The Debutante Ball, established in 2007, is a group blog for authors making their debut in the literary world. We are now in our twelfth season of celebrating up-and-coming authors. Former Debs include bestsellers in the genres of women’s fiction, mystery, literary fiction, nonfiction, young adult, and more. Click on any of the photos above to learn about The Debutante Ball Class of 2019 and their books. Read about the bestselling…
Mistakes Were Made
This week’s topic is taking me right back to one of my favorite parts of the writing process: copyedits. Copyedits are the most detail-oriented, downright nitpicky phase of editing. Other people might find them tedious or annoying, but I LOVE them. My petty perfectionist heart was filled with delight throughout the whole process. I actually think if I hadn’t become a writer, I could have had a very happy career…
Attacus Atlas & Other Inventions: bloopers
I don’t have a blooper reel, per se, with regard to The Atlas of Reds and Blues. What I do have is a strong-willed spell check on my computer which made for some humorous moments as I employed Bengali, Hawaiian, Spanish and French vocabulary in to the body of the novel. All of the sudden words like: sandesh, a Bengali dessert, became sadness. español, the language, became sepia. kejuur guur,…
Happy Accidents
This week we’re talking about bloopers or other mistakes uncovered during the writing/rewriting/revising/editing/proofing process. My bloopers are pretty mundane things that tend to look like one of two situations – Situation 1. Editor: Uh, this thing here doesn’t really make sense. Me: Oh, that’s probably because it’s referencing something I cut earlier. Let’s cut this, too, just to be sure! or Situation 2. Me: This is a cool thing! Me,…
[News Flash] July 14, 2019
Thank you so much to yesterday’s guest, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee! If you haven’t already, enter the #DebBallGiveaway to win a copy of Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember. You can enter by sharing our post on Facebook and/or retweeting the following tweet (make sure you follow @DebutanteBall on Twitter too!): https://t.co/sBu4zxAO5h we are so excited to host @xtinehlee on @DebutanteBall this week! RT & Follow for a chance to win…
Interview with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee and Giveaway for TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DON’T REMEMBER
I am so pleased to welcome debut author Christine Hyung-Oak Lee to The Debutante Ball! Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, which was featured in The New York Times, Self Magazine, Time Magazine, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, The Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. She is a…
Cutting Room Floor
When I finally felt as though I had a reasonable draft of The Dream Peddler, the one I began sending out to agents, it came in at right around seventy-nine thousand words. This was a nice length for a debut literary book, as in, appropriate to the genre and not so long as to be scary. I had cut many things, because I tend to go on and…
TEMPER is a sizzling summer read!
Today, I want to talk about Layne Fargo’s TEMPER, a book that came out just a few days ago and has already set my summer on fire. I usually stick to literary fiction, and I’ve read some popular psychological thrillers years ago like GONE GIRL and GIRL ON THE TRAIN and LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE. I liked those books, but Layne’s book, which is filled with complex yet totally relatable…
Cut It Out
When I wrote and revised Temper, I didn’t only delete scenes, I deleted an entire character. The book used to include another supporting character named Sophie, who was a playwright and engaged to marry Malcolm (I know, what the hell was she thinking??). The whole first draft included her, and I even wrote about 30,000 words in her POV before jettisoning her in favor of Joanna. Having Sophie in the…
Attacus Atlas & Other Inventions: Chopping block
Aloha! This week we are supposed to address “what we cut from our books and why:” Well, technically I had almost everything deleted from my debut novel, The Atlas Of Reds and Blues. On May 17, 2010, the Georgia state police raided my home at gunpoint and confiscated, among other things, my laptop. Even though a state judge in Georgia dismissed all of the charges against my husband back in…
Deleted Scenes, Deleted Drafts
This week we’re talking about deleted scenes or pieces we cut from our novels and why we cut them. Funny thing, though, is that I don’t really have any deleted scenes for The Perfect Assassin. I have scenes I wrote in earlier drafts that don’t exactly show up in the final version, but often they’ve been rewritten and tweaked and repurposed through the process, steadily morphing from one thing to…
