How is the new year treating you so far? Are you taking things in stride? Or are you still wondering where 2018 went? As for me, I’m trying to cope with the chaos 2019 has brought into my life. My fridge is in the living-room, my microwave is on the TV stand and plugged in next to the fridge. My stove and dishwasher are squeezed somewhere near my dining-table, and boxes are piled almost to the ceiling.

No, it’s not a scene from my current work-in-progress, neither am I moving. It’s just a matter of taking care of some water damage in my kitchen, which has left me feeling sick and disoriented, to say the least. But in spite of eating out of paper plates, and eating things I don’t normally eat, life goes on. Right? Right. So, I just finished typing The End to my latest book and uploaded the final chapter to my critique group. Yay!!!

I began working on this manuscript twelve years ago and had to set it aside time and again for various reasons and was only able to work on it consistently this past year. Shows what you can do if you just stick with it. I feel great about myself because I accomplished this under very trying circumstances. So, want to know what my latest masterpiece is about? Remember the Golden Girls sitcom? The four middle-aged women who sat around eating ice-cream and sharing secrets? Well, my new novel is something like that, except that there are three of them and they are too figure-conscious to eat ice-cream very often. And that’s all I’ll say about them for now.

Remember to grab a copy of each book in my Egypt series or whichever one you haven’t read yet and tell your friends about them. And when you have read them, please leave a review on Amazon. You can find them on my my Amazon author page here.

Thank you and happy reading!

This post really belongs in the category, Guess What I Read This Week, a post that I started last week, however I couldn’t use the same title twice, so I decided to use the next best thing, which is the title above. If you’ve been following this blog, you may have read my post some time ago on famous authors who suffered rejection. You may recall that Jane Austen was one whose famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, formerly called First Impressions was rejected by the publisher and subsequently accepted after some revision.

That was centuries ago. The famous scribe was once again rejected in this century, according to an article in Writer Beware Blogs, but this time the person submitting the manuscript was not Jane Austen, but a writer named David Lassman. How did this come about? Well, it seems that Lassman, frustrated with all the rejections he was receiving for his own novel, decided to pseudonymously submit chapters of Ms. Austen’s books to several publishers. The result? Rejections galore. Why did he do it? He wanted to test whether the publishers and agents could recognize great literature. You can read more about it at this link: http://www.janeausten.co.uk/regencyworld/pdf/rejecting28.pdf.

So, what do you think? Should Lassman have played that hoax? According to WBB, submission hoaxes have been around for some time, with even the UK’s Sunday Times getting in on the act and achieving the same result as Lassman. Of the 18 publications that he submitted to, only one responded, letting him know they recognized what he’d done and warning him of the consequences of plagiarism. But hoaxes aside, what lesson can we as writers, desperate to have our works published, learn from Lassman’s folly?

I think the first one should be, never plagiarize, whether seriously or in jest. Think of how you would feel if someone plagiarized your work.

Second, always research your markets carefully before submitting. Apparently, Lassman did not. He subbed romance manuscripts to houses that do not publish romance, and to publishers who do not accept unagented submissions.

Third, be prepared to wait. And while waiting, continue to sharpen your writing skills. It will all pay off in the end.