For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, there’s an excerpt from my new short story, “A Night at Northanger”, up on Scribd, along with excerpts from the other short stories in the Jane Austen Made Me Do It anthology.

“A Night at Northanger” features Cate Kartowsky, a budding young journalist with vast ambitions who has somehow found herself working for… Ghost Trekkers. Or, as she refers to it in her less gruntled moments, “Tits ‘n Ghouls”.

I’d originally meant “A Night at Northanger” to be a one-off, entirely unrelated to the Pink world. But, as chance would have it, I wrote “Northanger” just as I was in the midst of writing The Garden Intrigue last summer. I hadn’t meant to link the two, but, somehow, Cate slipped right from one manuscript into the other, joining the film crew that has, much to Colin’s discontent, invaded Selwick Hall.

As you may have noticed, sometimes my timelines get a little topsy turvy. This is one of those cases. In The Garden Intrigue, it’s 2004 and Cate is just out of college, thrilled to get a summer internship with the DreamStone film crew, and all revved up to start Columbia School of Journalism in the fall. The Cate you’ll meet in Jane Austen Made Me Do It next week is already an older Cate, several years out of J School, wondering how on earth she’s wound up with… Ghost Trekkers.

As to how Cate wound up with Ghost Trekkers…. Well, that’s another story. (Involving Eloise and Colin and quite possibly a murder mystery.) One of these days, I may even get around to telling it.