Launch is tomorrow!

I'm getting excited and nervous... tomorrow is the launch party for Woman of Ill Fame, at 7 p.m. at A Great Good Place for Books in Montclair Village. Hope you can come!

Kemble Scott, a writer I greatly admire, has written a review of my book for the SF Guardian that you can read here. Scott himself has a novel that launched just yesterday! It's called SoMa, named for the region south of Market in San Francisco, and it's about characters who explore the alternative sex scenes available in that fair city. His launch party is Feb. 26, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Le Colonial bar in San Francisco: mark your calendar. SoMa is incredibly fun, a very fast read: you'll gobble it up in one or two readings and never look at SF the same way again. Visit his website here for more.

Woman of Ill Fame launches Feb. 1!

My novel Woman of Ill Fame is about a Gold Rush prostitute who gets caught in the web spun by a killer targeting women of her kind. It is available as of Feb. 1. Please attend any of the readings below. Information on how to purchase is also listed here.

Readings:

1. Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007. Launch Party and reading at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, 7 p.m., 6120 LaSalle Ave. 510-339-8210.

2. Friday, Feb. 9, 2007. Reading at Laurel Bookstore, 7:30 p.m., 4100 MacArthur Blvd. in Oakland. 510-531-2073. Note: originally posted at 7 p.m., this event is now a half-hour later.

3. Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007. Reading at Books Inc. in Alameda, 7:30 p.m., 1344 Park Street, Alameda. 510-522-2226.

4. Sunday, March 4, 2007. Reading at Bird & Beckett's in San Francisco, 4:30 p.m., 2788 Diamond (cross street is Chenery... this is close to Glen Park BART). 415-586-3733.

How to Purchase:

• First of all, please check first with your local bookseller. Most Bay Area stores should carry it... and if not, you can prompt them to order it. Most booksellers can order a book and have it to you within days.
  
• You can visit my publisher's website and follow the links.
• It is available at Barnes & Noble online: click here.
  
• Amazon will be listing the book... but the posting has been delayed.
• Attend a reading! Books will be available for purchase and signing at any of the book events.

Please also see my website for more information on the novel.

Why are her lips purple on your book cover?
You got me! Blogger loaded the jpeg strangely, somehow. The lips are supposed to be blood red, and that splotch is indeed a blood drop.

What's going on with your blog these days?
Well, it's a bit of a paradigm shift. When I first established the blog, I intended it to be a place for me to post additional information about my novels--sort of like the Extras on a DVD. But then my publisher pushed forward the pub date and with such an invitingly open blogosphere, I just started blogging about my personal life: trips I took, what I was thinking, what's great about Oakland.

But now that my first book is actually going to hit bookshelves, I'm going to revert back to the initial purpose. This post will remain up for a while, and then I'll start posting things about the research behind the novel: where the cover photograph came from, why I started writing the book, whether Nora is based on a real person, etc.

And when my novel The Witch's Trinity comes out in mid-October, I'll again shift the blog, to talk about research behind that book.

I hope you will check back here (or my website's events page) to see if/when new readings are added. For instance, we're in the middle of scheduling something at San Francisco's Bird & Beckett bookstore and I'll post that when the date is firm.

Thanks for reading!

Happy New Year!

This is me today, at 24 weeks and 3 days. Compare to the post two down where I announced the pregnancy... I grew a lot in six weeks!

That spot on my forehead is called "The Mask of Pregnancy"... I love how dramatic and Dumas-esque that sounds. It's supposed to go away after birth.

In about five hours, I leave for New York to stay a few weeks at Yaddo, an artists' colony. I've never done such a thing, and I hope it will be a great experience.

Happy 2007, everyone!