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Few aspects of online aspiring-writer culture are more irritating to me than “literary lifestyle” tips and paraphernalia. (Library-scented perfume. Dictionary wallpaper. Moleskines. Bookshelves fashioned of reference books pulled from library dumpsters. The onslaught is maddening.)

But every curmudgeon I’ve ever met is at least something of a hypocrite, and I am no exception. I visit writers’ houses, read their recipes, and sometimes stop in at the White Horse Tavern, a bar that has nothing to recommend it apart from the fact that Dylan Thomas was served his last drink there. Last night A.N. Devers gave me a replica of Mark Twain’s pen knife. It’s sitting here on my desk next to — ahem — the Poe figurine.

And now I am going to recommend a book for your coffee table.
 

My friend Dwight Garner’s Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements, a revealing cultural history posing as a novelty book, collects one hundred years of book ads, from the creatively manipulative to the hilariously misguided. Read Me shows, more effectively than any treatise could, how pitches to book-buyers evolved in the last century, and also that the marketing arm of the publishing industry has always had the capacity to be more than a little tone-deaf (as in the perky ad for Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, below).

It’s the perfect thing to pass around and read aloud from after holiday meals, while everyone is still drunk and merry and not wanting to contemplate the moment they’ll have to head back out into the cold.

“Snagged this from my managing editor’s desk,” texts a friend on the staff at a newspaper, following the announcement about the shuttering of Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews. “The teaser in the upper right… Oof.”

I guess my cardigan and the cat hair I couldn’t lint-roll off of it must’ve screamed “truly, I have renounced every aspect of being an attorney,” but, in light of my background, I was surprised to be selected for a civil jury today.

Evidently the trial is an expedited, one-day affair. I’ll be at the courthouse tomorrow. Can’t say more, but you get the gist.
 

To mark the occasion, here’s a link to “Regarding the Insurance Defense Attorney,” a story I wrote in early 2003. Looking back, it’s a pretty amateur piece of work, although I still like a handful of lines. Or at least the one about the thong.

With a single exception, all the sentences are questions; in that sense the piece is a pretty blatant rip-off, structurally, of Donald Barthelme’s “Concerning the Bodyguard.”

It was Padgett Powell who introduced me to Barthelme’s fiction, in a college writing class. And now Powell has published a new book, The Interrogative Mood, which is composed entirely of questions. You can hear him asking some of them in the video above.

Gregory Cowles enjoys The Interrogative Mood most in small doses. Me too.

Europa Editions, one of the most interesting and beautifully curated publishers of works in translation, has just put out Boualem Sansal’s The German Mujahid, a novel inspired by an Algerian mayor who was a former SS officer.

In an evocative review at Words Without Borders, Emma Garman calls Sansai “a novelist at the absolute height of his powers.”

It’s common knowledge that, at the end of WWII, many German war criminals fled from justice via “ratlines” to South American countries. Less notorious, though, are the Nazis who, like the title character of Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal’s excoriating new novel, The German Mujahid, found permanent refuge in Arab countries such as Egypt, Syria and Algeria. Inspired by a visit to a European-style Algerian village whose mayor was a former SS officer, and by what he views as the Arab world’s “erasure” of the Holocaust, Sansal has written a bracingly unsentimental, ingeniously structured story that not only lays bare past collusions between German fascists and Arab governments, but draws explicit parallels between Nazism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, all the while grappling with the emotive question: “are we responsible for the crimes of our fathers, of our brothers, of our children?”

The German Mujahid is banned in the author’s native Algeria, according to Garman.

If you were riveted by her Letter from a Japanese Crematorium, you’ll be glad to hear that Marie Mockett’s first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, is out at last.

Judging from the advance reviews at Amazon, some readers seem to expect The Joy Luck Club, but for Japan, which is not at all the story they find.

The book is deeply preoccupied with girls, talent, and power. As Mockett has observed, talented women often fare badly in fiction. And yet Satomi, one of the main characters in Picking Bones from Ash, expects her creative virtuosity to ensure her independence. Her monologue opens the novel.

My mother always told me that there is only one way a woman can be truly safe in this world. And that is to be fiercely, inarguably, and masterfully talented.

This is different from being intelligent or even educated. The latter, she insisted, could get a girl into trouble, convincing her that she has the same power as men. Certainly the biggest mistake a woman could make was to rely on her beauty. Such a woman is destined to grow old and ugly very quickly because she is so much more disappointed by what she sees in the mirror than someone who is busy. “But when you are talented,” she whispered to me late at night as we lay in our futons, “you are special. You will have troubles, but they won’t be any of the ordinary ones.”

For more Mockett, see the profile in the Columbia Spectator, her thoughts on talented girls, her book notes for Largehearted Boy, her advice for aspiring writers, her interview with Colson Whitehead, and her recipe for bamboo shoots. She also has a blog.

Emma and I enjoyed the novelist Margaret Drabble’s recent observation that depression is useful “for stripping off ways of getting through life that prevent you from having to think.”

“Happy and buoyant don’t force you into action on the page,” Drabble (pictured, in an earlier era) told Daphne Merkin.

These kinds of arguments in favor of depression as a creative impetus — not uncommon from writers — tend to be greeted with wariness by mental health practitioners, who typically view depression, and the obsessive rumination that flows from it, as an affliction to be cured, in every case.
 

Yet some scientists are suggesting that depression — peculiarly prevalent for a mental disorder — is not a malfunction at all, but an evolutionary adaptation, a state of mind which can have debilitating effects, but also promotes highly analytical thinking.

Depressed people, they contend, tend to “dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.” A special depression receptor enhances focus, allowing “depressive rumination to continue uninterrupted with minimal neuronal damage.” Writing speeds the process:

if depressive rumination were harmful, as most clinicians and researchers assume, then bouts of depression should be slower to resolve when people are given interventions that encourage rumination, such as having them write about their strongest thoughts and feelings. However, the opposite appears to be true. Several studies have found that expressive writing promotes quicker resolution of depression, and they suggest that this is because depressed people gain insight into their problems.

From this perspective, depression is less a malfunction than “an intricate, highly organized piece of machinery that performs a specific function.”
 

Previously: Too far down: writing and the emotions, even Nobel Laureates get the blues, writers and depression, more on writers and depression (by Stephany Aulenback), and February haters unite.

Even as the printing press was taking hold, the Abbot of Sponheim urged his monks to keep copying texts by hand. The written word on parchment, he said, would last a thousand years, whereas words printed on paper were cheap and fleeting.

His argument has echoes in the ebooks debate. But somehow rigorous prose withstood the demise of parchment — and of the scroll and the cuneiform tablet before it. I’m pretty sure it will also survive the Kindle, the iPhone, and whatever else emerges.
 

Ebooks have really taken off recently, but as a culture we’ve actually been using electronic books for awhile now, even if we haven’t always thought of them that way. On the Internet we’re constantly encountering texts that were once bound and shelved. The change has happened so gradually, and so naturally, that it sometimes seems as though we’ve suffered a collective case of amnesia: the moment a text moves online, we forget that we used to perceive it as a book.

If I start reading a history of the printing press on Google Books and then check the volume out from the NYPL, am I doing something fundamentally different because I can turn the pages in my hand? Some people I respect would say yes, but I don’t see it.
 

Maybe I think in this fluid way because my day job is in legal publishing, where everything, from the shortest local law to the most massive scholarly treatise, is available (for a fee) online, and has been for more than a decade. Not that the shift was painless. When I started law school in the mid-’90s, some professors saw legal research databases like Westlaw and Lexis Nexis as a fad. The sites were said to foster laziness and sloppy thinking, and to fly in the face of jurisprudence and tradition. Proper apprehension of the law, it seemed, involved cross-referencing dusty tomes and using our highlighters. But by the time I graduated — and certainly while I was practicing — the vast majority of legal research was happening on the Internet.

Nowadays most medical practitioners and scientists rely on the same kinds of databases. Academic journals are migrating online at an astonishing rate. Google Books, JSTOR, and online card catalogs (like the NYPL’s) help researchers pinpoint sources for all manner of specialized subjects. Classics are available, through Project Gutenberg and other sites, for free in myriad formats. Print periodicals like Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Granta are making their archives available to subscribers online. Even dictionaries have gone electronic — and it’s become a cliche to say so, but I literally can’t remember the last time I consulted a print encyclopedia.
 

Last June, William Gibson predicted that everyone eventually will own a single volume. It will look like the ones on your shelf, he said, but will be “whatever book you desire, when you open it.”

I guess it’s not terribly surprising that the author who prophesied the coming of cyberspace (and is a Borges fan) would conceive of an infinite library collapsed into a single device — particularly when techies have been decrying “treeware” and awaiting an e-reader revolution for years now. But what has become clear since Gibson’s pronouncement is that ebooks are going mainstream in multiple formats, and will continue, at least for the moment, to coexist with print.
 

At home I still turn mostly to hard copy for reading novels, but increasingly I rely on my iPhone while commuting. Not only does it hold your page if you drop it on the subway tracks, but the device quickly becomes invisible, which is the best compliment I can pay it.

As Toni Morrison observed in her endorsement for the Kindle, reading novels means entering another world. When I’m fully immersed, I don’t focus on the pages, or how I move between them, but on the story itself.
 

While the increasing migration of the books into electronic formats is a foregone conclusion, we don’t know yet exactly how the shift will affect literature.

Will literary magazines continue to spring up online? Will control of publishing, as William Gibson implies, shift dramatically? As the reading experience changes, what will happen to stories themselves? Could hyperlinks and interactive maps and theme songs and video games undermine or even destroy the fictional narrative as we know it?

Lots of free-association here, I know. Maybe too much. Next Sunday afternoon I’m moderating a panel on Literature and the Digital Age at the Brooklyn Book Festival, and I figured I should set down some of my own thoughts before coming up with questions for the panelists: John Freeman, Dwight Garner, and Sarah Schmelling.
 

See also How writer and ebook pioneer Josh Koppell’s own publishing disaster spawned the Iceberg reader; Budd Parr, Carolyn Kellogg, and me on the literary iPhone; how to build a literary app for the iPhone; Mike Cane’s The eBook Test; and PDAs of the ancient Sumerians.

The Battle Scene image, above, is taken from the medieval illuminated manuscript Book of Maccabees 1, and appeared in the Met’s recent Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages show.

Today at The Second Pass, Emma Garman returns to Françoise Mallet-Joris’ The Illusionist and Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, two compelling and remarkably amoral novels narrated — and written — by teenage girls in the middle of the last century.

The Illusionist centers on the protagonist’s affair with her father’s mistress, while Bonjour Tristesse involves the heroine’s “plan of sexual deception that ingeniously exploits the vanity, jealousy and desires of everyone around her.”

“Fantasies of weddings and babies and maybe even a career, so omnipresent in contemporary chick lit, are conspicuously and pleasingly absent,” says Garman. “What resonates is [the] shared mood of irresponsibility, in which the wider consequences, moral or otherwise, of one’s actions are scarcely of concern.”

Although The Illusionist was published sixty years ago, its author “could have given Gossip Girl’s arch villainess Blair Waldorf lessons in amorality.”

Amid all the discussion of massive layoffs and restructuring in publishing, I keep hoping someone will take a detailed look at how books fared during the Great Depression, and consider how the current economic crisis compares.

Conventional wisdom holds that books have done well in hard times, because they’re cheaper than many other gifts people might give. Even without reference to hard numbers, however, the emergence of the (cheap) paperback in the mid-1930s seems to undercut the idea that publishing has sailed through previous major downturns.
 

In his wonderful forthcoming biography of John Cheever, Blake Bailey offers some actual data:

“I don’t know how I’ll get along unless I sell a story,” [Cheever] wrote Denney, a few days after moving to [Walker] Evans’s studio [in January 1935]. It was, perhaps, the worst time in history to be starting out as a writer. In 1934, only fifteen authors in the United States sold fifty thousand or more books, and the magazine market was even more straitened; advertising was at an all-time low; and many of the mass-market, high-paying “slick” magazines had either shrunk or folded.

As for the WPA, Cheever wrote later that year, “I can’t get a WPA job because I can’t get on relief because I can’t establish residence… And there don’t seem to be any other jobs.” Read more about the WPA Writers’ Project — and Cheever’s take on it — here.
 

Image taken from Business Week.

Huge realignment at big-R Random House the day after the publisher of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt tendered her resignation.

The Doubleday and Nan Talese imprints wind up under Sonny Mehta’s Knopf. The Dial Press, Bantam, and Spiegel & Grau imprints are shifted under the Random House Publishing Group umbrella. Crown takes on…

Ah, screw it — normally I don’t go into detail about these kinds of developments, but this is such a staggering reorganization — and such a sign of these uncertain times — that I’ll reproduce the text of the memo below.
 

Meanwhile, if you’re not sure what all of this means, here’s a trusted friend’s analysis:

even though they say the imprints will maintain editorial independence and their own individual identities, soon enough some will disappear and others will blend into one another. More consolidation also means less competition among publishers for authors and agents. Consolidation on this scale also means big time job cuts coming in all departments - editorial, publicity, rights, etc.

It also means that SONNY MEHTA is now publishing DAN BROWN. How in the hell does that make any sense?

The only one that makes sense to me is the Crown consolidation. At least there’s some continuity among all those imprints in what they publish. Everything else is just crazy.

The image, by the way, is taken from Franklin Foer’s December 1997 Slate article on the state of book publishing. Your opinions (kept anonymous, as always) are welcome. Mail to maud [at] maudnewton [dot] com.
 

Here’s the memo:

Dear Random House Colleagues:

I am writing today to tell you about a new publishing structure and a new leadership team for the adult trade divisions at Random House, Inc. here in the U.S., effective immediately. After looking closely and extensively at our organization and its rich diversity of authors and resources, we have created a plan for our future that aligns existing strengths and publishing affinities and fosters teamwork throughout the company. It will maximize our growth potential in these challenging economic times and beyond.

The new structure will augment the exceptional publishing programs of the Random House, Knopf and Crown divisions and draw on the veteran leadership of Gina Centrello, Sonny Mehta and Jenny Frost, respectively.

The Random House Publishing Group, under the leadership of President and Publisher Gina Centrello, will expand to include the imprints of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, including The Dial Press, along with Doubleday’s Spiegel & Grau.
The Knopf Publishing Group, led by Chairman Sonny Mehta, will expand to include the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese imprints from the Doubleday Publishing Group.

The Crown Publishing Group, under the direction of President and Publisher Jenny Frost, will expand to include the other imprints from the Doubleday Publishing Group — Broadway, Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion and WaterBrook Multnomah.

As a result of this reorganization, Irwyn Applebaum and Steve Rubin, two colleagues who have dedicated many years of service as the publishers of Bantam Dell and Doubleday respectively, will step down from their positions as announced in the accompanying memos.

Within the new Random House Publishing Group, Ballantine, Bantam Dell and Random House will continue to have separate editorial departments. Random House, true to its heritage as the flagship imprint, will continue to publish its diverse list of distinguished and bestselling fiction and nonfiction in hardcover and trade paperback. The addition of The Dial Press and Spiegel & Grau will make this group an even greater force in literary and high-profile publishing. Side by side, Ballantine and Bantam Dell will be a commercial powerhouse with their stellar lists of bestselling and critically acclaimed authors.

The Knopf Publishing Group will augment its enduring reputation as a leading publisher of quality nonfiction and literary fiction — and now some of the biggest names in fiction — with the addition of the flagship Doubleday and Nan A. Talese Books imprints. Collectively, Doubleday and Knopf have more than two centuries of distinguished publishing history, and Knopf Chairman Sonny Mehta is committed to supporting the great publishing traditions of their now sister imprint. The group will take on a new name, The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and the hardcovers of all their imprints will feed the extraordinary paperback lines of Vintage and Anchor Books.

The Crown Publishing Group’s unique and editorial diverse portfolio combines lifestyle and business books, along with prominent authors and branded businesses which have long dominated their nonfiction categories. The addition of Broadway as well as Doubleday’s business and religion imprints will complement and solidify these core areas of publishing strength. The group’s high-quality nonfiction and fiction frontlist programs will feed the impressive trade paperback lists of Broadway and Three Rivers Press.

I want to stress the fact that all the imprints of Random House will retain their distinct editorial identities. These imprints and all of you who support them are the creative core of our business and essential to our success. The newly formed publishing groups will continue to bid independently in auctions. Each group will have my full support to publish autonomously, promote aggressively, and strive for more competitive advantages in the marketplace.

Through greater collaborative efforts among the publishing, marketing and sales departments, we can sharpen our priorities, market our books more effectively, and respond more quickly and directly to a constantly changing marketplace. That, in turn, will strengthen our vital partnership with our customers.

Coordinating our online marketing and growing our digital publishing business will be further priorities.

Gina, Jenny, Sonny and I will share our more specific publishing plans and organizational structure in due course.

The highly regarded Random House Children’s Books division, led by President and Publisher Chip Gibson, will continue its remarkable publishing programs without change.

We are all proud of the hundreds of years of publishing that our combined imprints represent. In order to preserve this legacy of excellence and build upon it in the future, we must continuously examine the way we do business, and the way the business is changing. Our aim is to always be a leading force in American trade book publishing.

Because of the current economic crisis, our industry is facing some of the most difficult times in publishing history. We are very fortunate to have four of the most dynamic and accomplished publishers to lead us into this new phase of our life at Random House.

I greatly value the support of all of you who care deeply about our authors and the content and quality of the books we publish. I share your commitment to publish the best books in the best way, and I am excited about the opportunities that these changes offer us. I am convinced that our new organization, drawing on our expertise and focusing on the market with a team-oriented approach, will make our great company stronger than ever before.

For me, one of the pleasures of reading a good book is trying to figure out afterward which of my friends to recommend it to.

One thing’s for sure: I won’t be pressing my copy of Andrew Sean Greer’s The Story of a Marriage on Jessa. But maybe Chris, maybe Emma? It’s so hard to decide; if you steer people wrong too many times, they start ignoring the books you give them. And OGIC and Mark would be cheating, since both undoubtedly will pick this one up on their own. In a pinch, I’d point to Marla.
 

Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli and this latest book — like Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History — are contemplative first-person narratives, structured so as to withhold and to manipulate, and I can intuitively understand how a reader might find the contrivances unconvincing and therefore empty. (For a mixed take, see John Updike’s review.) But Reader, I am not that reader.

I’d like to say more, but work calls, so I defer to the author. Greer recently appeared at Google to discuss The Story of a Marriage.
 

Some critics have characterized Kurt Vonnegut’s Armageddon in Retrospect as a disappointing epitaph, and I can see why. This collection of previously unpublished writings on war and peace doesn’t really cohere as a traditional anthology.

But as a road map of the literary path Vonnegut followed from a POW-repatriation camp to the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five 23 years later, it is immensely satisfying (and, at least to this first-time novelist, encouraging). “These early stories,” Julie Phillips observes in the Village Voice, “mainly illustrate the traps Vonnegut didn’t fall into, the wrong turns he didn’t take, the superficial answers he didn’t accept.”
 

To me the most gripping entry in the collection is the letter Vonnegut sent his family on May 29, 1945, when the horrors he witnessed in Dresden were still fresh. The L.A. Times‘ David Ulin writes:

Here, we see the writer in protean form, commenting on material he would later explore in his fiction: the absurdity of war, his experience surviving the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, the futility of looking for meaning in a world gone mad. “When General Patton took Leipzig,” he writes, “we were evacuated on foot to Hellexisdorf on the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. There we remained until the war ended. Our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P-39’s) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen, but not me.”

This “but not me” is vintage Vonnegut, a sigh of resignation not unlike “Poo-tee-weet” or “So it goes.” There are other such whispers throughout the collection: “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets,” a slice of memoir about Dresden, or “Brighten Up” and “Just You and Me, Sammy,” which also spring from Vonnegut’s time as a POW, highlighting the fine line between collaboration and survival, between what we do to preserve our bodies and what we do to preserve our souls.

But while each of these pieces has its charms, they’re ultimately little more than first impressions, initial forays into the territory Vonnegut would revisit to such searing effect in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” That’s a process he evokes in “A Man Without a Country,” when he describes an encounter with a friend’s wife that forced him to see things in a different light. “In 1968,” Vonnegut noted, “the year I wrote ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. . . . Why had it taken me twenty-three years to write about what I had experienced in Dresden? We all came home with stories, and we all wanted to cash in, one way or another. And what Mary O’Hare was saying, in effect, was, ‘Why don’t you tell the truth for a change?’”

The full text of the letter is available online, but do try to pick up a copy of the book so you can see the facsimile of the actual document. In it, my beloved, semicolon-averse Vonnegut incorrectly uses two “hermaphrodite transvestites” of the punctuation world.

“Not since the Gutenberg Bible has there been a publishing revolution to match that of the Internet.” So begins the mission statement of Narrative, a literary magazine founded in 2003 “to bring literature into the digital age.”

Naturally, everything in Narrative (and in StoryQuarterly, its sister publication) is available for free online. Better yet, though: If you’re not sure whether you want to shell out for the print StoryQuarterly annual — featuring contribuions from Lorrie Moore, TC Boyle, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Walker, Robert Olen Butler, Lore Segal, Rick Bass, and many others — you can buy stories piecemeal from your computer and read them immediately, thereby avoiding that painful affliction, literary blue balls.
 

Addendum: Eric Rosenfield writes in to point out that Narrative charges reading fees for submissions — and evidently sells its subscriber list (to trade journals, literary magazines, environmental and humanitarian fundraisers, and book clubs).

My longtime literary idol (and, more recently, my friend) Rupert Thomson is working on an autobiographical book. I’ve mentioned this already, I know. But as I pace the halls, trying not to watch the clock or pick my cuticles, I keep wondering: will his memoir be as frank, sensual and disorienting as his best novels?

And now I’ve decided: probably. Take a look at what is ostensibly a review of two high-end London bars. Who else could spend time in a place like Sketch (above) and write about it without letting his reflections on the ethos of the night out dissolve into pretention or whimsy?

There is a spaceship sunk into the floor, with two grand white staircases leading up into sheer whiteness above. A few steps down into the spaceship: it is a lounge, with a small round bar sunk further into the floor and intricate pencil illustrations covering the ceiling. Up the stairs and it gets weirder still. There is a papier mâché Dalmatian swimming in a pool. There is a French maid going about her business, dusting and offering assistance. And there are eggs. Giant, eight-foot eggs which each contain an individual toilet (there must be about twenty eggs, the room is ballroom-sized). It’s like the ‘heaven’ scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but all the more fantastic because, well, films are already supposed to be quite fantastic, but going to the toilet was never supposed to be like this.

Bonus link: On the Bat Segundo Show last fall, Thomson said he’s relied on his novel The Five Gates of Hell to remember certain aspects of the time following his father’s death, which is the subject of his memoir. (Scroll to 19:42.)

Image found at The Manser Practice.

Guess the Plot

The Cursed Queen

1. He was a royal. He was a cross-dresser. He was from Queens. Could anything else go wrong for Pat ("Geisha") Tudor? Oh, yes.

2. After a delivering a brutal fashion critique to a wandering Gypsy woman, Gavin finds he can no longer croak his way through his favorite show tunes.

3. The story of Queen Maria Expletiva, so hated by her subjects they had to invent new words to express their loathing, and to describe her personal blessing of the Spanish Armada.

4. Forced to marry a king feared for his cruelty and savagery, Ariashal discovers the man has no name or face, thanks to an old curse. Now Ariashal hopes her own curse is still working, the one that states that every man she marries will die.

5. Once a month Queen Hepsabah felt the curse approaching. Her body swelled to enormous proportions. She craved pretzels and chocolate and chocolate pretzels. What she didn’t crave was the King. When she runs out of Midol, will the King make it to the pharmacy on time, or will she sic the hounds on him again?

6. When Syrji learns the drought her family has tried to flee for years is specifically following her, she runs from home. But two rogue mages recognize her for what she is - a walking curse and a reincarnated queen. Each means to use her, and Syrji must play them off each other to reach their citadel, where she can break the curse and gain a kingdom.


Original Version

Dear Evil Editor

Ariashal is cursed: Every man she marries dies.

When the man she loves is murdered just before her sixth wedding, [You know, when you find out that the first five guys your sweetie married dropped dead, you might want to consider just moving in together.] she longs to withdraw from the world. As King Turabar’s only daughter, however, she is a pawn in the family’s schemes for power. To fulfill dynastic ambitions, she is forced to marry the King of Angevar, a sorcerer feared for his cruelty, savagery and might. [Do they hook the daughter up with the sorceror king to form an alliance, or hoping her curse kills him?]

Once they are married, Ariashal slowly gains his trust. [I don't recommend doing anything slowly when you're under this curse.] She learns that has a curse of his own: his visage and name taken by a jealous god. [Does he have no name or visage? Or does he have a different name and visage, like the name Goober and the visage of a cow?] [It would be hard to negotiate treaties if you were a king with a cow's face:

Okay, then it's agreed, you guys get our seaports, our mineral rights and all of our military equipment, and we get your pastureland.]

Her brother’s treachery forces her return to the land of her birth, where the true nature of her curse is exposed. Together Ariashal and the King seek to defeat their curses. [It would seem they've already defeated hers; they're married and he's not dead.]

I am seeking representation for my paranormal romance, "The Cursed Queen", which is complete at 108,000 words. May I send you some sample chapters?

I am a member of RWA, and have published a vampire short story. I have a BA in English and post-graduate work in both Literary Criticism and Art History.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely


Notes

Are they using the curse as a weapon? Were they with the previous five husbands?

This peters out when she marries the sorceror king. There's room to tell us more. What is the true nature of Ariashal's curse? What is her brother's treachery? What can they do to defeat the curse placed on the king? Is the goddess available to discuss it? Why is the king still alive? Sorcery?

Guess the Plot

The Love Possessed

1. Ventriloquist Kenneth Darby's wife needs an exorcism, but there are no priests at their Antarctic base camp. Can a demon be tricked into thinking a penguin is a midget in a cassock?

2. An insipid teen whose best friend is a hamster, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to save the wee beast after devastating earthquakes, fires, and floods flatten Los Angeles. Plus, a barbeque.

3. Doug's in love with three different women, but little does he know that each of them was possessed by the same ghost at the time he fell for them. Now the ghost has taken possession of yet another woman in hopes of marrying Doug--but Doug won't be marrying anyone unless he can beat a murder rap.

4. Annabel Holland has been playing the dating game for too long, and charming lawyer Alex Miller seems to be her ticket out. As their courtship progresses, though, he begins to display some disturbing quirks: an aversion to holy water, a tendency to vomit on all her best clothes, and an ability to stare up at her while she gives him a backrub. Will she make him choose between her and the Dark Lord, or will she decide that at her age she can't afford to be picky?

5. When a Dutch band called The Love makes a pact with a minor demon, they rocket to superstardom. But when The Love go on tour, the demon and his pals possess the band members and terrorize their calm, elderly audiences with acid rock from Hell. Also, a bellhop with a speech impediment.

6. Demon hunter Dylan Ghostlight has killed dozens of demons – but never a Succubus –until he heads to a small Kansas town where the townsfolk are having orgies non-stop until they die of exhaustion, and finds himself fighting demons in a way he never has before.


Original Version

Dear Admired Agent/Esteemed Editor:

I was delighted to read on your blog that paranormal romance continues to be a hot genre. THE LOVE POSSESSED, complete at 85,000 words, is a spicy contemporary paranormal romance -- without a vampire in sight.

After her soul mate is killed while serving overseas, Callie wonders if she will ever fall in love again. When she dies shortly afterward in a car crash, it appears she'll never find out. [Usually in a romance you don't want your hero and your heroine to be dead by chapter 2, but this may work out.]

But dead, she's getting another chance at love [thanks to a necrophiliac mortician]. Possessing the living is easy -- if you can catch them when they're vulnerable, like during an alcohol blackout. Not particularly ethical, even if it is just temporary. [Other unethical actions by the dead:

Possessing someone because you desperately need a cigarette.
Possessing someone to see if those Jimmy Choos can possibly be comfortable.
Possessing someone in order to murder everyone who ever annoyed you.
Possessing someone in order to check your email.]

Still, it's the only choice she has if she wants to feel again. And, while sex in a different body with a different man every night proves fun, [sex with a different woman every night proves even better.] it isn't totally satisfying. Because when material things no longer matter, love really is all there is. [Well, love and revenge.]

An overachiever who's burned himself out at work, 40-year-old Doug starts frequenting the corner bar, ready to find something more meaningful in life. [Because, when you're looking for meaning in life, what better place than a bar?] What he finds are three women he clicks with, who are not only amazing in bed but who have him seriously thinking [Bigamy? STD?] marriage.

Except one of the women turns up dead after spending the night, and he's the last person seen with her. Now it's up to Callie to find a way to make Doug believe in ghosts so she can help clear him as a murder suspect. Make him realize the "it" factor in those three women is all her. And figure out how to make their unconventional relationship work.

That's when fate throws a suicidal woman Callie's way. [The woman jumped off a building just as Callie, in possession of the body of the driver of an open-bed truckload of pillows drove past.] Depression makes the woman's possession easy. And her body's a comfortable fit -- for both Callie and Doug. But is it wrong to use someone else's body to fulfill your own passion, even if that someone is willing? [I need someone to take over my body when I'm working. I can handle the passion fulfillment all by myself.] Or can Callie, after all, wind up with a happily ever afterlife? [Admit it: you came up with that line before you even started writing the book.]

THE LOVE POSSESSED is my first paranormal romance, although several of my fantasy/science fiction short stories have been published in various royalty-producing paperback anthologies and professional magazines (list at [website]). Chapter One is available to read at [website]. [I'm more likely to look at your chapter and credits if I don't have to go to your website and find them.] I'm of course happy to send more pages at your request.

Kind regards,


Notes

Was Callie still in possession of the dead woman when she was killed? If not, how does she know Doug's not the killer? If so, can she possess the real killer and turn "herself" in to the cops?

How does she know the suicidal person is willing? Can she communicate with the person she possesses? If you can communicate with the person you possess, one way to convince Doug that ghosts exist is to possess him and tell him.

If it's so easy to possess the living, why doesn't Callie's soulmate possess someone (Doug, for instance) so they can be together? Or did I just spoil the ending?

In a world where it's easy to possess the living, you'd think there'd be millions of ghosts possessing people. Screw ethics; Callie can't be the only unethical ghost.

Of course none of these questions matters if this is a light comedy, but with a dead soldier, fatal car crash and murder, it may be dead serious, in which case you want to be sure there are logical answers to questions about the world you've created (in the book--in the query it may be better to leave out stuff that leads to questions, rather than try to answer them).

I found switching to Doug a bit jarring. Possibly you could transition into that paragraph by saying, When Callie meets Doug in the corner bar, she likes him so much she goes back every night as a different woman so . . .