Okay, I’m insanely busy right now. Like, holy sheesh levels of insanely busy. I’ve also been blogging for almost five? six? years now and…I’ve run out of things to say because 1) crazy busy and 2) been talking non-stop for years.

So…for the moment, I’m closing the blog. This may be a permanent, but it may just be until I get on top of the insane-o deadlines. Until I decide, here are places where you can get updates or say hi because I can just give little mini thoughts and not do full blog posts.

Facebook
Twitter
Mailing List (just to find out when my new books release, chatting with me happens on the other options)

You can also check out the Yahoo Group and Blog for my Smutketeers group. Lots of chatting all the time. It’s a fun crowd!

Or you can always just email me from my contact page to say howdy.

À Bientôt! Or, as the Professor Moriarty would say, bis später!

Hey, I finally joined Facebook, so if you’re on there and you want to be friends…

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001514115589

It’s that time again! We’re soliciting proposals for the Popular Culture Association conference. This year it’s in San Antonio, TX. As always, it’s over Easter weekend!!! April 20-23, 2011. So if it’s a problem to be away from your family for Easter/Passover, we’ll miss you, but we’ll understand.

PCA is an amazing conference to go to to experience the joy and sheer intellectual brilliance of the field of Popular Romance Studies. We are truly a community. We hang around together all weekend, eating most of our meals together, talking between panels. It’s a VERY inviting conference for new scholars, and for interested non-scholars. We’ve had undergraduates and brand new graduate students present their papers at PCA and they loved it. We’re welcoming, friendly, fun, a little bawdy, and very very interesting.

With no further ado, here’s the full Call For Papers:

PCA/ACA 2010 National Conference
San Antonio, TX, April 20-23, 2011
Call For Papers: Romance Area

(Conference info: http://pcaaca.org/conference/national.php)

Deadline for submission: December 15, 2010.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to popular romance: all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras. All representations of romance in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and anywhen, are welcome topics of discussion.

We will consider proposals for individual papers, sessions organized around a theme, and special panels. Sessions are scheduled in one-hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per standard session.

If you are involved in the creative industry of popular romance (romance author/editor, film director/producer, singer/songwriter, etc.) and are interested in speaking on your own work or on developments in the representations of popular romance, please contact us!

Some possible topics (although we are by no means limited to these):

* Popular Romance on the World Stage (texts in translation, Western and non-Western media, local and comparative approaches)
* Romance Across the Media: crossover texts and the relationships between romance fiction and romantic films, music, art, drama, etc.; also the paratexts and contexts of popular romance
* Romance High and Low: texts that fall between “high” and “low” culture, or that complicate the distinctions between these critical categories
* Romance Then and Now: representations of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern love
* Romancing the Marketplace: romantic love in advertising, marketing, and consumer culture
* Queering the Romance: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender romance, and representations of same-sex love within predominantly heterosexual texts
* BDSM Romance and representations of romantic/erotic power exchange
* Romance communities
* New Critical Approaches, such as readings informed by critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, or empirical science (e.g., the neurobiology of love)
* The Politics of Romance, and romantic love in political discourse (revolutionary, reactionary, colonial / anti-colonial, etc.)
* Individual Creative Producers or Texts of Popular Romance (novels, authors, film, directors, writers, songwriters, actors, composers, dancers, etc.)
* Gender-Bending and Gender-Crossing / Genre-Bending and Genre-Crossing / Media-Bending and Media-Crossing Popular Romance
* African-American, Latina, Asian, and other Multicultural romance
* Young Adult Romance
* History of/in Popular Romance
* Romance and Region: places, histories, mythologies, traditions
* Definitions and Theoretical Models of Popular Romance: it’s not all just happily ever after

As we have done for the past three years, the Romance area will meet in a special Open Forum to discuss upcoming conferences, work in progress, and the future of the field of Popular Romance Studies. Of particular interest this year: the 2011 New York City conference for the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), planning for the 2012 IASPR conference, and the first volume of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS).

Presenters are encouraged to make use of the new array of romance scholarship resources online, including the romance bibliography , the RomanceScholar listserv , and the open Forums at the webpage of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance .

Submit a one-page (200-300 words) proposal or abstract (via regular mail or e-mail) by December 15, 2010, to the Area Chairs in Romance:

Sarah S. G. Frantz
Department of English and Foreign Languages
Fayetteville State University
1200 Murchison Road
Fayetteville, NC 28301
(910) 672-1438
sarahfrantz@gmail.com

Darcy Martin
Adjunct Faculty, Women’s Studies
East Tennessee State University
12 Wataugua Court
Bluffton, SC 29909
(843)705-4861
martindj.etsu.edu

If you have any questions as all, please contact one or both of the area chairs. Please feel free to forward, cross-post, or link to this call for papers.

Hope to see you there!
-Sarah

It officially releases today! Run out and buy a copy, you know you want to!

The Between. A race of people between light and dark. Good and evil. Human and animal. The world discovered their existence over a decade ago, and so far the balance between humans and Between has been precarious at best. One bite is all it takes to cross the line from human to Between. It doesn’t matter what species of shapeshifter bites a human–only the soul can dictate what kind of animal is most suited to a Between. Many humans think they’re dangerous and should be locked away, while others covet their power.

On a fateful camping trip, fiery Oregon beauty Rhiannon Reid is kidnapped and turned into a “Between”–a magical shape-shifting creature. Now forced to prove her worthiness to the group’s golden king, lion-shifting Elan Delacourt, the two test each other’s strength and character–but lose themselves in the hot-blooded battle…

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