It’s here!  The mass market of Blame It on Paris hits the shelves today.  For anyone not familiar with publishing lingo, “mass market” means the smaller paperback that is, conveniently, a lot cheaper.   It also becomes available in electronic format.

Thanks so much to all of you who read it and recommended it to friends and even random strangers!  Actually, I have 5 secret tips on how to win friends and influence people, and ONE of them is to give them a copy of Blame It on Paris.  I will tell you the other four later.

If you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss this comic and romantic true story about falling in love with a place, a culture, and a person.  

I’m very excited to announce, for those of you in Georgia, that March 10, I will be doing an event at the University of West Georgia to help establish the Pierrette Frickey Study Abroad Scholarship for students at West Georgia.

Pierrette Frickey is now retired but was a wonderful professor of French, and I can clearly remember sitting on the wall by the Humanities quad trying to figure out Madame Bovary after having been assigned it as extra reading.  (A little bit more than I could chew at the time–everyone else in the class was reading short stories.  I do love teachers who are good at spotting hungry minds and feeding them.)

On Wednesday, March 10, at 7 p.m., therefore, I will be giving a talk titled, “Blame It on French:  From UWG to Tahiti to Paris”, so that everyone can learn to blame things on other cities, countries, and languages.  And as I can all too well remember longing to spend a summer in Paris as a college student and not having the money, please help us make a few more study abroad dreams financially possible.

Blame It on Paris is donating itself to the cause:  The talk is free and open to all, of course!  But for everyone who contributes to the Pierrette Frickey Study Abroad Scholarship fund, I will offer a copy (signed on the spot!) of Blame It on Paris, the larger, trade paperback edition, not the smaller mass market coming out in May.  Suggested donation is $10.  ALL of that donation goes to the scholarship fund, none to defray costs.

The talk will be in TLC 1303, University of West Georgia.

I hope to see you there!   Wednesday, March 10, 7 p.m., TLC 1303, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia:  Blame It on French.

Sponsored by the University of West Georgia Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures,  the Office of Alumni Affairs, and the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

 Tor Forge will be re-releasing Blame It on Paris, this time in mass market paperback, in May 2010.  Check out the new cover!  Isn’t it romantic?  I have to say, the hero of the story would not be caught dead in a dolman-sleeved sweater, but I like the leaning tower of Eiffel.