The New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Prizewinners

I'm happy to boast that I'm one of 'em. The New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance has given The Edge of Ruin their prize for the best historical novel to come out in 2010 about New Jersey. (I didn't ask them how big the field was. Some things you're better off not knowing.)

There were four of us this year who got a prize from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, or NJSAA, me and three real historians. Tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock in the Pane Room on the first floor of Rutgers' Alexander Library on College Avenue in New Brunswick, we're going to get together and talk about it.

2011 NJSAA Author Awards Winners:

Non-fiction scholarly category:

Ezra Shales. Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010).
See: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/Made_in_Newark.html


Non-fiction popular category:

Michael S. Adelberg. The American Revolution in Monmouth County: The Theatre of Spoil and Destruction, (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2010).


Link to footnotes and accompanying essay:
http://www.monmouthhistory.org/images/MCHA_essay_final_in_word_2003.pdf

Non-fiction reference category:

Joseph G. Bilby, ed. New Jersey Goes to War: Biographies of 150 New Jerseyans Caught up in the Struggle of the Civil War. (Hightstown, N.J.:
Longstreet House, 2010).
A publication of the New Jersey Civil War 150th Anniversary Committee, see: http://www.njcivilwar150.org.

Fiction and poetry category:

Irene Fleming. That's me! The Edge of Ruin, (New York, N.Y.:
Minotaur Books, Macmillan, 2010).

See: http://us.macmillan.com/theedgeofruin-1

What I'm Up To These Days

Now that the cool weather is upon us I'm happy to say that I'm experiencing that snap of returned consciousness that comes with the end of a steamy summer. I have plans. First of all I plan to brag about the prize I got from the NJSAA (that's the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance) for The Edge of Ruin until everybody gets sick of hearing about it.

But that won't take long. Then I plan to get busy, or busier, on the two books I'm working on right now, the suspense novel that takes place in a town much like Lambertville and the book about the sailor girl in the War of 1812. Which pretty much takes care of my mornings.

Then I'm actually going to drop the twenty pounds I've been promising to shed for the last ten years. I figure I can do that between noon and one. Maybe I'll stop eating and tap dance.

But what I wanted to announce today is my intention of doing more with this blog.

I'm already posting every Friday to the Crime Writer's Chronicle, which I hope you're following; four really interesting writers are on that with me. But for this one, I'm going to try to post every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday, starting next week. Tuesday's posts will explore aspects of the War of 1812, hoping to gin up some interest in that wacky conflict in advance of the bicentennial. Friday and Sunday, random subjects, until I finish the suspense novel, at which time I may begin running excerpts from Bucker Dudley.

I'm going to have to put one of those gizmos on the blog now that make you copy hard-to-read letters into a box before you can comment. Wish I didn't have to, but I'm being snowed under with the attention of Russian spam bots. I hope you'll forgive me.

And that's what I'm up to.