Final Days in London

I can't believe that tomorrow I will be back in New York. I've had such a lovely time here in London on this trip that I hate to see it end. Leaving our lovely little flat in Earl's Court, while the sun is shining and people are out talking on their cell phones on their little balconies. I must stop or I'll cry a little.

Yesterday, I attempted to go to Leighton House which is the home of Frederick, Lord Leighton, a Victorian painter whose most famous painting is probably Flaming June. Well, after going the wrong way, I finally found the house only to discover that it closed for renovations until the end of 2009. Boo-Hoo. The notice suggested that one could check out the Linley Sambourne house instead but unfortunately due to time constraints I couldn't do that. The house is only available for viewing on a private guided tour and I had just missed one and the other didn't start until 2:00 by which time Hope and I needed to get going to attend the Romance Novelists Association meeting at The New Cavendish Club.

We arrived for the meeting just as it was starting. The New Cavendish Club is a private members only club which has several meeting rooms downstairs. The speakers for the RNA meeting were author Carole Matthews, and editor from Little Black Dress books, and a publicist for a literary PR firm who does the publicity for Mills & Boons for their centenary celebration. The topic was what could you, the author, do to help out your publicist. The general consensus was that authors, due to budget constraints at publishing houses, largely need to do their own publicity as much as possible, or come up with angles that might make them marketable.

It's important that a debut novelist have a web-site in place, and that they have a presence on facebook and myspace, as well as think about putting out a newsletter. That all seems like commonsense, but it's amazing how many authors out there don't have a web-site or who don't know about facebook etc. Carole Matthews talked about twitter but all three agreed that whatever publicity you do shouldn't keep you away from what is most important, sitting your butt in a chair and writing.

Afterwards, Hope and I went out to the pub with Julie Cohen, and several other members of the RNA for copious amounts of wine. We then went on to have dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant in Pimlico where we enjoyed more wine. Needless to say that I'm feeling a tad fragile today. I did manage to do some laundry and start packing for my trip home tomorrow.

Since it is so lovely out, I might head up to Camden market and to see the view from Primrose Hill.

More from London

I'm back at ye old Internet cafe, twittering, facebooking and blogging. My trip here is almost at an end and the depression is about to sink in. I have had a fabu time here in London. Went to see the always wonderful Dame Judi Dench in Yukio Mishima's 1965 play Madame de Sade. She didn't play Madame de Sade but her mother. I thought the acting for the most part was wonderful but the play left something to be desired. Not because it wasn't well written but because it was hard to understand Madame de Sade's motivations. We had standing room seats which were brutal but only £10. Fortunately the play was 90 minutes without an intermission but towards the middle it was getting pretty hard to stand. The costumes I have to say were stunning. Each actress wore a variation on the same palate for each scene.

Had an intimate tour of the Theater Royal Drury Lane in Convent Garden. Hope and I had booked the 2:15 tour which was supposed to be full. However, the school group that had also booked was late, so the tour guide just took us on a tour. It was lovely to talk to a fellow actor and to learn more about theater history in London. It gave me some interesting ideas for future projects that I'm keeping in the vault for a moment.

I had to head over to the National Portrait Gallery which is one of my favorite musuems in London. There is nothing like being able to look at the faces who have influenced history, particularly for me since I write about Scandalous Women. Saw an interesting painting of Lady Jane Grey and one of Emily Bronte that was new to me. Before I knew it, I had spent almost two hours in the museum and had only gotten to 1900!

I'm off to Leighton House today, the home of painter Frederick, Lord Leighton, and then off to the Romance Novelist Association meeting.

I'll write more tomorrow before I leave on Monday.

London Calling Update

I'm sitting here in an internet cafe in London near the flat where I'm staying. For only a pound ($1.50ish) I have a whole hour of time to surf the internet, check facebook, and write this post. So far, I'm having a grand time here in the UK with the lovely Hope Tarr and Liz Maverick. I couldn't ask for two better traveling companions. I arrived on Monday from the US and Hope and Liz took the chunnel from Paris and we met up in our glamourous flat in Earl's Court.

We're sharing a two bedroom/2 1/2 bathroom flat for the princely sum of $199 a night which is frankly a steal. The flat is centrally located to the Earl's Court tube station. We have an M&S Simple Foods nearby along with a Boots Chemist and several delicious restaurants. So far we've been to the V&A museum, which I could spent all day in frankly, and yesterday I went to the Cortauld Institute which is a lovely little museum with a lot of gorgeous Impressionist Art. I have bought way too many books, but it's hard when they keep offering them for half price of buy 2 get one free kind of thing.

I've bought Kate Williams new biography of the Young Queen Victoria, a book on Dining in history, books on Princess Margaret, Penelope Deveraux and a few more. I had to throw in some fiction just to balance it out. I was bummed that Janet Mullany's book won't be out until August even though the Little Black Dress sight says that it was supposed to be out in March. Oh well.

Trying not to buy any clothes because despite the pound being lower than it has been in awhile, clothes are still incredibly expensive here. I saw some lovely tops in Oasis and Monsoon but they were like £65 pounds, stuff that we could buy at Old Navy for $25. A great dress in French Connection was £130. I know that sometimes the French Connection in Europe like the H&M here have different stuff than we get in the states but it is still pricey.

Saw James McAvoy in Three Days of Rain. He was lovely and the play was surprisingly good. Well that is my update for today. I'll try to blog again before I leave.

London Calling

I'm off to London for a week for research (LOL!), many cups of tea, and prawn sandwiches. I'll be back with news of my trip and my thoughts on Watchmen, the Bachelor and other subjects.

Taking Tea with Tut

This is my final post about my trip to London and I'm almost as sad as I was when I had to get on a plane to come back here. Particularly since yesterday it snowed here in New York! Then it rained, so apart from the Parks, all the pretty snow is now gone. Thank god, I have a Payless two blocks from my house, because I was completely snowshoeless.

So my last day in London, I headed out to North Greenwich to see the King Tut exhibit. Yes, I could have gone to Philadelphia to see the exhibit as one of my co-workers so helpfully pointed out, but I wanted to see King Tut in London since it was an Englishman Howard Carter who discovered the tomb in 1922.

One of the things I love about London is the subway system, which they fondly call 'the tube.' I think it's the best system in the world, certainly better than New York's where any given weekend, either a train is not running or there are changes due to track work. In London, they helpfully give you details every morning about how well the trains are running. Plus, not only do they let you know how long you have to wait until the next train (which they do in DC as well) but they also tell you how long it will take you to get to a certain station. So I knew it would take me 19 minutes to get to North Greenwich.

The exhibit was held in something called the O2 which looked kind of like the Millenium Dome. In fact it may just be the Millenium Dome, if so, good for them for finding another use for it. It's now a concert venue, along with several restaurants and two Starbucks. It kind of reminded me of Universal City in LA, except without the theme park. The line to get into the exhibit was incredibly long, and they search your bag twice, just in case, somehow you managed to make a bomb in between the first time someone checked your bag.

It wasn't quite as crowded inside, but the exhibit could have been spread out a little more to maximize the impact. Still, it was pretty impressive, I have to say, and I'm glad that I've seen it. The exhibit traced not just King Tut but gave you information about his lineage back to Ahkenaten or Amenhoetep, along with pertinent information on what it was like to be a Pharoah. The end of the exhibit they talked about what caused Tut to die so young. The myth that he was murdered by a blow to the head has been debunked, but it appears that he may have taken a fall, and blood poisoning set in, or a blood clot.

I roamed through the gift shop but given the exchange rate, I quickly concluded that I could just wait until I returned and buy stuff off the National Geographic web-site since they were one of the sponsors of the exhibit. Seriously earrings that I know cost $30 in the States, were twice that in the UK.

I saved the best for last on this trip. As a special reward, I took myself off to the Berkeley Hotel for their Pret a Port tea. I love to do Afternoon Tea when I'm in London. Over the years, I've head tea at the Savoy, Brown's Hotel, The Dorchester, the Waldorf, the Lanesborough, Claridges, the Ritz, and Harrods. There's something so 19th Century, about taking time out of your day to sit down and have tea, with lovely little sandwiches and snacks.

The Pret a Port tea though tops them all. The conceit behind this Afternoon Tea is that all the sweets are designed to look like outfits from the latest London collections. The pictures here are from the current Pret a Port tea. I can tell you that they were just as yummy as they look, although I hated to eat them, they were that pretty. I also had a glass of Laurent-Perrier champagne to wash everything down. Hey, champagne is the drink of life as far as I'm concerned.

The tea was served in the Caramel Room which was this lovely room off the lovely decorated in the most luxurious shades of brown. The wait-staff couldn't have been lovelier, and my table had a little placecard with my name on it, which I kept. I thought about keeping the menu but I thought that might seem a little tacky. I can tell you that there were about ten treats that were served, which was out of proportion to the amount of sandwiches! Still it was enough to fill me up.

I ended the day by heading to the National Theater to see a production of Women of Troy by Euripides.

So that's my trip to London in a nutshell.

Thanks for reading,

EKM

I'm back!

Yes, I have finally flew in from London and boy are my arms tired! (Sorry I couldn't resist). It was an amazing week and I can't believe how fast it flew by. Seriously, I almost wept when I had to get on the plane yesterday which is why I was so stroppy with the security guard who searched my bag before I got on the plane (this was after being searched like 3 times since I'd gotten to the airport. And seriously if you're not searching everyone's bag before they get on, don't tell me you're 'providing security' because you may have just let a terrorist slip by while you were searching my Tommy Hilfiger bag which isn't big enough to hold an umbrella let alone a bomb) I'll probably be writing quite a few posts on my trip over the next few days giving the highlights, so bear with me.

The day I left I received my 30 pages back from the editor from Pocket Books who's critique I had won through AAR's auction. Note to self, when you've just suffered a heartbreak, everything seems worse than it is. After I read her critique I just fell apart. I felt as if the universe was crapping all over me. Picking myself up of the floor, I wiped away my tears and read it again. Everything she said made sense and now I'm kind of excited to go back and make changes. I just wish I had gotten this critique before I submitted the novel to Llewelleyn Flux and The Golden Heart contest.

Things went from bad to worse when I discovered that I had booked the wrong date for my SuperShuttle (due to my lack of focus from the aforementioned heartbreak) which left me scrambling for a way to get to the airport. However, I decided to make lemonade out of lemon and I managed to grab a cab to Penn Station where I took the train to Newark Airport (quite nice for $15).

I was beginning to get worried about how the trip was going to go when we got on the plane at 10 p.m. and then sat on the runway for two hours. Apparently there was something wrong with the plane that they just discovered when we were about to take off. So instead of landing at 10 a.m. in London, I landed at noon.

But then things changed for the better once I arrived. After schlepping my bag from Gatwick Express through Victoria station to the underground to take the tube to Vauxhall, I finally arrived at Janine's house which I booked through At Home in London. She wasn't home but I couldn't believe how lovely my room was and there was a framed copy of the Romney portrait of Emma Hamilton over my bed! I knew that I had found a kindred spirit.

I quickly dropped off my bag and headed back out to Central London where I went to Mysteries, always my first stop in London, where I had an amazing tarot card reading from Barbara which cleared things up for me. Then I was starving, so I hightailed it over to Wagamama's which is this groovy Japanese noodlebar, for dinner. I was so hungry by this point that I could have poured soy sauce over my arm and eaten it. I scarfed down my vegetable gyoza and my pad thai which wasn't since it was Japanese. Then I headed over to Waterstones to browse through the books for an hour or two. What's cool about the Picadilly location is they have a wine bar upstairs.

I'm telling you I think that Borders and Barnes and Noble are missing out on a cool thing by not having a wine bar in their store. Plus the Picadilly branch is like 6 stories high jam-packed with books and they have more than one bathroom. I ended up buying Isabel Wolff's new book which I'm sure Red Dress Ink will publish at some point. Saw lots of biographies that I longed for including Claire Tomalin's books on Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Jordan and at least 3 books on Mary Robinson. The biography section was so huge that it covered most of the 3rd floor in the store. Unfortunately book prices with the pound being so strong were unbelievable. 8.99 which is about $17.00 for a paperback and that's not even trade size, we're talking mass market.

By this time, I was knackered. Normally when I arrive in London, I hit the ground running, booking theater tickets, etc. But the long delay and everything just wore me out so I went back to the house around 8:30 and just sat in the kitchen with Janine, her other lodger Mark who was from Canada (he was in town looking for work and a flat for him and his girlfriend), and Janine's friend sipping wine and talking until I finally went upstairs around 11 to watch the end of 'I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here," with Janice Dickinson of all people! Yes, the same woman who had her own hair and make-up artist during The Surreal Life is in the Australian outback with a bunch of D list English celebrities. It was hilarious!

So thus goes my first day in the UK.

Thanks for reading!

EKM

Leaving on a Jet Plane

So I leave tonight for London and I can't wait. There's nothing better for getting over heartbreak than traveling to another country, where there are no reminders of the one that you love. I suggest that the two women from The Bachelor do the same thing. Take a vacation to Club Med and stop mooning over Brad Womack. Be grateful that he didn't pick either one of you and then dump you after a month (FYI, I only watched the final episode of this season. ABC should do everyone a favor and cancel this travesty of a show or invest in a team of pyschotherapists to deal with these women.)

My plans for my trip are evolving. I'm now staying in a private home which will save me 28 pounds a night instead of staying in a hotel. I'm seeing some great theater and hanging out with my lovely American and British friends while I'm there. I'm even having Thanksgiving but on Saturday.

I'm still torn about taking either a day trip to Bath or seeing what the heck is up with this Dicken's World theme park. I'm kind of curious about it. It depends on what the cost is. I'm not spending the equivalent of what it would cost for a day at Disney World to watch people run around pretending to be living in Victorian London.

I'm also going to have afternoon tea at the Berkeley Hotel. It's called the pret a port tea, because all the cookies and cakes are dressed up to look like dresses from the latest collections, so I'll try and take pictures if they'll let me. I'm also going to stop in at Mysteries to have a tarot card reading. Maybe I'll get some good news that I'll finally meet someone else to help me get over cutie pie author. Hopefully someone who looks like James Purefoy! Hey a girl can dream can't she?

I don't know if I'll be blogging while I'm there. I don't have a laptop and it depends on if I can find an internet cafe. So don't miss me too much!

Thanks for reading,

EKM

Born in Arizona, Moved to Babylonia, King Tut

Hey, I'm over at Scandalous Women today, talking about Ninon de L'enclos, an early sex icon. Check it out! In the meantime, I've just booked my tickets to the London Eye and the King Tut exhibit.

Apparently that's the only way to get a ticket, since they are pretty sold out. The venue is called O2 and it's located out in Greenwich. My friend Chip's husband saw Barbara Streisand there. J works for a ticket agency that is selling the King Tut tickets and even he can't get one. So although on principle, I had the idea of having to buy one thing to get another, I booked both tickets.

And the London Eye is supposed to be pretty cool. I decided that since I was booking both, I might as well go for the Champagne option (a waiter brings you a glass of Laurent-Perrier). It was only 4 pounds more than the basic ticket. And I booked an early ticket for the King Tut exhibit because I figured it would be much more crowded later in the day than at 11 o'clock in the morning.

If my schedule had been better, I would have gone to see the exhibit in Philadelphia which would have been cheaper. Oh well, since a Brit discovered the tomb, in a way it's fitting that I see the boy King in London.

Thanks for reading,

EKM