Hey! You won!

Specifically, two of you: First book goes to JUAN MARROQUIN! Congratulations! He wrote: "My favorite 'strong woman' is Elizabeth Bennet, from 'Pride and Prejudice'. She is strong and does her best with the resources she had at hand, gracefully but without giving up."

Second book goes to LIZ W, who is @westbynorth on Twitter. Congratulations to you, as well!

Juan, Liz, I'll be in touch later today to get your mailing addresses.

Now, for the rest of you amazing people who indulged this little game, you can still win a copy of the book, in a sense. It just requires a purchase -- of the book.

(Sorry. It's the opposite of "No Purchase Necessary." I had to.)

Anyway, The Last Love of George Sand is officially on sale from all your favorite sellers (disclaimer: first two are affiliate links, but you can bypass them if you so desire):

Amazon Barnes & Noble Indiebound ...or your favorite local bookshop

Spread the word! George Sand is here, in English, as you've never seen her before.

And now, THE GIVEAWAY

And ain't she a beauty?

*doot doodoodoo doot doot doot doooooooooooo*

As promised. I wouldn't let you down.

The Prize: Two (2) randomly-chosen people will each receive one (1) hardcover copy of The Last Love of George Sand, by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, translated by yours truly, published by Arcade Publishing, released February 6, 2013. Each book will be signed by me and inscribed however you'd like.

The Entry(-ies): There are two ways of entering, each of which grants you one entry (so every person can enter up to twice).

1. In honor of George Sand, leave a comment on this post of who your favorite strong woman is. Bonus brownie points for explaining why.
2. To help spread the word, tweet a link to this post. Must either tweet at me (@sunshineabroad) or include this hashtag: #GeorgeSandGiveaway

The Deadline: Tonight! Wednesday, February 6, 2013, at 11:59 p.m. EST.

The Rules: After the contest, I will randomly select two entrants (by assigning a number to each comment and Twitter account and using a random number generator), and announce the winners on this blog on Thursday, February 7. I will then contact the winners for their mailing address. Anyone with a valid mailing address anywhere in the world may enter. Limit two entries per person.

The Why: George Sand is freaking cool. And I loved working on this book. I'd like to share it with people.

Good luck to all!

Please don't interrupt me when I'm reading

Especially not when I'm reading a story about a family of Baptists from the great state of Georgia who force their way into missionary work in 1960's Belgian Congo, who choose not to leave when rumors of "independence" start swirling, because the father/preacher is so blindly convinced of God's plan for them and God's work through them that he ignores the fact that they have nothing left to eat, and the villagers start getting mad at them, and a curse is placed on their chicken house, where they find a green mamba snake, which bites someone on the shoulder... A green mamba snake bites you too close to your heart, you have no chance of survival.

Please don't interrupt me when I'm reading about a favorite character's death, mourning that favorite character right along with all the other characters, trying to figure out how everyone will survive now right along with everyone else.

Or, if you do interrupt me, I will look sad. Tears might be slipping down my cheeks, unbidden. Don't worry. You may think something is terribly wrong, and it is. But it's nothing you've done.

Except interrupt me at the wrong time.

The aforementioned wonderful book is Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. I'm almost done with it, and I HIGHLY recommend it.

Also, the aforementioned death isn't really a spoiler. It's first mentioned by page 5.

Proofer's Eye

Add this to the list of, well, conditions that I have. That many writers have. That, indeed, all copyeditors and proofreaders have. All of them. (All of them worth their salt, anyway.) Proofer's Eye means that you can never just read for pleasure. The slightest misplaced comma stabs you in the gut. The odd-one-out verb tense is like lemon juice on a canker sore.

It means that entire conversations get completely derailed when walking down the street, barraged by signs and ads, if any word is inappropriately capitalized.

It means that you find markedly less humor in lolspeak, because why would anyone in their intelligent right mind ever type like that?

You don't necessarily have to be a grammar nazi, lashing out and taking everyone to court for their mistakes. Proofer's Eye encompasses the more private heartaches and bitter tears shed in your own living room. But it does exist, and it is a problem.

Please, if you know someone with this debilitating disorder, do your part to help them out. Don't forget your apostrophes. Don't write non-poetic fragmented sentences. Do murmur tacit agreement when they shake their head. Don't let them tear their hair out.

Be there for them, not they're for them.

(These statements not endorsed by any creators of the DSM-V, although I was quite intrigued when it was recently released...)

TK: Giveaway!

Yes, you read that right. It's almost time for the First Not-Nearly-Regular-Enough-To-Be-Called-Annual A.M.C. Giveaway! (A.M.C. stands for me. Allison M. Charette. Not that similarly-named movie-related company. All rights reserved, or something.)

I've just received my box of books for The Last Love of George Sand, and boy, do they look nice. Take a look!

To celebrate, I've decided to give not one, but TWO FREE COPIES away! Not today, mind, you, but when the official pub date rolls around.

So, mark your calendars for February 6. That's pub date, and that's when I'll be giving away two (yes, 2) copies of the book. For free. Should be awesome. Details TK.

P.S. "TK" is publishing-speak for "to come." Why it ended up not being a real acronym is beyond me.

Stellar reviews don't make anyone blue!

Marketing for The Last Love of George Sand is in full swing, with pub date only two weeks away. But the first review came in last year. Yep, this review from Kirkus was posted way back in early December. Publishing timelines are weird. But enough about that, the review itself is brilliant!

Now, Kirkus is an especially important reviewer to get. They call themselves "The World's Toughest Book Critics Since 1933," and it's no joke. The entire industry looks to them for helpful, honest reviews. And they have starred reviews, which they award "to Books of Exceptional Merit."

Ladies and gentlemen.

I present to you.

The STARRED Kirkus review for The Last Love of George Sand.

Delightful reconstruction of the deeply fulfilling, late-life romance of the French novelist with a devoted, younger engraver.

Obviously a labor of love, this work by the accomplished French biographer Bloch-Dano (Vegetables: A Biography, 2012, etc.) is highly entertaining and original. The author sees her job as reassembling the life of her subject from scattered pieces and “the ravages of time” and then, if all else fails, using her imagination to fill in the details much like a novelist. The result is a series of pointed assertions like light bulbs going off in her head, questions and switching to the present tense, all while sticking to the courageous, romantic spirit of her subject. George Sand was in her mid-40s when her son brought his engraver friend Alexandre Manceau to spend the holidays of 1849 at her beloved ancestral home, Nohant. A famous novelist and playwright, she was now bone-weary after the failures of the socialist revolution of 1848, into which she had thrown herself, and strapped by debts and squabbles with her headstrong daughter. Nohant had always served as her refuge, in between bruising stints in Paris and maternal love affairs with a series of “men-children.” Bloch-Dano ably portrays Sand's attraction to the 32-year-old engraver, a man of modest beginnings and much talent, highly intuitive, intelligent and devoted to Sand. Manceau not only took over the theatrical productions at Nohant, but also assumed the role of her secretary and copyist, living with her for 14 years while plying his commissions as a sought-after engraver. Bloch-Dano’s portrait is poignant and beautifully researched.

A love story probably suppressed by Sand’s resentful son, brought here to vivid life in the hands of her capable biographer.

Color me very proud.

It's coming...

Yes, folks, the major event we've all been waiting for. Okay, maybe just me.

The Last Love of George Sand gets published on February 6. I translated this biography of the famous French writer from Evelyne Bloch-Dano's rich French text. Thus, I'm nearly buzzing with excitement.

But you should also be excited about it! Why, you ask?

Look. George Sand was a lion of a woman. Facts:

1. She was a proto-feminist in the mid-1800s, dressing in men’s clothing, smoking cigars, and managing her own finances and philanthropic work. She took a male name for her pseudonym, even spelling it in an English fashion, instead of the French "Georges." (That's why her name looks so familiar to English speakers.)
2. Like most other artists and cultural creators at the time, she was a staunch supporter of democracy. But she was also friends with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who later became Napoleon III, Emperor of France. During a series of audiences with him after his coup d'etat, she convinced him to grant amnesty to her friends, whom this self-same emperor had exiled to Algeria or sentenced to death for political crimes.
3. Divorce was illegal in France during her adult life. So, at the age of 26, she just negotiated with her husband to spend half of each year in Paris with her lover.
4. Then, she continued on to have some of the steamiest and gossip-worthy affairs of all time – five years with the libertine poet, Alfred de Musset; nine years with the genius composer, Frederic Chopin, until his untimely death from tuberculosis; the list goes on and on, and on and on and on.
5. Oh, right, and she was a writer. One of the most admired and prolific artists of her era, in fact. The list of her completed works runs as long as my arm. She was one of those rare authors who managed to earn a nice living from her work, gained fame and acclaim for her writing during her lifetime, and whose works continue to be taught in French literature classes around the world (especially in high school classes in France).

So of course, there have been many biographies of this amazing woman written over the years, in both French and English. But not all of her life has been told yet.

See, at Christmastime in 1849, she met a young engraver from the working class, thirteen years her junior. His name was Alexandre Manceau. He was a modestly successful artist in his own right, but not one whom history would ever remember. They fell in love. He became her companion for the next fifteen years -- the rest of his life -- and George would never take another lover.

But there was one problem. (There always is.) Alexandre Manceau was one of Maurice's best friends. Maurice Sand. George's son. George only met Alexandre through Maurice's introduction, and then "stole" her son's best friend away from him. Naturally, Maurice resented his mother for this. Quite a bit.

After George's death, Maurice did everything in his power to suppress any records of Alexandre Manceau. Burned letters, forbade anyone from talking about the engraver, refused to allow publication of any posthumous works by his mother that mentioned Manceau. It took years after Maurice eventually died in 1889 for those works to be legally published.

So for decades, even upwards of a century, there were no primary sources that mentioned Manceau. Everyone assumed he must not be very important, so he's only awarded a few lines in any biography of George Sand. If he's mentioned at all.

But guess what? That's all about to change.

This book is entitled The Last Love of George Sand. Guess who this "last love" is?

Yep, right in one: Alexandre Manceau.

Now do you see why I'm so excited about this book???

Been rejected, and it feels so good!

Oh wait. No, no it doesn't, really.

Actually not that great.

Especially when it's one of the coolest pieces you've worked on to date, and you had crafted it so lovingly, and you had really thought that it fit the magazine perfectly, and you even had a colleague introduce you to the editor-in-chief herself...nope.

Turns out, there's no Magic Bullet to getting a story accepted. I mean, I knew that. But rejection still sucks.

So you keep working. There's an editing job today, and one lined up for tomorrow. There are still several irons in the fire, other submissions that you're waiting to hear back from. And this is only one in a long string of rejections that are bound to come. You're a writer, after all. Writers, all writers, even very good writers, get rejected all the time. (Except for possibly Neil Gaiman.) It's a ridiculously large percentage: 9 out of 10, or 99 out of 100, or maybe even 993 out of 1000 submissions will be rejected. You just have to keep plugging away.

Besides, it's still a very good piece of writing, skillfully translated. There are other journals out there. Eventually, someone will bite.

They have to. Right?

Regarding "The End of the World for Translation as We Knew It"

Rob Vandenberg wrote an article on Wired, all about his predictions for the translation market in 2013 and about how if you don't think about "Big Data and the cloud," you're screwed. Look, I understand where he's coming from. There are so many time- and money-saving tips and tricks and techniques that businesses and regular ol' people can use to make translation easier. There's the CAT tools. The globalization analytics. Online management systems (I think the acronym is WEM, for web experience management). Social media and crowdsourcing. Some of these things are good, some are, well, not so good, both for business and for the translators themselves.

There is a place for all of this. Projects with high repetition and consistency issues blossom with CAT tools. International companies can hit unprecedented numbers of markets with globalization analytics. All of this is great, and business is booming, so they say.

Yet it takes the focus off of the artistry of translation and shines the light squarely on commerce, efficiency, and money. Again, that's fine, especially in the financial world, or the legal world, or the pharmaceutical world. But.

BUT.

That is not what I love about translation.

And that is why I will endeavor to translate literature and other creative types of writing for as long as my brain keeps humming along.

Baby steps

This post is all about me working out. Shock. Sorry, you were expecting something else, weren't you? Well, translators have to stay active, too.

I'm not a work-out person. I was the kid my Mom had to force to do just one active extra-curricular activity every season. I don't enjoy working out. I'd rather read.

But I also don't like feeling lethargic and weak, and I don't like when I can't run to the end of the block without getting winded, and heaven forbid if my clothes start not fitting well.

So, a few years ago, fresh off of a year of gorging myself on cheese and bread in France, I decided to try to start actually working out.

2010: That was the year of running. And what did I learn? Although I can do a 5K in less than 30 minutes, I don't like running. I actually may hate it. Strong words.

2011: The year of the gym. I joined a gym. ME. For the first five months or so, it worked really well. I was only working part-time, and there were some great classes. I tried yoga for the first time, went to some spinning classes, even tried a couple that should have probably been called jazzercise. I learned how to strength-train properly and everything.

And what did I learn? Although the classes were pretty good and there were some nice people at the gym, I stopped going once I had a full-time job. Too much effort, not enough time. I felt guilty when I didn't go, but I didn't enjoy going if I didn't have the time. So I canceled my membership after the 12-month experiment.

2012: The year of what-the-heck-should-I-do-now. Whenever I thought about exercising, whenever I had the time (could be five times a week, could be once every two weeks), I tried something. I biked around Prospect Park, storing my bike in my third-floor walk-up. I tried Kinect YourShape workouts. I tried the app for 100 push-ups.

And what did I learn? Well, I finally started learning about things I liked, things that would work, instead of everything that I hated that wouldn't work for me. I learned that I enjoy variety. I get bored really easily, if I have to do the same two workouts in rotation forever. I learned that I didn't like spending lots of time on workouts, but I did actually like working out. Even 10 minutes of jump-roping is better than nothing. 30 push-ups is actually pretty cool. Maybe I can eventually work up to an hour of exercising every day, but for now, 20 minutes a day, three days a week is good. It's better than nothing. And if that makes me feel better physically, then it's worth it.

So. 2013. This will be the year of doing what works for me. Variety. Quick workouts. I've already been doing well over the past week (and really, I've been doing pretty well on it for the last three months).