Ann Herendeen

I uploaded my fifth Eclipsis story today: Captivity. This is the first work of mine that isn't, in some way, a romance. It is, as best I can describe it, a family drama. But what a family!

If what I've written so far is alternative or unconventional romance, this is definitely alternative, (more…)

Many years ago I came across one of the books espousing the "Oxfordian theory," the belief that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.
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I live alone, making spaghetti with sauce from a jar tests the limits of my culinary abilities, and I love red meat. So one Thanksgiving I invited just one very good friend over and I served filet mignon.

When I put that first big bite of charred-on-the-outside, oozing-blood-on-the-inside tender beef into my mouth, I almost cried. It was that good. (more…)

Colm Toibin, in a review of a biography of E.M. Forster, derided the idea of the "honest novel" (as the biographer, Wendy Moffat, described Forster's Maurice): "novels should not be honest. They are a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors … they are not forms of self-expression, or true confession." (more…)

I just spent a long weekend copy editing the second book in my ECLIPSIS series of Lady Amalie's memoirs, Choices. If anything could cure a person of wanting to be a writer, this would seem to be it.

But it occurred to me that the worst is yet to come: the synopsis. (more…)

Like many authors these days, I've decided to self-publish my backlist as e-books. Recognition, a $.99 novella, the first installment in what I'm calling the ECLIPSIS series of Lady Amalie's memoirs, is now available for the Kindle and Nook, and will be up in other formats soon.

My backlist is a little different (more…)

In a recent post, I talked about the problems of trying to write while earning a living at the same time. The issue comes down to the ability to write—that is, write well, produce good prose, the best you can—and work at a full-time job.

But the ugly secret nobody talks about is as old as the change from nomadic hunter-gatherers to villagers: (more…)

Anybody who’s worked at writing knows that creative success doesn’t necessarily lead to material success. We tend to think of the award winners and the bestsellers as two mutually exclusive sets of writers; and we hope, even if we don’t always believe it, that if a writer stays true to his or her voice, the work will be recognized on its merits, eventually. (more…)

Authors of “controversial” fiction go through a steep learning curve. If we get good print and mainstream reviews for our first book, as I did with Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, we eagerly and obsessively check the blogs, the offbeat or specialized online reviews and our sales rankings on Amazon and B&N. And, wow—can that be a bucket of cold water, or, to use an analogy Henry Fielding might have employed, a chamber pot emptied over one’s head. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago I heard a talk by Francine Prose, author of Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Like many writers of fiction, Ms. Prose uses the word “books” here to mean novels, and her talk was similar to the first part of Reading, a discussion of the reasons people read, or might want to. First on her list was: Escape. (more…)

Readers of my LiveJournal blog may have noticed that my user name is Ann_Amalie. Some may have wondered where that came from. When I first started to write (fanfiction set in a sword-and-sorcery world), “Amalie” was my alter ego. She was a telepath, a misfit, who comes to this fantasy world in (more…)

I'm leaving in a day or two on my one event to promote my Pride/Prejudice: a three-day "mini-tour" of western North Carolina, centered around an invitation to the cosmopolitan Malaprop's in Asheville, and including appearances at two other independent bookstores.

Many people, when they hear I've had a second book published, routinely ask if I'm going on a book tour, even though, for most authors, the tour is no more a part of our lives than manual typewriters or fountain pens (which people also assume we use). We persist in our beloved stereotype of the shy writer who dreads speaking in public, with the agent or publisher pushing this reluctant wallflower into the spotlight, a modern Iphigenia sacrificed for favorable trade winds, or at least good PR.
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I got my first angry e-mail message the other day from a Jane Austen fanfic site:

“It is thoroughly disgusting to read of your use of the P&P characters to write prono [sic] to Jane Austen's works.
You should be ashamed but I am sure the money you are raking makes it all worth it to you.”

Where to start? Surely Austen fanfic writers are better spellers, although perhaps it's a clever device for getting the message past my e-mail program's spam filter. And does anyone really believe that writers like me are “raking” in money? Seriously? Or that we write for any other reason than that we need to, have to--that it's a labor of love? And what, exactly, do fanfic writers do, if not “use” another writer's characters? And why is using them in anything, from “prono” to alphabet books to Christian inspirational romance, reprehensible? (more…)

Part 1. Getting to the Ball.

Whenever I tell my story, I’m inevitably compared to Cinderella. I even make the comparison myself in the dedication of my first book.

No, I didn’t lose a glass slipper at a ball and end up married to Prince Charming. I did something far more extraordinary: I self-published a first novel (subsidy published, print-on-demand), then got an offer from a real publisher—HarperCollins, no less. (more…)