Silk's Release Day Comes with Most Welcome Jane Austen Flattery

Hello dear Readers!

Hurrah!  Silk: Caroline’s Story has at last been released to the world! (Purchase links at the bottom of this blog.)  If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with the gist of the story, so I won’t bore you with a long description--see vendors or sign up for my newsletter on the side bar for a reading sample--but here is the nutshell version:

“It’s 1899. Caroline must choose between the town doctor and a Lowcountry farmer, but Jessie isn’t about to let this happen.”

That settled, I am still over the moon about a most amazing blurb that I wanted to share with you. It came from one of my favorite authors just a few days ago.  She said:
 
“The social realism of Jane Austen meets the Southern gothic of Flannery O'Connor in this absorbing novel by Sophia Alexander. Silk: Caroline’s Story explores questions of longing and desire, of jealousy and heartbreak, and of the fateful choices that shape one’s destiny—or doom us completely. Alexander has a true gift for illuminating the most intimate desires of her historical characters in this richly drawn book that I couldn’t put down." -Sarah Domet, critically-acclaimed author of The Guineveres.

When someone you admire so much gives you that sort of praise, you’re smiling for days!  And to top it all off, just this morning an advanced-copy reader told me, “I love the book. One of my favorite books is Pride and Prejudice, and Silk takes me back.”  So yes, my head is about as swollen as it can get.  I never dreamt of being classified in any way with Jane Austen!  Really, my ego is going to be quite unmanageable now.

My husband tells me not to feel badly about it, that my writing isn’t THAT bad.  Ironically, we’ve squabbled for years over Jane Austen!  I adore her, obviously, but he sides with Mark Twain, who said:

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898
 
"To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909

"Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."
- Following the Equator

The above quotes are taken from a website, but I’ve heard them here and there for many years.  Mark Twain’s very intensity about Jane Austen makes me suspect he really loved her writing on some level, but that could just be my fanciful thinking! Really, though, isn’t it telling?:  ‘Every time I read Pride & Prejudice’!  Hmm… Sounds like he was really just frustrated at being in love with her when she was already dead long before he was born!

Doesn't Mark Twain look frustrated here?

What irony, given my long-standing disagreement about Jane Austen with my hubby, who oddly enough has gone through phases in his life where people called him Mark almost more than his real name of Michael!  (See where my fancy comes in there?)

So, anyhow, my head is clearly swollen with that amazing praise (no matter what Mark/Michael says), but all is not perfect in my world.  I should be celebrating at my debut novel release, and I am sorta, but I did shed a few tears this morning!  Amazon's 'Look Inside' function has screwed up my formatting. I was wondering why I had sales on other sites and virtually NOTHING on Amazon!  It's still screwed up, but an Amazon tech support guy tells me he's fixed it, that it will just take a day or two to be corrected on the site.  You'd think their tech guys could make it happen pronto, but I guess those are safeguards in place?  I don't know...  Never fear, though. The real Kindle version looks just fine.  It’s only that ‘Look Inside’ preview that is botched a little bit, and that glitch should be fixed within the next day or so, maybe even by the time you read this.

Thank you for waiting patiently for the release of my novel.  If you read it and enjoy it, please do leave a review.  It means so much to us authors, especially for our debut books.

Silk is available as an ebook on virtually any device, as a regular paperback, or in its large-print edition. So exciting to see it out there on all those vendor websites!  You can request it from your local bookstore, or click on these links to purchase it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Kobo, Scribd, or the Apple e-bookstore.

Onalex Books, $4.99 e-book; 276 pp., $14.99 paperback, ISBN: 978-1-955444-00-2; 469 pp., $19.99 large-print paperback, ISBN: 978-1-955444-01-9; available wherever books are sold.

Meet Addi & Gunther!

Today is my birthday, and my 19-year-old daughter surprised me with this linotype of Addi with her wolf-dog, Gunther. Addi is the protagonist of my as-yet-to-be-published YA (young-adult) fantasy novel.  I was over the moon at seeing this!  No, my daughter hasn't had any sort of specific class in how to create linotypes, just got the notion to do it, so looked it up online. She says this is still unfinished; somehow she's carved the lines in a tile, then inked it and pressed it onto a paper.  This was a 'sample' of what she's working on, she says.  Anyhow, it seems very period, as they used to create images with woodblocks and ink them onto paper for mass distribution. I could bore you with bragging about how innately talented my daughter is--but she has had art classes ever since she was little, and she even just took an art class at UGA. Hopefully you'll be seeing more of Addi and Gunther one day sooner rather than later, but it may be a while, since Tapestry is next in line after Silk!