A few years ago, Entertainment Weekly hit a new level on the hubris meter: they listed the 100 best in a variety of entertainment categories, movies, television, plays, music, and books (and therein lies another blog post). Predictably, I disagree with a lot of their choices, but I’m sure I’m not the only one. Everybody […]
The woman in line ahead of me at the grocery store was talking to the clerk. “It’s not a real holiday,” she said. “It’s all about marketing.” “Oh, I know,” the clerk said. “My husband and I never give each other anything.” “And the cards,” the customer said. “They’re ridiculous. And so expensive.” “I agree,” […]
Billionaires are in. If you go to Amazon and search for “billionaire” and “romance,” you’ll find a hundred pages of titles. Fifty Shades of Grey is probably the most prominent of these books, but there are lots of others, and the trend has been around for years. I remember reading Christina Dodd’s Just the Way […]
You see this meme repeatedly on Facebook—a Venn diagram showing the small intersection between what the author meant and what the English teacher thinks the author meant. Usually it’s posted by an author who’s convinced that English teachers are evil witches distorting an author’s true meaning. English teachers, say the authors, should just stick to […]
I’m on record as not liking some kinds of alpha heroes: heroes whose main qualifications are big muscles, membership in some elite military group and thinly disguised misogyny just don’t do it for me. But I think a lot depends on how alphas are defined. And I recently had a chance to take a look […]
All of my Konigsburg books include animals. I’m not sure how this happened, it just did. Starting with a diabolic cat and a sweet-natured Chihuahua in Venus In Blue Jeans, I had a greyhound in Wedding Bell Blues, a mostly coon hound puppy in Be My Baby, and a largely Maine coon cat in Long […]
If I were given a choice between writing a synopsis and writing a blurb (and believe me, that’s a horrible choice), I’d go with the synopsis. Synopses are basically summaries, and most of us have some experience with summarizing. You’ve got three or four pages for the whole thing, and your main job is to […]
1. It’ll make you hungry for some interesting things. For some reason, several of my books include a lot about food and drink (maybe because I like both), and Saison for Love is no different. My heroine, Ruth Colbert, owns a deli/lunch counter that serves the goat cheese she makes. Ruth’s a whiz with sandwiches […]
At the end of Finder, Emma Bull’s author bio has a neat thing: the soundtrack for the book. She lists the songs she listened to while she was writing, and it’s pretty extensive (also, from my point of view, sort of obscure). Bull is obviously one of those writers who likes to listen to music […]
Finding Mr. Right Now, the first book in the Salt Box Trilogy, will be on sale for 99 cents from August 10-17 at all the usual outlets […]
