I recently discovered that I seem to be a bear. Do I mean cranky, apt to snarl? Well, sometimes (just ask my kids). But what I really mean is my tendency to hibernate.
At the end of November, I took a kind of break from the Internet. I didn’t mean to, and the urge was partly due to the coming holidays, a looming deadline, and the onset of the Season of Sickness in our house, but it lasted for a while. Until…this past week, as a matter of fact.
I didn’t blog. I didn’t even read other blogs. I was well and truly holed up with my own thoughts, recuperating on one level and gearing up on another. And it made me wonder what happened to some other authors that it seemed, to me at least, had gone missing at one time or another?
When I first started working at Kensington Publishing, I wasn’t a huge romance fan. I’d read some oldies but goodies — Victoria Holt, Dorothy Eden, the occasional gothic — and the new romances Zebra published were fascinating to me. So many different settings! So much action! So much sex!
Some of those books remain favorites of mine, but it struck me when I was thinking about my own mini hiatus from the web that I hadn’t seen anything new by those authors in a while. Had they stopped writing? Had the market changed and left them behind? Had I simply not been paying attention? (Always a possibility with me.)
Guess what? Tracking people down is a lot easier with the Internet – come on now, a big round of, “Duh, Amy!†– even if the results are sometimes as disappointing as they are satisfying.
I started with Deana James. I loved a few of her historicals, one in particular – sadly, most of my older romances were lost in a move – and I was pretty sure she hadn’t written anything in a while. I turned out to be right about that, which made me sad, but I found new (or newish) books from a bunch of other authors I had lost track of, author who apparently hadn’t been on hiatus at all. After loving Laura Parker’s historicals, I see she’s now writing women’s fiction as Laura Castoro. Stobie Piel wrote one of the first time-travels I ever read, and she apparently kept writing historicals (and one sci-fi romance!) long after I lost track of her. Janis Reams Hudson is now writing for Silhouette Special Edition, and Olga Bicos has been writing for Mira.
The news wasn’t all good, of course. Cindy Holbrook, the author of more than a dozen hysterically funny and heartwarming traditional Regencies, hasn’t had a book out since 2001, which is a really long time in the publishing world. And Taylor Chase, whose Heart of Deception floored me, it was so wonderfully dark and passionate, wrote only one book after that, at least under that name (which was a pseudonym to begin with).
Still, it gave me a little Nancy Drew-like thrill to wander through cyberspace, hunting down familiar names and remembering books I hadn’t read in years. But at the same time it made me wonder about how fast the world moves these days, how quickly tastes and trends change, and how little the Internet really means when you think about how many authors (and singers, actors, artists, reality show stars, and heiresses, and you get my point) are out there trying to lure you to their little corner of it. Is it even possible to take a hiatus anymore, without losing a valuable foothold in the marketplace and space in your readers’ hearts?
I mean, let’s face it, some of the authors I was looking up hadn’t disappeared at all. But in the crush of new authors’ releases, word of mouth, Internet buzz, blog posts, and my own life, I had forgotten some of those writers.
Have you ever lost track of any of your once-upon-a-time favorite authors? Have you ever taken a hiatus from the sticky charms of the web – or even from a certain genre of romance? Share!
No related posts.
I’ve taken a month off from the web (travelling, though I did check email about once a week). I preloaded all my daily blog entries (thank goodness for scheduling). Lucky for my hectic schedule, my readers are not the commenting kind (unless I post something they find fault with, THEN I hear about it).
As for missing authors, I don’t honestly track authors (unless that author is a buddy).
Instead of tracking writers who might still be in the prime years of their careers, I decided to check on a couple of legends. Phyllis Whitney is still alive at 103 and Mary Stewart is 91. Good for them!
I’ve been on a very long hiatus from historicals. Even the ones I’ve read recently had more than a touch of the paranormal.
Just lost taste for historicals as a whole.
Amy, really great post. It touches a sore spot for me, though. So many of my favorites, who inexplicably (at least to me) never got past midlist status don’t even write anymore. Gayle Feyrer/Taylor Chase was absolutely one of the best romance writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. My only consolation is that I do have Heart of Deception and have been able to find a few of her other books at the USB. I think she might have been a little ahead of her time . She’d fit in just fine today, though.
I took a many-years hiatus (7?) from reading romance. I grew up reading them (started at an inappropriately young age, but those Harlequins coming through the house weren’t exactly steamy stuff at the time), and it just got to the point where every single one was the same thing. I could read the back and the first chapter and tell you pretty much what was going to happen for the rest of the book, so I lost interest and moved on to other things that made me guess a little.
It took paranormals to get me back into the romance section, but I still haven’t picked up any historicals. I’m thinking about some of those para/hists, but they’re low on my list of priorities.
I often take a break for a month or three from the web when there’s a trend going on that makes me angry. I want to throw in my 2 cents, but it changes nothing and provokes more of whatever torqued me off in the first place, so I just go away for a while and hope it’s gone when I come back.
I tend to read things other than romance because I get a little romanced out by writing it. Then once in a while when I feel I’m getting stale, I’ll delve back in–but I’ll try to find something really different. That’s when epubs really shine–when you want to read something by a risk-taker. That’s my humble opinion, don’t shoot me, okay?
Right now I’m on a nonfiction roll, trying to gear up for a quasi-historical.
I miss Jan Freed who wrote for Superromance more than anything. She wrote the best family stories, the best romances. I remember seeing her nominated for countless awards.
Count me as another Gayle Feyrer/Taylor Chase fan. She had such interesting settings and characters, I fell in love with Heart of Night and was so disappointed when I realized there was no more to come. I think the Elizabethan era is a perfect setting for those complex, passionate stories.