Sara Donati's Blog, page 9

The Gilded Hour (limited) giveaway

I’m giving awayfive copies of the unabridged audiobook edition ofThe Gilded Hour through Audible.com’s “SendThis Book” program. Their description:

What is Audible Send this Book?

Send this Book allows you to send the audiobooks in your library to friends and family. It is free for you to send. And if it is your recipient’s first time accepting an audiobook through this feature, it will be free for her/him. Members and non-members can redeem titles and once redeemed, can send that book to othe...

Frustration, Dissected

I have been pretty fortunate in my career as a novelist. Ten novels in, working on the eleventh, I have a lot of loyal and supportive readers. Not everybody loves every book, but it would be silly to expect that; there is no novel out there, no matter how beloved generally, that doesn’t have its detractors. People who find it boring, or activity dislike it for whatever reason.

Women’s Medical School, Philadelphia. 1900. Dissection: Getting to the heart of the problem.

When you’ve been writing...

Kindle UK Edition of The Gilded Hour

The UK Kindle edition should be available shortly

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Amazon Kerfuffle: Sock Puppets Real or Imagined

Before this spinsout of control, I’d like to get something on the record.

I posted a question on Amazon’s Kindle Forum regarding an invitation I received for Amazon’sWhispercast program. Whispercastallows a person to register a group of Kindle owners, and then send materials to their Kindles. You can imagine this would be useful for teachers. Today I got an invitation to be included in a group by somebody I don’t know and whose name I didn’t recognize, and I was then surprised to see that the...

Havanese if you please

If you are thinking of getting a smaller-sized dog, please think about Havanese (and you don’t have to buy — there are three different Havanese rescue organizations).

Look at these puppers.

They come in all colors and markings.

They are small (usually less than fifteen pounds, often between ten and twelve, sometimes smaller), very sturdy, playful, wicked smart, loyal, long-lived, with very few health problems*, they don’t shed, and oh yes, the cutest puppers on the planet who grow into fanta...

100 (more or less) novels

Will Barnet, Woman Reading

This is my alternate list to 100 Books you Should Read (Gina Barreca) in Psychology Today. I gave myself an hour to do this.

I started by going through Barreca’s list and asking myself: If this book were assigned to me to teach or to lead a discussion in book group, would I want to do it?If the answer was no, I struck it. A lot of books disappeared. I then looked at the books I struck, and tried to come up with an alternate by the same author. Example: Barreca had D...

Margaret Lawrence (Hearts and Bones) 1945-2011

Hearts and Bones, first in the series

I was thinking of sending somebody Margaret Lawrence’s three Hannah Trevor novels (and The Iceweaver, which isn’t technically part of the trilogybut is, kinda), which are out of print but (I hoped) might have been released in ebook format. So I went to seeand found instead that the author died four years ago.

This article about Margaret Lawrence (a pen name)appeared in her hometown paper at the time of her death.

It makes me melancholy to think of all the...

My side, your side: Fan fiction and The Gilded Hour

An email from an unhappy — and proactive reader.

Ms Donati, You have created a wonderful but unfinished story with very lovely and interesting people. Since you have written that you like to leave unanswered questions at the end of your books I will not be able to read your future works of art. I read– almost uninterrupted —” The Guilded [sic] Hour” and could not believe you would give up on the story without having an ending.—I know you think there was one—but I beg to differ. I have read t...

What is Amazon up to with *Romance Literary Fiction*?

Genre is a subject I have successfully avoided for years. I purposefully stopped writing about terms like ‘literary’ and ‘commercial’ ‘women’s fiction’ and ‘bodice-ripper’ because it felt like a useless exercise. Opinions about romance novels seem to be carved in stone.

“I’m not really into espionage novels,” is something you might hear someone say. No censure, just a simple statement of preference. I have a hard time imagining the same person saying “I’m not really into romance novels.” To s...

In which I confess to a terrible weakness.

I have a real weakness for fonts. Sometimes I’ll look at a font face demo and go all squishy. Why? Why? Telling myself I don’t need the font is silly. I know I don’t need it. It would be wasteful and self indulgent to buy this font: Sigmund Freud’s handwriting.

Oh, but look at it.

Sigmund Freud, oh my

Money is tight and will get tighter, so $55 for the Sigmund Freud font set: Nope. Really not.

The question is, other women lust after shoes. Not me. I own four pairs of shoes and two purses, an...