It's official now: only the really good-looking men are bisexual. That’s the gist of a press release about a recently discovered painting that some scholars claim is a portrait of William Shakespeare. From The New York Times of March 10: " 'This Shakespeare is handsome and glamorous, so how does this change the way we think about him?' the handout reads. 'And do the painting and provenance tell us more about his sexuality, and possibly about the person to whom the sonnets are addressed?' "

As the article in the Times explained: "the [Shakespeare Birthplace] Trust said the portrait might open a new era in Shakespeare scholarship, giving fresh momentum, among other things, to generations of speculation as to whether the playwright, a married man with three children, was bisexual. Until now, that suggestion has hinged mostly on dedications to the Earl of Southampton that Shakespeare wrote with some of his best-loved poems and some of the sensual passages in his poems and plays, particularly his sonnets, most of which, the London scholars said, are centered on expressions of love and desire for men, not women."

Wow! All this time, ever since I first learned about the "fair" young man and "dark lady" of the sonnets, I had simply enjoyed the extra dimensions of meaning these personae gave to my reading. It wasn't really a new interpretation of the words themselves, just something interesting to bear in mind when brooding over "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action" or "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

Part of the pleasure of this kind of speculation is that it's necessarily vague. The young man and dark lady may or may not have been "real," and Shakespeare may or may not have had "sexual relationships" with them. But the possibilities were so much greater because we couldn't know for sure. All we could do was imagine. If I had any visual image of the author it was probably that standard black-and-white engraving we all see in textbooks. That bland face certainly isn't going to set the world on fire. Then there's the "Chandos portrait," named for its first documented owner. Whoever that's a picture of, at least it looks like a writer. Somewhat scruffy, with a high forehead, receding hairline with hair too long in back (to compensate?), just like Detective Andy Sipowicz as played by Dennis Franz on NYPD Blue. That little gold earring adds a welcome rakish touch.

Of course, the sonnets themselves give us some hints, although we should be wary of taking anything a writer says of himself at face value.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

(Sonnet 73)

Shakespeare died at 52, not so unusual in his time as in ours, and he probably didn't look like a miraculously preserved, Botoxed thirty-something when he passed. Still, let's not forgot this is, on some level, a love poem, a seduction. Is there a part of the author that's winking at his readers, letting us in on the way he's manipulating the sympathies of the innocent young man to whom the maudlin message is addressed?

But it honestly never occurred to me that, of course, Shakespeare couldn't have been bisexual, or even sexual at all, if he wasn't handsome or glamorous enough.

It makes me think, as it probably made everybody who read it think, of the so very different way writers are viewed now. In a debate a while ago on the "Dear Author" blog, there were some comments as to how it's better not to see a photo or know anything about an author apart from the works themselves. But good luck with that in today's publishing world. Writers who are published by a major publisher rarely have the option of not providing a photo. We are practically required to present ourselves as "handsome and glamorous." During a telephone seminar I took on self-promotion for writers (I know, I know) the only thing it turned out I was doing "right" was the headshot at the top of my website. Verlyn Klinkenborg, always the voice of reason, explains in an opinion piece (New York Times, Editorial Notebook, March 11):

"The perennial search for a portrait of Shakespeare is really a search for an image that justifies our idea of Shakespeare, our idea of writing. We somehow want the young Shakespeare to look like Joseph Fiennes, fiery and slashing. But what if he looked like Ricky Gervais? Would the plays mean less to us? …

"From a canon as rich as his, and a documentary record as meager as his, you can infer almost anything. When it comes to privacy, Shakespeare out-Salingers Salinger and out-Pynchons Pynchon. Go looking for the man, and you will find only the person doing the looking."

It’s been so long since I posted anything that the title of this one could just as well be “Zombie Librarian Returns to the Daylight World, part 2”—but I hate to repeat myself, even when the reason is almost exactly the same as it was the first time around:

I was working on editing, or revising, or whatever you want to call it, my manuscript for my second novel. It’s actually the old-fashioned process of turning a first draft into a second. I’m still afraid to jinx things by talking about it too soon, so let’s just say that if my luck holds, another “bisexual” comedy set in 1812 or thereabouts will be hitting the bookstores early next year.

I’ve been told that rather than beating up on myself for not being able to focus on two things at once, much less multitasking, I should just accept the way I work. So I have. I work on one thing at a time. I’m a unitasker. For the last couple of months I was working on my novel. Now I’m ready to blog, to say hello to the world and find out what’s going on with you Earthlings. But I have so many ideas roiling my brain I can’t even settle on one thing to make a reasonable length blog post. See, I’m already close to the limit of what people want to read and I haven’t even said anything yet.

I’ll never be a Twitterer, that’s for sure!

Probably every author has had the thought: "Some people wouldn't recognize good writing if it jumped up and bit 'em on the ass."

This cliché came to mind as I looked over my meager store of reader reviews on Amazon and the extremes of variation among them. Now, we all know tastes differ: what reads like elegant prose to one person will seem stilted to another; an incisive treatment of an important theme to this reader will go down like stale cotton candy to that one. It's a natural reaction, when we haven't enjoyed something, to call it "bad writing," and sometimes it is; but sometimes the more honest response is simply, "I didn't like it." Some reviews are so odd that the author can't help but wonder if the reviewer even read her book at all, or if perhaps there was some other agenda, an ass-biting incident that didn't end happily.

Jane Austen was clearly familiar with this emotion. True to her tough character, one who "dearly loves a laugh," she collected readers' reactions, good and bad, to two of her novels, Mansfield Park and Emma. Just as on Amazon, these are amateur reviews. (There were no published reviews of M.P.) Austen kept the ridiculous letters as well as the praise, like the one from a Mrs. Augusta Bramson who "owned that she thought S. & S. and P. & P. downright nonsense, but expected to like M.P. better, & having finished the 1st vol., flattered herself she had got through the worst." For Emma, Austen saved letters from a neighbor who found it "too natural to be interesting;" from a Mrs. Dickson who "liked it the less for there being a Mr. & Mrs. Dixon in it;" and the comment from an acquaintance who "did not like it so well as the others, in fact if she had not known the author could hardly have gotten through it." There's even a letter from someone who says he "Read only the first and last chapters because he had heard it was not interesting."

Bringing up The Divine Miss A. will inevitably lead some people to ask: If it's genuinely good writing, should it be biting anyone on the ass at all? Well, I think the answer is Yes. Even the rare case of good writing that also manages to be "charming" and "life-affirming," as The Plain Dealer describes Alexander McCall Smith's The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, has sunk its teeth into some readers' posteriors. "Main character achieves all her good results from lying, hates dogs …" says one reviewer, giving it just one star. "BOR-ing" and "Disappointing, a bit condescending" are the headlines on a couple of two-star reviews. My guess is, if you've read all of Austen and never once had the sensation of her sharp little teeth nibbling at your rear end, you haven't really read her work.

Most truly good writing is good precisely because it does jump up when you're not expecting it and sinks its teeth into your derrière. If that's not what you're looking for, or if the author's persona just isn't your type, it can feel like a violation. Good writing tends to make the reader think. And sometimes we just don't want to do that. We want to curl up with something comfortable, something that confirms all our dearly-held beliefs and doesn't challenge our assumptions. That's not wrong; I've felt that myself many times, and it's led me to choose genre fiction. In fact, I imagine the books that receive uniformly good reviews are those competent, workmanlike genre novels that don't take any risks.

But a book doesn't have to be "literary" fiction to be well written, to be a thought-inducing, even challenging work of art. And it's the writer who provokes a range of reactions who is more likely to be creating some ass-biting, taboo-breaking great stuff.

Which leads me, finally, to the reason for this essay: I have been invited to be a panelist (speaker) at an interdisciplinary academic conference on the romance novel to be held at Princeton University this coming April. The title of the two-day conference is "Love as the Practice of Freedom," from an essay in bell hooks's (she doesn't use upper case) 1994 collection, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations , and the panel I'm on is called "The Sweetest Taboos."

I've held onto this fabulous piece of news for months now, not wanting to be the first one to boast. I'd like to put a link in here to the full schedule, but there isn't one yet… But since I haven't posted for months, I decided to break the silence, let my readers know I'm still alive—and besides, it makes a cheerful Christmas message.

All I can say now is that I am extremely honored to be chosen. I'm certainly the low (wo)man on this totem pole. Along with ms. hooks herself, the participants include nonfiction writers like Stephanie Coontz, who wrote the fabulous Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage

and Pamela Regis, who wrote the definitive history of the romance novel, as well as a number of well-known romance novelists like Jennifer Crusie, and Mary Bly aka Eloisa James.

The other author on my "Taboos" panel is Joey Hill, author of some bestselling BDSM romances like Natural Law.

And it's made me wonder what, exactly, is so taboo about my work? The ménage? The "bisexual" hero? Or something else? Well, that will be revealed at the conference. I'm still editing my second book, another project I'm not at liberty to talk about, and I haven't yet had a chance to work on the paper I will present.

But it's clear that at least one of the reasons I was chosen is that Phyllida tends to bite readers on the ass. Many readers are into that, and it's all good. A few have complained that my heroine is not a proper Regency miss, their outraged tones implying they felt a little…compromised by the experience. I suspect, despite her preference for gothic fiction, Phyllida may be a good writer, like me.

I'm a native New Yorker, which means I'm a pedestrian. Not only do I not own a car, I don't even have a driver's license. My attitude to cars is Ratso Rizzo's (Dustin Hoffman's character in Midnight Cowboy): I'm walkin' here. We don't even think of them as drivers—just machines that must be kept in line by displays of human superiority. Don't look at them when you're crossing the street, popular wisdom goes, and they won't hit you. There's a kernel of truth in there. If the burden of avoiding a collision is shifted to the driver, he'll make the effort, if only to save on insurance premiums. (It's a highly risky strategy with taxis, though.)

Back in my college days, I fell in love with a friend when he slammed his hand down hard on the hood of a car stranded in the crosswalk, probably some deluded New Jersey driver who thought he could make a turn on a red light. We passed the car—Bam!—and shared a complicit smile. Like a peacock unfurling its tail or an antlered buck running off the competition, he had flaunted his manhood for my womanly admiration and declared his intention to fight for me, all without interrupting our conversation.

But something weird happens on those rare occasions when I get inside a vehicle: taking a cab from the airport, perhaps, or enjoying a visit from an out-of-town friend. All of sudden I want to mow down those jaywalkers, those morons who step off the curb in mid-block and dart out between cars, those maddening shopping-cart laden slowpokes who start crossing Broadway as the light is blinking red. As for those solid phalanxes of midtown office workers who just take over the entire crosswalk regardless of the lights, I want to plow through them like a Sherman tank barreling toward Berlin in April 1945.

I think of this odd transformation because of having been a reader most of my life and only more recently becoming a writer. There's that same antagonism of purpose. Readers want happy endings, "role model" characters, and simple, clear plots neatly resolved on the last page. Follow the rules of the road and obey the traffic signals. Writers want…who knows what those maniacs want? We want to make U-turns, run through stop signs, do 100 mph in a school zone. We want to write all the stuff that's in our head that may not make sense, certainly won't make readers happy and perhaps shouldn't even be written down.

Take Maria McCann's brilliant novel As Meat Loves Salt, set during the English Civil Wars of the mid-17th century and featuring a doomed same-sex love story. The narrator, Jacob Cullen, is a psychopath; I knew from the first paragraph, maybe the first sentence, that he had done bad things and would do a lot more by the end of this long novel. I felt sick to my stomach the entire time I was reading this book, trapped inside this horrible man's head. But I read it. I read it straight through, then started in again from the beginning, because it's the kind of story you don't really get the first time. Then I let a couple of weeks go by and read it a third time. So, yes, I loved it as a writer and I loved it and hated it, both, as a reader. McCann has said in interviews that she deliberately created a monster for her narrator and was surprised when some readers actually liked him. Well, not this reader. But the language, the storytelling, and, most of all, the way she imagined and recreated a whole world of three hundred and fifty years ago, brought it to life and made me feel as if I were living it myself—I was, and still am, in awe. That is art. That is writing.

But I couldn't read books like this all the time, even assuming there were a lot of them out there. As a reader I need to escape into unthreatening situations with lovable characters. I need genre fiction, the mysteries and romances that give me the simple pleasures I crave. And as a writer? Well, all I've published so far is one work of genre fiction, but it was exactly what I wanted to write, and not quite like the others. A "bisexual" Regency romance novel? I didn't run any red lights, but I may have scared the bejesus out of a pedestrian or two. And with my second novel, a "bisexual" version of a beloved literary classic, I may end up getting a ticket, perhaps even lose my license for a while. Because now that I've experienced life behind the wheel, there's no going back to the speed limit and one-way streets.

Of course, we're not all crazy New Yorkers. There are many types of readers and writers, just as there are sensible drivers and timid pedestrians. There are novelists who actually prefer research to writing (Jean Auel of The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels comes to mind, a memory of a long-ago interview) and writers who just want to make stuff up. There are readers who crave historical details, who pounce on every error of word or fact, and readers who just want a good story. There are writers who want to write tragic stories about flawed individuals and writers who want to put basically good characters through manageable challenges and reward them with a happy ending. There are readers who will embrace a monster like Jacob Cullen as a kindred spirit, others who, like me and McCann herself, will run away if they see him coming down the street.

Perhaps some invisible system keeps us all in line, like the hormones that regulate pregnancy. If the baby were to grow unchecked, it would drain the mother of nutrients and become too big for childbirth. But if the mother's body had its way, this foreign object inside her womb would be kept to a safe size, ending up stunted and damaged. Somehow the right chemical balance prevails most of the time and a healthy infant is born in nine months. Maybe something like that goes on between readers and writers. Readers find writers that please them and slam the hoods of those that don't; writers learn what they can get away with or take the chance of getting towed.

Or maybe there are no traffic signals or rules of the road. Maybe we find what we're looking for like molecules bouncing up against each other in Brownian motion.

Maybe it's simply about Once Upon a Time…

Here's a link to a Borders interview with Maria McCann:

http://www.bordersstores.com/features/feature.jsp?file=mccannmaria

OK, I confess—the title of this post is misleading. It's the middle of August, everybody's on vacation, absolutely nothing of interest seems to be happening (for those of us uninterested in the Olympics) so I thought I'd try something attention-grabbing.

No, I'm not writing about social or economic classes, but about classification. You probably know from an earlier post ("Zombie librarian returns to daylight world") that I'm a librarian by profession, specifically a cataloger. While the daily grind of the job tends to boil down to tedious matters of punctuation and the correct forms of corporate names, theoretically cataloging is about "aboutness:" classifying works based on their subject.

Another confession: this will be, like all my posts, a discussion centering on my one published book. I can't even genuinely apologize, because the fact is that's all I have to talk about. My job, as you can see, does not make for fascinating reading; I live alone, not so much as a cat; and what I do with my free time is write (that's the official version). So if I'm going to blog at all, and publishers strongly encourage their authors to do so, then all I can come up with is another angle to the Phyllida story. This time around, it's Phyllida's subject matter or category: as catalogers would say, its "class."

Libraries and bookstores don't shelve fiction by subject. Most of us are familiar with having to browse through the "fiction and literature" section arranged alphabetically by author's last name. Awkward as this can be, can you think of a better system? Imagine trying to figure out the subject of Dave Eggers's What is the What? if all you know is the title ("What"?) But this doesn't mean works of fiction aren't assigned subject headings. It's just that these categories aren't useful for arranging books physically on the shelves in what are called, so evocatively, "bricks and mortar" stores and libraries. There are usually the broad genre divisions for romance novels, sci-fi and mysteries, but that's as deep as it goes, and a good thing too.

Online, of course, it's a little different. If you find a book you like, and you want to see others like it, Amazon, for example, allows you to "look for similar items by category" and "by subject." And here's where things get complicated, at least for Phyllida. The Library of Congress, charged with cataloging every book published in the United States, has a wonderfully inclusive and thorough system. Phyllida's one LC subject heading is Bisexuals—Fiction. But on Amazon, the system is more, as we say, "binary." Amazon's first category for Phyllida is Gay & Lesbian—Literature & Fiction—Fiction—Romance—Gay. As the lyrics to "Accentuate the Positive" warn us, "don't mess with Mr. In-Between." Since clearly there's no Lesbian romance in Phyllida, and since it's also been given Historical and Romance—Regency categories, no harm done, right?

I'm not so sure. At the height of Phyllida's popularity, shortly after it went on sale, it was no. 2 in that Romance—Gay category. I joked then along the lines of, "Oh, man, will those readers be mad when they find out the title character is a woman." As you see, I had fallen into an absurd error: assuming that the people who were buying the book were synonymous with the book's assigned subject; that they were gay men looking for exclusively gay male romance. I certainly didn't assume from the fact that Phyllida had a slightly lower but still respectable ranking in the Regency category that the buyers were miraculously preserved two-hundred-year-olds. The rankings say nothing about the readers, but only where a book's sales rank in relationship to other books given the same subject headings.

Still, is there perhaps some validity to my worry? That is, do these broad subject headings create confusion, even resentment when a book doesn't quite fit the Procrustean bed into which it's been forced? If you look at the "tags" that readers have assigned to Phyllida, you'll see that the most popular ones are things like "romantic comedy," "bisexual romance" and "regency"--all more or less accurate and expected--then down to "trashy" (Hmm…is this good or bad, given the well-known Smart Bitches blog) and "bad porn" (Is it "bad" if you weren't trying to write porn in the first place—or is that the definition of "bad porn"?) If you click to see all tags, the next to last is "gayness is fixable" (Who knew it was broken?)

This saddens me. Apart from whether this reader "misinterpreted" the story, it tells me that using "Gay" as part of the subject heading may lead to false expectations. If you buy a book thinking you're getting a gay romance, and the story turns out instead to be a variation on the marriage-of-convenience plot of a Regency romance in which a primarily same-sex oriented man falls in love with his wife—well, that could strike you as funny, disgusting, amusingly different, or, as here, threatening and offensive.

Yes, a potential reader could check out some of the descriptive text and reviews. But many readers don't, perhaps because they don't trust them to be "objective." An assigned subject heading by a supposedly neutral party, the Library of Congress, say, or Amazon, seems a safer guide. But if the system isn't fine-tuned, you get reactions like this.

On the other hand, and to close on a happy note, I want to state here, for the record, that I have come to embrace the Romance category wholeheartedly, unashamedly and proudly for Phyllida. I admit to having vacillated many times on whether to use the word "romance." One reason was that a love story involving three people might not fit everyone's definition of a romance. Just as the Gay subject heading seemed misleading, so did I worry about Romance. While it seemed to me that any love story with a happy ending could be called a "romance novel" in the modern sense, there were times when I felt that "romantic comedy" was a more accurate description.

Here's what changed my mind: Pamela Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, c2003). This is a brilliant and necessary work of scholarship, and I hope to write more about it in later posts, and why I am reading it at this particular moment. For now, I will merely say that Ms. Regis writes a clear and comprehensive definition of the romance novel, listing its eight "essential elements," without which a work is not a romance novel, and three "accidental elements" that a romance may include but aren't necessary.

Although, as I say in my note at the end of Phyllida that the book "began life as a Regency romance," I had little confidence when I finished writing it that I had actually managed to produce one. But when I went over Ms. Regis's list, I found that Phyllida contains all eight essential elements and two of the three options, and that they're easy to identify in the story. Don't know how I managed it, but I did. I guess all that romance-novel reading paid off, and that we can, in fact, learn from experience.

The quotation/solution to last week's acrostic puzzle in the Sunday New York Times was from Edna Ferber: "Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!"--A Peculiar Treasure (Ferber's autobiography), first published in 1938.

I used to do the acrostic. It's so much more satisfying than a plain old crossword. When you solve it, instead of a matrix of random words, you have an author, a title and a quote; it's like an oracle from the writing gods. But I've been working on my second book for so long (feels like half my life), that I've put aside almost every superfluous activity. These days I simply look up the solution a week later to get my belated Delphic prophecy.

This message naturally made me wonder all over again whether I'm an amateur or a "real writer." Back at the beginning of this year, I was sure I knew the answer. I even posted to this blog on that very topic ("Coming out as a writer"). All writers are familiar with this idea, that writing is hard work, that the quality of your prose is directly proportional to the amount of sweat and suffering that went into producing it. The more readable your novel, the better constructed it is and the deeper its meaning, the harder you must have labored. As Red Smith observed: "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."

But things have changed. I don't mean that writing has miraculously become easy. Just because most of us sit down at a computer instead of a typewriter hasn't made the creative process any less challenging, although it has done wonders for editing and revision. And certainly the modern writer's precision tools for time-wasting, the Internet and computer solitaire, are a vast improvement over the blunt instruments previous generations had to make do with: a bottle of bourbon and a pack of cards. But I digress.

No, what has changed is the peripheral stuff: the publicity, the marketing and the whole process of being a "professional." There are so many of us writers, working very hard at making a living from this marginal occupation, that some of us have become...drudges, wage slaves. Just last year, I went to Daniel Silva's book party for his tenth novel, The Secret Servant. (How did I crash this event? I happen to have spent the first twelve years of my life in the same apartment building where his wife spent hers). Daniel had the kind of bash that a writer like me can only dream of: a blow-out at his in-laws' swanky Midtown apartment, a real crush, dozens of free copies blithely signed and handed out. When it was my turn in line I asked Daniel how it was going, although I already knew the answer. "Great," he answered in glum tones. This was a tired, world-weary laborer. It's a seven-day-a-week job, you see. This party is just lost time from researching and writing the next book. When one book is extruded, another one must enter the pipeline. He can barely afford to take a bathroom break from the assembly line for fear the entire factory will shut down. Now, barely a year later, his next book, Moscow Rules, is ready to roll.

I know, I know. I should have such problems, you say. I've said it myself. But there are different kinds of ditch digging, after all. Digging to unearth a priceless archaeological relic or a fossil of a heretofore mythical extinct species is a far cry from digging the trenches for the gas lines or the highway. A treadmill is still a long walk to nowhere, even with the illusion of a computer screen showing us an enchanted forest or an unspoiled beach. Daniel Silva, along with many other successful novelists, is locked into that death march to success that has turned a creative, anarchic, "bohemian" existence into just another rat race.

Now, writing is the "fun" part. The real treadmill is the selling. Publicity and marketing are where the ditch-digging and mountain-climbing come in--literally. I was both delighted and dismayed to learn that the third person to climb The New York Times's building last week was a self-published author, David Malone, trying to get publicity for his book, Bin Laden's Plan (2005).

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/third-man-climbs-times-building/?scp=1&sq=third%20man%20climbs%20building&st=cse

Unlike the two previous climbers, who saw the building as an urban mountain to be conquered (because it's there), and were aiming for the summit, made accessible by its convenient horizontal rods, Malone simply wanted to hang a banner for his book.

These days, it seems to me, a writer had better be doing it, at least on some level, because it amuses her, or else why bother? Yes, I understand what Ms. Ferber meant. There's no question that serious writing is work, not a pleasure cruise; and finishing a book will (I hope) continue to make this childless woman feel as if I've gestated and delivered another beautiful baby. But why would I go through it at all if I didn't enjoy it; if it didn't, on some level, make me happy—even, yes, amuse me?

All I can say is, when the writing stops being amusing, I'll be climbing the walls, too.

Like many writers, I have a day job to help me pay the rent: in my case, as a cataloger in a library that specializes in natural history. I don't talk about it much because there's not much interesting one can say about sitting in front of a computer all day looking stuff up. But last week, after a long leave of absence so that I could finish my second novel, I went back, and I thought I'd describe what it's like to see my writing from the other side.

My job goes like this: every week the library gets new books. The first thing I do is check the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) WorldCat database for a record for each book. Thousands of libraries all over the world have joined together (OCLC) to share their records online (WorldCat). When a member library acquires a book, rather than having to catalog it (create a new bibliographic record) from scratch, we can look it up in WorldCat and use the master record. Modified to reflect our individual library's system, these records are added into our online catalog so that users can identify books of interest and find them on the shelves.

The records tell many things about a book: obvious ones like title, author, publisher and number of pages; more specialized info like the ISBN (International Standard Book Number, useful for ordering if the title and author are difficult), subject headings and the call number; and stuff that only a librarian will care about, but can mess you up if they're wrong and you're trying to find a book. Things like whether the book is part of a series, and the correct form of any "corporate bodies" involved in producing the book, (examples: World Wildlife Fund; the University of Tokyo's natural history museum, which turns out to be Tōkyō Daigaku. Sōgō Kenkyū Shiryōkan).

While I was out writing my second book, staying up until 4 in the morning and sleeping till noon, my first book, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, had her debut and has been on the market for several weeks. After I had looked up all of this week's new books, I figured I'd look up Phyllida, just for the fun of it. No, the library where I work isn't going to buy it: it's a natural history collection. As a coworker pointed out, "you should have written a dinosaur or two into the story." It costs something like 64 cents for each search on OCLC, but hey, I thought, after promotional postcards at $95 for 250 and Authors Guild membership at $90, I'll reimburse them.

This is what I found: Phyllida has been purchased by 222 libraries across the country. Compared to some of our more obscure titles, with one or two other holdings if we're lucky, this sounds like a bestseller! (It's actually at the level of "not bad" for fiction).

I have an Authority Record for my name. What this means is that, should I write more books and be careless enough to have my name appear in different ways on the different books (Ann W. Herendeen, A. W. Herendeen), or start using a pseudonym (Phyllida Carrington?) all of my works will be listed under the "authorized form" of my name, so that searchers can find them. The authority record is also useful should another Ann Herendeen start writing and publishing. This person will need to provide a middle initial or a year of birth to distinguish her works from mine. Obviously, with a name like mine, this sounds like much ado about very little, but authority records are invaluable when you're cataloging a book by J. Smith (84 different authors with a total of 198 works, just in my library's catalog).

Authority records are established mainly by the Library of Congress and are hyperlinked in a bibliographic record. Seeing that clickable underline made me feel as if I'd really arrived.

Most fun of all, I have a Library of Congress call number: PS3608.E735 P59 2008. Whew! Why is it so huge? Simply because there are so many American authors writing fiction in the 21st century. (That's the PS3600+ part.) We're grouped by last name, and the first letter of the last name is incorporated into the number, putting all the Hs into PS3608. (H is the 8th letter of the alphabet—3608.) The next part, E735, is based on the "Cutter table" (named for the guy who thought it up). It's just like the keypad on a phone, where letters are assigned a number from 1-9. E is the second letter of my name and 735 reflects where Herendeen fits in with all the other He… authors alphabetically. It makes sure that in a large collection I'll be shelved after Heredia and before Herndon. Finally, the title (Phyllida …) is reflected in the last part of the number, P59, and the year of publication, 2008.

I'm thinking about having it made into a gold-plated charm that I can wear on a necklace. How's that for a conversation killer?

Well, none of this is a substitute for becoming a bestselling author (not likely), winning the Nobel Prize (not until they create a category for high class trash) or having my work made into a blockbuster movie (Clive Owen, Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson—are you reading this?) But as a zombie librarian returning to the daylight world, it sure felt good.

I had a reading at the Park Slope, Brooklyn, Barnes & Noble two weeks ago. It was the major event for me so far in my publishing odyssey.


Phyllida is what I like to call a "romantic comedy." That means there's sex in it as well as jokes. When I read for an audience, I often choose a sex scene. One reason is I'm not good at "voices." If a scene has six or seven different characters, all exchanging witty banter, listeners are going to hear just one voice: mine. It's not easy to distinguish who's saying what. In a sex scene, there are only two people (yes, it's a "bisexual" romance, but nevertheless the characters do it in twos). Plus, I figure if people are going to come all the way out to Park Slope on a weeknight, the least they deserve is a little action.


I read a scene from early in the story, after my hero and heroine, Andrew and Phyllida, have been married for one day. This is their third sexual encounter, and the first time Phyllida enjoyed it. The scene takes fifteen minutes to read aloud, including the sex scene itself and the two characters' respective reactions to it. Andrew, who's primarily same-sex oriented, is surprised by his strong desire for his wife but has no concept of the kind of foreplay a woman needs; Phyllida, who was a virgin just two days ago, doesn't understand why she responds to Andrew's supercilious manner and forceful lovemaking. Afterward, Andrew is amazed that sex with a woman can be so satisfying, whereas Phyllida tries to make sense of deriving physical pleasure from what she feels is rape.


I practiced at home, reading the scene aloud and timing it. But reading in a public space in front of an audience was a very different experience. The scene sounded much more graphic here, and it was ironic that I was standing directly in front of the Religion section, with a whole shelf of Bibles behind me. At the end of the reading and the questions and discussion, the store coordinator and the HarperCollins publicist joked with me about "breaking barriers" at B&N.


But it was the audience that made this event a success. I had hoped for a larger turnout. Most of the people were coworkers, friends and neighbors, along with two lovely ladies I met that night, fans of the book. It may have been a small audience, but it was an active, engaged one. As Spencer Tracy's coach says of Katherine Hepburn's athlete in the movie Pat and Mike: "Not much meat on those bones, but what's there is cherce."


The most probing questions had to do with my choice of subject--the bisexual husband--and style of writing. I have always said that I wanted to write entertaining, popular fiction that is well written--what my mother, who valued more serious works, called "high class trash." After a discussion of the concept of "slash" fiction, I joked that perhaps what I write could be called "high class slash."


Finally, two old friends who had supported Phyllida from its earliest days as a POD (print-on-demand) book asked if I thought I was limiting the book's audience, and myself as a writer, with this kind of story. It's true, I said, that some people are turned off by the idea of a man who gets to "have it both ways" and of a wife happy in her marriage to this man. But when I thought about it, I knew I was privileged to be writing exactly what I wanted, not tailoring my ideas, my characters or my plots to the demands of the marketplace.


I left that night with the same feeling I had at Phyllida's book party a month ago: that I have been blessed. Perhaps those Bibles had a message for me after all.


To everybody who has read Phyllida and enjoyed it, and especially to all of you have written to tell me so: Thank you for giving me the ultimate affirmation.

Phyllida is listed in the no. 1 (top) position in OUT Magazine's June/July issue "Hot List: Literature" feature on "Summer Reads."

My hero, Andrew (a total top), would be proud.

My "debut novel" (how's that for making me feel eighteen again?), Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, is being released tomorrow. In this age of the life lived online, I have this nagging feeling there's something I'm supposed to say, something I should do to mark this momentous (to me) occasion. How can I expect potential readers to notice me and, more important, seek out my book, if I just sit quietly and let the moment pass?

I'm old enough to remember a very different time, not that long ago, when a serious author tried to be anonymous, sometimes literally. An author photo? Absurd! What could it possibly matter what a writer looks like? Even a short bio seemed, somehow, unseemly. It's the work that matters, the writing. The author isn't the point of this endeavor; the book is.

Sometimes anonymity or a pseudonym are essential. Think of the original Flashman, written by George MacDonald Fraser and first published in 1969. I've heard that some early readers genuinely believed this darkly satirical work to be the memoir of a cad, coward and blackguard who lived through every major British campaign from the Afghan wars of the 1840s to the Boer War. Fraser wouldn't have helped his cause if he'd tried to make more of a splash than his antiheroic creation.

And of course, many women writers of the past simply couldn't be published under their own (feminine) names. Currer Bell is Charlotte Bronte's now-familiar male alter ego, and Jane Austen and Frances Burney published their first works anonymously.

But we live in strange times. Readership for traditional novels is down. Everybody and her sister is blogging, writing, posting, making videos. New authors are supposed to publicize themselves; it's practically a required clause in the contract. Even a big publisher like HarperCollins can't work miracles for every new, unknown author. So: Get the word out! Send email blasts! Don't have a MySpace page? What are you, crazy? Update your website for crying out loud! And blog! blog! blog!

The one danger in all this is that the diligent publicist/writer will alienate just about everyone after the fifth or sixth blast. I received a wonderful "reply" to one of my blog posts announcing yet another good review: "At this very moment," one exasperated reader wrote, "I think I'd particularly enjoy a romance [like Phyllida] ... But I certainly wouldn't read it if I knew you wrote it."

Well, there's the rub. I did write it. I wrote the book and I wrote the blog and the website content and the emails and . . .

What can I say except: I've loved every minute of it. I wrote what I wanted to write, what gave me great pleasure, what I wanted to read. Tomorrow--in a few hours--it will be on sale in bookstores for everyone to read.

I hope that some of you will find in this humorous, romantic story of the spirited, beautiful authoress, her glamorous bisexual husband and his honorable gay boyfriend the same joy I had in creating it.