Here are some Venetian palazzi to get you in the mood for MUSIC’s release this week!

I got them on a site I spent a lot of time on to bring back the memory of Venice. *g*

Bear: (pointing to picture in book) What’s that?
Me: A snail.
Bear: (with utter contempt) It’s a mollusk.

Yay! THANK YOU, Emma!

You can get to it from the front page (though it looks silly for now with only one flag) but here is a direct link.

Once I take over the world, there will be a HUNDRED FLAGS! MWAHAHAHAHA…er…um…yeah.

I’m having my agent (or rather the person in charge of foreign at my agency) pester my foreign publishers for content. I’d like to get it up before the book is released. I have three more languages that are for sure now, so I’m very excited even though making the new graphics was a bit of a pain.

This is so very relevent to a post that will be coming up soon…

I’m still doing bits of research for WHISPERS, and so when I found out there was a Balkan folk dance tonight, I had to go. DH took the Bear to our usual dance, and I went to a coffee shop near UNM. I was a sport, and so I dressed up (it was officially a costume party), which about half the other people did, so I’m glad I chose to. I waited too late to figure out what to be for Halloween, so I just wore my Chinese dress and did my hair and makeup in a semi-authentic historical fashion. My face looked diseased before the night was out, though–the white concealer did NOT imitate white base or rice powder very well at all! Oh, well! *g*

Anyhow, here are pics of me before I left. You can kind of see my hair in the first. DH decided to get fake tattoos for Halloween (no costume yet again), and I took two he deemed too sparkly and slapped them on my leg since both he and the Bear were wearing some. SO authentic, huh? (I’m chubby again, but my still legs look pretty good–I suppose nice dancer legs balance out hideous dancer FEET. )

Here is DH in his tattoos. I don’t like this picture, but he says its the only one I can put up. *sighs* You can only see one and a half fake tattoos (out of 4), and you can’t tell that he’s ripped at all–the flash did something weird here. I’m going, where are the abs and the six-pack??? But it’s the one he likes, so here it is.

And here is the Bear in his Chinese emperor’s outfit. He wasn’t happy until we bribed him to smile with a flashlight.

Anyhow, I’m very glad I went. I had a great time, I learned a number of dances, and I got a feel for the dances and the music. I also got to talk to several Balkan history buffs, the effectiveness of which was only slightly hindered by the fact that I could pronounce NOTHING correctly and generally spoke around the foreign words to get other people to say them first. *g* I also got to listen to quite a bit of Serbo-Croatian speech, which was great, too, although none will appear in WHISPERS–I just got a handle on the rhythm and feel.

My camera was not very happy about focusing, so I got very few decent shots. I am putting them with the appropriate caption.

It was odd being back on a college campus after so long–being reintroduced to the multicultural (and I mean REALLY multicultural) atmosphere again. I realized I missed that. There’s something different about the perspective of people who have lived all over the world and who are surrounded by other people from many places that is…restful. You have to be REALLY weird to be weird.

I got to talk to a physics major (or grad student, he didn’t say) about my heroine’s hypercomplex numbers. The funny thing is that, aside from a mathematician, a physicist is the only person who would have any idea what they are–or who would care! In the practical world, hypercomplex numbers are only used in modern physics. He was also an aspiring author of realistic science fiction.

Off topic…I had a mathematician my mom knows review my explanation of hypercomplex numbers in the text of WHISPERS (Alcy calls them “extracomplex” because the term hadn’t been invented yet…) for accuracy and a non-math person read it for clarity, so I’m pretty happy with it. It kept the non-math person’s interest because Alcy was so enthusiastic–WHEW.

Three older gentlemen were extremely helpful with fact-checking/verifying. I am SO pleased with my grasp of what was going on in the date I was interested in: it was such a time of upheaval that I usually had to clarify exactly who had what at that moment–like that Serbia hadn’t been divided yet and was still Ottoman, but after the failed revolutions, Milosh Obrenovich was given control of the region by the sultan instead of an Islamic pasha, and that Rumanian Banat was part of the Austrian Empire and Walachia was still part of the Ottoman Empire BUT was no longer under the control of the Phanariot Greeks, etc., etc. I know all this detail because I had to work my backside off to find JUST the right date to make everything I wanted to have happen work, but I was very gratified that other people found it confusing, too. *g* Don’t worry, readers–you won’t need to know anything about history for the book to make perfect sense! The information simply isn’t presented. I have realized that I am quite uncomfortable with giving out a business card declaring that I write sensual romance to men of ANY age! It’s that they don’t know what’s in it and will sort of…make it up that embarasses me. Thankfully, none of them seemed to have any preconceptions about romance as a genre.

One of the men (whose picture I didn’t get and whose name I don’t remember because I don’t have it written down ) definitely had a strong romantic Serbian point of view, and so he probably won’t much care for my anti-romantic approach to Balkan history. I strongly blame nationalistic romanticism for thousands of pointless deaths and can absolutely see its role in the wars of the 1990s, so you can imagine how unsympathetic I am toward it! But he gave me some very good info on folk dancing and traditions. He also, bless him, confirmed that there would have been hajduks (Serbian romantic bandits) in the area when I needed them to be. WHEW!!!

Steve (the man in the black vest) is actually wearing a fairly accurate version of Serbian folkloric costume of the 1800s. Yay! That was wonderful! I also have a stronger starting point for finding female fashion now thanks to him, too. He’s Serbian.

Ted gave me a lot of things to think about in the way of village culture. I am GROSSLY symplifying my Serbian village by not having any Moslems or Jews (that I talk about!). Ted is also an aspiring writer and has made an admirable collection of rejection letters to prove it. *g* (I threw mine away after I got accepted!) He’s Bosnian, so I’m guessing that’s where his costume is from. I don’t know, though! Notice the fez-ish hat. It was supposed to become part of the national Ottoman clothing after the Tanzimat reforms (to replace clothing that differentiated men by religion, occupation, and status) but was adopted in reality with varying levels of enthusiasm across the empire.

This is the lady who taught most of the dances next to Victor, who is not Balkan at all but Mexican. This is one of the better pictures where you can see the entire line. All the fances we learned were danced holding hands, sometimes in a broken circle but often in whatever shape the leader decides to take, kind of like a conga line with everone sideways. The line moves a lot, which is hard to tell, led by the person on the far right…the woman in the skeleton costume in this dance! I didn’t get to talk to her because she was dancing almost the entire time, and most of the rest of the time, she was with the band. I am very glad that I had a dance background because I was the only one of the handful of newbies to get the steps. The dances are rhymical but assymetrical, which I (with my ultra symmetrical Latins basic background) had a hard time with at first. But without dance experience, I would have been at least as lost as the other newbies–if not more so because I was not exactly a “bright beginner” when it came to dance.

I don’t know who this is, but she’s dressed up!

This is (really!) Vladimir (which is a name whose Romanian version I considered before deciding readers would simply not buy it, along with Lucian and other authentic-but-BOY-does-that-sound-romance-hero-y names). He’s a Serb who has come over to the U.S. fairly recently–I didn’t find out when, but he speaks English very well but with a strong accent. Anyhow, he cracked me up because as soon as Ted introcuded us, he poured me some of his beer, and when I said “No, thanks,” he said “It’s only beer!” in the tone that an American would say “It’s only water!” in. *g* Ah, yes, the Eastern European attidue towards alcohol. I’m afraid I’d never make a good Eastern European because alcohol makes me fall asleep even in minute amounts. (That, thankfully, was an acceptable excuse, combined with the fact that I am an American, whose oddities must be indulged. I really hate offending people, but I do NOT tolerate alcohol and had to drive myself home.) Vladimir started a group of the men (including Steve above) in singing Serbian songs near the end of the evening, which was cool and great for research. When I said goodbye to everyone, he did the Eastern European cheek-kissy thing, which made me feel REALLY, REALLY WEIRD because I had never done it with anyone except a few female Spanish friends and, although I am working on it (and ballroom has done a lot), I really am not a touchy-feely person, and air-kissing a very handsome strange man is definitely outside my comfort zone! I must have been the color of my dress. *crosses eyes*

*second later* Actually, that ISN’T the first time that a man did that. The other was even more embarrassing. I went to Costa Rica alone when I was seventeen, and for the first and last time in my life, I was in a culture that considered someone with my looks to be beautiful, exotic, and tall (rather than cute, wholesome, and dead average–I swear many of my dates in college were more like genetic screenings than anything else and I was ridiculously pleased at the first guy who seemed more interested in DATING me than measuring my hips and my IQ to see if I was good breeding material).

Anyhow, I had a 20-minute conversation with a young Tican man on top of Arenal Volcano while waiting for the rest of my tour group to gather back together, and right before my tourbus drove off, he ran onto it and declared his great romantic admiration for me (and I could even see the ringing of distant wedding bells in his oh-so-serious eyes–I somehow brought out the instantaneous marrying urge in a certain kind of man even though I was a let’s-not-rush-into-things-because-forever-is-a-long-time kind of girl). He asked for my address to write me in the states (hinting at maybe coming to see my parents, for goodness sakes) while trying to get me to agree to see him again back in San Jose. I complied with the address part while mentally going, “I’m SEVENTEEN! You must be TWENTY-FIVE! I really don’t want a serious relationship right now! Especially with a much older man who probably only likes me because he thinks I’m hot! I don’t care how cute you are! And, yeah, you are really cute! Handsome, even! Damn it!”

And then, to my amazement and utter humiliation, back in San Jose I wandered into the bank were he worked as a middle manager without having any idea, and he greeted me with the cheek-kissy thing and I blushed so hard I actually fogged my glasses. I could have died. He’d thought that I was coming in to see him (he’d said where he worked but there were something like 300 branches of that bank in San Jose alone, and I didn’t remember the street), and it was SO painful and embarrassing to get out of. Thank God he never wrote me after. He was terribly charming and very good-looking in a rather young and earnest way (and I was never very good and young and earnest unless I was the one being young and earnest), and I felt like quite the monster, but romance was not anything I wanted to get into at that moment at all, much less an agonizing international relationship-cum-courtship.

Ack! I had completely blacked that out. That has to be near the top of my list of Most Embarrassing Moments of My Life. Most of the rest have interested males in them as well, including when I was first asked out in fifth grade by a boy who “fell in love” with me after seeing my (incredibly embarrassing) picture in the paper after I won the district Invention Convention and virtually every encounter in the first relationship I ever took seriously.

Hmm. I spent a great deal of my time around interested males feeling acutely self-conscious and ridiculous, with only a very few exceptions. The running commentary in the back of my head that said “You’re too young for any sort of relationship!” or, later, “You don’t even LIKE him like that. Why are you going out with him? Are you an idiot?” or, later, “Don’tsayanythingstupiddon’tsayanythingstupiddon’tsayanythingstupid” or, later, “He only likes you because you’re an engineer.” or “He’s only interested because he thinks you’re smart.” or “He only likes you because you’re wholesome-looking and he wants someone to bring home to Mom.” or “He’s interested because he’s on the rebound and you look safe to him.” or “He only likes you because he has no clue that you can have a vile temper.” definitely contributed to the entire feeling of awkwardness. I need the whole friend-and-romantic-other thing in relationships, and when only one or the other was there for me, things were…not good. Especially when there wasn’t time for *either* and men were already hinting at an “ever after,” especially since those men were usually focused on a few aspects of WHAT I was rather than the whole of WHO I was. The whole love-at-first-sight thing had me running the other way in sheer terror, particularly when men (usually breathlessly and oh-so-fervently) admired qualities that I knew had countering flaws that weren’t so obvious but would make a BIG impact on their rose-glasses half-hour view of what I was. No, I’m sure they never HAVE met anything like me before, but not everything that’s rare is wonderful, so there’s no reason to get so excited. I am just as likely to be fossilized carrier-pigeon poop as I am to be a blue diamond!

And I write romance? *g* That must be why so many of my characters are neurotic!

And no wonder I don’t react well to cheek-kissies! Repressed memories of utter humiliation!

Erk. I’m going to go and try to forget that I ever remembered that.

*runs away, humiliated all over again*

I’m exhausted, but I’m feeling very happy about Whispers (and Music!) and how everything is going.

For all you readers out there who have been wanting books faster…well, it looks like you’re getting your wish. I am probably going to start writing two Lydia Joyce books a year. This makes me happy, too, because it means my career will move that much faster!

As far as what’s coming up next, my very next book will probably be set mainly in the London underworld. After that, it looks like Beloved Stranger (though it may be called ____ of the Night) will also see the light of day. My sixth book will probably be the story of a woman who pretends to be psychic and the man whose mother gave her the family jewels. My seventh…well, I have many options, and I have no idea yet which one I will use. Let’s just say I’m not hurting for ideas.

My Chinese in-laws and I have very different points of view about many areas of life. One culture clash, in particular, had me chuckling recently.

My DH was talking to my MIL, and among her weekly dose of advice, she said, “You need to teach your son that learning is about working through hardship and discomfort, and even though it isn’t fun at the time, the results make it all worthwhile.”

My response? “Why not just teach him that learning is fun?”

My MIL would be completely baffled by that! To her mind, anything that is fun must be frivolous and cannot be worthwhile. Learning is worthwhile, and therefore it can’t be fun. I don’t tell them that I love my job (okay, most of the time) or otherwise they wouldn’t think it could be a real job…

I want to hire you for a translating job! Email me!

I went hunting for reviews of MUSIC since I haven’t yet, and this is what I found!

I was the featured review from BellaOnline this month:

“The Music of the Night (Signet Eclipse) by Lydia Joyce is a book I’ve been waiting impatiently to share with you, since the ARC arrived here over a month ago. I very much enjoyed her first book, The Veil of Night, and I’d hoped she would prove prolific. At least we’re not kept waiting too long for her second book. And not at all disappointed. Sarah Connolly’s new position as companion to Lady Merrill has put her in the path of Sebastian Grimthorpe, who is bent upon revenge on Lady Merrill’s son. His misunderstanding of her position in the household doesn’t stop his plans, however, because, by the time he discovers it, it’s far too late in their relationship and in his plot to retreat. This one is every bit as steamy and dark as her last, so those readers who loved her first book will love this one as well. It’s earned four and a half of Cupid’s five arrows. I can hardly wait until her next, in July 2006, which seems a very long time from now.”

Awesome!

MUSIC was mentioned in a review of VEIL:

“I liked this book because of the characters and their interaction with each other. Victoria is a lot more mature than your average romance heroine. She’s a breath of fresh air to those of us who are sick of reading about 18-year-old virgins. Byron is an adequate moody but wounded hero. The character interaction early in the book is fascinating as the characters chip away at each others’ secrets. … My only major problem with this book that there are no other plot elements aside from the romance. I liked this book enough to pick up the author’s next book, The Music of the Night, due out in November.”

Well, she’ll like my next three better! Not book #5, though. Hehehehehe.

The rest of the hits…well, I ran into a lot of people just talking about my books. It is SO WEIRD. You wouldn’t think it, but just having all these people you’ve never met who know about you… It’s not BAD, mind you. It’s just disconcerting! Cool but weird, like they’re talking about someone else. I think that’s one of the reasons I don’t get too worked up about people saying bad things. It doesn’t really feel like ME, even when they’re saying good things. Not the me that scrubs toilets and bath tubs, anyway. *g* One of the hits was someone who’d visited my site and had forgotten who I was and someone else was saying, “Oh, I know that book!” (They were right–it WAS me.) I’m going, “Really? You DO? How? ACK! That’s so weird!”

Huh?