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July Salon Recap and August at Lady Jane’s

  • Posted on July 16, 2010 at 1:39 pm

The July 6th Lady Jane’s Salon saw a fabulous turn out despite the steamy temperatures and holiday weekend. In addition to co-hosting two great guest authors, Dianna Love and Colby Hodge, and our very special guest, PW book blogger Barbara Vey, I got to be a guest myself! Please check out my videotaped reading from The Tutor.

The August Salon welcomes three great guest authors: Anna DePalo, Erica Ridley, and Alaya Dawn Johnson.

Guest authors books will be available for purchase on site.

Lady Jane’s meets at Madame X (94 West Houston) on the first Monday of every month, 7-9 PM. Cash bar. Admission is $5 or one gently-used paperback romance novel with net proceeds supporting local women’s charities.

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June Salon Recap

  • Posted on June 10, 2010 at 12:49 pm

The June Salon was the usual mix of  relaxation and fun with guest authors Cara Elliott, Maya Rodale (Salon Co-Founder), and Elizabeth Kerri Mahon (“Scandalous Women” blogger and upcoming non-fiction author) stepping in to read for Amanda McCabe.

Image Courtesy of LisaDaleBooks.com

In a fun break with Za Rules, this month’s recap post is by a guest author who hasn’t read at the Salon–yet! Click on the link and hear what the wonderful Lisa Dale has to say about her Lady Jane’s experience.

And please do mark your calenders to join us on July 5th. We have a jam-packed evening with four guest authors reading from their latest releases: Toni McGee Causey, Dianna Love (returning to the Salon), Colby Hodge AKA Cindy Holby, and yes, me,  Salon Co-Founder, Hope Tarr reading from The Tutor, my July Victorian-set romance.

Otherwise, same time, same place: 7-9 PM at Madame X. Admission is $5 or one gently-used paperback romance novel with net proceeds supporting an end-of-year donation to a New York City women’s charity.

As always, we’ll have author books available for purchase and signing on site, including Maya’s late June release, A Groom of One’s Own.

Cheers,

Hope

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Lady Jane's Salon at RT by Guest Author, Sabrina Jeffries

  • Posted on May 6, 2010 at 10:44 pm

We at Lady Jane’s took our show–or rather Salon–on the road to the RT BOOK Lovers Convention held this year in Columbus, OH. The Special Salon was held on Saturday, May 1st, 7-9 PM at the Hyatt Regency. Thanks to the magic of conference director, Jo Carol Jones, a rather bland event room was festooned with red scarves, votive candles–and the va va voom that is the Lady Jane vibe. Though the venue changed, we had our usual fabulous lineup of great guest authors, in this case Sabrina Jeffries, Linnea Sinclair, and Delilah Marvelle. And bonus: thanks to the generosity of the Salon attendees, including Delilah who donated 10 signed copies of her latest release as giveaways, we collected more than $150 for Linnea’s pet (literally) charity, Persian Purebred Purrbaby Rescue, a Columbus, Ohio group that rescues and re-homes Persian and mixed-breed shelter cats. What fun we had! But don’t take our word for it. See what guest author, Sabrina Jeffries (A Hellion in Her Bed) has to say.–LJ

Ever since I visited Lady Jane’s Salon in New York as an observer last fall, I’ve been dying to go back.  Romance readings! A venue that looks like a cross between a brothel and an Italian granny’s bedroom! Free-flowing liquor!  Romance fans!  What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, I don’t live in New York City, so my first chance to attend the salon as an author giving a reading was at the RT Booklovers Convention in Columbus, Ohio, this past weekend.  The lovely ladies of the salon (waving to Maya Rodale, Leanna Renee Hieber, and Hope Tarr) and their debonair master of ceremonies (Ron Hogan) made do with swashes of red net and champagne to transform a hotel meeting room into the usual sultry setting.

I felt right at home.

The night started out well.  I’d showed up with reading in hand, had talked to Hope about the length of the reading (no more than 15 minutes), told her that it was really only about 10 minutes, pulled out my pages, and discovered that I’d lied.  Somehow I’d miscounted the length.  My reading was long.  Really long.  Twenty minutes at least, if not more. That’s when panic set in.

I didn’t want my performance to be too long, because nothing is as unnerving as watching people snooze while you read.  On the other hand, the scene I’d chosen from my upcoming October 2010 release—A Hellion in Her Bed—was the one I thought most interesting when read aloud.  Frantically I started cutting.  I had two people ahead of me, right?  Plenty of time to trim if I ignored the other readings.

But I didn’t want to ignore the other readings.  That would be just plain rude—and ultimately impossible for a romance lover like myself!  Ack!

In the end, I started cutting, got sucked into Delilah Marvelle’s reading, then Linnea Sinclair’s (both books promptly added to my massive TBB list), and then it was my turn.  I prayed my excerpt wouldn’t put people to sleep and headed to the stage to read.

Fortunately, the people who frequent Lady Jane’s Salon (even on the road) are incredibly wonderful and forgiving people who actually like and read romance (there wasn’t a snooty litfic critic in the bunch).  And apparently there is no such thing as too long with them.  People listened, laughed (at the appropriate points, thank God), and applauded.

It was wonderful.  (And the champagne was good, too.)

Thanks for a lovely time Lady Jane’s Salon.  I can’t wait to read again in New York in October.  And this time I promise not to panic . . . and to keep it to 15 minutes.

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The Journey to Lady Jane’s by April Guest Author, Kate Noble

  • Posted on April 13, 2010 at 1:52 pm

Read what April guest author, Kate Noble has to say about her Lady Jane’s Salon experience–and yes, Kate, you and your delightful reading more than passed with flying colors!

There is no more awesome cacophony of sound than 75 romance lovers gathered in small upstairs room of a bordello-esque bar on Houston Street in New York City.  If we could but only harness the powers of this sound to fight for truth, justice and the romantic way, we could blow down the walls of Jericho.  No trumpets required.  It truly is a fantastic atmosphere, a place for romance lovers — but some may ask, how does one end up there, on that stage?

I found out about the no-longer-quite-so-underground Lady Jane’s Salon last summer at RWA — I was introduced to Maya Rodale and, as a fellow New Yorker, she suggested I come to a reading.  Unfortunately, when she told me about it, I was about to move across the country, so I missed my opportunity to go purely as an observer.   But, when the release of The Summer of You was approaching, I asked Maya if I could read… and then I hopped on a plane. 

That’s right.  I travelled 3000 miles for this.  That’s how cool it is. 

Now, I’m not gonna lie.  About two hours before the reading, I started getting nervous.  I don’t know why, I had been fine before!  I had chosen what I was going to read, I had done a run through, I knew what I was going to wear, I was ready to go.  But suddenly I’m in 10thgrade speech class all over again, freaking out because I can’t find my notecards.

All I can say is – thank God for wine.  (Er… now.  Not in 10th grade.  Because that would not have flown with my mother.)

First up, was new author N.K. Jemisin reading from her intriguing fantasy novel A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  She whetted everyone’s appetite for more.  Next up, Miranda Neville – another of my ‘N’ author brethren.  She has the decided advantage of a real British accent, making every word she read of her delicious historical The Wild Marquis sound like it was spoken by her characters.  Then, after a short break, wherein it is entirely possible more wine was consumed, it was my turn. 

Here’s the thing, and all future Salon readers take note: I wore a dress, hitting at about the knee.  But, the stage is raised and we authors sit on a bar-level chair… well, it took some maneuvering to keep the show PG-13.  But contorted myself appropriately, and then I started reading from my new book, The Summer of You.  And all my nervousness fell away two or three sentences in.  People laughed at the right moments, clapped at the end… I’m confident I got a passing grade.

The great thing about being done with reading was I got to relax and enjoy the final reader, Sarah MacLean, who’s Nine Rules to Break when Romancing a Rake not only wins for the night’s longest title, but has also just hit the NYT and USA Today Bestseller lists!  And those of us in the room could tell why.  I had already purchased Nine Rules, and it was my plane book on the way home to the west coast the next day.

It was a fabulous evening, where I got to meet old friends, electronic friends, and make some new ones.

And whether you travel 3000 miles or 3 blocks, Lady Jane’s Salon is not to be missed by any lover of romance.  Why?  Because everyone there is a lover of romance.  Here, I can promise you will find your people!

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Confessions of a Lady Jane’s Salon Virgin by author Louisa Edwards

  • Posted on March 5, 2010 at 9:54 am

I’d love to talk about how froid my sang was at the prospect of reading from my new contemporary romance in front of a crowd of smart, savvy Salon regulars in a bar in the West Village. I write fiction for a living; I could definitely spin you a tale about laughing carelessly in the face of public speaking, or how I just threw on whatever dress came to hand and definitely didn’t try on multiple outfits or take an extra shower to get my hair looking right.

But I’m not going to lie. I was freaking out. I practiced the section I’d painstakingly chosen over and over. I thought about what I’d say when I got up there, the points I needed to hit. And then it was my turn and Ron Hogan, our emcee, ushered me up those stairs and onto that little balcony stage.

Nearly every second I spent up there is a blur. I can only hope I pronounced my own name correctly, much less the title of my book, On the Steamy Side. I know for a fact that I forgot to mention it was hitting bookstores the very next day! I’m pretty sure I read the right section, but my main memory is of how hot it was under the lights.

And then . . . something kind of magical happened. I know, that sounds lame. But there was this moment, as I got to the banter between the hero and the heroine, and I read a line of dialogue that always makes me smile—and the crowd laughed.

I looked up from the book I’d been clutching hard enough to make my fingers ache. I stared out over the upturned faces of my listeners, perched on couches and poufs, sprawled on the floor and standing by the bar, and realized they were all smiling with me. They were engaged and interested and present in the moment, right alongside me.

And all of a sudden, my nerves evaporated.

What was there to be nervous about? I wasn’t on some random stage in front of strangers! No. I’d stumbled into a room filled with kindred spirits, romance readers and writers and aficionados, just like me. I was home.

That’s the magic of Lady Jane’s Salon. It’s a safe place, a sanctuary for those of us who don’t believe that a fondness for happily-ever-afters makes us stupid. It’s also a way to expand our world and discover new writers, as I did when I got my turn in the audience, gazing raptly up as the fiercely intelligent Cara Elliot and the lovely, frank, funny Mingmei Yip took to the stage.

I can’t wait to go back to Lady Jane’s Salon, to experience that energy and enthusiasm for the genre I love, and that sense of community and camaraderie I miss during my solitary writing hours. And while I’ll probably still choose my next reading—and my outfit—with care, I won’t be afraid.

Louisa

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A tribute to Lady Jane's Salon by Lauren Willig

  • Posted on January 30, 2010 at 7:11 pm

A little over a year ago, I received an email from Maya Rodale, a fellow Regency romance writer, inviting me to speak at a new romance reading series.  It was called Lady Jane’s Salon and would meet at a bar downtown called Madame X.

Huh?  Romance reading series?  Bar? Madame X?  Writers get some strange invitations (I’ll share those stories another time—some of them aren’t internet appropriate), but this sounded pretty weird even by my usual standards.

Upon reflection, it was actually a fairly clever notion, getting together a romance reading series.  Every other literary group seemed to have them.  The poets had their open mike nights (with that strange poet inflection we so mocked in all the writers’ camps I went to as a teen); the mystery writers had their cloak and dagger cabals; the serious Literary writers had their prescribed podia.  Why not romance writers, too?

But, still, reading in a bar?  This was going to work how?  I’d been to bar events before.  They invariably involved a lot of bar and not a lot of event.  I toddled off to that inaugural meeting of Lady Jane’s Salon with a novel in hand—to donate to Maya’s chosen charity, Share the Love—and a whole bundle of serious doubts.

Take crow; roast lightly; chew and swallow.  I am happy to say that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The upstairs lounge of Madame X was packed with a smart crowd of romance writers and readers, many with champagne flutes in hand.  The interior was all red velvet, lush without being louche, with a tiny stage at one end of room.  Perfect for balcony scenes!  Within in a remarkably short while, the crowd was herded to their seats and the reading began.  And it worked.  People listened and laughed and clapped in the right places.  There was no whispering or chatting at the back of the room—there would be time for that during intermission—just genuine interest and appreciation for the people up there on that podium.

In short, Lady Jane’s was a stroke of genius.

Rather than being a one month wonder, Lady Jane’s Salon has grown from month to month, building up a population of both repeat visitors and friends of friends.  Whether writer or reader, everyone is there for the same reason: a shared love of romance fiction.  Basically, we’re all romance nerds at heart.  This makes for very easy interactions and some occasionally rather bizarre conversations.  A recent favorite: “I’m really not attracted to zombies.”

Nowhere else, folks, nowhere else.

I owe Lady Jane’s a personal debt of gratitude, not just for the friendships formed or the warm reception at my reading last year, but because, without Lady Jane’s, I probably wouldn’t be teaching a class at Yale this spring.  One of the readers at the first meeting of Lady Jane’s was Cara Elliott, a fellow Yalie turned romance writer.  During the intermission, we got to talking about the romance scholarship movement, how much we wished there had been classes taking a serious and literary look at romance novels during our undergrad days.  Glasses of wine in hand, we began brainstorming about how we would go about crafting and teaching such a class, a survey of the Regency romance novel from its origins in Austen to its more eccentric offshoots today—and now we’re teaching it.  Thanks, primarily, to Lady Jane’s.

Lady Jane’s has done all of us in the romance writing and reading community a vast service by providing us a place to meet up and, yes, share the love.

I hope you’ll join me on Monday in raising a great big toast to Lady Jane’s Salon and her founders.  Many, many happy returns of the day, Lady Jane!

Thank you to  the lovely Lauren Willig–New York Times Bestselling author and repeat Lady Jane’s Salon reader–for this wonderful blog post! She will be reading from her latest, The Betrayal of The Blood Lily.

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Salon reader Stacey Agdern reports

  • Posted on December 16, 2009 at 3:50 am

I’ve been attending Lady Jane’s Salon pretty regularly since it’s inception, and so when it became my turn to read, I was both excited and nervous. Excited because I’d come to enjoy both the spirit of camaraderie that the salon offers to the people who come, and the wonderful variety of readers that contribute to the salon’s atmosphere. Nervous, because I wanted to let neither the attendees, nor the other readers nor the founders down.  If I was going to fall, I was going to fall big.

So on December 6th, it was my turn. Regulars, friends and even my parents were in attendance. After Ron Hogan’s fabulous introduction, it was my turn to climb the famous stairs to the platform at Madame X’s. I made it up without falling, and managed to both sit on the stool and adjust the microphone without causing damage. Then it was time for me to speak.

I happen to be a Jekyll and Hyde for public speaking; I’m not quite sure why that is.  I’m either ‘on’ or …not. I either nail it, or stutter through, and I can never tell which one is going to happen before I open my mouth for the first time. That night, I was on. The audience laughed at the right points, the words came flowing out of my mouth, all contributing to a general feeling of perfect synergy. I even sang the passages I’d chosen to sing well enough that the song was recognizable. It was a victory in the truest sense of the term.

Once I’d finished, it felt almost like any other Lady Jane’s night; there were two other readers to go. Brenda Chin spoke next, and gave us all a summary of Harlequin’s 60th anniversary year and the amazing changes that Harlequin was instituting starting in January. I also got to hear Hope Tarr, a friend and one of the founders, read from her brand new Scottish Historical, Twelve Nights.

But it also seemed slightly miraculous. That night we also heard about Harlequin’s amazing contribution to ‘Share the Love,’ and I was able to share it all with my friends and family. Thank you all so much for allowing me to be a part of this wonderful community, and I will definitely be attending on January 4th.

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Boys That Bite At Lady Jane's Salon

  • Posted on October 6, 2009 at 1:00 pm

Salon guest author Mari Mancusi reports on what it’s like to read at Lady Jane’s…


I have many talents, but reading out loud is not one of them. I think mostly this is because I talk too fast and therefore end up tripping up over my words. Not a pretty picture.

So when Lady Jane Salon co-founder Leanna Hieber asked me if I’d come to Madame X’s in October to take part in their monthly reading series, I was more than a little nervous. I have no problem going up on stage, mind you, or talking to a big crowd. I just hate reading out loud.

But how could I turn up the opportunity to share my book, Boys that Bite (which is about to be re-released by Berkley along with my other Blood Coven Vampire books) with such a great group of people? I had to say yes.

The night came and I arrived at Madame X, greeting my friends and others who had turned out for the event. It was a packed house. Then Leanna came up and told me the other author who was supposed to read had been forced to cancel. She was going to be reading from Kathryn Smith’s book instead.

Oh great, I thought. So now I’m following a reading done by a professional actress! I’m doomed! I sat there, listening to Leanna’s lyrical voice and her proper English accents, wishing at the very least they’d have let me go first.

Soon enough, Leanna had finished and I was up. Gathering my nerve, I mentally reminded myself to speak slowly and headed up on stage. After a lovely intro by Ron Hogan I started reading.

And turns out – it wasn’t so bad. I stumbled a bit and decided against giving my British vampire an accent (I could never top Leanna’s after all!) but overall I felt pretty good up there. The audience was receptive – laughing in all the right places and eventually I got through my passage unscathed. I walked off the stage feeling good about myself and my book.

So thank you everyone who came out to hear me read! I appreciate your laughter and attention – definitely helped me get through it! And I hope to see some of you up on stage in months to come!

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A Strangely Beautiful Release Party

  • Posted on September 21, 2009 at 2:07 pm

The night was, frankly, pure joy for me. I had some of my very, very best friends in all the world in one room. That’s something that doesn’t happen every day. I had friends come in from out of state, fellow writers, bloggers, friends, industry professionals (C.H. Admirand and Tara Nina brought me flowers, champagne and a Tiara!!!!!! – I DID feel like a princess!!

I was excited to see Tara win the Phoenix pendant we raffled off for Share The Love!) – it was such an honour and delight to share 9 years of labour with a crowd full of friends. Plus, getting the chance to thank the people on my acknowledgement page in person, in public, let me again express how none of us gets anywhere on our own, and how grateful I am for the village that made the “book of my heart” possible.
Dressed in my Victorian Regalia, I listened to my dearest Isabo Kelly read from one of my favourite of her many wonderful books, Thief’s Desire. We indulged in Strangely Beautifulcocktails (blue-coloured, of course) and signed a lot of books!

And then I took the stage to read two of my own very favourite scenes from The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker. Thanks to Morgan of Miss Media Productions for taking so many great photos!

I confess, I’ve missed being on stage, so the chance to read from my work (accents included and in appropriate attire) was SUCH a treat.

Thanks so much to everyone who was able to come out on a holiday weekend and support me, and all those who were there in spirit – it was one of the best nights of my life.


And a special thank you to my sweetheart for sharing his Birthday with this very special Salon night.

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August Salon Review: boys, billionaires, and one lord of pleasure

  • Posted on August 5, 2009 at 3:49 am

Supposedly, New York is deserted in August. Apparently, everyone came down to Lady Jane’s Salon on Monday. It was standing room only our three authors.

Johnny Diaz read from his latest, Boston Boys Club. Anna DePalo read a delicious scene from The Billionaire In Penthouse B. Delilah Marvelle came in a fabulous costume for a fabulous reading from Lord Of Pleasure.

Co-founder Hope Tarr is blogging about the readings and everyone who was there. Visit her blog for the details.

The delightful and talented Biz Urban took many gorgeous photographs! See the rest of her work at www.bizurban.com.

(Photos: Anna DePalo, Johnny Diaz, Delilah Marvelle, and one of my favorite pictures from Biz :)

Anna DePaloRomance Author Johnny Diaz

Delilah Marvelle

HQ Desire by Biz Urban

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