If You've Got It, Flaunt it

"If you've got it, flaunt it -- within reason.  Too much Southern Exposure will get his attention, but-- lose his respect."  Rule #64

At least that's what the Southern Belle's Handbook, Sissy LeBlanc's Rules to Live By says.  But if you have another ending for this rule let me know. 

Finally The Southern Belle's Handbook has become available for download to your Kindle, Nook, or iPad or smart phone.www.LoraineDespres.com

More Rules from the Southern Belle

THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF MEN

The ones who are interested in you and the rest.  The second kind are so misguided, they're not worth your time.  Because if a man doesn't have the sense to appreciate you, he obviously doesn't have any sense at all.  Rule #71

Never marry a man too stupid for you.  He'll spend the rest of your life getting even.  Rule #43

HOW TO KEEP A MAN HAPPY

Forget his stomach.  The surest way to keep a man happy is to become his cheerleader.  Rule #33

Men fantasize about being a knight and rescuing a maiden in distress.  Encourage this.  It's a good thing.  There's no reason for you ever to struggle pushing a heavy bag into an overhead compartment.  Ask him to do something easy for you and thank him sweetly.  He'll feel great about himself -- and you.  Rule #48

Starting today you can download the Southern Belle's Handbook for you Kindle, Nook, iPad, Tablet, or Smart Phone.  

Southern Belle Rules

ATTRACTING MEN IS EASY 

How to Make Conversation: 

Men always find themselves the most fascinating subject of any conversation.  When in doubt, let him talk about himself. He’ll think you’re a brilliant conversationalist. Rule Number 11

Laugh at his wit, and he’ll admire your sense of humor.  Rule Number 13

Let him know you think he’s intelligent and he’ll be awed by your perspicacity, even if he can’t pronounce the word. Rule Number 15

How to Get His Attention at a Party:

Look at him over your shoulder or up at him through your eyelashes, and he’ll salivate like a Pavlovian dog.  Pat the seat next to you and he’ll come bounding across the room.  It’s usually ok, to let him sit on the furniture.  Rule Number 5

The Southern Belle's Handbook will be available for download January 29.

Holiday Blues

About this time of year, I feel over loaded. Don’t you?

Instead of joy and holiday fun, I have cooking anxiety—what’ll I cook? Will it come out all right? Does my stove work? Will anyone want to eat it?

And oh Lord, there’s the shopping anxiety. Did I forget someone? Will everyone like what I get them? (Oops everyone and them is not grammatical. But will everyone like what I get him—that sounds terrible. Her—worse.) More holiday pressure to do it right! More pressure to be perfect. Even writing about the holidays trips me up.

Before anxiety overcomes me I channel Sissy LeBlanc. What would Sissy say: “When attacked by the holiday blues, a smart girl takes a glass of wine into a soothing bath and lets the rest of the world fend for themselves. It will help them appreciate her.” Rule number 106 The Southern Belle’s Handbook. (You won't find this rule in the book. Sissy just made it up.)

Musical Week

What a week. Thursday night we heard Dr. John at a free concert on the Santa Monica pier. We were jammed together, standing, dancing outside under the stars. The sweet smell of flannel cake and marajuana filling the air.

Then Friday night Randy Bachman scored a great box at the Hollywood Bowl for the Earth, Wind, and Fire concert. It was sold out for mere mortals. Didn't have my camera but snapped this photo with my trusty Droid. That's Randy and Denise McCann Bachman as the concert began. He's in town promoting his new Bachman Turner recording which is fabulous.

The Southern Belle says: Might as well have fun while you're on top of the ground. It'll be too late once you're under it.

Cool Note from Facebook Friend

My books take so long to write, letters from readers mean a great deal to me. I thought I'd share one I received last month from a Facebook Friend:

Ms. Despres -
Thank you for the comments and the wall posts. I hope you know that myself, as well as the girls I work with, absolutely love your novels, and the rules from The Southern Belle's Handbook...I I truly do appreciate your writings, as they tend to influence us on a daily basis. For years it has been a habit of mine to pick up the handbook and simply remind myself of all the little life lessons, and the situations that surround them. I will continue to do so, and will be passing allong "The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell" as soon as it arrives and I get the opportunity to enjoy it.

I hope you are well, and enjoying life to its fullest.

Thanks again,
Brandy

Two Kinds of Men

There are two kinds of men. The ones who are interested in you and the rest. The second kind are so misguided, they're not worth your time. Because if a man doesn't have the sense to appreciate you, he obviously doesn't have any sense at all.

Rule Number 71, The Southern Belle's Handbook.

Men Are Easy

I talked to a beautiful young 20 something today who told me she was excited because someone invited her for a date.

"What!" I said. "You should be carrying rocks in your pocket to fend them off. What do you mean, you're excited?"

"I guess I'm not very encouraging. When I'm out with my girlfriends, I'm sort of out with them." She went on about how she discourages men.

"How's that working for you?"

She tried to change the subject. Finally she admitted it wasn't working out well at all. She dreams of having children, but I know too many lovely 40 somethings who are sitting home Saturday evenings, because they don't know how to encourage a man.

What she and any girl who's looking for love has to do when they go out on the town is to interview the men who come up to them and offer to buy them a drink.

The guys will love it. As I said in The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc, Rule #11 "Men always find themselves the most fascinating subject of any conversation."

Let him talk. He'll enjoy himself and you'll be interviewing for a bf. The point is, you want to find out if he's good enough for you.

More tips on how to interview for a boy friend in later blogs.

MINDY WRITES; THE VIRTUAL BOOK CLUB

I want to give a call out to Mindy Long and her excellent blog MINDY WRITES: http://mindylong.com/blog/ She writes about books and writing.

I did a call in to her book club tonight and she posted the following. I've embedded it here to make it easy for you to read, but check out her blog for lots of good stuff on what it's like to be a free lance writer, she has a virtual book club too.

December 1st, 2009

Book Club with Belle

I love my virtual book club, but every once in a while even I miss talking in real time about the books I love. So tonight I hosted an in-person book club, pulled out some serving platters and dusted off the carafe.

The holidays and the dreary weather here resulted in a small turnout, but we delved into The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell by Loraine Despres and had a great conversation. In addition to writing Belle, Despres wrote The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc in which Belle appears as Sissy’s grandmother. Despres was generous enough to call in and take part in the discussion and we peppered her with our questions.

Belle is full of details from the 1920s—details that could only be captured by meticulous research. Despres said she spent a year researching the time period. “Thank God for the Web,” she laughed. She read books, visited the library and studied magazines from the period.

To capture the details of one particular scene, Despres reached out to the Stutz Barecat Club and found someone who shared the particulars of how to shift.

Despres even committed to only reading literature written before 1920 during the three years it took her to write Belle.

I fell in love with Sissy, and the entire time I was reading Belle I couldn’t help but think about how Despres weaved the two stories together even though they were very different stories. I was also left wondering how much the author knew about Belle when writing Sissy.

“I knew I wanted a lady like some of the ladies I knew in New Orleans—very imperious, very sure of themselves. Belle really came to me,” she said.

Of course we asked Despres her favorite rule. Without hesitating she said, "It’s okay for a woman to know her place. She just shouldn’t stay there."She also told us she doesn’t usually come up with a rule cold. “If something tickles me, I write it down,” she said.

Several parts of the book were inspired by Despres’s own experiences. She told us she grew up in a house like the Rubinstein’s—a house complete with bullet holes in her bedroom wall. “A vigilante group tried to drive my family out of town. It probably happened in the 1890s, but I knew I wanted to tell that story,” she said.

She also shared that she some of her favorite traits of Belle’s were her courage and her cynicism. “She was pretty much based on my mother,” she said.

SPOILER ALERTS—IF YOU HAVEN’T READ BELLE, STOP READING NOW. COME BACK AFTER YOU FINISH THE BOOK.

Based on the letter Belle found in Claude’s jacked, I assumed he was having an affair, but since I’m ever the optimist, I held out hope that Belle just misunderstood parts of the letter. I asked Despres flat out if Claude was having an affair. She confirmed my fear—he was unfaithful. Oh Claude—how could you? I will cut him a little slack since he was at war.

Throughout the novel I went back and forth on whether Belle was ignorant of the dangers she faced or if she was brave. I felt that she became more aware of her danger she faced as the novel went on and clearly was courageous when defending the Rubinsteins against the Ku Klux Klan.

Despres said she envisioned Belle as being brave when writing her. She added, “As a middle-class southern lady, she thought [the KKK] wouldn’t hurt her. Her family was important in the town and she thought they wouldn’t go after her.”

There were so many great story lines in the book. After we hung up the phone with Despres, we kept chatting about the book. I definitely recommend it as a book club pick and, you never know, Despres might call into your group, too. You can visit her blog athttp://www.lorainedespres.blogspot.com/ and her Web site atwww.lorainedespres.com. Also, check out my earlier Q&A with Loraine here, my post about Sissy here and my virtual book club post about Belle here.

By the way–my local library system had a a good number of copies of Belle available, but there was a wait list! So, you may want to check your local library or order from Amazon.

GIVEAWAY!!! What could be better than adding an autographed book plate courtesy of Loraine Despres to your copy of Belle or Sissy? Leave a comment by midnight Dec. 4 and I will pick a lucky winner on Dec. 5.

Married Men

A woman who goes out with a married man always plays second fiddle to his wife--
Southern Belles don't make that kind of music.

Rule #54 The Southern Belle's Handbook, Sissy LeBlanc's Rules to Live By

THE FLAVOR BIBLE

We Southern girls love to cook--and if we don't actually cook ourselves we love to eat. For real cooks, the ones who itch to try a little of this and pair it with a little of that to see how it tastes, I mean the really creative cooks who don't want to be recipe bound, but want to create something original THE FLAVOR BIBLE is a must. The authors, Karen Page & Andrew Dornenburg spent eight years interviewing great chefs all over the world and came up with parings--what tastes great with what. The book has been out 52 weeks inspiring amateurs and professionals and is now in its 4th printing. So the Southern Belle lifts a virtual glass of champagne. Way to go Karen.

Rule No 172, The Southern Belle's Handbook: There's nothing so sexy as a man who cooks.

"The most important thing about virture is to talk as if you're in favor of it."

Or at least that's what my character BELLE CANTRELL thought, when faced with the visit of some very uptight neighbors. What do you think?

Help for Aging in the New Year

2009. I've come up with new Southern Belle advice for those of you who plan to become a year older:

A woman who always insist on telling her true age...
shows a sad lack of imagination.

Hoping 2009 is the best year yet for you-all and for me, too.

MORE TIPS FROM THE SOUTHERN BELLE'S HANDBOOK

Men fantasize about being a knight and rescuing a maiden in distress. Encourage this. It’s a good thing. There’s no reason for you ever to struggle pushing a heavy bag into an overhead compartment. Ask him do something easy for you and thank him sweetly. He’ll feel great about himself– and you. Rule #48

Attracting Men is Easy

A few years ago, I wrote The Southern Belle’s Handbook, Sissy LeBlanc’s Rules to Live By. I thought it would be fun to share a few rules with you.

How to Make Conversation:

Men always find themselves the most fascinating subject of any conversation. When in doubt, let him talk about himself. He’ll think you’re a brilliant conversationalist. Rule Number 11

Laugh at his wit, and he’ll admire your sense of humor. Rule Number 13

Let him know you think he’s intelligent and he’ll be awed by your perspicacity, even if he can’t pronounce the word. Rule Number 15