I don’t wanna be bought and sold

Things have recently heated up over on the Wylie-Merrick blog on the topic of advertising in books.  Scott Jensen, a reader of the blog, was invited to post his ideas about the future of e-publishing, which in his opinion will mostly involve books being free to consumers.
We’re all familiar with the phrase “there’s no such [...]

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House made of books

I’m in the midst of selling my house and searching for a different home, so I’m having the requisite existential crisis over what I own.  A lot of dishes and a lot of books.  The dishes are an inherited problem.  Not that I got my obsession with dishes through some quirk of genetics, but that [...]

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What does sex tell you about a character?

I’m rarely surprised when I encounter writers who say, “I would never write a sex scene. Just fade to black.” I’m sometimes a little surprised by readers who say, “I won’t read anything with graphic sex.” (Because frankly, reading a sex scene is easier than writing one, let me tell you.) I’m not even that [...]

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Who writes for the Insiders?

Arriving home from the library, I came to this realization: of the twelve books I’d picked out, ten of them were written around themes of Otherness.  Not surprisingly, nine of those ten were young adult books.  I don’t typically read that much YA, but I’ve come to the conclusion that my new writing project is [...]

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Depends on what you mean by “publish” or “perish”

I know I’ll be sorry, because those people who believe deeply, truly, sincerely in the value of self-publication, they’re going to come to my blog and torment me.  Fine.  I just can’t help but write this post after the self-publishing laugh/cry fest I recently witnessed in the form of a promotional website for a soon-to-be-released [...]

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Happiness by the numbers

I’ve been tagged.  At least I didn’t wake up with a big, unfashionable GPS-locator collar around my neck.  Those are soooo last season.
Oh, crap, I’m such a slow, lumbering beast that I’ve now been tagged twice.  Gretchen and Karen both tagged me to list six things that make me happy.
1.) Driving in the country at [...]

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Freebies

Two writing friends of mine are offering free give-away drawings of their Advance Reader Copies.  All you have to do is visit their blogs, comment, and you might win a free ARC of their forthcoming books.
Cindy Pon is giving away a few copies of her forthcoming Silver Phoenix book.  (It’s a YA book based on [...]

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Read Recently: Death and Justice

You’ll remember Mark Fuhrman from such media frenzies as O.J. Simpson’s trial for murder.  You may also recognize him more readily as the author of a series of sensationalist true-crime novels, but I recently read his book on the death penalty in Oklahoma.  My interest in the book began as practical research for a novel [...]

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Read Recently: The Mount

Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount is one of those small books I pick up at the library, thinking, “I’ll take this to my dentist appointment and toss it off in the waiting room.”
I was wrong.  I lingered over it and read it twice before I returned it to the library.  The book is written in the [...]

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