charlie_cochrane (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
charlie_cochrane) wrote2013-11-26 03:39 pm
charlie_cochrane) wrote2013-11-26 03:39 pm
Guest author - Leila Monaghan
So, Leila, tell us about yourself...
Hi everyone and many thanks to Charlie for inviting me on to her blog! My name is Leila Monaghan and I am the publisher of Elm Books. By day, I am a humble professor of linguistic anthropology, but for nights and weekends I walk in to my phone booth (do phone booths even exist any more?), rip off my distance glasses and replace them with reading glasses so I can stare at all the cool stuff that flows through the Elm Books pipeline. So glamorous!
I am a woman with wild ideas. One of the most brilliant of these wild ideas ever was asking Jess Faraday to be the head editor of Elm Books' "Death" mystery series. I asked her because I love her work (if you haven't read The Case of the Porcelain Dog and The Left Hand of Justice yet, run out and get them *now*--they are amazing! So full of the eery details of 19th century London and Paris underworlds with terrific characters including a gay rent boy forced into detecting and a lesbian paranormal investigator.) I also figured that maybe I could convince her she owed me something as I was mistress of ceremonies at her wedding (and accomplished everything needing to be done even without the bull whip she offered me). However I convinced her, it was a totally brilliant idea. Jess has just finished editing the third Elm Books mystery collection, Undeath and the Detective, a delightful collection of ghosts, vampires and werewolves solving all sorts of mysteries. So cozy, so creepy, and includes a great piece from Charlie herself. You'll love them! Along with her first two collections, Death on a Cold Night, a collection of winter mysteries, and Death and the Detective featuring sleuths of every variety, Undeath is available on all major websites and through bookstores throughout the United States, Great Britain, Europe and Australia.
Our philosophy at Elm Books is that we should reflect the diversity that is America--female, male, Black, White, Asian, Native American, gay and straight, old and young, urban and rural. Too often genres become ultra-targetted and calcified. We look for authors from all walks of life and are delighted to consider manuscripts from both new and experienced authors. Have a look out for our calls for stories and check out our book selection at http://elm-books.com ; Order by December 10 for Christmas delivery for hard copy books.
In addition to doing mysteries, Elm Books also does romance collections. Our first, Christmas is for Bad Girls, five romantic holiday romps, will be rereleased shortly. And because we don't have Jess doing enough things, she has also signed on to be the co-editor of Fae Love, our supernatural romance collection of lyrical tales of love and magic. She is working with M.M. Ardagna, a woman with a fabulous eye for romance and a well-placed comma.
I write under a pseudonym for Elm Books. Or maybe pseudonyms. I'm not telling which one(s) though! Under my own name I have published edited volumes in anthropology including Many Ways to be Deaf, a cross-cultural look at Deaf communities around the world and A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication, which is more interesting than it sounds. It's a nice collection of language oriented ethnographic work aimed at the typical undergraduate. We cover everything from greetings in the desert to gender variation in the United States and New Zealand to cursing. Before I went back to school for a PhD in anthropology, I did a series of odd jobs including being a secretary for a Broadway advertising firm and running away to the circus. Yeah, Barnum, Bailey and Ringling Brothers. I got to see Michu the world's smallest man drunk, learned that elephants smell like strong hay and lions like really bad sweat before getting fired about three days later.
Look forward to sharing more with you all as we develop here at Elm Books. The ride is just beginning!
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