Picture Day Friday

In the category Best Wedding Day Dress EVUH...

Anne of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library designed a dress made from romance novels. Courtesy of The Frisky.

Amanda McCabe Visit & Giveaway

Please join me in welcoming wonderful historical author

Amanda McCabe
to the blog on
Wednesday, May 5

She will be blogging about the Muses of Mayfair in her upcoming trilogy and also the muses that rule (or not) her writing life.

She's also giving away a copy of each of the three books in her trilogy.

Two books will go to two commenters chosen at random.

The grand prize winner will receive one book from Amanda AND a tote bag and author goodies from me.

Jane Austen and Game Theory

I was astounded when I came across the title to this paper that ties Jane Austen, a contemporary romance novelist of her times, with Game Theory. I would never have put those two, in my mind, mutually exclusive facets of academia in the same sentence together, much less in anything that inextricably connects the two.

Game Theory is a branch of applied mathematics used, most notably by economists and political science theorists, to capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. Initially developed to analyze competitions in which one individual does better at another's expense (zero sum games), the application of the theory is to find equilibria in these games.

Associate professor at UCLA, Michael Chwe, gave a talk on April 23, 2010 on how Jane Austen used the principles of strategic thinking in her novels long before Game Theory was developed. Here's the abstract of his talk:

'People have analyzed strategic thinking long before the academic field of game theory started in the 1950s. I argue that Jane Austen's six novels, among the most widely beloved in the English language, can be understood as a systematic analysis of strategic thinking. Austen's novels do not simply provide interesting "case material" for the game theorist to analyze, but are themselves very ambitious and wide-ranging theoretically, providing insights not yet superseded by modern social science. Austen prizes individual choice and argues that social norms against "selfishness" can simply be a way to control women. Like a rational choice theorist, Austen lauds stable, complete preferences but also examines how they can change according to the social context. People who are good at strategic thinking have "penetration" and succeed by understanding the preferences and choices of others. Austen thoughtfully considers competing models of human action, including those based on emotion, instinct, habit, rules, and social embeddedness, but consistently favors rational choice. Austen carefully distinguishes strategic thinking from concepts often confused with it, such as selfishness, economistic values, and competition. Far from assuming that strategic thinking assumes atomistic individuality, for Austen strategic partnership is the surest foundation for intimacy and marriage. Austen critically looks at how strategic thinking, usually so useful, can itself have disadvantages, and also why high-status people are often clueless about the strategicness of lower-status people.'

Pretty zany, eh?

RWA Nashville

The Romance Writers of America have updated their 2010 Conference website with the following information:

1. Schedule of events.

2. Detailed alphabetical list of Workshops with handouts for most of them.

3. List of Publishers attending the conference.

4. List of Editors taking appointments and their interest grid.

5. List of Agents taking appointments and their interest grid.

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first National Conference, RWA is hosting a special RITA and Golden Heart Awards Dinner prior to the Awards ceremony.

JoBev Giveaway

Since I didn't hear back from the winners from last week, the new winner for both the books is...PJ. Please email your address to me.

Children's Books & Open Letter

Today, Esi Sogah blogged about a trip down memory lane into her reading and love of reading as a child. My reply on her blog was so long, I thought I'd pop it on here to share with you.

Esi has a picture of the first Betsy-Tacy book on her post. What a conincidence that because of a recommendation from Ammanda McCabe, I have the same Betsy-Tacy book waiting for pick-up at the library for my daughter. I'm so excited for her to start reading it.

Thanks to my daughter, I've the read the following chapter book series: Junie B. Jones, Amanda Pig, Magic Treehouse, Fairy series, Princess Ellie, and Arthur. Dr. Seuss was instrumental in getting her interested in reading, and the Junie B. Jones character by Barbara Park for chapter books.

My childhood reading was in two distinct parts: books I loved and books I was forced to read.

In the first category were: Enid Blyton (love, love, LOVE), Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, lots of European boarding school books in translation, folk stories in translation, the original science fiction, Russian science fiction in translation, Georgette Heyer, category romance novels (sneaked between covers of textbooks), mysteries, Romantic poets, and daily newspapers.

In the second category were The Classics. This second category is the one that was a surprising discovery. Some were god-awful-borrrring, but there were delightful, engrossing, vocabulary-expanding ones, too. My favorites ones I read in all formats, from easy reading versions to fully unabridged ginormous tomes: Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Jane Austen, and Alcott; the worst were the tumescent Russians (bitch, moan, groan). As I mentioned to Esi, The Force To Read was a maternal one, not of a scholastic (from school) nature.

What were your favorites books as a child? Was there a summer holiday required reading list for you when you were a child? Or were you allowed to visit the library and withdraw any book you wanted so long as you brought a book home and read it?

* * *

Open Letter to Children's Book Publishers:

Due to budget constraints, lack of trained professionals, and myriad perfectly valid reasons I'm not aware of, copyediting and proofreading of books is getting short shrift from the publishing industry these days. With adult books, it's can be an annoyance, but it's a livable issue.

Where children's books are concerned, it's a serious problem. Children are absorbing rules of grammar, writing styles, and word usage from everything they read. Poorly punctuated sentences that are causing even the very young readers to stumble as they read aloud are an atrocity.

It behooves publishers to pay good money for experienced editors for every children's book they publish. While a publisher is not a charity organization, educating our young is like a paying-it-forward public service.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.