Archive for July, 2011

The Lady of Bolton Hill: The Cover Story

Posted by ElizabethCamden on July 29, 2011 | Comments

After years of madly scribbling away in the privacy of my office, I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to finally know that actual people are reading and enjoying my book.  A huge majority of the comments note the lovely cover.  I agree!   

At the very beginning of the design process, my editor asked me to write up some notes about what the characters look like and the setting of the book.  Unlike many inspirational romance novels that are set on the prairie, The Lady of Bolton Hill takes place in Baltimore during the gilded age, so it was important to communicate the setting so people knew what they were getting.  Hence, the skyline through the window.  In my design notes, I spoke a lot of the heroine, Clara, as a very refined and gentle woman.  This quality really comes through on the cover. 

Aside from those initial notes, the cover illustration is an aspect of the book I have almost zero control over, so I was sweating bullets over what it would look like.  In my head I have a vision of the tone, setting, and atmosphere of the book, and it is a huge leap of faith to turn all that over to someone else.   I was very lucky to be paired up with such a gifted artist, Jennifer Parker, for my first cover.   

It was late at night when I got the email with the cover image attached, and my computer was unusually sluggish.  I remember the wave of nervous anxiety as I waited for that image to load.  I think I was clenching my teeth so hard I almost gave myself lockjaw. Anyway, what a huge relief to be greeted with something so lovely!  

I never realized how much work goes into the design process.  The cover illustrator actually came up with several mock-ups of the cover before settling on the lady in the blue dress.  Here are the rough drafts of alternate cover ideas:

Once they decided on a lady standing before a window, they hired a model, a photographer, and went to work.  Here are the two, almost identical versions of the cover that made it to the final round:

They ultimately decided on the version on the left.  After that, they began working on the artwork, text, spine, and layout of the back cover.  All in all, I was immensely pleased and humbled to have such a great team of people working on my cover. 

Bibliomania

Posted by ElizabethCamden on July 27, 2011 | Comments

Bibliomania is a recognized psychological condition characterized by the obsessive need to possess books.  For those of you who read The Lady of Bolton Hill, you know the novel’s villian suffers from bibliomania.  I’ve always believed that a really good villian ought to have an admirable trait (a hobby, love for a person, desire to succeed) that has been magnified to such a degree that it turns him or her bad.  This makes them infinately more fascinating than the run-of-the-mill villians who are motiviated only by greed. In The Lady of Bolton Hill, Professor Van Bracken has an obsessive love for antiquarian books.  He will do anything in order to acquire enough money to pursue his love of books, including building a mansion in the Vermont wilderness which he keeps at a constant 60 degrees, the optimal temperature for book preservation.  The setting is chilling both physically and spiritually.  The Professor’s bibliomania also leads to a string of crimes and  kidnappings to amass the fortune necessary to acquire the world’s rarest volumes.  

For anyone interested more in real life bibliomaniacs, I recommend Nicholas Basbane’s fabulous book A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.  I drew heavily on this book for insight into the condition.   Basbanes sheds light on the subject by providing dozens of cases of real-life bibliomaniacs, such as the homocidal Don Vincente, a Spanish monk whose monestary was mysteriously robbed of all its valuable books in the early 1830’s.  Shortly after the unsolved robbery, Don Vincente left the order and opened a rare book store in Barcelona.  Over the coming years, Don Vincente committed at least eight known murders of men who possessed fine book collections, most of which ended up in the former monk’s shop.  Don Vincente was ultimately caught and executed for his crimes in 1836. 

Basbane’s book recounts dozens of such stories, and it is a fiendishly good read for people who enjoy the world of rare book collecting.  

Here a a couple of other unhealthy book obbsessions:

  • Bibliophagy (book eating)
  • Bibliokleptomania (book stealing)
  • Bibliotaphy (the hoarding and hiding of books, usually through burying them)
  • Bibliomancy (using books, usually the Bible, for divination by flipping to a random page and pointing to a passage)

 

 

Ten Years!

Posted by ElizabethCamden on July 25, 2011 | Comments

This week, Bill and I have are celebrating our ten year anniversary. I can say without a doubt, it has been the best ten years of my life (and I make him say the same thing to me!) 

It doesn’t seem like ten years.  It seemed like only last year we were moving in to our house and figuring out who would get to use the shower first in the mornings.  Now I can’t imagine a life without him in it.   

I got married relatively late in life, and I think this was an odd sort of blessing.  After all those years of flying solo, I have become deeply, profoundly appreciative of having a partner in life. 

 We don’t really have any special plans.  I have been warning Bill for a couple of years that I might want to get a nice ring or something (you can see from the picture that I wear a plain wedding band, and I have a grand total of four pairs of earrings to my name, so jewelry has never been a big thing for me).  We went and looked at rings, but well…..meh.  I think what I am enjoying about hitting the ten year mark is simply the ability to SAY that I have been married for ten years.  It seems like such a nice, solid number.  It expresses the sense of strength and solidity that I feel being Bill’s wife.  I can’t wait for the next ten years…

Chancellor Green Library at Princeton

Posted by ElizabethCamden on July 22, 2011 | Comments

Here is one of the older libraries at Princeton:

What a fabulous building, designed in the high Victorian gothic style. This library was built in 1871 in order to address the small, crampt, and inconveniet library they had been using until then. In 1868 the President of Princeton complained that their library was only open once a week….for a single hour!

That would have been a cushy library to work at!

The Myth of Friends with Benefits

Posted by ElizabethCamden on July 20, 2011 | Comments

At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I wish we could banish the distasteful term “friends with benefits” from our vocabulary.  Does anyone with a functioning brain cell really believe such a concept (in which two friends agree to casual, commitment-free sex with no expectations of a romantic relationship) really exists? 

Since I work on a college campus, I hear girls toss this term around as though it is a sign of hip sophistication.  It isn’t.  If two people are claiming to be “friends with benefits,” I guarantee you that one of them, almost always the girl, is settling because that is all she thinks she can get.  I simply don’t believe young women have sexual urges so strong they are happy to turn off all emotional inclinations in exchange for a quickie.  If you meet a girl who swears it is true, I’ll show you someone who is fooling herself.

It was only a matter of time until this concept started creeping in to taint romantic comedies.  Now there is a major motion picture with Justin Timberlake that features this premise.  There has been a real erosion of respect for the beauty of physical intimacy, and with the growing popularity of terms like friends with benefits, I see this bizarre concept becoming more and more mainstream.  The whole “hook-up” culture is setting expectations so high and creating such pressure for young women who don’t want to participate in it. 

Getting off my soapbox now.  Still, I can’t wait for this fad to be over.