1. There's a short interview with me up at Grinding to Valhalla.

2. Serendipitously, I have found an example of omniscient which involves switching PoV within a paragraph and yet is quite distinct from head-hopping. These are the opening lines of Georgette Heyer's The Toll-Gate:

The sixth Earl of Saltash glanced round the immense dining table, and was conscious of a glow of satisfaction. It was an emotion not shared by his butler, or his steward, each of whom had served the Fifth Earl, and remembered, with a wealth of nostalgic detail, the various occasions upon which the State Dining-room had been used to entertain Royalty, foreign Ambassadors, and ton parties of great size and brilliance.

The entire first chapter is told in this panoramic omniscient, moving from viewpoint to viewpoint, and she does it with beautiful smoothness.

3. Even more serendipitously, as I was writing item #2, I got email telling me that another interview is live, this one at Suite 101.

4. When I went to sleep around midnight last night, the Elder Saucepan was loafed on my hip. When I woke up at 6:25 this morning . . . the Elder Saucepan was loafed on my hip. My inference is that there's about six hours in there where I didn't move.

It is perhaps not to be wondered at that I'm feeling a little stiff this morning.

5. The Wii keeps trying to use me against mirrorthaw. I find this highly objectionable--although not as objectionable as the house centipede that was lurking up near the ceiling in the corner behind the TV last night.

I'm rereading The Reluctant Widow and am wondering: does anyone have a good photo-reference for Bouncer? I know roughly what a Mastiff looks like, and by lurcher, I imagine Heyer most probably means a Greyhound-Collie cross, but I'm having a rather difficult time imagining how the three would go together. Aside from the part where Bouncer is clearly a Very Large Dog.

Since it seems unlikely that anyone out there actually has a Greyhound/Collie/Mastiff cross and has put pictures of same on the internet (although this is the internet and one never knows), speculation is also welcome!

This post is as much a PSA as anything else: two publishers, Sourcebooks Casablanca and HQN (otherwise known as Harlequin), seem to be in competition to reprint Heyer's books. The funny thing is, it's very difficult to tell one from the other. Trade paperback, similar palettes, similar fonts (the fonts they use for GEORGETTE HEYER are almost indistinguishable), similar choices wrt cover art: oil paintings of Regency people. Sourcebooks is using better quality paper and has eschewed the dodge of "foreword by NYT bestselling author!"--and doesn't have ads for their other books in the back, either, which I confess counts as a win in my estimation. Sourcebooks is also making a serious effort to reprint Heyer's historical novels (i.e., all the ones that aren't category romances) and mysteries, which means that I finally, finally have a copy of The Unfinished Clue that isn't literally falling to pieces in my hands. So, yeah. PSA. If you're looking to complete your Heyer collection, or to replace books in bad condition, now is a really good time.

The Black Moth and Black Sheep are the two Heyer romances I have never previously been able to find. (You may imagine my glee in the dealers' room at Penguicon when I discovered them.) They make an interesting pair, and not only for the color motif in their titles.

The Black Moth is Heyer's first novel, famously written to entertain a convalescent brother when she was seventeen, and if the book as published is what she wrote as a seventeen-year-old, she was magnificently precocious and should possibly be canonized as St. Georgette, patron of teenage writers.

( The Black Moth: spoilers--also discussion of These Old Shades and Devil's Cub )

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( Black Sheep: spoilers--also discussion of Lady of Quality )