Georgette Heyers being re-released

From work.

I stopped in Barnes & Noble the other day and out of sheer habit checked the romance shelves under "H" with the faint hope that perhaps I might find a Georgette Heyer I didn't already own. To my absolute astonishment and wild delight, I found a brand new edition of The Grand Sophy, which heretofore I had only owned as a dog-earred Xeroxed copy. Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen are just about the only romance novelists I buy. Austen is always in print, but Heyers are difficult to find—but Harlequin is re-releasing six of them this year: The Grand Sophy (in the stores now), followed at monthly intervals by The Foundling, Arabella, The Black Moth, These Old Shades and Devil’s Cub. ( Here’s a delightful excerpt from The Grand Sophy )

Peg

Solveig's journal

From work

I realized this weekend that Solveig keeps a journal, which she writes in each night about her day. No, I don't mean that the novel itself will be a journal (e.g., Bridget Jones Diary). What I have in mind is more like the use that E.B. White made of Sam's journal in The Trumpet of the Swan, where each journal entry can help close a chapter.

I realized this because I wonder who Solveig might make her confidante. She'll tell some things to her mother, because they're close, but not everything. I was wondering whether I should give her a girlfriend to tell things to, like Carla in War for the Oaks (you don't tell everything to your mother, after all, particularly about your sex life). But then I thought, Solveig's an introvert. And she's a single parent, and so it isn't easy for her to go out for drinks after work to hang out with the girls.

So, a journal. It'll have to be a thinking-oriented, rather than feeling-oriented journal, at least at first (I figure Solveig's a Meiers Briggs ISTJ). It might be technically interesting to really scale back any of Solveig's internal reactions in the narration to events, and then only when you see the journal entries do you understand what she thought/felt about them--a way to help her seem introverted. And gradually, perhaps, the journal entries become more personal/introspective as she "thaws out."

Peg