Jerri Corgiat

JERRI CORGIAT’S NEWSLETTER
Fall 2011
www.jerricorgiat.com

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CONTENTS:
Note to Readers
Article: Books to Soothe the Heart
Best Book(s) I’ve Read This Month
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Dear Readers,

Hope this finds you happy and healthy; we’re enjoying a beautiful autumn, leaves are a-changin’ and nights have gone crisp. I love it! I’ve been plugging away at my day job (copyediting) and laboring with love over TWO new books. One is another in the HOME series, as promised, although it’s had to take a back burner to… I don’t know what you’d call it. It’s a departure for me, a novel set in the 1930s full of family secrets and, yes, murder. There’s been some Big New York Publisher interest in the latter, so I hope fans of the HOME series will understand I need to strike that iron while it’s hot. I hope to have that completed in December. Hope. That’s the operative word.

I’ve been distracted of late. My National-Guard-Soldier son will shortly be deployed to Afghanistan, something that fills me with both pride and fear, as you military parents and partners all understand!

So that’s what’s on my plate. What’s on yours? Links to my Facebook page, blog, and email are all on my website.

NOTE: If you’re no longer interested in receiving this newsletter, follow the link to unsubscribe. I’m sorry, but I’m unable to do this for you.
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BOOKS TO SOOTHE THE HEART
(As seen on FreshFiction.com)

I’ve been thinking about the economy and war and my son and entertainment-market trends. Hang in there with me; I’ll tie this together.

Just recently, I read this article that said, because of the Depression-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named, Hollywood has been finding success in adventure-escapist-fare such as this past summer’s spate of movies based on comic book heroes.

Not much later, I spoke with my former print editor. She said there was a new, growing demand for “gentle fiction” of the same stripe as my Love Finds a Home series.

And then, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, my son spoke with a sergeant, and he said, you’re headed for Afghanistan, private, before another month is out.

My epublisher, thinking that last point might be overshadowing pretty much everything else in my life just now, reminded me I’ve a blog entry due to Fresh Fiction. She’s right; I’d forgotten and now the hour is late. So I face this page with all these thoughts knotted up in my head and very little patience in untangling it all, so let me grab a thread and pull.

A decade ago, before 9/11, I fought an uphill battle to find representation for SING ME HOME, the first book in the Love Finds a Home Series. SING ME HOME features an introverted, non-college-educated, small-town woman falling in love with a country rock star who lives his life in the glare of celebrity. Together they discover, as Catherine Anderson once blurbed for me, “the things that matter most.”

I pitched this book—and pitched and pitched and pitched it—to agents, who pitched it right back. A decade ago, soft contemporary romance was out, chick lit was in. SING ME HOME was no SEX IN THE CITY and my protagonist, Lil O’Malley, no Bridget Jones.

Fast forward two years. Two years that held two revisions of SING ME HOME and a two-inch pile of rejections, two years that ended with one horrific tragedy on September 11.

As our nation picked itself up and looked around at a changed landscape, I started pitching again, and this time had prompt, eye-blinking, positive responses and a pick of several agents. Within six weeks of choosing from among them, my new agent sold the book to NAL at Penguin Putnam. When I wondered aloud at the abrupt turnaround, my new editor said, post-9/11, in a nation stunned by horror and about to launch a war, the populace was trending toward “comfort food” entertainment.

Ten years ago …comfort entertainment.

Ten years later …gentle fiction.

If you’re to believe my former editor.

And I did. Until I ran across that article I just mentioned, the one on comic book heroes. Not gentle stories at all. Perplexed, I did some research.

A year after 9/11, the bestseller list was stocked with such stories as THE LOVELY BONES and THE NANNY DIARIES, THE SUMMONS and PREY. This past year, the list included DIARY OF A WIMPY KID and the TWILIGHT SERIES, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST and THE HELP.

Good books, all. Escapism, much of it. But “comfort food?” “Gentle?” I don’t think so.

You know, writers get tired of having books rejected, not because they aren’t good stories, not because they aren’t terrific stories, but because a publisher has determined a trend, which may or may not be more than their wishful thinking, desperately wishful, even, as said publisher has just snapped up every manuscript that bears any resemblance to the last Big Bestseller, whether those manuscripts are excellent work or…not so much. So, owning up to some pettiness, and even though it didn’t bode well for my own work, I’ll admit to a small thrill of delight at uncovering evidence which seemed to fly in the face of my former editor’s convictions.

Except this morning, browsing on Amazon for a new book for my Kindle, and with my mind still cluttered with thoughts of the economy and terrorism and of my son, I chose, from all the bounty before me, a sweet inspirational read, based on the recommendation of a friend who knew my heart needed warming.
Maybe my former publisher knows more than I think. I hope so. It is both humbling and wonderful to think my books might have once met a need for readers who were looking for a gentler, kinder fiction, for books filled with the warmth of family, home, friendship and romance, regardless of what titles are populating the bestseller lists.

And, in their current ebook incarnation, that they might do so again.
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What I’m Reading:


Mysteries with depth, is how I’d put it. Somehow these seem to transcend genre-ization.
WHAT THE DEAD KNOW, by Laura Lippman
THE SCENT OF RAIN AND LIGHTNING, by Nancy Pickard


Jerri Corgiat

Author of the series, LOVE FINDS A HOME:
Sing Me Home
Follow Me Home
Home at Last
Home by Starlight
Take Me Home