature the younger sister of the protagonist, to Rose Hilliard at St. Martin's, in a major deal, for seven figures, with the new series first publishing in fall 2010, by Bill Contardi at Brandt & Hochman (NA).

The Pursuit of Happiness and What Happens Here author Tara Altebrando's CONEY ISLAND HIGH, about a girl who inherits her grandfather's house on Coney Island and sets about discovering her late mother's past - and Coney's - while struggling for acceptance among a clique of freaks at school, to Julie Strauss-Gabel at Dutton Children's, in a two-book deal, for publication in Summer 2011, by David Dunton at Harvey Klinger (World). Here on LJ we call her taltebrando.

Author and illustrator team Greg Neri and Jesse Joshua Watson's high concept young adult novel, GHETTO COWBOY, based on a real-life community of African-American cowboys in Philadelphia, to Andrea Tompa at Candlewick, by Edward Necarsulmer IV at McIntosh & Otis (world English). Here on LJ we call him gneri.

I’m fascinated by the idea of chimeras, which happens when twins become one person in utero very early on in the pregnancy. According to Wikipedia, “For example, the chimera may have a liver composed of cells with one set of chromosomes and have a kidney composed of cells with a second set of chromosomes. This has occurred in humans, and at one time was thought to be extremely rare, though more recent evidence suggests that it is not as rare as previously believed. Most will go through life without realizing they are chimeras. The difference in phenotypes may be subtle (e.g., having a hitchhiker's thumb and a straight thumb, eyes of slightly different colors, differential hair growth on opposite sides of the body, etc) or completely undetectable .”

Go here and start about 4.5 minutes in to hear about a woman who discovered she was a chimera when she was told DNA tests showed she was not related to her sons.

More magazine had various stories about "what it's like to" - and one was about a woman who lost money to Bernie Madoff. The lady says she has lost "everything."

But tears started running down my face when I read this, "I cut my tennis lessons in half, cut the dog-walker from five days to three, stopped getting extra treatments from the facialist."

Can you imagine having to suffer so much?

A hollow point bullet. Not fired.

I just was part of animated discussion that included me, my nephew, and my mom.

About fractal geometry.

My nephew is 9 and home schooled and probably a little genius. He just learned about fractals from some materials his mom picked up. My mom went to florist school, but has always loved to think about things like Flatland, which is a novel set in just two dimensions. And me - well, I loved math in high school but I think I've forgotten most of it. I do remember I loved Fibonacci numbers. All I remember about Fibonacci numbers now is how they start, and that they had something to do with spirals.

My mom and I just watched an old video my sister-in-law loaned us about fractal geometry that featured Stephen Hawking and a very natty Arthur C. Clarke (attired in some sort of safari jacket/shirt cross) discussing the wonders of fractals.

Never say my family doesn't know how to have fun.