Congratulations Marley Gibson!

Congratulations are in order for a good friend and all around wonderful person Marley Gibson who just sold to Hougton Mifflin.

From Publisher's Marketplace:

Marley Gibson's GHOST HUNTRESS series, featuring a transplanted Chicago teen who begins to experience a psychic awakening, then forms a ragtag ghost hunting team to research and battle the belligerent ghosts in her historic Southern town, to Julia Richardson at Houghton Mifflin, in a very nice deal, in a three-book deal, by Deidre Knight of The Knight Agency.

This is Marley's second series after her Sorority Rush 101 Series that comes out in May of 2008. I've read the proposal for her GHOST HUNTRESS series and it is awesome.

In other news NaNoWriMo is going very slowly for me and since I'm going to London next week for vacation (I can't say that enough) it will go even slower. I'll be happy if I end up with 30,000 words by the time the month is done. I did however have an epiphany last night while walking to my dance class. I realized that the book my hero wrote wasn't sexy enough. He's a bit unusual for me, in that he's a total beta male. Incredibly handsome, incredibly smart, but a total egghead. His profession? He's a professor of psychology at a New York university.

My original plan was that he had written a biography of Freud and Jung's friendship and later split. Sounds terribly sexy doesn't it? My next thought to sex it up was that the hero had been encouraged to throw in all sorts of sexy details of all the women Jung slept with and an intimation that Freud got up to no good with his sister-in-law (not really a new theory). But I could just hear an editor or agent explaining to me that idea of Freud isn't really sexy in a romance novel.

So now the plan is that his PhD thesis on gender roles has been sexed up into a book on the male/female relationships. Which completely makes him uncomfortable, particularly since the publicity department of the publishing company has used his attractiveness as a marketing tool. I think this now contrasts nicely with the heroine, who was once a championship ballroom dancer before she was injured. So she's used to being the spotlight, and he's not. And their roles are also now reversed because she's retreated to teaching at her parents dance studio, while he's trying to deal with is minor fame he's gotten.

I still like the whole Freud/Jung book idea, but then I'm kind of an egghead myself. But I can see how I had to open it up and change things around. This adds more dimension to the novel now and gives me a chance to sort of poke fun at all those self-help books etc. Since that's the last thing the hero ever wanted to write.

Thanks for reading,

EKM