April 24th is Indie Bookstore Day and to celebrate, I wanted to shine a light on my favorite local indie, Blue House Books in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blue House Books is everything you want from a local bookstore: not only filled with amazing books from every genre you love to read, but owned and operated by a warm and welcoming bookseller. Samantha Jacquest is a one-woman small business maven who started…
I am a self-proclaimed craft geek. I love craft books, craft classes, online or when possible, in person. I have traveled as far as Maui to take a workshop and have purchased audiotapes and videotapes and bid on private craft lessons with superstar instructors at online auctions. Sounds a bit like an addiction, I’ll admit it. But for nearly two decades, writing workshops fell under my idea of a great…
Thank you to Simone st. James for talking to us about her new novel, THE SUN DOWN MOTEL. If you missed Denny’s interview with Stacie Murphy about her forthcoming novel, A DEADLY FORTUNE, you can still watch it now at our Instagram page. Tune in to @thedebball tomorrow, 10/19, when J.S. Dewes, author of THE LAST WATCH, takes over our Instagram account for the day, finishing with an interview with…
Diane Zinna was our guest author this week, talking about her novel, THE ALL-NIGHT SUN, available now. Tune in to our Instagram account this Wednesday, September 30 at 2pm ET when Elizabeth Gonzalez James will interview Zinna about her novel, Ari Aster’s Midsommar, and her path to publication! Early reviews are coming in for Greta Kelly’s THE FROZEN CROWN and they are glowing: Ehsaneh Sadr has two great events…
If you ask most professional writers, they’ll tell you they’ve been writing since childhood, and the same is true for me. I dreamed of writing a book and getting it published for almost as long as I can remember. But how do you actually go about writing a book? I had no idea… and it showed in my writing. For more years than I can honestly count, I worked on…
I wrote last week about how I hadn’t planned on becoming a writer, and how writing was something I came to after being unemployed for a long time. So already my path to publication was a little longer and had more forking paths than some people. I completed the rough draft of my novel in about six months in 2011, and I spent the next four years first learning how…
I’m so pleased to present Carole Stivers, our guest blogger this week! Carole is the author of The Mother Code, an exciting and fresh science fiction novel, which launches August 25th. About Carole Stivers Born in East Cleveland, Ohio, Carole Stivers received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She went on to post-doctoral work at Stanford University before launching a career in medical diagnostics. She now lives…
I am excited to introduce our guest author for this week, Alexis Marie Chute. Alexis is an award-winning author, artist, photographer, art curator, filmmaker, and public speaker. She has received over 40 noteworthy distinctions for her visual and literary work. Chute’s bestselling memoir, Expecting Sunshine: A Journey of Grief, Healing and Pregnancy After Loss, was a top Kirkus title of 2017 and received a plethora of other literary distinctions. The…
Recently, I read a post on someone who found out that not everyone has a running inner dialogue in their minds. I was as shocked as the original poster at this discovery. My mind has always been a chatterbox; I just assumed it was the same for everyone! My inner world is constantly questioning, observing, judging, apologizing, and taking stock. I’m like a ringmaster, struggling to bring peace to a…
I grew up very introverted, completely over sensitized to the world on a daily basis and retreating inside my head to cope. From ‘Baby Yoda’ me, till I was around 17, my personality type could be very easily summed up by the words “bookworm”. Books were my escape, my safety blanket, and my deepest friends. Looking back, it was my own form of obsessive coping mechanism. I was a depressed…
